[ Music ]
>> Hello I'm Kevin Costner.
Welcome to 500 Nations.
The settling of this country has always been of interest to me.
It's fired my imagination and shaped my life both personally and professionally,
but my knowledge of history has been limited by what I was taught.
As far as I was concerned, the history of the continent started 500 years ago
when Columbus discovered the New World.
But we know that's not true, there were people here.
So how is it that we know so little about this past?
The human history of North America, our own story?
Could it be that we don't think it worthy
of mention the way history has remembered the ancient civilizations
of Greece, Rome, Egypt or China?
The truth is we have a story worth talking about.
We have a history we're celebrating.
Long before the first Europeans arrived here,
there were some 500 nations already in North America.
They blanketed the continent from coast to coast, from Central America to the Arctic.
There were tens of millions of people here speaking over 300 languages.
Many of them lived in beautiful cities, among the largest and most advanced in the world.
In the coming hours, 500 Nations looks back on those ancient cultures,
how they lived, and how many survived.
[Background Music] We turned for guidance to hundreds of Indian people across the continent.
You'll meet many of them in our programs.
To bring the past to life we searched archives for the oldest
and most authentic images of Indian people.
We sought out rare books and manuscripts for the actual words
of participants and eye witnesses to history.
Our camera crews travel throughout North America to film at the actual places
where important events in Indian history occurred.
We filmed incredible treasures of Indian creativity
from museums across North America and Europe.
Historians and archeologists work with visual artists and advance computer technology
to allow us for the first time to walk through virtual realities of ancient Indian worlds.
What you're about to see is what happened.
It's not all that happened and it's not always pleasant.
We can't change that.
We can't turn back the clock.
But we can open our eyes and give the first nations of this land the recognition
and respect they deserve, their rightful place in the history of the world.
With that in mind, we take you first to where our story ends,
on the great planes in the late 1800s.
[ Music & Noise ]
>> The rumor got about the school.
The dead are to return.
The buffalo are to return.
The Lakota people will get back their own way of life.
That part about the dead returning was what appealed to me,
to think I should see my dear mother, grandmother and brothers, and sisters again,
but boy like I soon forgot about it.
Until one night when I was rudely awake in the dormitory, "Get up, put your clothes on
and sleep downstairs we are running away".
A boy was hissing into my ear.
Soon, 50 of us little boys about 8 to 10 started out across country,
over hills and valleys running all night.
I know now that we ran almost 30 miles.
There on the Porcupine Creek thousands of Lakota people were in camp.
[ Chanting ]
>> By the late 1880s a message of hope spread across the great planes.
It was called the ghost dance, a dance to restore the past, when Indian nations were free.
[ Chanting & Noise ]
They dance without rest, on and on.
Occasionally, someone thoroughly exhausted and dizzy fell unconscious
into the center and laid their dead.
The visions into the same way like a course describing a great encampment of all the Lakotas
who had ever died, where there was no sorrow but only joy,
where relatives strong out with happy laughter.
The people went on and on and could not stop.
And so, I suppose the authorities did think they were crazy,
but they weren't, they were only terribly unhappy.
>> Driven off their lands Indian nations were confined to desolate reservations dependent
on corrupt government agencies for food and supplies.
>> [Background Music] The people were desperate from starvation.
We felt that we were mocked in our misery.
We held our dying children and felt their little bodies tremble as their souls went out
and left only a dead wake in our hands, Red Cloud, Oglala.
>> The ghost dance hurt no one, but as it spread white settlers panic.
The United States government outlaw the dance.
>> The white men were frightened and called for soldiers.
We had begged for life and the white men thought we wanted theirs.
>> On a mild day just after Christmas of 1890, a band of [inaudible] Sioux
under their leader Big Foot left the Cheyenne River agency in South Dakota heading
for a meeting at Pine Ridge with the Oglala leader Red Cloud.
Traveling with Big Foot were 106 men and 252 women and children.
Among them was a boy, Dewey Beard, who would later tell his children
and grandchildren about that day.
>> Grandpa Dewey Beard being the last survivor, I would listen to what he had to say.
In a way, it was sad and yet it's so beautiful because it's bringing back history.
One thing that he would say is that had the soldiers had the government left them alone.
In time, they would have looked outside and seen how things were changing
and the change would come about from within the bands.
>> [Background Music] Big Foot's band was intercepted by the 7th Cavalry.
The officer in charge found Big Foot wrapped in heavy blankets dying
from pneumonia in the back of a wagon.
Big Foot was ordered to make camp along Wounded Knee Creek.
In the morning, his people would be stripped of their weapons and escorted to Pine Ridge.
Big Foot made assurances of his peaceful intentions and the band made camp.
>> He's a peaceful man.
He's always say that think about the elderly, think about the children
and the women and don't start the trouble.
>> Morning broke after a sleepless night surrounded
by soldiers [inaudible] witnesses would later recall what happened next.
>> Big Foot who was sick came up with a flag of truce tied to a stick, Dewey Beard.
>> As soldiers strained their guns on them,
Big Foot and his men brought forth all their weapons, placing them near the white flag
of truce Big Foot had planted in front of his lodge.
The soldiers then searched their tents and wagons for arms,
even confiscating cooking and sewing tools.
[ Music & Noise ]
As Big Foot's people gathered around the flag of truce outside his tent,
four powerful Hotchkiss rapid repeating guns were mounted above the camp.
>> I noticed that they were erecting cannons up here,
also hauling up quite a lot of ammunition for it.
>> They encircled us like a band of sheep.
>> I could see that there was commotion amongst the soldiers and I saw
and looking back they had their guns in position ready to fire.
>> Thomas Tibbles, a white reporter who followed the troops
to Wounded Knee recorded what happened next.
>> Suddenly, I heard a single shot from the direction of the troops.
Then three or four, a few more and immediately a volley.
At once came a general rattle of rifle firing then the Hotchkiss guns.
[ Gun Shot ]
>> An awful noise was heard.
I thought I was paralyzed for a time.
Then my head cleared and I saw nearly all the people on the ground bleeding.
My father, my mother, my grandmother, my older brother and my younger brother were all killed.
>> And he saw his mother walking toward him.
She was walking along and she was shot.
"Dewey" she said, "Keeping walking, my son."
She said, "Keep going."
She said, "I'm going to die."
And that was the last time he saw his mother.
>> The women as they were fleeing with their babies were killed together, shot right through.
And after most of them had been killed, a cry was made that all those not killed
or wounded should come forth and they would be saved.
Little boys came out of their places of refuge and as soon as they came in sight,
a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there, American horse Oglala.
>> The firing continued for an hour or two wherever a soldier saw a sign of life.
[ Noise ]
>> With the sunset, the weather turned intensely cold.
[Background Music] About 7 o'clock that night, the 7th Cavalry brought in the long train
of dead and wounded soldiers and Indians from Wounded Knee.
Forty-nine wounded Sioux women and children had been piled into fueled wagons.
>> The wounded Indian women and children were eventually carried into an agency church
where they lay in silence on the floor beneath a pulpit decorated
with a Christmas banner reading, "Peace on Earth, goodwill to men."
>> Nothing I have seen in my whole life ever affected or depressed or haunted me
like the scenes I saw that night in that church.
One, unwounded old woman held a baby on her lap.
I handed a couple of water to the old woman telling her, "Give it to the child."
Who grabbed as if parched with thirst.
And she swallowed it hurriedly I saw it gush right out again,
a blood stain stream through a hole in her neck.
Heartsick, I went to find a surgeon.
For a moment he stood there near the door looking over the massive suffering
and dying women and children and how the silence,
the silence they kept was so complete it was oppressive.
And then to my amazement, I saw that the surgeon who I knew had served
in the Civil War attending the wounded from [inaudible], it began to grow pale.
This is the first time I've seen a lot of women
and children shot the pieces, he said, and I can't stand it.
Thomas Tibbles, reporter.
>> For three days, the frozen bodies of the dead including Big Foot lay
where they fell at Wounded Knee.
Finally, the army dug a large trench at the massacre site then
as they collected the bodies, a blanket was seen moving.
Beneath it snuggled against her dead mother was a baby girl.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] The official military history's called Wounded Knee the last battle
in the Indian wars.
But the tenacious struggle for Indian survival is symbolized by a child clinging to life
for three days on a frozen field continues to this day.
500 nations will follow a path that covers thousands of years
and will bring us full circle to 1890.
In this hour we will travel back in time to three stunning civilizations
that flourish long before the arrival of Europeans.
To the Anasazi of the southwest, the mound builders of the Mississippi,
and the great pyramid builders of the Maya.
But when we return we'll go back even farther to creation as seen
through the eyes of Indian people.
[ Music & Noise ]
>> When earth was still young and giants still roam the earth, a great sickness came upon them.
All of them died except for a small boy.
One day while he was playing, a snake bit him.
The boy cried and cried.
The blood came out and finally he died.
With his tears our lakes became, with his blood the red clay became,
with his body our mountains became and that was how earth became.
Taos Pueblo.
>> Pleasant it looked this newly creative world.
Along the entire length and breadth of the earth our grandmother extended a green reflection
of her covering and the escaping odors were pleasant to inhale.
Winnebago.
>> God created the Indian country and that was the time this river started to run.
Then God created fish in this river and put deer in the mountains.
Then the creator gave Indians life.
We walked and as soon as we saw the game and fish, we knew they were made for us.
My strength, my blood is from the fish, from the roots and berries and game.
I did not come here.
I was put here by the creator Meninick Yakama [phonetic].
>> In the Old Testament, Adam and Eve were forced from the garden
of creation and expelled to a cruel world.
[ Noise ]
>> For most North American Indian nations, it was and is very different.
They stayed in the garden, the place of their creation,
the single place on earth most perfect for them.
>> The Crow Country is a good country.
The creator has put it exactly on the right place.
While you are in it, you farewell, whenever you go out of it,
whichever way you travel, you fair worst.
The Crow Country is exactly in the right place.
Ealaapuash.
>> There is a song in everything, [inaudible].
[ Music ]
>> Make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset.
Make me wise so that I may know the things you have taught my people,
the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock.
Make me ever ready to come to you with clean hands and straight eye so that when life fades
as the fading sunset my spirit may come to you without shame, Tom Whitecloud Ojibway.
[ Music ]
To the outsider, the sun beaten deserts of the American southwest are a harsh
and unforgiving land reluctant to support life.
To the ancient people who live there, it was a place where the creator provided everything.
>> There is nothing there that you can see even to this day with very little vegetation.
We see a lot of rocks and we see a lot of sand.
The Hopis are always maintaining that that's a chosen place from who was chosen for them
by the creator of the great spirit for the Hopis.
>> The ancient people of the desert were the ancestors of all the modern Pueblo nations.
To their Hopi descendants, they are known as the Hisatsinom,
but to most of the world they are known by the Navajo name, Anasazi.
Around 900 AD the Anasazi flourished in a wide circle covering parts of modern day Utah,
Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.
[ Noise ]
The Anasazi found balance with their world.
They learned where to find water and how to harness it.
Villages joined together to build dams, reservoirs
and irrigation canals turning deserts into gardens of corn and squash.
They were a people intimately connected to their land.
In a very real sense, they emerged from it.
Generations before the time of Christ, the Anasazi lived in subterranean pit houses,
sunken homes with stone worked walls and broad strong roofs, formidable protection
against the searing sun and bitter cold of the desert.
With time, they adopted their above ground storage houses into living spaces
but the underground pit houses were not abandoned.
They were retained as spiritual places of teaching, the place of origin, the Kiva.
100 years before the first gothic cathedrals were built in Europe, the master architects
and stone masons of the Anasazi were building great Kivas that could hold 500 people.
Around 900 AD the Anasazi leadership embarked upon a bold and visionary plan,
create a mecca for pilgrimages and a focal point for trade at the very center
of their land they chose the barren treeless Chaco Canyon, 100 miles northwest
of present day Albuquerque, New Mexico.
It was a monumental undertaking.
They built 400 miles of distinctive graded roads and broad avenues all leading to the canyon.
At distant points, signal stations were constructed where fires blaze to communicate
across the vastness of the dessert and to guide travelers at night.
Over 50,000 trees were cut down in the surrounding mountains
to build the towns of Chaco Canyon.
Along with traders and pilgrims, the roads carried resources
to maintain dozens of communities.
None compared with the largest single complex the Anasazi ever built.
[ Music ]
Pueblo Bonito, the Wonder of Canyon.
[ Music ]
At its peak Pueblo Bonito's 800 rooms may have housed over a thousand residents.
Some sections overlooking the main plaza loomed five stories above the canyon floor.
The plaza pulsated with life.
Women gathered the colored corn blanketing the rooftops and melt and rose to grind it.
Children played, men returning from the fields gathered to talk.
[ Music & Chanting ]
37 sacred kivas scattered throughout the complex speak to Pueblo Bonito's rich ceremonial life.
During ceremonies the feet of dancers pounded the ground smooth as spectators huddled
against the buildings and throng the roofs to watch.
The Chaco Canyon was more than the spiritual mecca.
It was also a center of trade and commerce.
And trade in one stone more valuable to Chaco's Mexican trading partners than gold or jade,
was the engine of the canyon's economic growth.
Turquoise.
Here, raw stone arrived from distant mines for the craftsman of Pueblo Bonito to cut and shape
into small tiles and beads which would then traded south
to merchant centers in the heart of Mexico.
There they were transformed into extraordinary creations.
For 150 years trade fueled the Chaco economy but the wealth and power of the canyon was fleeting.
Chacos made your turquoise consumer to a land in central Mexico fell to civil strife.
Extended drought or hostilities also may have contributed to the down fall of Chaco Canyon.
[ Music ]
By 1150, it was in decline.
The great turquoise road over the Mexican high sierra abandoned.
But the Anasazi world still flourished,
the people of Chaco Canyon simply moved to other locations.
Many went north to Mesa Verde which at
that time was reaching its cultural and architectural height.
