Topic 1 · The First Americans
Study guide notes, academic vocabulary, and review questions with answers. Textbook pages 21–26.
How did Native American ways of life differ based on their surroundings?
That is the one question this lesson answers, and it is the same question Lesson 1 opened with — this is where the whole Topic gets settled. Up to now the answer arrived already written. Here it does not: five sources sit in front of you — a carving, two canoes, two stories and a photograph — and you work the answer out of the evidence yourself.
The lesson video is posted in Google Classroom. This page is the written material that goes with it, in the same order as your workbook: notes first, then vocabulary, then the review questions. Answers are hidden until you click Show answer. Try each one in your workbook before you click.
Historians reconstructing early Native American life work from what people made and from what people still tell. This lesson sets four kinds of evidence side by side and labels each one on the page: a petroglyph, artifacts, traditional stories, a photograph. Put physical evidence and oral tradition together and you can work out how a community lived without a single written page — which is exactly the job in front of you in the source table.
A birchbark canoe starts as a frame of curved wooden slats with a skin of bark peeled from birch trees attached to the outside, and it is lightweight on purpose: the peoples of the Northeast Woodlands and the Great Lakes built them that way so a canoe was easy to carry. A dugout canoe is the opposite idea — one large tree carved hollow, with the cross supports left standing as the carver worked around them. The Cherokee made dugouts forty feet long that could seat twenty men, and greased the outside with bear fat to make them waterproof. Light and portable answers a country where the boat has to be carried; heavy and solid answers open water near the coast.
The Comanche of the Great Plains told how Coyote schemed the buffalo free from an old woman who had them penned up in the mountains, and the story closes: “Thus the buffalo came to live on this earth.” The book is direct about why stories like that exist — some are creation stories telling how the world and the people came to be, and others explain the origins of the resources that are especially important to a people. Buffalo were the resource the Plains ran on: food, tools out of the bone, hides for the tepees. A people tells origin stories about what it cannot live without, so the story itself is evidence of what mattered there.
A source can be real evidence and still not tell you everything. Look at Source E again. It is a photograph of a Pomo woman gathering seeds, and the caption points out something easy to miss: she is using traditional tools, but she is not wearing traditional clothing. The photograph was taken in 1924. So it is strong evidence about the seed beater and the basket, and it is not evidence about what people wore three hundred years earlier. Good source work means saying what a source shows you, and then saying where it stops.
Five sources sit at the centre of this lesson, and your workbook table has a row for each one. Here is what each source is, where it comes from, and the resource it points at.
| Source | What it is | People and region | Resource it points at |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Southwest Rock Art A petroglyph — figures carved into rock — found in Nine Mile Canyon, in what is today northeastern Utah | The Southwest. The book does not name the people who carved it. | Game animals and hunting |
| B | Birchbark and Dugout Canoes Two artifacts, printed side by side. B1, a birchbark canoe in the style used by the Cree. B2, a dugout canoe on display in St. Augustine, Florida | B1: the Cree, in the Northeast Woodlands and the Great Lakes. B2: the Cherokee, in the Southeast | Trees — bark peeled from birch, and single large trunks — and the waterways themselves |
| C | A Comanche Story: The Liberation of Buffalo A traditional story, told aloud and printed here | The Comanche, on the Great Plains | Buffalo |
| D | A Kalapuya Story: Falls of the Willamette A traditional story, told aloud and printed here | The Kalapuya, on the Willamette River in what is today Oregon | Salmon |
| E | Gathering Seeds in California A photograph, taken in 1924 | The Pomo, in California | Nuts, berries, seeds and roots |
Source B is one row with two pictures. B1 is the birchbark canoe and B2 is the dugout. Both belong in row B of your table.
Read C and D against each other. Both are stories about a trickster who changes the world for the people who tell it, and page 25 asks you straight out whether Tallapus and Coyote are similar characters.
Tap any word for a picture and the full definition. The bold part is the definition to write in your box.
Watch this one: an artifact and an inference are not the same kind of thing at all. The artifact is the object — the carved rock, the hollowed log, the seed beater in the woman’s hand. You could hold it. The inference is the conclusion you draw from it, and that is the harder half. Your source table asks for the inference in the right-hand column, so if you write a dugout canoe there, you have named the artifact and not answered the question. Say what the object proves about the place the people who made it lived.
Write the answer for each one in your workbook in your own words first. Then tap Show answer to see if you got it right.
Evidence made or told by the people who lived it.
An object people made or used, left behind for us to find.
A dugout canoe — one log, carved hollow. Winterville Mounds museum, Mississippi
Designs that are carved or scratched into rock.
A hunting scene carved into rock in Nine Mile Canyon, Utah
A conclusion you reach from evidence, not from being told.
Birchbark canoes were a light bark-covered frame built to be carried; dugout canoes were one large tree carved hollow, heavy and solid for open water. Birchbark canoes came from the Northeast Woodlands and the Great Lakes, where a boat often has to be carried overland. The Cherokee made dugouts forty feet long that could seat twenty men, and greased the outside with bear fat to make them waterproof.
A birchbark canoe — a light frame skinned with bark. Royal Ontario Museum
Canoes were how people travelled and carried goods where rivers, lakes and coastlines were the roads to food, trade and other people. Native Americans built them right across the continent — birchbark in the Northeast Woodlands and the Great Lakes, dugouts near the coasts.
A dugout canoe under way on Puget Sound, about 1911
Buffalo, salmon, seeds and nuts, trees and game animals — each source shows a people building their food, their tools and even their stories around what their surroundings gave them most of. Buffalo for the Comanche on the Great Plains, salmon for the Kalapuya on the Willamette, seeds and nuts for the Pomo in California, trees for the canoe builders, and game animals for whoever carved the Utah petroglyph.
Bison on open prairie, Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota
Look at what every one of those sources had in common. Figures carved into rock in a Utah canyon. A canoe light enough to carry, and a canoe heavy enough for the ocean. Coyote scheming the buffalo free, and Tallapus building the falls where the salmon leap. A woman in a California field with a seed beater in her hand. If someone asked you right now how Native American ways of life differed based on their surroundings, you should be able to answer in one sentence: people built their food, their tools and even their stories out of whatever their surroundings gave them. If you can look at a source, say plainly what it is, and then say what it proves about the place it came from, you have Lesson 5.
Every photograph on this page is public domain, CC0, or openly licensed. Creative Commons images are credited by name and licence, as their licences require.
The petroglyph photograph shows a panel in Nine Mile Canyon. It is not the panel printed in the textbook. Textbook page images, including the five sources, are reproduced from Early Americans pages 21–26 for classroom use only.