Native America's Great Indian Nations (video)

WisdomKeeper Cheyenne, Sept. 8, 2016; Xochitl, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Many of the white man's business fruit labels celebrated the defeated Native Americans.

Wisdom Keeper

The white man came to "America" in search of wealth and power. There were an estimated 100 million Natives here. Many would endure four centuries of struggle and resistance before the sun finally set upon their free dominion.

These European enslavers, colonialists, and settlers came in wave upon wave to occupy Native American lands. In the bellies of their ships Europeans carried horses, steel guns, and diseases. And in their hearts they carried a belief or useful lie about their "destiny" to rule the Americas from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

Last of the proud warriors resisting invasion

As whites pressed westward they finally waged an absolute war on the indigenous people, the Native Americans, that would close the frontier and usher in the white man's era of railroads, telegraphs, and destructive mining.

Yet, the history of America is in many ways the history of the Amer-Indians, for they gave the Europeans the skills and knowledge needed to survive in the New World. These are the stories of the mightiest Indian Nations.

The Iroquois of Upstate New York were a unique confederation of six nations. Their great law of peace attracted the attention of American colonists, who were forging their own new country.

The Catholic Church was a military arm.

The Seminoles of Florida, who gathered together free red Indians and dispossessed black slaves fleeing northern lands. Together they built a patchwork nation of peoples mirroring the melting pot of America.

The Navajo, whose powerful spiritual link to the land inspired a courageous defense of their territory in the great Southwest, also resisted.

Become "Mexican" or cease to exist.

The fiercely independent Cheyenne, the "beautiful people" of the plains, whose families were massacred by U.S. Army soldiers, refused to be overtaken.

Their brothers, the Lakota, the defiant warriors of the west who united with the Cheyenne to hold back the tide of Western expansion for 50 years, aligned with others against a common invading enemy.

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