There under the shelter of the pines studded mazes of Southern Colorado,
the architects of Chaco Canyon would help create some of the most stunning buildings of all time.
The largest of this is known as Cliff Palace, though it is a palace in name only.
These beautiful stone buildings of Anasazi were home to common families.
It was a society based on equality.
Men rotated service on public works, women plastered houses.
The men who farmed also carved.
Spiritual leaders tiled the fields.
>> Each time when I see and visit any ancient drawling I feel close
because these are my ancestors, my forefathers for centuries.
I feel on meditation looking at their drawlings within few minutes half hour I get refreshed.
[ Music ]
>> The people of Mesa Verde and many other Anasazi towns relocated around 1300.
The period of the ancestors came to an end and the modern day Pueblo world took shape.
Traditions that lived today in the American Southwest the way of life, the architecture,
the religion are the resonants of a heritage reaching back thousands of years.
[ Music ]
>> We [inaudible] wanted to send a prayer to the sun so we called on his friend the bear
and the bear came and he said I'm honored to be asked to do this but I can only take it
to the top of the highest tree but I know someone who can.
So let's call eagle and so eagle was called and eagle said "Yes, I can try."
And so eagle flew and flew and flew up, up, up and got to sun and delivered the prayer.
And the sun was so taken with this and said "Give me one of your feathers."
And so the eagle plucked out a tail of feather and gave it to the sun and the sun kissed
that feather which is why, you know, eagle feathers are black on the end
and this is because the sun sings on there.
So take this back and forever this will be my recognition of my special people.
[ Music ]
>> Along the Mississippi river, six miles
from present day Saint Louis Missouri there stood a city
that once dominated the heart of the continent.
At its center was a powerful leader.
>> [Background Music] A great number
of years ago there appeared among those a man who came down from the sun.
This man told us that he had seen from on high that we did not govern ourselves well,
that we have no master that each of us had presumption enough to think him self capable
of governing others while he could not even conduct himself.
>> A thousand years ago the great sun, a leader who was both king
and Pope lived the top a man made royal mountain 10 stories high,
its 16 acres base larger than any pyramid in Egypt.
>> He told us that in order to live
in piece among ourselves we must observe the following points.
We must never kill anyone but in defense of our own lives.
We must never know any woman besides our own.
We must never take any things that belong to another.
We must never lie nor get drunk, we must not be avaricious.
We must give generously and with joy and share our subsistence
with those who are in need of it.
>> From the heights of his royal state the great sun mediated between the creator
and the people between the sun and the earth.
This is Cahokia city of the sun.
The great sun ruled the thriving center of a vast Mississippian culture.
Outside the walled city communities of farmers, hunters, and fisherman stretched
from miles surrounded by fields of corn.
With 20,000 residence, no city in the United States would surpass Cahokia's historic size
before 1800.
Only then would Philadelphia's population eclipse the ancient center.
>> This people lived in the [inaudible] houses on time the principal people did, the priest
and the royalty, they lived in very substantial houses not tipis, not tipis.
Tipi is Western plains people.
Down here they live in houses.
They were sedentary, they were farmers, they use the rivers and the miles and streams
as a not only for commerce but for sustenance as well.
>> [Background Music] With the Mississippi and other major rivers has its highways.
Cahokia was linked by trade to a third of a continent.
Copper arrived from the great lakes, obsidian from yellow stone,
mica and crystal from the Appalachians,
gold and silver form Canada, shell from the Gulf of Mexico.
[ Music ]
>> Look at this old trees that has seem so much asked by them,
magnificently dressed Indian people coming down that-- by that dug out, reading people,
standing right here on this bunk of-- having a good time 'cause they did, you know,
Indian people are always known how to have a good time.
And there would be a feast prepared
and the women would put the corn together and they make sofkee.
They would roast a deer, the people would bring gifts.
You never go to an Indian's house without bringing something that was old as the sunrise.
[ Music ]
>> Cahokia was the pinnacle of a mound building culture
with traditions dating back to before 1,000 BC.
Thousands of mounds still dock the landscape from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
An average funeral mound in the Ohio Valley was three stories tall.
Construction could represent 200,000 man hours of labor
or 100 men carrying the baskets of earth for a year.
But few mounds compare with the religious effigy located 50 miles east
of Cincinnati, Ohio, the Great Serpent Mound.
The enormous snake stretches over 400 yards in length.
While their earthworks are the mound builders most visible legacy,
their smaller creations are their most beautiful.
[ Music ]
Only glimpses remain of the people who changed the course of life on the northern continent.
Most of their material world, wooden buildings, boats, baskets, woven textiles,
leather footwear, and clothes have long since turned to dust.
>> An old [inaudible] relative of mine that used to go outside and hold my hands up
and bless my self with the sun that's hot [phonetic].
Well, I can't do that anymore because they say we sun worshippers said we didn't worship
the sun.
We worship what was behind it, the power behind it.
[ Music ]
[ Noise ]
>> In the 19th century, 2,000 miles south of Cahokia,
a group of European explorers carved their way in the jungles of Southern Mexico.
There, buried for centuries and surrounded by massive pyramids,
they came upon a royal palace splendid with grand rooms, courts, and a tower.
The Europeans recognized that by their own standards, the site was a legacy of greatness.
Standing in the middle of the largest Indian nation in North America, the Maya,
descendants of the pyramid builders, the explorers could not imagine
that the towering architecture was the work of Indian people.
Instead, they speculated wildly about the lost civilization
that could have built so grand in existence.
Refugees from the sunken continent of Atlantis, a lost tribe of Israel,
seafarers from the Orient, even beings from another planet.
They considered everything but the obvious.
In 1949, a Mexican archeologist came to the same magnificent ruins now known as Palenque.
[ Music ]
He climbed the steps to the top of the largest pyramid, the Temple of the Inscription.
There he noticed holes in the floor below the capstones.
He removed the slacks and discovered a rubble-filled passageway descending deep
into the pyramid's heart.
After three years of excavation, the passage was clear.
At the bottom was a tomb that had been buried for over 1,200 years.
It would unlock the history of Palenque and help to reveal the past of the Mayan people,
a past they left for the future to read.
For centuries, Mayan glyphs were considered complex picture stories
like Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Only in the 1980's that archaeologists finally recognized that it was true writing.
They were not looking at pictures to be interpreted but symbols for sounds to be read.
It was the Maya language.
Instantly, a door was opened on the past.
Beneath the five ton sarcophagus cover at Palenque,
late Pacal shield in the Maya language.
He was born in 603 A.D. His head was bound at birth to enlarge his forehead,
a fashion that marked him as a member of the royal elite.
He wore a cosmetic bridge on his nose and decorated his hair with water lilies.
Pacal rose to power at the age of 12.
He would build a holy city and rule for nearly 70 years leading Palenque during a time
of greatness and growth in the Mayan world.
[ Music ]
[Background Music] As the Maya expanded, over 60 capital cities emerged.
Their growth fueled by a successful agricultural society.
[ Music ]
The roots of Mayan agriculture reached back thousands of years and stretched
across Mexico and into Central America.
Now, friends and brothers listen to these words of dreaming, spring rains give us life
and bring forth the golden corn silk.
By the time of Christ, there were millions of people in the region
with agriculture allowing populations to settle and expand.
[ Music & Noise ]
Art, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, priesthood and royalty, all flourished.
[ Music ]
By the mid '700s, at Palenque alone, the sons of Pacal ruled over 200,000 Maya living
in regional communities of farmers, weavers, stone masons and feather-workers.
[ Music ]
At the golden age of building and growth could be transformed
by a new era of war and destruction.
For reasons still locked in the past, the Mayan world turned against itself.
Farmers became soldiers.
[ Music & Noise ]
By 800 A.D., an era had ended.
Most of the capitals that have been among the living wonders
of human creativity including Palenque were deserted and reclaimed by the jungle.
[ Music ]
South of here there's a desert.
It's a forbidding barrier stretching hundreds of miles.
On the other side of that dessert is Mexico.
Over thousands of years, skilled travelers managed to cross this barrier
but widespread contact was impossible, and so each side developed in their own unique way.
In Mexico, millions of Indian people, 80 percent of the continent's population created art
and architecture that was unparalleled and it's your size and physical ambition.
They developed writing and astronomy.
Their wars were wage between massive armies even by contemporary standards.
In this hour we follow an epic story told
through the actual words of those who took part in it.
Along with eye witness illustrations of events that occurred almost 500 years ago,
we take you to the present day site of Mexico City to the heart
of the most powerful military empire in the continent's history, the Aztec.
[ Music ]
>> Extended lies the city lies Mexico spreading circles
of emerald light radiating splendor like a quetzal plume.
[Background Music] Oh author of life, your house is here.
Your song is heard on earth.
It spreads among the people, behold, Mexico.
By the Aztec calendar, it was the year one read.
And Motecuhzoma, emperor of the Aztec was the most powerful man in the Americas,
by many standards, the most power man in the world.
[Background Music] From his capital, Tenochtitlan,
Motecuhzoma ruled over 10 million subjects.
For almost 90 years, his people had build an empire with their armies and become rich
from the tribute of defeated states.
But Motecuhzoma was troubled, prophetic nightmares disturbed his sleep
and he had been reading ominous signs.
[ Music and Noise ]
A huge tongue of fire burning in the night sky to the east,
a major temple mysteriously destroyed by fire.
[ Noise ]
A comet blazing across the day time sky.
Signs and dreams were vital to the Aztec.
They guided decisions of state.
>> Motecuhzoma thought as now we'll do in our villages today
that when important things happen you will dream of it.
They too saw things perhaps in the night sky, a shooting star.
Motecuhzoma and others at the time would have thought I have seen it.
>> Motecuhzoma could feel disaster approaching but he did not know what threatened his empire.
He did know that nations lived in cycles like all things in nature,
growth and fullness were followed by fall.
[ Music and Bird Chirping ]
The cycles of nations had been played out many times in the valley of Mexico.
Ruins of ancient cultures were scattered across the region.
Motecuhzoma had only to look 20 miles to the east to the ruins of a long abandoned city
so magnificent the Aztec called it the Home of the Gods.
In the cycle of nations, even the Home of the Gods had fallen.
[ Music ]
900 years before Motecuhzoma, workers had come from throughout Mexico to build Teotihuacan.
The city among the grandest in the world was a monumental work of art.
[ Music ]
Its largest building, the pyramid of the sun had a base the size of the biggest pyramid in Egypt.
Teotihuacan's military might controlled Central Mexico for centuries.
>> When I first saw this place Teotihuacan and the pyramids, I thought this is truly beautiful
that which our grandfathers, our fathers before have done.
And I thought when I looked at it again; it is like having your father that died
or your brother that died and meeting them again here.
You remember them and you see their greatness when you contemplate what they left behind.
>> [Background Music] With all it's power Teotihuacan was still trapped
in the cycle of nations.
In one of history's great unsolved mysteries,
the city was systematically burned and abandoned at its height.
With the dissolving of the empire, Central Mexico turned to chaos
with small rival kingdoms locked in struggle for power and survival.
[ Noise ]
Elite warriors fought for kings on the field of honor like knights in medieval Europe.
It was a world of royal blood line's betrayal and revenge.
In Central Mexico, small kingdoms would struggle for 200 years before the cycle would turn again
and they would begin to unify under the leadership
of the Toltec people from the city state of Tolan.
Over 500 years before the rise of the Aztec, the Toltec redefined leadership
in Central Mexico enforcing power not through military might
but through the moral force of their teachings.
They coordinated trade between states and arbitrated disputes all
within the framework of their religion.
[Background Music] Their capital functioned like Wall Street,
the Vatican and the Supreme Court combined.
It was also here in Tolan that a priest who held the name of the god, Quetzalcoatl,
the feathered serpent would be exiled, eventually sailing into the Gulf
of Mexico vowing to return in another time as a savior for the people.
[ Music ]
After less than two centuries, Tolan like Teotihuacan before it was violently destroyed.
But while the city burned, the sophisticated Toltec leadership escaped many
of the elite families moving to the valley of Mexico.
For 150 years in the shadows of the ruins of Teotihuacan, the Toltec established control
over the city states of the valley.
Their influence was so great that their blood lines became the benchmark
of nobility throughout the region.
During the same time, a nomadic tribe far to the west was in the midst
of an epic search for a homeland.
They were the Meshika, Motecuhzoma's ancestors.
[ Music & Noise ]
Behold, a new sun has risen, a new god is born, new laws are written and new men are made.
Around 1300 after nearly two centuries of wandering, the Meshika people came to the valley
of Mexico, a valley long dominated by the Toltec.
The Meshika with no Toltec blood were seen by the refined city states as violent barbarians,
a threat to the stability of the valley.
[ Noise ]
The local states attacked the Nomad nation, killing many and driving the survivors
to a rocky area covered with cactus and infested with snakes.
The exile was meant to destroy them but the Meshika were used to adversity, they flourished.
Soon the resilience and skills and warfare impressed their sophisticated neighbors.
They begun to sell their services as mercenaries
and within a generation the Meshika were accepted as part of the social
and political fabric of the lush mountain valley.
In 1325 they asked the neighboring Lord of Colhuacan to send his daughter
to become the wife of a Meshika ruler.
Flattered and seeing the opportunity for unity the Lord of Colhuacan complied.
Days later when he and the other lords of the valley went to the Meshika town
to honor the new princess, instead of seeing his young child emerged a priest appeared dressed
in her skin.
Horrified, the Lord of Colhuacan called for revenge.
>> "Here, come here my vessels from Colhuacan.
Come avenge the hideous crime committed by this Meshika.
Let them die, destroy them such deprave man of evil.
My vessels, we shall finish them off and leave no trace on memory of them."
>> Colhuacan and its allies attacked the Meshika driving those they did not kill
into a lake in center of the valley.
Almost annihilate the Meshika again prove resilient.
