Journal 1

We actually learned about Native American culture in American History this morning. Apparently the first Native Americans came here around ten thousand years ago over a land bridge from Russia to Alaska. They started off as hunter-gatherers, and they hunted woolly mammoths for most of their food. Eventually though the mammoths died off and they were forced to start hunting other things such as fish in order to survive. Then they learned how to plant crops and created villages because of the agricultural revolution. Each new civilization brought something new that the civilization before them did not have. First they began forming small villages. After that, because their cities were growing so large they began developing systems of government. Some of them created giant buildings called pueblos that were immensely large because they were wealthy due to trade. Eventually though, they wore out the land and they experienced severe drought so they all disappeared and their giant pueblos were left deserted. Next, a people called the Mayans developed a calendar that we still use today. The civilizations also began fighting each other for territory and goods and there was a lot of war. Also, some groups would keep their prisoners and sacrifice them alive as gifts to their gods in order to appease their anger and keep them from destroying them. They believed in multiple gods and each one was usually a god of some sort of element of nature or some sort of emotional feeling that they were in charge of. Because of their massive amount of gods they had to do a lot of sacrificing. The Mayan calendar is also the calendar that supposedly predicted the end of the world to be in 2012 because it is the end of their calendar.

Eventually the Native Americans were driven further and further west by the white men who were colonizing the New World and they were forced to live in reservations. As a result their numbers dwindled until today there are not many pure blood Native Americans left at all.