How much do we know about the more than 500 Native American tribes in North America? Not as they exist today, not their historical interactions with Europeans, but who they were before Europeans arrived?
Unlike the Columbus chapters in the America Series that use historical research to correct false historical narratives, the chapters immersed in Native American society seek to reveal an unknown world illuminating their culture, language, lifestyle and religion. Yes, there are false narratives about Native Americans that absolutely need to be corrected, but the greater challenge is erasure.
It is difficult to discover authentic details about Native American life because many early accounts of Native Americans trivialized and dehumanized them in order to justify the inhumane treatment they received. One of the most important primary sources of the Columbus voyages and other early Spanish expeditions was Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's Historia General y Natural de las Indias (1535, expanded 1557). Oviedo voyaged to the Caribbean and Central America. In addition to interviewing and recording details about the Spanish expeditions, he systematically portrayed natives as subhuman, naturally slavish, and incapable of civilization. He described them as inherently sodomitic, cannibalistic, and intellectually inferior.
Richard Hakluyt, an English clergyman, compiled works including The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589) that promoted and justified English colonization through sensational and dehumanizing accounts of Native Americans. Sadly, he is but one of hundreds of Europeans who viewed and documented Native American society in this manner.
On the other hand, some, such as Thomas Harriot who learned an Algonquian language, more accurately captured the ethnography of Native Americans in his book, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588). The Florentine Codex, or Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, is a 2,400-page study of Central Mexican Aztec and Nahua culture. Completed in 1577 by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and Nahua collaborators, it is an early bilingual (Nahuatl-Spanish) 12-book encyclopedia documenting religion, society, natural history, and the Spanish conquest.
From these incomplete, conflicting and often biased sources, one has to exercise patience in creating a complete, coherent and consistent archetype for each tribe. I asked questions about rarely documented topics such as sexuality. This was a particularly difficult subject because it was rarely written about in the 15th and 16th centuries and also because Europeans often did not understand or did not embrace the more open views about premarital sexuality, which contrasted with European cultural shame, largely against women.
I knew that lacrosse originated in North America among Iroquois tribes, but didn't know more than that until conducting further research. Through research, I was able to confirm that the Timucuan tribe plays a variation of lacrosse and soccer where they attempt to hit a pole rather than advance a ball into a goal. I found the boat building and hunting practices of the Ais, the Susquehannock and Taino creation stories and hundreds of rich details that through multiple sourcing confirmation I was able to determine were accurate. This creates the fabric of culture that those traveling back in time experience and through their experiences, the largely unknown world of pre-colonial Native American societies is brought to life through fiction.
Though 500 years later and transformed by centuries of colonization, my own experiences in the Peace Corps in Guatemala helped me have a lens for what culture felt like beyond the pages of history. After an initial difficult period in which the local Q'eqchi' people thought I was a CIA agent based on their past experiences with Americans during the Guatemalan civil war, once I was accepted, I had unreplicable experiences such as witnessing the Baile de la Conquista about the 1524 Spanish invasion or the Toritos dance about Mayan identity. I learned to speak Q'eqchi' and spoke in villages about the power of villages working together — like a cord of sticks that could not be broken, whereas one stick alone could be.
To celebrate Easter, at an aldea miles from any road, I was treated as the guest of honor and as part of the Easter ceremony was given a cup of blood from the heart of a pig killed in front of me. I saw men killed and discarded on the side of the road or trail and engaged in intratribal territory disputes. I probably received a marriage proposal once a month from fathers who brought their daughter to present to me. It was an exhilarating and terrifying cultural immersion that helped me have a nonabstract sense with which to interpret the historical sources I read about pre-colonial Native Americans.
I believe that the immersion in pre-colonial Native American life with fidelity will reveal a largely unknown world to readers who find the cultural history as well as the fictional stories embedded in it interesting. There are many fictional works that reference colonial interactions with Native Americans, but very, very few immersed in the pre-colonial world. My hope is that readers enjoy this pre-colonial Native American world and that more fictional and nonfiction authors focus on revealing more of its richness — and that we deepen our modern understanding of Native American culture and history.