As they gathered on a swampy island and lake they saw an eagle perched on a cactus.
The prophetic sign they were told they would see when they reach the end on there long search
for home land, the place that would be called Tenochtitlan.
[ Music ]
Now we have found the land promised to us.
We have found peace for the weary Mexican people.
Now we want them nothing be confident children, brothers and sisters
because we have obtain the promise of our God.
[Background Music] For 100 years the people of Tenochtitlan built up the island
through great sacrifice they reclaimed land from the swampy lake
and erected stone temples public buildings cause ways of hue
and stone were constructed to the North, South and West.
An Aqueduct was built to bring in freshwater from main land spring three miles away.
Canals were dug throughout the island to transport goods and people.
They gained trade wealth and again hired themselves out as mercenary soldiers
for the powerful city states of the valley.
Marriages were arranged that finally brought them honored Toltec blood lines.
Tenochtitlan was a city on the rise.
The cycle of power was turning toward the Meshika and when war again broke
out in the valley the Meshika and their allies prevailed.
In victory they called themselves the Aztec, after the Meshika place
of origin Aztlan, land of herons.
[ Music ]
From this point Aztec prophecy foretold a glorious future.
The might of our powerful arms in the spirit of heart shall be felt.
Within we will conquer all nations near and far rule
over all villages in cities from sea to sea.
Become lords of gold and silver, jewels and precious stones, feathers and tributes
and we shall become lords over them in their lands and over their sons and their daughters
who will serve us as our subjects.
For over 80 years, the Aztec launched far-reaching campaigns
of conquest expanding their domain from Gulf to Pacific.
They fought epic battles with city states throughout the region.
Most were conquered and turned into tributaries, forced to supply slave laborers
for Aztec public works and pay high taxes and goods.
Aztec scribes recorded the taxes of many states.
Bolts of fine clothe, discs of hammered gold, exotic plants and feathers,
precious stones, feathered military uniforms.
[ Music ]
[Background Music] Built on the backs of the tributary states, the island capital
of the Aztec grew into one of the wonders of the world.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] When I first opened my eyes in this world, I was born of this heritage.
I have seen the beautiful festivals we have in our villages, our dances,
and it would've been like that there.
They had many festivals in this place with many beautiful dancers wearing many brilliant colors.
I think it was even more beautiful then, much more beautiful
when our grandfathers lived there and followed their ways.
>> The two-story houses of the elite were adorned with beautiful gardens.
Royal aviaries housed thousands of rare birds
and store houses swelled with the wealth of empire.
The city was cleaned daily by thousands of sweepers.
Its refuse [phonetic] collected and shipped away on barges.
[ Noise ]
The central markets thronged with professional traders whose travels took them
to far distant locations, men who spoke many languages
and often carried with them news of the world.
[ Music & Noise ]
[Background Music] The center of Tenochtitlan was dominated by the great temple.
Its twin pyramids representing deities who embodied the conflict at the heart
of Aztec society, the eternal struggle between life and death, fertility and war.
Their private rituals which on special occasions included the sacrifice
of human prisoners incorporated this duality.
Life required death to exist and death required life.
Tenochtitlan became a city of hundreds of thousands, a bustling metropolis ruled
by the Aztec emperor from the grand imperial palace.
But in the year 1 reed, the Christian year 1519, Motecuhzoma could feel a shadow
across his empire and he could not forget that the prophecy of Aztec greatness had a dark side.
A prophecy long held in their oral tradition.
I shall make war against all provinces and cities, towns and settlements and make all
of them my subjects, my servants.
But just as I will subjugate them, so too will they be snatched from me and turned against me
by strangers who would drive me out of this land.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] Ever since their years as a wandering tribe,
the Aztec believed their destiny was to rule the world.
Now, at the height of empire, Motecuhzoma listened to his dreams and saw the signs.
They foretold disaster.
Then, word came of strange happenings in the east,
boats and men landing on the Mexican coast.
Men unlike any they had encountered before, their bodies sheath in metal.
[ Music & Noise ]
Motecuhzoma sent scouts to the coast to find out more about the new arrivals.
They were very white, their eyes were like chalk,
their hair on some it was yellow and on some it was black.
They wore long beards, they were yellow too.
The strangers had landed on the gulf coast, that was also disturbing information.
Centuries earlier, the banished priest from the cult of the feathered serpent,
Quetzalcoatl had left Mexico from the same coast promising one day to return.
[Background Music] Another prophecy that threatened Motecuhzoma.
If he comes in the year 1 reed, he strikes at kings.
It was now the Aztec year 1 reed.
Whether Motecuhzoma believed the prophecy or not was of little importance.
He knew that many subjugated people throughout the empire embraced the story
of the feathered serpent and awaited his return.
For it was in their heart that he would come
that he would come to land to reclaim his kingdom.
Whoever these invaders were, whether they represented Quetzalcoatl or a foreign power,
Motecuhzoma could feel the threat to his empire.
And his fears were justified.
Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes had landed in Mexico.
>> It was said that first he dreamt that Quetzalcoatl would return.
After that when he saw Hernando Cortes and the others, he thought, he has come.
Quetzalcoatl has come.
Only, he was wrong, another had come, someone with evil intentions because Cortes did not come
with religious faith or to do good things.
He came to commit terrible crimes against the Meshika.
>> As a diplomatic gesture, Motecuhzoma sent emissaries carrying the costume of Quetzalcoatl
which they presented to Cortes aboard his ship.
Cortes responded with a display of force.
He ordered the Aztec delegation shackled and forced to watch as his men fired a Lombard canon
and a thunderous hail of fire and smoke blowing apart a tree on shore.
The astonished emissaries were released and they raced back to Tenochtitlan.
Motecuhzoma received the news with alarm.
Spanish weapons and armor were formidable and it would be only a matter
of time before tributary states chafing under the yoke
of Aztec oppression would join the conquistador.
They would lead him to the wealth that lay at the center of the empire
to the one thing Spanish conquistadors crave above all else.
>> We Spanish suffer from a disease of a heart which only gold can cure.
>> Cortes ordered his 450 men army inland.
When some of his men resisted, he sank his ships.
There would be no turning back.
[ Music & Noise ]
[Background Music] The army moved relentlessly toward the valley of Mexico.
As Motecuhzoma had anticipated, Cortes formed alliances along the way
with rebellious city states.
One tributary leader spoke for the fears of many.
>> Motecuhzoma and the Meshika had given us much pain.
They have imposed a tribute upon us, they have become our rulers.
If the Spaniard should abandon us in haste, if they should go,
so perverse are the Meshika that they will kill us.
[ Music & Noise ]
>> [Background Music] While many nations lived in fear of the Aztec, one city state less
than 50 miles east of Tenochtitlan had never fallen to the empire, Tlaxcala.
There, Cortes forged his key alliance, 6,000 Tlaxcalan troops joined the Spaniards.
[ Music & Noise ]
As reports reached the Aztec capital, some of Motecuhzoma's advisers argued
for a decisive military campaign.
But Motecuhzoma held his armies in check unwilling to leave the capital unprotected
or risk setting off a general rebellion.
Stalling for time, he sent emissaries to protest Cortes' advance and had a wall of trees planted
across the road to disguise the route to Tenochtitlan.
Paralyzed with doubt, the emperor was fast becoming only a player
in a prophecy being fulfilled.
>> And he must have thought, these men, why have they come?
What do they want?
Maybe we can attack and kill some of them but not all of them.
For that reason, some did not want to fight.
They had seen that if they shot arrows at them, they did not fall.
They made a clanging sound as they bounced off their armor.
Even if they fired at the horses, they did not die because the horses had armor.
>> Cortes and the Tlaxcalan army turned first to a city state
that remained loyal to the Aztec emperor, Cholula.
Eyewitness accounts were recorded.
>> The mira [phonetic] rose from the Spaniards [inaudible], summoning all the noblemen, lords,
war leaders, warriors and common folk.
And when they got crowded into the temple courtyard, then the Spaniards
and their allies blocked the entrances and every exit.
There followed a butchery of stabbing, beating, killing of the unsuspecting Cholulans armed
with no bows and arrows, protected by no shields.
With no warning, they were treacherously, deceitfully slain.
>> 6,000 Cholulan citizens lay dead in the streets.
[ Music ]
Tenochtitlan received the news of the massacre and shock.
An Aztec eyewitness later recalled.
The city rose into molt [phonetic], alarmed as if by an earthquake,
as if there were a constant reeling of the face of the earth.
Motecuhzoma's worst nightmare was about to reveal itself.
[ Music ]
Do the former rulers know what is happening in their absence?
Oh, that any of them might see might wonder at what has befallen me.
That what I am seeing now that they have gone for I cannot be dreaming.
[ Music ]
>> Proudly stands the city of Mexico, Tenochtitlan.
Here, no one fears to die in war.
Keep this in mind, oh princes.
Who could attack Tenochtitlan?
Who could shake the foundations of heaven?
[ Noise ]
>> On November 8, 1519, in the Aztec year 1 reed, Hernando Cortes arrived at the gates
to the imperial city of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan.
An Aztec eyewitness later recalled, Mexico lay stunned silent.
None went out of doors, mothers kept their children in.
The roads were deserted as if it were early morning.
[ Music ]
Motecuhzoma walked out onto the grand causeway.
Coming face to face with Cortes, the emperor offered his hospitality leading the Spaniards
through the city gates to his imperial palace.
[Background Music] The people of Tenochtitlan watched and their words were remembered.
The iron of their lances glistened from afar.
The shimmer of their swords was as of a sinuous watercourse.
Their iron breast and back pieces, their helmets clanked.
Some came completely encased in iron as if turned to iron.
And ahead of them ran their dogs panting with foam continually dripping from their muzzles.
>> The Spanish soldiers were themselves struck with awe [phonetic].
>> We were astounded.
The majestic towers and houses, all of massive stone and rising out of the waters were
like enchanted castles we had read of in books.
Indeed, some of our men even asked if what we saw was not a dream.
>> Even Cortes was amazed.
>> Considering that these people are barbarous, lacking the knowledge of God and cut off
from all civilized nations, it is truly remarkable to see what they have achieved.
>> Once they reached the palace, Motecuhzoma's diplomatic plans were shattered.
Cortes turned on his host seizing the emperor hostage.
>> What now my warriors?
We have come to the end.
We have taken our medicine.
Is there anywhere a mountain we can run away to and climb?
>> Motecuhzoma was forced to lead Cortes to the treasury.
>> Motecuhzoma's own property was then brought out.
Precious things like necklaces with pendants, armbands tufted with quetzal feathers,
golden armbands, bracelets, golden anklets with shells, turquoise items,
turquoise nose rods, no end of treasure.
They took all, seized everything for themselves as if it were theirs.
>> Cortes wrote to the king of Spain, "Your highness, there is so much to describe
that I do not know how to begin even to recount some part of it.
Motecuhzoma has all the things to be found under the heavens fashioned in gold and silver."
The Spaniards melted the beautifully crafted gold into blocks.
For five months, holding Motecuhzoma prisoner in his own palace they lived in splendor
and pillaged the city from within.
>> I thought this isn't Quetzalcoatl.
This isn't a God.
They said, "Look at them, how they eat just as we do.
Look at them they go about just as we."
When they saw him, they knew he wasn't really Quetzalcoatl.
They said among themselves to their people, "Look brothers, this isn't a God.
Our gods do good things and this one, he wants to destroy us."
>> Among the Aztec people, a resistance began to organize under the direction
of Motecuhzoma's brother, Cuitlahuac.
In an effort to cripple the movement, the Spaniards attacked the large,
unarmed religious gathering in April of 1520.
[ Noise ]
One man who saved his life by playing dead later recounted a scene.
They charged the crowd with their iron lances and hacked us with their iron swords.
They slashed the backs of some.
They hacked at the shoulders of others splitting their bodies open.
The blood of the young warriors ran like water had gathered in pools.
And the Spaniards began to hunt them out of the administrative buildings,
dragging and killing anyone they could find even starting
to take those buildings to pieces as they searched.
[ Music & Noise ]
>> [Background Music] The Aztec counterattacked forcing the conquistadors
to retreat behind the walls of the great palace.
The Spaniards then brought Motecuhzoma
out in chains before his people to order them to stop fighting.
But the emperor could not bring himself to speak.
He stood by while another hostage delivered his message.
"Mexicans, men of Tenochtitlan, your ruler, the lord of men, Motecuhzoma implores you.
He says, Listen Mexicans, we are not equal to the Spaniards.
Abandon the battle, still your arrows, hold back your shields, otherwise, evil will be the fate
of the miserable old men and women of the people, of babes in arms, of the toddlers,
of the infants crawling on the ground or still in the cradle."
>> But the Aztec were not of people to be subjugated.
They reformed their government and elected Motecuhzoma's brother,
Cuitlahuac as the 10th emperor.
Under his direction, the Aztec continued the siege of the palace.
[ Music & Noise ]
[Background Music] After 30 days, Motecuhzoma was killed.
The Aztec accused the Spaniards of strangling him
and hurling his body from the top of the palace.
The Spaniards claimed he was stoned to death by his own people.
[ Music ]
One of the most powerful men on earth had fallen, trapped in a play of destiny.
Prophecy had become reality.
Days later, the Spaniards trapped in the palace without food or water attempted
to escape undercover of darkness.
Aztec witnesses recounted the events.
>> That night at midnight, the enemy came out crowded together.
The Spaniards in the lead, Tlaxcalans following screened
by a fine drizzle, a fine sprinkle of rain.
They were able undetected to cross the canals.
Just as they were crossing the canal,
a woman drawing water saw them, "Meshikas, come all of you.
They are already leaving.
They are already secretly getting out."
Then a watcher at the top of the temple also shouted
and his cries pervaded the entire cities.
"Brave warriors, Meshikas, your enemy already leaves.
Hurry with the shield boats and along the road.
>> [Background Music] As the Spaniards moved out onto one of the main causeways over the lake,
canoe after canoe full of Aztec soldiers
under Cuitlahuac's direction showered them with spears and arrows.
Many Spaniards waited down with gold stolen from the palace fell into the water
and drowned carried to the bottom by the weight.
The canal was filled, crammed with them.
Those who came along behind walked on corpses.
It was as if a mountain of men had been laid down.
They have pressed against one another, smothered one another.
>> Three quarters of the Spanish army never reached the outskirts of Tenochtitlan.
Cortes and the rest of the survivors escaped into the countryside.
For a moment, the great city was free.
And when the Spaniards thus disappeared,
we thought they had gone for good never more to return.
Once again, the temples could be swept out, the dirt removed, it could be adorned, ornamented.
But the fleeing Spaniards left behind another enemy, an Aztec survivor remembered.
At about the time that the Spaniards have fled from the city,
there came a great sickness, a pestilence, the smallpox.
It's spread over the people with great destruction of men.
It caused great misery.
The brave Meshika warriors were indeed weakened by it.
Even the new emperor died of the disease.
>> It was after all this had happened that the Spaniards came back.
[ Music & Noise ]
>> Cortes and his men had healed their wounds and rebuilt their army.
New alliances were made.
The Spaniards and 75,000 Tlaxcalan and allied Indian soldiers set siege to Tenochtitlan.
[ Music & Noise ]
The entire population rose to defend their city.
Aztec witnesses would remember the struggle.
Fighting continued.
Both sides took captives.
On both sides, there were deaths.
Great became the suffering of the common folk.
There was hunger, many died of famine.
There was no more good pure water to drink.
Many died of it.
The people ate anything, lizards, barn swallows, corn leaves, salt grass,
never had such suffering been seen.
The enemy pressed about us like a wall.
They herded us.
The brave warriors were still hopelessly resisting.
[ Music & Noise ]
>> After two and a half long months,
the Spaniards with their overwhelming numbers brought Tenochtitlan to its knees.
[ Music ]
>> Finally, the battle just quietly ended.
Silence reigned.
Nothing happened.
All was quiet and nothing more took place.
Night fell, and the next day nothing happened either.
No one spoke aloud.
The people were crushed.
[ Music ]
[Background Music] Great was the stench of the dead.
Your grandfathers died and with them died the son of the king and his brothers and kinsmen.
So it was that we became orphans oh my sons.
So we became when we were young.
All of us with us, we were born to die.
[ Music ]
Tenochtitlan was leveled.
The magnificent gardens, the marvel of their world were destroyed, the rivers and canals
that so amazed the Spaniards were filled in.
Then Cortes set fire to the aviaries.
Thousands of birds, vermilion flycatchers, iridescent hummingbirds, scarlet tanagers,
green and blue macaws, the beauty that was Mexico was turned to ashes.
[ Foreign Language ]
>> [Background Music] Some say the Meshika came to an end.
It's gone, finished.
We're still here.
We, the people who ignorant outsiders insult by calling us Indians, we are here.
This culture was not finished off.
The culture is gone as an empire, as a social political religious structure.
But what remains is what the people have.
We weren't finished off.
[ Music & Noise ]
>> Proudly stands the city of Mexico, Tenochtitlan.
Here, no one fears to die in war.
Keep this in mind, oh princes.
Who could attack Tenochtitlan?
Who could shake the foundations of heaven?
[ Music ]
>> Our next program will begin far to the east of Mexico on a Caribbean island where a meeting
between Spanish and Indian people appeared at first glance to be merely an encounter
between two potential trading partners.
But that first encounter between Christopher Columbus and the Taino people in 1492 was
in reality, a world shattering event.
Please join us for 500 Nations, a Clash of Cultures.
[ Music ]
>> Hello. I'm Kevin Costner.
Welcome back to 500 Nations.
First encounters between Europeans and Indian people are some of the most famous
and important events in world history.
Most of us can recite the names of Christopher Columbus' ships.
The year he first landed in the new world
and how he mistakenly called the people the encountered there Indians.
But few of us know the names of the people who greeted Columbus
or much about the lives they lived.
How did they greet the strangers?
Were they treated like gods?
Were they feared?
Were they attacked or were they treated as a new and exotic trading partner by people
who had a long history of dealing with other seafaring cultures?
The first meeting between European and American worlds would bring two very different cultures
into conflict.
We'll take you now to the Caribbean where the rough road of contact begins.
500 Nations continues with a Clash of Cultures.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] How much damage?
How many calamities, disruptions and devastations of kingdoms had there been?
How many souls have perished in the Indies over the years and how unjustly?
How many unforgivable sins had been committed?
Bartolome de Las Casas.
[ Music ]
>> In December of 1492, three ships under the command
of Christopher Columbus approached the second largest island in the Caribbean.
For eight weeks, Columbus had traveled from the Bahamas to Cuba finally reaching the site
of modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The island he would name Hispaniola.
The island was then populated by people known as the Taino.
One region was controlled by the paramount chief, Guacanagari.
[ Noise ]
On Christmas Eve while coasting along the shore, Columbus' flagship, the Santa Maria ran aground.
>> When Guacanagari learnt the news, he sent all his people from the town with many large canoes
to unload everything from the ship.
So great was the care and diligence which that came exercised.
And he himself was as diligent unloading the ship as in guarding what was taken to land
in order that everything would be well cared for.
>> Grateful for the island leader's help, Columbus accepted his invitation to come ashore.
>> The admiral left to dine on shore and arrived at the time when five kings had come.
All subject to the one who is called Guacanagari.
Guacanagari came to receive the admiral as soon as he had reached land and took him by the arm.
>> Columbus was immediately struck by the beauty of Taino life.
>> The king observes that very wonderful state
in such a dignified manner that it is a pleasure to see.
Neither that of people nor land can there be.
The houses and the villagers are so pretty.
They love their neighbors as themselves.
And they have the sweetest beach in the world and they're gentle and they are always laughing.
Christopher Columbus.
As a token of gratitude for the rescue of his men and supplies, Columbus presented Guacanagari
with a red cape, a prestigious item among the Taino elite.
In return, Guacanagari gave Columbus a golden tiara he wore on his head.
To Guacanagari, it was a fair exchange, a gesture of mutual respect and recognition.
The opening of trade between equals.
To Columbus, it was a crown, a symbol of authority.
Guacanagari was surrendering his lands and people to Spain.
But Columbus was not simply looking to rule people.
He saw something much more valuable to his future.
He saw gold.
The price he could take back to his sponsors in Europe.
There was wealth to be had.
And to the Europeans of that time wealth belong to those strong enough to take it.
[ Music ]
Now, I have ordered my men to build a tower and a fort.
Not that I believe it to be necessary for it is obvious that with these men that I bring,
I could subdue all of this island, seize the people and make and without arms.
But it is right that this tower be made so that with love and fear, they will obey.
[ Music ]
Leaving behind a contingent of men and a fort built from the timbers
of the Santa Maria, Columbus set sail for Europe.
With him, he would carry the news of a new world, gold and dazzle island natives.
Guacanagari and the Taino had no way of knowing what was
about to happen to their ancient way of life.
The Taino's ancestors were part of the series of migrations
of South American-Indian people dating back over 2,000 years.
They farmed the land and harvested the wealth of the sea.
Taino traders traveled in huge, ocean-going canoes capable of carrying up to 150 men,
boats laden with feathers, gold, wood, pottery, beautiful birds, cotton fabric, and food.
Island nations were woven together by trade.
Trade was the communication system by which nations knew one another.
It maintained peace.
Some trading partners even exchanged their names
to create lasting bonds between their communities.
[ Music & Chanting ]
By the time of contact, there were well over a million people living in the Caribbean.
Local community leaders were subject to powerful regional leaders like Guacanagari,
who controlled trade with large personal fleets and warehouses of commodities.
[ Music & Noise ]
Into this world, Columbus returned in November 1493 with a military flotilla of 17 ships.
Under his command were armor-clad soldiers, mounted cavalry, attack dogs, and guns.
The Spanish conquest of the Caribbean began.
Gold mines were opened and the Taino were enslaved, forced to mine the ore.
A Spanish priest, Bartolome de Las Casas who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage spoke
out against the cruel treatment of the Taino people.
>> It is not possible to recount the hundredth part of what I have seen with my own eyes.
A man have need to have a body of iron to undergo the labor they endure
in getting gold out of the mines.
They must delve and search 100 times over in the inner parts of the mountains
until they dig them down from top to bottom.
They must work the very rocks hollow, Bartolome de Las Casas.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] Epidemics and famine swept the island.
Yet the Spanish continued to demand
that the beleaguered Taino supply them with both food and labor.
Garrisons were strung across the island to fortify the gold fields.
When resistance sprang up, Columbus sent out military units
to terrorize towns into submission.
[ Music & Noise ]
>> They were so relentlessly persecuted and pursued with their wives and children
up into the hills so tired, hungry, and harassed.
And there went with them disease, death,
and misery just as if they had been killed in the wars.
They died of hunger and sickness that surrounded them
and the fatigue and oppression that followed.
After 1496, no more than a third remained of the multitudes that had been on the island.
>> Taino suffering was so severe that thousands took their own lives rather than submit.
>> Where so many went to the woods and there hanged themselves,
after having killed their children saying it was far better to die than to live so miserably.
Some threw themselves from the high cliffs down precipices, others jumped into the sea,
and others starved themselves to death.
Benzoni, soldier for Spain.
>> Some escaped into the mountains including Guacanagari,
the paramount chief who had befriended Columbus.
He soon died a homeless wanderer.
By 1503, 11 years after Columbus' first voyage, only a few packets of resistance remained.
[Background Music] In the mountainous region of Xaragua, Taino people ruled
by a woman named Anacaona, successfully evaded Spanish demands for labor.
Determined to break the resistance, the Spanish governor requested a diplomatic meeting.
Anacaona agreed and summoned 80 regional sub chiefs to her statehouse for the meeting.
When the 80 leaders were gathered inside, the governor gave a signal
and that statehouse was set on fire.
Soldiers lined up outside with swords,
Taino leaders who did not burn were killed as they fled the place.
Anacaona was spared only to be later executed by hanging.
In the aftermath of the bloody carnage, a little boy stood among the ashes
and smoke beside the charred remains of his father.
A boy whose name, the Spanish would come to remember well, Enrique.
[ Pause ]
[ Music ]
[Background Music] The child who witnessed the murder of his father and the other Taino leaders
in Xaragua was taken away from the killing field by a Spanish priest.
He was placed in the care of missionaries and baptized Enrique.
Although raised by Spaniards, he never forgot his own identity, heir to the chiefdom,
the Bahoruco region of the island.
[ Music & Noise ]
>> Enrique was a tall and graceful man with a well-proportioned body.
His face was neither handsome nor ugly, but that of a serious and stern man.
He married a native, a woman of excellent and noble lineage named Dona Lucia.
Bartolome de Las Casas.
The Spanish government created a labor grant system
under which individual Spanish landholders were given village populations to use as force labor.
Enrique, his wife, and his people were turned
over to a debauched [phonetic] young Spaniard named Valenzuela.
They were at his mercy.
The priest, Las Casas protested.
>> In a more just world, Enrique would have been the master.
Valenzuela viewed Enriquillo as a slave and valued him less than manure in the street.
>> Enrique complied with Valenzuela's tyrannical demands for which he was rewarded
with regular beatings and robbed of his last remaining possessions.
His many appeals to Spanish authorities fell on deaf ears.
When Valenzuela raped his wife, Enrique reached his breaking point.
He and his followers escaped to their home lands in the lofty Bahoruco mountains.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] The Spanish came to call him the "Rebel Enrique" and those
who followed him were termed rebels and insurgents,
although in truth they were not rebelling but only fleeing from their cruel enemies
who are misusing and destroying them just as a cow or an ox tries
to escape from the slaughterhouse.
Bartolome de Las Casas.
>> Enrique organized his people.
Women, children, and elderly were sent into caves high in the mountains
where they raised chickens and cultivated gardens to feed the resistance army.
Scouts were posted on every crag and pass, heavy boulders rolled into place above the footpaths.
Enrique instructed his men to fight only in self defense to kill Spaniards only in the course
of battle and otherwise to simply deprive them of their arms.
At first, the Spanish army was confident they would quickly crush the Taino resistance.
[ Music & Noise ]
But Enrique's people armed only with spears, iron spikes, fishbone,
and bows and arrows fought with fierce determination
against the Spanish and their sophisticated arms.
Time after time, they forced the enemy to retreat.
During one fierce battle, Valenzuela himself was captured.
But even this mortal enemy's life would be spared.
Enrique ordered him released.
As word of Enrique's victory spread across the island, many Taino fled to his refuge
and joined the fight for freedom.
His legend grew.
It was said that Enrique never slept at night,
that he himself patrolled the village until dawn.
For over a decade, he fought Spain to a standstill.
Finally unable to defeat the guerillas on their own territory, an exhausted
and humiliated Spanish government made overtures of peace.
>> I know the Spanish very well because they killed my father and grandfather
and all the people of the kingdom of Xaragua, and reduced the population of the entire island
of Hispaniola, I have fled to my own land where neither I nor any
of my followers are harming anyone but are simply defending ourselves
against those who came to capture and kill us.
I need not talk to another Spaniard.
Enrique, Taino.
>> But there was one Spaniard to whom Enrique would still talk, the priest, Las Casas.
After many years spent demanding the king act to stop Spanish atrocities in the new world,
Las Casas had been officially designated protector of the Indians.
He now sought out Enrique in his mountain stronghold.
Two months later, Las Casas and Enrique appeared before Spanish authorities
and negotiated a truce.
14 years after it began, the rebellion came to an end but only after the Spanish agreed
to guarantee freedom for Enrique's people.
At the base of the Abajo mountains, Enrique settled with his 4,000 followers,
the last members of a culture that had flourished for millennia.
By the end of the century, the Taino population that Las Casas had estimated
at two million was officially reported extinct.
[ Music ]
>> What does the name de Soto mean to me?
It means, the personification of evil.
[ Music ]
[ Music & Foreign Language ]
>> [Background Music] In the late spring of 1539, less than 50 years after Columbus,
less than 20 years after the fall of the Aztec empire,
Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto landed
on the west Florida coast north of present day, Tampa Bay.
[ Music & Noise ]
He rode at the head of a 600 man army, 200 mounted.
They were supported by 100 servants, herds of horses,
pack animals, swine, and trained attack dogs.
Unable to carry the quantity of food needed to support the massive expedition,
de Soto would feed his men and animals on the bounty of the towns they entered.
The invaders came prepared to take their provisions by force.
[ Music ]
In July, de Soto struck north into the lands of the Timucua people.
Chiefdoms of fishermen and farmers scattered across the northern Florida peninsula.
[ Music & Noise ]
[Background Music] One by one, villages were plundered by the marauding army.
[ Music & Noise ]
Indian people were enslaved as burden bearers chained together
with iron neck collars in groups of 30.
>> If they were men of virtue, they would not have left their own country.
They have made high women, adulterous and murderers of themselves
without shame of men or fear of any god.
Timucua.
>> But the Timucua were people who also knew of war.
As the Spanish army advanced, news reached one leader, Urutina who was secure
in a military strength that had never failed him.
As the Spanish force neared Urutina's town, de Soto sent a messenger ahead
with a warning to submit or be destroyed.
Urutina responded.
>> "I am king in my land.
I and all of my people have vowed to die a hundred deaths
to maintain the freedom of our land.
This is our answer both for the present and forevermore."
>> De Soto Urutina's town with his army in battle formation.
But oddly, they met no resistance.
The chief who had promised such defiance seemed to have completely submitted.
But the surface belied the reality.
While the Spaniards gorged upon the town's food stores,
Urutina secretly summoned fighting men from throughout the region.
Then playing out a military chess game, the young chief invited de Soto
to witness Timucua military maneuvers in a large field, his plan, to amass his army
and launch a surprise attack on the Spanish force.
But de Soto had been forewarned by a spy.
Matching the Indian leader move for move, he brought his army
to the field in battle formation.
To the rear of the Timucua force were two lakes, to their flanks were forest,
and in front of them, the Spanish army.
Suddenly, de Soto gave a signal.
Urutina was seized and the Spaniards attacked.
The Spanish cavalry thundered forward.
Their horses hoofs driving into the Timucuan ranks.
[ Noise ]
Outmatched, the Indian force fell back.
[ Music & Noise ]
Some ran towards the shelter of the trees.
Hundreds more plunged into the lake nearby swimming
out into the deep water to evade their pursuers.
The Spaniards fired into the lake trying to force the Timucua to surrender.
[ Music & Noise ]
Indian resistors had to tread water constantly, but by nightfall not a single man had yielded.
A Spanish chronicler observed the agonizing struggle.
>> And now, they continued to torment the Indians.
Never once letting them set foot on the shore hoping that they would become exhausted
by the swimming and as a result, give up more quickly.
Alas, they threatened with death those who would not surrender.
Regardless of how much the Castilians afflicted them they could not do enough to keep them
from showing their spirit and strength.
For even though these men realized that they were without hope of in the hardships
and danger they were experiencing, some chose death as a lesser evil.
It was not until late the following morning, the 200 survivors surrendered in a body.
>> They had been swimming 24 hours and it was a great pity to see them emerged
from the lagoon half drowned, and swollen, and transfixed by the toil, hunger, fatigue,
and lack of sleep they had suffered.
Garcilaso de la Vega, Spanish chronicler.
[Background Music] The remaining seven were dragged
out of the water at knife point by de Soto's men.
[ Music & Foreign Language ]
>> The Timucuan prisoners were chained
and distributed among the Spanish soldiers as slaves.
Urutina was imprisoned inside his statehouse.
He would make one last act of defiance.
Pretending to have possibly accepted his defeat, he lured de Soto within his reach.
Suddenly, he launched at the Spanish leader smashing his face with chained fist.
[ Music & Noise ]
The chief gave up such a tremendous roar that he could be heard for a quarter of a league around.
The blow was so fierce that de Soto was unconscious for more than half an hour
and he bled through the eyes, nose, and mouth.
Simultaneously, Urutina was gored by 12 swordsmen.
Outside, the Timucua who fell upon their captors fighting with stones,
pots of boiling food, anything at hand.
The Spaniards turned upon them killing and discriminating.
They were valiant and spirited people
and had they found themselves free would have done more harm.
With all that imprisoned as they were, they tried to do everything they could.
And for this reason, the Spaniards killed each
of them not permitting a single one to live which was a great pity.
[ Music ]
>> In a certain way, I feel like the land has a memory its own.
And the memory of the suffering can still be felt in the Southeastern United States.
You can go in the sites where Indian villages and even reminds a cities once where
and you can see the ruins, you can see the mounds where people were buried
and you don't see the people and you know immediately there was a great
and tragic story there.
So I think that the story still lives even if it's not
in our history books, it's in the land itself.
[ Music ]
>> Having led ways to the Timucua, de Soto marched his army north.
In the spring of 1540, he approached the town in a present day Columbia, South Carolina,
Cofitachequi, a farming community with a religious
and socia heritage reaching back to the ancient mound builders
[ Music & Noise ]
[Background Music] The armies approach was monitored by the people of Cofitachequi.
They hit what they could of their food stores and sent their elderly chieftess away
to a town removed from de Soto's path.
[ Music & Noise ]
When de Soto reached the bank of the watery river,
the niece of the old chieftess cross the river to meet him.
Relying on diplomacy rather than military force,
she hoped to persuade the Spaniard to spare her people.
The mistress of her town men, eight of her ladies embarked in a canoe
which have been covered with a great canopy and adorned with ornaments,
it was told by a second one which bore six principle Indians and many oarsmen.
In this manner, they all cross the river.
The mistress of Cofitachequi came before de Soto and after paying her respects,
seated herself upon a chair which her subjects had brought for her.
She alone spoke with the governor.
>> "Excellent lord, although my possibility does not equal my wishes for goodwill is more worthy
than all the treasures of the world which maybe offered without it, with very sincere
and open goodwill I offer you my person, my lands, my vessels, and these for service."
>> Unwrapping a great strand of pearls from her neck, she presented them to de Soto.
Struck with admiration, de Soto called her, The Lady of Cofitachequi, but her generosity
and graciousness would not prevent the plunder of her town.
The Spaniards feasted on 600 bushels of corn.
They looted the graves and temples for pearls.
Then de Soto demanded the old chieftess be summoned from hiding to gain her submission.
Finally, a 21 year old, adopted son
of the chieftess was pressed in to leading the army to her.
The Spaniards marched out of town behind the young guide stopping sometime later
in the forest to eat.
>> He begun to grow morose and to sit contemplatively with his hand on his cheek.
He gave some long and profound sighs.
Then as he sat in the midst of the Spaniards,
he began to remove his arrows one at a time and very slowly.
Observing that the Castilians were not watching him, he struck himself in the gullet
in such a way as to inflict a mortal wound and thus died instantly.
When the Indian bearers were asked why the boy had taken his life, they explained.
He realized that the act of guiding these people
to his mother's present location was unworthy of the love she bore him.
>> The elderly chieftess remained undiscovered.
But before resuming his march, de Soto took her young niece,
the Lady of Cofitachequi, as his hostage.
After days of traveling west, she managed
that daring escape even recovering some of the plundered pearls.
[ Music & Noise ]
De Soto would not pursue her.
He moved on crossing the Appalachian Mountains.
In July, he traveled down a broad river into the territory
of the Coosa, what is now Northern Alabama.
The Spaniard were amazed by the size and wealth of the Coosa nation
where a single day is march took him through 12 towns, each surrounded by vast fields of crops.
When they reached the Coosa capital, they were met on the road
by a thousand men wearing great feathered head dresses
and bearing their young chief on a liter.
After replenishing their supplies de Soto and his men departed without serious incident.
With them they would take stories of the Coosa wealth that would become legendary in Spain.
As the army headed west, they left behind one man too sick to travel,
a decision that would that shutter the Coosa world.
[Background Music] On October 18, 1540, de Soto arrived at the 45 town of Mabila
in the territory of the powerful Mobile nation.
The Mobile had been preparing for this moment.
Inside a strong defensive wall replete with towers, a war council was in progress.
Upon the arrival of the Spaniards,
a man described as a "Captain General" was sent out to confront them.
>> "Who are these thieves and vagabonds who keep shouting?
Come forth.
With as little consideration as if they were talking with some such person as themselves,
no one can endure longer the insolence of these demons and it is therefore only right
that they die today, torn into pieces for their infamy.
And that in this way an end be given to their wickedness and tyranny.
>> As he finished speaking, the captain general was struck down with a Spanish sword.
Instantly, thousands of Mobile fighters spilled out driving back the Spaniards,
fighting so fiercely, the even grabbed the caviler's lances by the blades.
>> The Indians fought with so great spirit that they drove us outside again
and again Elvas, Spanish chronicle.
[ Music & Noise ]
But the Spanish soldiers broke to the town's fortifications with battle axes
and drove the Mobile inside their homes.
[ Music & Noise ]
De Soto ordered the houses set on fire, wind funned the flames engulfing the town
in thick smoke while de Soto kept trumpets, pipes and drums flaring,
and yet the Mobile battled ever more desperately.
[ Music & Noise]
Women fought frantically beside the men prompting one Spanish soldier
to say, they fought the desire to die.
[ Music ]
Finally at sunset, after nine hours of battle it ended.
Eyewitness estimates of the Mobile dead range up to 11,000.
Bodies littered the streets between the charred remains of buildings,
even the Spaniards reeled in shock.
One soldier emerged from the silence of the aftermath frozen
like a wooden statue until he died.
A Mobile fighting men hanged himself by himself
by his bowstring rather than be left to survive alone.
82 of de Soto's men died, and every one of his soldiers was wounded, many seriously.
For a month, the army was forced to stop and recover.
Then as the surrounding Indian nations watch in horror, de Soto renewed his march.
But his army had been weakened.
The tide was beginning to turn.
In April of 1541, the invaders reached the Mississippi river.
There, de Soto heard stories of the powerful Natchez nation,
direct inheritors of the grand Mississippian culture.
Natchez influence both economic and military spread in all directions along the Mississippi.
Their temple pyramids rose majestically along the banks of the rivers.
The Natchez paramount chief, Quigualtam was heir to the tradition of the great sons
and spiritual head of a powerful religious aristocracy.
His title was "Son of the sun".
He was carried on a liter so his feet would never touch the ground.
His head was flattened according to Natchez custom and tattoos of black red
and blue design were [inaudible] across his body.
De Soto, claiming that he too was a child of the sun,
summoned the Natchez leader to the Spanish camp.
Quigualtam sent back his reply.
>> With respect to what DeSoto said about being the "Son of the Sun",
let him dry up the great river and I will believe him.
With respect to the rest, I am not accustomed to visit anyone.
On the contrary, all of whom I have knowledge visit
and serve me and obey me and pay me tribute.
Quigualtam Natchez.
>> De Soto would never meet Quigualtam or see the wealth of the Natchez.
On May 21st, 1542, he died.
His body was buried in the Mississippi.
Over the following year, DeSoto's army ventured as far west
of Texas before returning to the Mississippi.
There they build a flotilla and headed down river for the Gulf of Mexico.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] En route, they were met
by 100 magnificently-painted Natchi canoes arrayed in battle formation.
Seated under canopies, fighting men dressed in vivid colors and wearing large headdress plumes,
drove the Spanish boats out of Natchi territory and down river where one tribe
after another picked up the pursuit.
[ Music ]
The Spaniards reached the Gulf of Mexico on July 18th, 1543,
setting sail for Spanish outposts on the Mexican coast.
[ Music ]
For the American-Indian nations, de Soto's expedition mercifully came to an end.
[ Music ]
But it would not be the end of de Soto's influence on the continent.
20 years later, another expedition would enter South East.
This time, to colonize.
In Spain, the agricultural wealth of the region had become legendary.
But the new arrivals found few people and could barely survive.
[Background sound] In desperation, they traveled North to the land of the Coosa
where de Soto's army had passed through 12 thriving towns on a single day marched.
But instead of the fabled towns, they found ruins and temple mounds deserted and overgrown.
And instead of populations of thousands, they found only pockets of survivors.
>> Our village had once been very great and populous.
When other men similar to you destroyed it and forced us to run away in fear.
[inaudible] Coosa.
>> Unknown to de Soto, the sick men he had left
with the Coosa carried a weapon far more deadly than Spanish arms.
While the army carved a path of destruction through the South East,
a hidden enemy that would take more Indian lives than all the generals
and conquistadors combined, was secretly traveling among them.
>> The Europeans had tremendous immunity and resistance to the diseases that they had known
for tens of thousands of years, smallpox in the plague,
chickenpox, whopping cough, measles, mumps.
The Indians had no epidemic diseases.
None of these were there.
Consequently, they had no immunities, absolutely no resistance.
So, a disease as simple as mumps that we think of today as a childhood disease,
it would come in to an Indian community
and quite possibly kill of 20 percent of the village.
Then the next year, another disease could come through such a smallpox and kill,
perhaps 30 percent of the village.
So the Indians were tremendously weakened by disease.
Knowledge was lost as elders died suddenly.
Nations were thrown into upheaval.
In less than 20 years, civilizations that had flourished for centuries swirled into oblivion.
[ Music ]
>> Most Americans grew up with the story of the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock
and how they were the first to encounter Indian people in untouched wilderness.
But in fact, the arrival of English colonist was by no means, the first encounter.
By the time the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, English slavers
and traders had been working the regions for decades.
Two of the first Indian people that pilgrims met spoke English.
One of them had even been to England.
It would've been easy for the Indian nations to destroy the original settlement but they didn't.
Instead, they welcomed them as potential trading partners and allies.
They gave them land and a knowledge of how to survive on it.
But nothing in the experience of the Indian nations had prepared them
for the European invasion that would follow.
But before we look at the first colonist,
we'll go north to a people the English would never conquer, the Inuit.
The people who most of us know is Eskimos.
Welcome to part four of 500 Nations, Invasion of the Coast.
[ Noise ]
>> [Background Sound] And I think over again, my small adventures when--
with a sure win, I drifted out on my kayak and I thought I was in danger.
My fears, those I thought so big for all the vital things I had to get and to reach and yet,
there was only one great thing, the only thing to live, to see and [inaudible] journeys,
the great day that dawns and the light fills the world, Inuit.
>> In the northern reaches at the continent, straddling the Arctic Circle,
lies an island larger than Great Britain, Baffinland.
This was the world of the East Baffinland, Inuit, people commonly known as Eskimo.
[ Music ]
For the Inuit, the spring thaw was the time of euphoria and plenty.
[ Noise ]
Small bands would move to summer camp along Baffinland's great southern bay.
There they would hunt caribou along the coast and seal and walrus's in the rich marine waters.
[ Noise & Music ]
>> The great sea has set me adrift.
It moves me as a weed in the great river.
Earth and the great weather moved me, had carried away and moved my inward parts with joy.
>> [inaudible] Inuit.
>> The Summer of 1576 would bring something different.
That summer, English sea captain, Martin Frobisher led an expedition and search
of a northern passage to the Orient.
In July, he passed between masses of broken packed ice
and through a mountainous channel he named Frobisher Straits.
As the English sailed into the bay,
several Inuit launched their kayaks and paddled toward the ship.
Events were followed by the ships chronically.
>> Our captain discovered a number of small things fleeting in the sea far off
which he supposed to be popped ices [phonetic] or seals or some kind of strange fish.
But coming nearer, he discovered them to be men in small boats made of leather.
>> The Inuit offered fish, seals skin clothing and friendship.
One man agreed to guide the Europeans through the straits
to a place Frobisher believed to be the Pacific Ocean.
Five sailors were dispatched in a small skiff to row the Inuit guide to his kayak on shore.
Then for reasons that may never be known,
the English man disobeyed Frobisher's orders not to row out of site of the ship.
>> Contrary to his commandment, they rowed further beyond that point of the land
out of his sight, he could not here nor see anything of them.
And thereby, he judged they were taken and kept by force.
>> Although, Inuit continued to approach the ship for trade,
Frobisher was convinced of treachery.
Preparing to weigh anchor, he decided to take a price back to his patrons in England.
>> The captain was oppressed with sorrow that he should return again back to his country
without bringing any evidence or token of any place whereby
to certify to the world where he had been.
>> Frobisher held out a bell toward an Inuit trader whose kayak had drawn near the ship.
Reaching toward the hand outstretched in friendship,
Frobisher seized the man dragging him aboard.
He then set sail for England, leaving behind his five missing men.
But Frobisher would be denied his living trophy,
aboard ship the captain Inuit defiantly beat his tongue in half and later died.
Soon after Frobisher left Baffinland, the winter ice flows closed the bay
and the Inuit returned to their winter lives.
[ Music ]
The following summer Frobisher returned to Baffinland.
On July 31st, one of his ships put ashore at a point some 150 miles
from where his five men had disappeared the previous year.
Stumbling upon a vacant Inuit summer camp, they found articles of European clothing.
>> In this tents, they beheld a doublet of canvas made after the English fashion, a shirt,
a girdle, three shoes for contrary feet and of unequal bigness, which they well conjecture
to be the apparel of our five poor countrymen.
>> The next day, Frobisher sent 40 soldiers back to the area
where they surprised 18 Inuit men, women and children.
[ Music ]
[Background Music] As the Inuit fled they're tents, the English open fire
[ Noise ]
[Background Sound] Dodging bullets, the Inuit ran for the shore.
Launching a large boat called an Umiac, they tried to escape to open water
but English boats forced them back against the rocky coast.
Frantically, they climbed up the crags above the waves.
Soldiers surrounded them from land and sea.
While women and children huddled against the rocks, the Inuit men fought for their lives.
>> Desperately returning [phonetic] upon our men,
resisted them manfully so long as their arrows lasted.
And after gathering up those arrows which our men shot at them, yey, and plucking our arrows
out of their bodies maintained there cause until both weapons and life utterly failed them.
And when they found they we're mortally wounded,
with deadly fury they cast themselves head long from of the rocks into the sea.
Less perhaps, their enemies should receive glory.
[ Noise ]
>> Some Inuit scrambled over the rocks, slippery with blood and the wash of the sea and escaped.
A women and her wounded child were less fortunate.
Frobisher took them captive.
Along with a man he had captures days before, he had now collected a set of Inuit people.
As his ship sailed for England, Frobisher displayed little compassion
for the kidnap victims torn away from their homes and families.
They we're confined together, the English crew allowed to watch them
for entertainment, hoping to see them mate.
>> Having now got woman captive for the comfort of our man, we brought them both together
and every man with silence, desired to behold the manner of their meeting and entertainment.
>> The crew was to be disappointed by the couple's dignity.
>> Although they live continually together, yet did they never use as man and wife
and they both was most shamefaced, least any of their private parts be discovered.
>> Upon arrival in England, artist John White painted these portraits.
Soon after, the Inuit man, woman and child all died of illness.
The following spring, Frobisher sailed on his final voyage to the Inuit world.
This time, no one came forward to greet the ship.
The Inuit held themselves aloof refusing contact.
[Background Sound] The English never solved the mystery of their missing men.
But for centuries, the Inuit would tell the story of the five white men Frobisher abandoned.
It was said that after living peacefully among them, one spring the five men outfitted an umiac
with a masked and sails and departed, never to be seen again.
[ Music ]
[ Pause ]
In 1600, the Atlantic coast of North America, the present day United States,
was home to well over a 100 Indian Nations.
Nations nourished by fertile farm land and bountiful hunting and fishing.
[Background Music] Well-maintained gardens produced corn,
squash and a variety of other fruits and vegetables.
Summer fishing camps stretched along the barrier islands.
Sounds [phonetic] and estuaries swarmed with fish harvested by traps and nets.
Land, people and teachings had melded into a rich sophisticated way of life.
[ Music ]
At the very center of the Atlantic seaboard, south of present day Washington D.C.,
30 small nations united in the early 1600s to form the powerful Powhatan Confederacy.
The Powhatan Confederacy was built by a charismatic leader who traveled
between his many subject towns with an entourage of bodyguards and followers.
His named was Wahunsunacawh.
Through diplomacy, he held 30 nations together
and through military strength, he controlled the region.
[Background Music] In 1607, an English ship sailed up Chesapeake Bay
and into the lands of a Powhatan.
The ship was captained by a soldier of fortune, John Smith.
Hoping to be the first successful English colony in North America,
the small but well-armed expedition landed at a place they would call Jamestown.
As Jamestown took shape, Wahunsunacawh carefully weighed his options.
He could destroy the settlement, but he was well aware of the power of European weapons and knew
that an attack would be costly in Powhatan lives.
Wahunsunacawh also saw the advantage of trade for European weapons and tools.
He chose to watch and wait, monitoring the progress of the settlement through the eyes
of his most trusted ally, his brother Opechancanough,
chief of the most powerful Powhatan nation, the Pamunkey.
[Background Music] During their first winter, the colonists we're barely able to provide
for their basic needs and many died.
[ Music ]
Opechancanough reported that the desperate English had begun entering Powhatan towns
and taking food by force.
Wahunsunacawh decided that he had to bring the colony under his direct control.
He ordered the capture of John Smith and had the English captain brought before him.
Present was Wahunsunacawh's favorite daughter, Pocahontas.
The romantic story of Pocahontas saving Smith
from death was undoubtedly an example of Smith's own creativity.
His account of the incident written immediately afterward said nothing
of his life being threatened.
Only his memoirs written 17 years later included the story.
In fact, in his memoirs, he claimed to have been saved from death at the last moment
by a beautiful woman no less than three times.
In reality, it is probable that Wahunsunacawh cemented an alliance by proclaiming Smith leader
of the Powhatan's newest subject town, Jamestown.
Having established his supremacy and English submission, Wahunsunacawh released Smith.
But as new people and supplies arrived from England,
the colony tried a new tact to gain the upper hand.
The English attempted to crown Wahunsunacawh king of the Powhatan
which would make him a subject king of England.
B6ut the coronation turned into a farce.
>> And a foul trouble there was to make him kneel to receive his crown.
He, neither knowing the majesty nor meaning of a crown nor bending of the knee,
endured so many persuasions, examples, and instruction has tired them all.
At last, by leaning hard on his shoulders, he a little stooped
and Captain Newport put the crown on his head.
John Smith, English captain.
>> The true balance of power was reflected in the trade between the two nations.
The English were forced to pay extremely high prices in copper
and trade goods for Powhatan food.
New arrivals to the colony were shocked at the exchange rate
and the situation was an embarrassment to John Smith and the English.
Finally, emboldened by an infusion of new weapons and men, Smith saw his chance
to tilt the balance of power toward Jamestown.
In January 1609, he took a military contingent into a Pamunkey town
and seized Opechancanough and held him at gunpoint.
His soldiers plundered the Pamunkey food stores then demanded regular food tribute.
If the Pamunkey did not comply, Smith promised to load his ships with their dead carcasses.
Despite the assault, Wahunsunacawh strove to maintain the peace.
>> Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love?
Why will you destroy us who supply you with food?
What can you get by war?
We are unarmed and willing to give you what you ask if you come
in a friendly manner, and not with swords and guns.
Wahunsunacawh, Powhatan.
>> But the English allowed for no diplomatic solution.
No longer pretending to respect Powhatan authority, they used their weapons
to take what they wanted, including Powhatan land.
[ Music & Noise ]
The survival of the Powhatan people at stake,
Wahunsunacawh finally turned to war in August of 1609.
[ Noise ]
It would continue unabated for four years.
[ Noise & Music ]
[Background Music] Then in April 1613, Pocahontas was kidnapped
for the ransom of all English prisoners of war.
The English captives were released, but Pocahontas remained a hostage.
While held, she was indoctrinated daily in English customs and Anglican religion.
Then the prisoner declared she had fallen in love with one of her captors, John Rolfe.
The weary Wahunsunacawh agreed to a truce hoping to see his daughter again.
>> I am not so simple as to not know that it is much better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably,
laugh and be merry with the English than to run away from them and lie cold in the woods
and to be so hunted that I can neither eat nor sleep.
Wahunsunacawh, Powhatan.
>> Pocahontas was baptized Lady Rebecca
and peace was sealed with her marriage to John Rolfe.
[Background Music] Two years later, with their infant son, they sailed to England.
Pocahontas was a sensation in London.
She was shown in the best circles and presented to the king.
But the woman billed as the "right-thinking savage" would not see her home again.
She became ill, and in March of 1617, as she prepared to sail for Jamestown, Pocahontas died.
She was 22 years old.
With his lands shrinking, the death of his daughter finally broke Wahunsunacawh's heart.
He relinquished power and died the following year.
For Wahunsunacawh's brother, Opechancanough,
the struggle continued and he faced a grave situation.
The American practice of smoking tobacco was taking hold in England.
Demand for Virginia tobacco gave Jamestown a cash crop and the need
for more Powhatan land for cultivation.
For the next 25 years, Opechancanough would lead the Powhatan
in wars for their land and sovereignty.
[ Music ]
But by 1645, the struggle was becoming hopeless.
The aged Opechancanough was carried into battle on a litter.
He could not walk without help.
He could not see without his servants holding his eyelids open.
The last Powhatan war ended with the capture of the 90-year-old leader.
[ Music ]
Opechancanough was murdered, shot in the back by an English guard.
[ Music ]
>> The powerful Powhatan empire had proved unable to stem the tide of colonial expansion.
On a little land that was left to them, Powhatan people live to this day.
Some, descendants of the two brothers, who guided their people
through the first generation of contact.
[ Music ]
[ Pause ]
In 1619, a young Patuxet man named Tisquantum returned to his Massachusetts Bay village.
But no mother or father or wife hurried to welcome him home.
His village was deserted, the houses overgrown.
And in the place of family and friends, lay a field of bones.
[ Music ]
Five years earlier, Tisquantum had been captured by Englishmen and taken
to Spain to be sold into slavery.
Freed by Spanish priests, he made his way to England.
From there, he worked his way back to North America as a guide
and interpreter on an English ship.
Tisquantum's village had been decimated by disease brought
by the same English slavers who had abducted him.
Now, he stood in the shattered remnants of his home.
This year there would be no ceremony of thanksgiving for the bounties of the earth
and sea, no thanks for the corn, the wild turkeys and geese, the lobsters,
walnuts and berries that were so plentiful.
Tisquantum's long journey finally ended in Montaup capital
of the neighboring Wampanoag nation, themselves recovering
from the ravages of European diseases.
[Background Music] In December of the following year, 1620, a small English ship, the Mayflower,
sailed into the Patuxet Ba,y landing at the site of Tisquantum's deserted village.
The English renamed it "Plymouth".
[ Music ]
The pilgrims' first winter was a hard one.
[ Music ]
Sickness and starvation reduce the 100 colonists by half.
No Indian people came forward and none could be found.
With the coming of spring, the surviving pilgrims were amazed by the appearance
of one Indian man who greeted them with the word welcome.
His name was Samoset.
>> He had learned some broken English among the Englishman that came to fish at Munhegan.
We questioned him of many things.
He told us, the place where we now live is called Patuxet and that about four years ago,
all the inhabitants died of an extraordinary plague
and there is neither a man, woman nor child remaining.
As indeed, we have found none.
So, that there is none to hinder our possession or lay claim unto it.
William Bradford, Plymouth Colony.
>> Samoset left Plymouth and traveled to Montaup to bring word of the fledgling colony
to the Wampanoag leader, Massasoit.
Within days, Massasoit and an entourage set out on a trip to Plymouth.
Samoset was sent ahead with someone who's English was even better
than his own, Tisquantum, the last Patuxet.
The one person who could truly call Plymouth home.
Later that day, Massasoit arrived.
>> He was a very robust man in his best years,
grave [phonetic] of confidence and spare of speech.
His face was painted with a red, like mulberry and he was oiled both head and face.
William Bradford, Plymouth Colony.
>> Using Samoset and Tisquantum as interpreters, Massasoit negotiated a treaty
with the pilgrims for peace and mutual protection.
Massasoit had reason to seek allies.
The European epidemics had wiped out a vast majority
of the Wampanoag people and neighboring nations.
However, they're powerful rivals to the west, the Narrangansett were left untouched.
An alliance with the pilgrims would help the Wampanoag regain they're diplomatic strength.
>> Why would they want to have two enemies?
The Narrangansetts whom they could probably consider to be their biggest threat
or this not-like English people that kept coming around the country
but they never seem to stay before.
Now, all of a sudden they got a group of them that's building houses
that have brought their, families, women.
The first time Englishwomen have been in New England, native logic would say, "Well,
you don't bring your women where you're going to make war.
So, let's make peace with this people, use them as allies.
They got their strange weapons.
If we make peace with them first before anybody else does, then we'll have them on our side
and we won't have to face their guns."
>> While Massasoit and his entourage return to Montaup, Tisquantum remained with the pilgrims
on his beloved homeland and taught the new arrivals how to plant and where to fish.
In the fall, 20 acres of Indian corn stood at Plymouth, ready for harvest.
And just as Tisquantum taught the pilgrims to plant, he must have told them
of the annual ceremony of thanksgiving.
A ceremony of thanks to celebrate the gifts of their world.
The pilgrims embraced the event and invited Massasoit
and his Wampanoag to share their bounty.
The Indian leader arrived with 90 of his people and five deer for the feast.
[ Music ]
For three days and nights, the celebration continued.
Prayers and dances, alternating with shooting contest, wrestling matches and games.
The Thanksgiving of 1621 would be remembered as the pilgrims' first.
But, for the Wampanoag, such a day of thanks had occurred from the beginning of time.
>> We believe that everything that was given to us was a gift from the Creator.
So, because it was a gift, we remember to give thanks and we did that and all of the ways
that we could and this was the basis of our ceremonial life.
And, because everything was a gift, we realize there was an obligation that comes with a gift
and that obligation was to share because if we didn't share, there was no reason
for the Creator to continue to give us those gifts.
>> At the end of the first thanksgiving, the pilgrims and Wampanoag promised
to make the feast an annual celebration of their harvests and friendship.
But the relationship between the nations was destined to change.
[ Music ]
>> We gave them unconditional acceptance and love and nurturement.
That was-- otherwise, they would have been massacred at the beach.
>> When the English first came, my father was a great man and the English, a little child.
He constrained other Indians from harming the English.
He gave the English corn and showed them how to plant.
He let them have a 100 times more land than now I have for my own people.
King Philip, Wampanoag.
>> For almost 40 years while the Plymouth Colony rapidly expanded, Massasoit maintained peace
between his Wampanoag and the English.
>> Massasoit of the Wampanoag nation, he was a magnificent peacekeeper and that 50 years
of peace maintained between us and the English was really due to his intelligence,
integrity, and love for the people.
>> By the time of Massasoit's death in 1660, a new generation had risen to power in Plymouth.
They had long forgotten his generosity.
Leadership passed to Massasoit's 24 year old son, Philip.
He would become known as King Philip.
>> The time when Philip took over, he was a different side of a person.
He was going to fight to the end for his people.
>> In 1662, when King Philip came to power, the growing colonies held 50,000 residents.
In New England, Indian nations found themselves surrounded.
Their agricultural land shrinking.
Many Wampanoag were left with little choice but to work
for the English as laborers and servants.
But it wasn't just land and liberty they were losing, their culture
and traditions were also under attack.
>> The English, they thought of Wampanoag as inferior from all the way around,
from a standpoint-- especially their religion, and then as a people, they were savages.
>> Zales [phonetic] Puritans set out to convert them, pressuring many to abandon their homes
and beliefs and to move to newly established praying towns.
With little regard for the lost of the sovereign Wampanoag nation,
the English arrested King Philip's people
for violating the Puritan Code of Ethics, the blue laws.
Individuals were prosecuted for hunting and fishing on the Sabbath,
for using Indian medicine and entering into non-Christian marital unions.
>> The women, when we went out for a moon lodge and spent time alone or with our friends,
who also had their moon at the same time and we sit out there
and with alone chatting and terrifying.
They made laws against us saying we couldn't do that.
That we needed to be in the village, we needed to be working except for on the Sabbath.
>> [Background Music] In Plymouth, Indian people were sentenced to death
for denying the Christian religion.
[ Gunshots ]
>> Pray or be shot was the method of conversion.
That's how the first Christian Indians had Christianity bought to them.
>> King Philip took an uncompromising stand against the repression.
>> "You see this vast country before us which the creator gave to our fathers.
You see these little ones, our wives and children.
And you now see the foe before you.
They have grown insolent and bold.
All our ancient customs are disregarded.
Treaties made by our fathers are broken.
Our brothers murdered before our eyes."
King Philip, Wampanoag.
>> Fifteen years after his father's death, King Philip finally urged his people to war.
>> Our ancestor's spirits cried to us for revenge.
These people from the unknown world will cut down our groves, spoil our hunting
and planting grounds and drive us and our children from the graves of our fathers.
>> King Philip had no other choice because his land was being taken away, his people,
the allegiance of his people was being eroded.
The war itself was not only over land.
It was also over the right to follow our own traditions the Creator had given us.
[ Music ]
>> On June 24th 1675, King Philip's War began.
[ Noise ]
In a brilliantly orchestrated series of forays several English towns were caught off-guard
and burned to the ground by the Wampanoag and their allies.
>> An Indian never forgets a kindness, but he never forgives a wrong,
and because there had been so much kindness shown during those good years between Massasoit,
King Philip's father and those settlers that came.
King Philip never forgot any of those families that had been close to he and his family.
And he spared them.
He actually even sent warnings to some of those families during the war
that their towns would be burned, so they could escape with their families.
[ Crowd Noise ]
>> As Indian victories mounted, hysteria gripped the settlements.
It was reported that Indian troops hung upon the fringes of the English towns
like the lightning on the edge of clouds.
On the side of a bridge over the Charles River,
one of King Philip's men posted a taunting message.
>> "Know by this paper that the Indians that you have provoked
through wrath and anger will war if you will.
There are many Indians yet.
You must consider the Indians lose nothing but their life.
You must lose your fair houses and cattle."
James, Nipmuc.
>> Through the fall and winter, fortune favored King Philip's forces.
Then a series of defeats demoralized some Wampanoag allies.
>> The Great Swamp Massacre was where over 300 Native American old women
and children were all burnt alive
in their wigwams just six days before Christmas, December 19th 1675.
And one historian recorded that the smell of burning flesh so moved one
of the Pilgrim soldiers that he later asked one
of his superiors whether burning their enemies alive was consistent
with the benevolent principles of the Gospel.
>> The fortunes of war were turning.
With the coming of spring, their winter food stores were depleted and they were unable
to plant or replenish their supplies.
King Philip's people were starving.
And English troops hunted them as though trailing a wounded animal.
[ Music ]
In May, the English attacked an allied Indian force camped
above the falls on the Connecticut River.
300 Indian people were killed.
Some managed to reach their canoes but in their haste, left behind their paddles
and were swept over the falls to their deaths.
[ Water Gushing ]
For the next two months, King Philip
and his people evaded capture but the noose was tightening.
[ Battle Sound ]
In August, English troops fell upon his camp killing or capturing 173.
King Philip narrowly escaped but among those captured were his wife and 9-year-old son.
[Background Music] In Plymouth, the clergy decided their fate.
They were sold into slavery in Bermuda.
>> My heart breaks.
Now, I am ready to die.
>> He would choose where he would die.
King Philip returned to his home at Montaup, where his father, Massasoit had often fed
and entertained the Pilgrims decades earlier.
[ Music ]
In the dawn light of August 12th, 1676, an English
and Indian army surrounded the sleeping camp.
[ Music ]
[ Gunshot ]
[ Music ]
Moments later, King Philip was dead, shot through the heart by an Indian mercenary.
King Philip's head was put on display in Plymouth
where it remained for the next 20 years.
[ Music ]
[ Water Flowing & Music ]
>> We all have a purpose, a role in life, and the Creator,
in all of his wisdom saw fit to spare us.
We all could have been burned alive in the Great Swamp.
We all could have been slaughtered in that war.
But we were left here for a reason.
And I believe that part of that reason is to be a conscience for this society
to prevent those same kinds of mistakes from continuing to be repeated over and over.
That's what I see as my purpose, as the purpose of all of our native people who will stand up
and continue with that spirit that King Philip, Pontiac, Geronimo,
all of our great leaders have had.
[ Music ]
>> In our next program, we move to the interior of the continent where the lands
of the Indian Nations were turned into battlefields as the French, the English,
and the American colonists all fought for supremacy.
Please join us when 500 Nations returns for "A Cauldron of War."
[ Music ]
Hello. I'm Kevin Costner.
Welcome back to 500 Nations.
Even before the colonies were established in the East, the European entrepreneurs
of the New World started pushing west testing the boundaries of this rich new land.
What they discovered was the wealth of the Indian Nations
and the staggering abundance of their natural resources.
The beautiful furs, the endless supply of deerskins.
Indian people, in turn, saw that the goods the Europeans offered made life a lot easier.
Metal axes, knives, copper kettles and guns.
And for a time, this simple arrangement worked.
But very quickly, North America became an irresistible prize to the Europeans.
They sent armies to fight for the control
of the continent's resources the way modern armies fight over oil.
In this hour, we take you to the heartland to a continent in turmoil.
Welcome to Part Five of 500 Nations, A Cauldron of War.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] "When the white man came here as stranger,
he saw that the furs worn by our nations were valuable.
And he showed to our ancestors many goods which he brought with him.
And these were very tempting.
The white man said "Will you not sell the skins of your animals for the goods I bring?"
Our ancestors replied "We will buy your goods and you will buy our furs."
The whites proposed nothing more.
Our ancestors acceded to nothing else."
Peau de Chat, Ojibway.
>> In the 1600s, French and English fur traders made deep inroads
into the North American continent where interior Indian Nations hunted beaver, mink,
fox and other fur-bearing animals.
[Background Music] For Northern Indian Nations, trading with Europeans was merely an expansion
of a seasonal round that had been repeated for centuries.
Winter was the traditional time for villages to disperse into smaller groups
to hunt and trap from winter camps.
Spring was the season when they came back together and resumed village life.
Hunters returned home with their winter's take of pelts and welcomed trade.
At first, European traders conformed to this cycle and the beautiful
and exotic furs placed Indian traders in a strong bargaining position.
>> "I heard my host, a Montagnais leader, say one day, jokingly,
the beaver does everything perfectly well.
It makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread.
In short, it makes everything.
He was making sport of us Europeans who have such a fondness for the skin of this animal."
Nicholas d'onee, fur trader.
>> Fur trade was becoming central to the European economy.
From beaver came felt, and when the felt hat came into fashion in Europe,
the North Atlantic trade took on global proportions.
>> It seemed like the European way of trading was to--
to go out and try to outdo one another who was going to have the most.
And so our people were not like that with the other nations before the Europeans.
But they soon caught on to-- to be able to become wealthy that way.
>> Increasing demand and higher prices forced the fur trade to change and along with it,
the very structure of Indian Nations.
Many Indian people found it more lucrative to trade than to pursue old economic activities.
>> If you take a primitive tribe anywhere and present them with something that's going
to make them live faster, have an easier life, they will take it.
You know, the easy, easy way.
And by using the easy way, you're losing also your culture
because keeping your culture is not always easy.
>> [Background Music] Young men broke away from their traditional community roles
to pursue commercial hunting in order to obtain goods that could only be gained through trade.
[ Music ]
Agricultural nations planted less.
Fields lay fallow as pelts were used to purchase food from European traders.
Ancient cultural and religious values came under attack as the relationships
between Indian people, the land and animals, changed through commercial hunting.
Even European traders noted the transition.
>> Before, they killed animals only in proportion as they had need of them.
They never made an accumulation of skins of moose, otter, beaver or others but only so far
as they needed them for personal use.
>> Within decades, the animal populations of entire regions were completely exterminated.
>> In the past, there was none to barter with us that would have tempted us to waste our animals
as we did after the white people came on this island.
>> Nations who once traded in peace were forced into competition, even hostility,
as hunters encroached upon the lands of others.
>> "The times are exceedingly altered.
The times have turned everything upside down chiefly by the help of the white people.
In times past, our forefathers lived in peace, love and great harmony
and had everything in great plenty.
But, alas, it is not so now.
All our fishing, hunting and fowling is entirely gone."
Harry Quaduaquid, Mohegan.
>> Adherence to traditional values was further eroded by the greatest
of all scourges that flowed from trade, alcohol.
A British trader observed.
>> They do not call it drinking unless they become drunk.
Immediately after taking everything with which they can injure themselves
from the houses the women carry it into the woods
where they go to hide with all their children.
After that, the men have a fine time beating, injuring, and killing one another.
>> With each generation, alcohol cut deeper into the social fabric of Indian nations.
In 1803 alone, 21,000 gallons of rum flowed into the interior.
>> "We are meant to deliberate upon what?
Upon no less as subject than whether we shall or shall not be a people.
The tyrant is no native to our soil, but is the pernicious liquid
which our pretended white friends artfully introduced and so plentifully pours among us."
Creek Speaker.
>> Trade also brought a deadly killer that went unrecognized until the 20th century.
Indian nations had long traditions in painting and paint making
and few pigments were as highly prized as red ocher.
When European traders introduced brilliant red vermilion paint it became widely used
for facial and body decoration.
But the paint was made from lead and mercury,
hidden poisons that may have struck down thousands.
[ Music ]
[ Howling ]
>> Such was the agreement made by my ancestors with the white man.
They hunted for the white man and before many years, the game grew scarce.
And the benefits we derived from this agreement are these.
Instead of using a stone to cut my wood, I used a sharp ax.
Instead of being clothed in my own warm, ancient clothing I used
that which comes from across the big water.
Instead of having plenty of food, I am always hungry.
[ Music ]
And instead of being sober, the Indians are drunk.
[ Howling ]
[ Water Flowing ]
>> Along the South Atlantic coast,
one small Indian nation would take their economic destiny into their own hands.
In 1670, the English founded Charleston on land belonging to the Sewee, or Islanders.
Charleston emerged as the economic heart of the Southern colonies built on a thriving trade
in deer hides with the Sewee and neighboring nations.
>> In the late 1600s, with the founding
of Charleston the whole economy revolved around the Indian trade.
The men who lived along Goose Creek became the big traders who would go
into the interior, trading with the Indians.
Trading all manner of manufactured goods and beads but primarily to get deerskins
which were being used for all kinds of purposes.
>> [Background Music] The financial success of the Charleston traders did not extend
to their Indian suppliers, who typically received only five percent
of what buyers in England paid for their hides.
The Sewee were determined to be treated fairly.
An English observer reported.
>> Seeing that the ships always came in at one place made them very confident
that that way was the exact road to England.
And seeing so many ships come thence, they believed it could not be far.
John Lawson, surveyor general.
>> The Sewee believed that by rowing to the distant point on the horizon
where ships first appeared they would be able to find their way to England.
Once there, they could establish direct trade eliminating the expensive middlemen.
Preparations were secretly begun.
>> "It was agreed upon immediately to make an addition of their fleet by building more canoes,
and those to be of the best sort and biggest size as fit for their intended discovery.
Some Indians were employed about making the canoes, others to hunting.
Everyone to the post he was most fit for,
all endeavors tending towards an able fleet and cargo for Europe."
John Lawson, surveyor general.
>> After months of preparation, the canoes were loaded with hides,
pelts and the most valuable possessions of the Sewee Nation.
All able-bodied men and women boarded the vessels and launched
into the surf leaving behind only the children, the sick and the very old.
The Sewee Nation had become a flotilla.
But as they entered Open Ocean, their fragile endeavor turned disastrous.
[Thunder] A gale blew up.
High seas engulfed the Sewee canoes.
[ Noise ]
Those strong enough to survive were not the fortunate ones.
They were rescued by a passing English slave ship, only to be delivered
to the auction block in the West Indies.
In an instant, the Sewee Nation ceased to exist.
Its people had become a commodity.
They were not alone.
Indian slaves, along with deer hides and rum,
formed the basis of the Southern colonial economy.
>> In Charleston, South Carolina, the slave trade really started with the selling of Indians
and everything that we see later with the African-Americans who were sold there was going
on in the 1600s and 1700s with the Indians.
They would be brought into market, they'd be put up on a block they would be auctioned off.
>> Many Indian slaves were kept for the home economy in the South or shipped to New England.
Most were sent to Barbados, the Bahamas,
Jamaica and other Caribbean outposts to work the sugar plantations.
Life in servitude was brutal and short and, as Indian slaves succumbed to violence disease
and harsh working conditions, African slaves were imported to take their place.
>> Africans and Indians were basically being treated as animals.
Even though the Catholic Church had recognized the humanity of the Indians,
most of the conquerors who came over did not recognize them as human beings
and they treated them the same way they would wild horses or cows by branding them,
by chaining them, by making them march in long lines chained to one another,
and then by selling them in an auction block.
You could see an Indian being sold on an auction block the same way you could see cows,
or horses, or a mule being sold.
>> As late as 1730, one-quarter of the slaves in some Southern colonies were still Indian people.
>> "They took a part of my tribe and sold them to the Spaniards in Bermuda.
But I would speak, and I could wish it might be like the voice of thunder
that it might be heard afar off, even to the ends of the earth.
He that will advocate slavery is worse than a beast and he that will not set his face
against its corrupt principles is a coward and not worthy of being numbered among men."
William Apess, Pequot.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] "You British and the French are like the two edges of a pair
of shears and we are the cloth which is cut to pieces between them."
Odawa.
>> By the mid-1700s, the Indian nations
of the Eastern interior were surrounded by European powers.
Spain controlled Florida.
The English were pressing in from their colonies in the East.
And the French were aggressively moving across the Great Lakes and along the Mississippi River.
Spurred by the increasingly lucrative fur trade, along with valuable farmlands,
North America was seen by the Europeans as a commercial prize.
To win it, the French and English established military outposts throughout the interior
to support their trading ventures and solidify their claims to the land.
>> This idea of encroachment and land ownership and [inaudible] were so foreign
to us that we couldn't understand it.
As individuals, we couldn't understand it.
It was carving up our mother's breast.
It was parceling out the land and the air above it to individual ownership.
[ Gunshots & Horse Neighing ]
>> In 1754, France and England clashed for control over the continent
in what would become known as the French and Indian War.
From Europe, the American conflict was seen as a distant chess match for territory,
power and trade with Indian nations mere fighting pawns.
But in America, the interior Indian nations saw their homelands turned
into violent battlegrounds.
>> "Why do not you and the French fight in the old country and on the sea?
Why do you come to fight in our land?"
Shingas, Lenape.
>> Most Indian nations joined the war on the side of the French.
>> We had a very close affinity to the French people.
The reason is because they had no designs on our territory.
They were not out to colonize.
If they wanted to live with us they married into the tribe,
and they lived with us, and they were welcome.
On the other hand, at the other end of the scale,
the English are notorious for being colonists.
They don't want the sun to set on the British Empire so they want colonies everywhere,
and this New World was no different.
That's why they came.
>> In 1760, after six years of war, the French shocked their Indian allies in the Ohio Valley
and the Western Great Lakes by abruptly withdrawing from the region.
While the French continued to fight for other parts of the continent here,
the English army moved into their abandoned forts unopposed.
>> Englishmen, although you have conquered the French, you have not yet conquered us.
We are not your slaves.
These lakes, these woods and mountains were left to us by our ancestors.
They are our inheritance and we will part with them to none.
>> One Odawa man, who had fought alongside the French then watched them retreat,
refused to abandon the struggle.
His name was Pontiac.
>> On the night he was born, there was snow and rain and winds.
There was lightning and thunder, and there were shooting stars.
And all of the phenomena that was taking place that night the elders said
that there was a great person being born.
>> While many leaders saw the English as a threat to their nations Pontiac saw the English
as a threat to all Indian people.
Nations had to put aside the past and unite in common purpose.
Pontiac's vision would change the thinking of Indian leaders for generations.
>> So, what he did was to organize his own thoughts
and then organize his own people and then other tribes.
Got them together, with what undoubtedly had to be great oratory and great diplomatic moves
and skills to get people, some of whom were his bitter enemies, our tribe's bitter enemies.
We fought the Hurons for hundreds of years.
We fought the Shawnees.
We fought many of these tribes.
He went around and got them to become part of what's known as Pontiac's Confederacy.
>> "It is important for us, my brothers, that we exterminate
from our land this nation which only seeks to kill us.
When I go to the English chief to tell him that some of our comrades are dead,
instead of weeping, he makes fun of me and of you.
When I ask him for something for our sick, he refuses and tells me that he has no need of us.
There is no more time to lose.
And when the English shall be defeated we shall cut off the passage,
so they cannot come back to our country."
Pontiac, Odawa.
>> Fighting men from the Anishinabe, Miami, Seneca, Lenape,
Shawnee and other nations, responded to his call.
In May of 1763, Pontiac's Rebellion erupted with the siege of Fort Detroit.
Over the next two months, nine of the 11 English forts in the region fell.
Only Detroit and Fort Pitt remained in British hands, both under siege by Pontiac's alliance.
>> When he started taking the British forts, and he took them one by one, cut off the security
of the colonists, then they were on their own.
Then his vision was that once we get the last one, once we get Detroit we'll start
and we'll just kind of herd them ahead of us like ducks
or geese right back to the Atlantic Ocean.
>> Pontiac stood on the verge of total victory.
With France still in control of Louisiana
and the Mississippi local French residents assured him that French forces would soon return
to the region to help him drive out the English once and for all.
But unknown to Pontiac, France had already signed a treaty of surrender
in Paris ending all hostilities between the two colonial powers in North America.
Rumors of the accord reached Pontiac in June at the height of his triumph.
But he refused to believe that the French would not respond to his victories.
The British army, freed from campaigns
against the French launched massive expeditions against the Indian forces.
But Pontiac's alliance held their ground.
[ Shouting and Gunshot ]
Increasingly desperate to prevail British commander Jeffrey Amherst put a bounty
on Pontiac's head then proposed a sinister tactic, germ warfare.
>> Could it not be contrived to send the smallpox among those disaffected tribes
of Indians?
We must, on this occasion, use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.
You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets to try
to extirpate this execrable race.
>> Shawnee, Lenape, and Odawa were crippled by smallpox-infested blankets from Fort Pitt.
>> Pretty soon, burst out a terrible sickness among us.
Lodge after lodge was totally vacated.
Nothing but the dead bodies lying here and there in their lodges.
Entire families being swept off with the ravages of this terrible disease.
>> In October, confirmation of the French surrender reached Pontiac and his allies.
The news was a decisive blow to the momentum of the rebellion.
Now they knew that help would never come.
Pontiac called off the siege of Detroit and retired with his people to their winter camps.
The next spring, he tried to rally forces for another push against the English
but his efforts were ineffective.
Many Indian nations were encouraged by English promises
that settlements would never be allowed on their land.
They were also anxious to normalize relations and to resume European trade.
[ Music ]
With the passage of another year, Pontiac was a leader without a following.
His moment had passed.
The British forts were there to stay.
In 1769, only six years after the incredible success of his campaign against the British,
Pontiac died murdered in the ancient Indian center of Cahokia.
But his life had not been in vain.
His vision of united Indian nations would echo
through the region and across the coming decades.
[ Music ]
>> The idea didn't die.
The idea that Pontiac had implanted with these other leaders and these other tribes prevailed.
>> Pontiac's life was a message to the future.
But before the nations of the Great Lakes
and Ohio Valley would rise again the continent would be embroiled
in another costly war this time, between the American colonists and their king.
[ Music ]
>> "The Iroquois laugh when you talk to them of obedience to kings
for they cannot reconcile the idea of submission with the dignity of man.
Each individual is a sovereign in his own mind and as he conceives he derives his freedom
from the Creator alone he cannot be induced to acknowledge any other power."
John Long, fur trader.
>> The Europeans, their point of view on our people is that we didn't really exist
as a people, as a structured people until they came.
You know, but, really, when you research back into our history you're going to find
that we were already structured and with governments intact,
and our way of life was already intact.
>> The oldest democracy in North America was created by five Indian nations.
And what is today New York State.
The Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, Seneca, and Cayuga,
together they became known as the Iroquois.
They called themselves the Haudenosaunee.
[ Pause ]
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy was born
in a violent era centuries before the French and Indian War.
At that time, a vicious cycle of war and revenge was running
out of control among the five nations.
[ Noise ]
In the midst of the chaos, a visionary man from the Huron nation appeared.
Rather than a war club and arrows, he carried teachings.
He would be known as the Peacemaker.
The Peacemaker proposed a set of laws by which people
and nations could live in peace and unity.
A system of self-rule, guided by moral principles known as the "Great Law."
>> In all your acts, self-interest shall be cast away.
Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always
in view not only the present but also the coming generations.
The unborn of the future nation.
>> When the Great Peacemaker designed the confederacy
and its laws he brought together five warring nations into one heart, one body,
one mind and he symbolized it by using five arrows
when he bound it together to make it a strong union.
He said, "When you pull one arrow out, it's easily broken."
He broke one in half in front of them, just to show them.
So he told them, he said, "If you all stick together
in union then you will never be broken."
>> [Background Music] The first wampum belt was created to symbolize the Great Law.
The image embodied the dream that became a reality.
Five nations, independent, but joined together as one.
The Great Law was both a set of moral teachings and a concrete plan for a democratic union built
around the social structures of the nations.
Each nation had long been organized into clans which served as extended families.
Clans lived together in longhouses which were owned by the women of the clans.
Up to 200 feet in length, longhouses sheltered as many as a dozen families
with private areas and shared fires.
They were a place of security, a warm refuge against harsh winters.
Clan membership passed from mother to child.
When a child came of age, they would marry into another clan.
In this way, the entire nation was woven into one greater family.
From this clan structure the Haudenosaunee built a representative democracy.
The women of each clan would appoint one man as clan chief.
In this way, leadership would rise through trust, rather than conquest.
The clan chiefs of each of the five nations gathered at the Haudenosaunee capital
of Onondaga to form the Grand Council.
Governing from the heart of their territory the Grand Council envisioned all five nations
as sheltered by a giant longhouse stretching 250 miles.
The longhouse's central aisle was the Haudenosaunee trail, the principal line
of communication between the members of the league.
The eastern door of the domain was guarded by the Mohawk.
The Seneca watched the door to the west.
And the Onondaga were the center, the keepers of the fire.
The democratic confederacy envisioned by the Peacemaker preserved peace for centuries.
>> When the Europeans arrived in the territory of the Haudenosaunee
in the early 1600s the process or protocol that the Peacemaker had given to us was in place.
So we were able to deal with those Europeans on a political basis.
>> In 1754, Benjamin Franklin attended a conference
with the Haudenosaunee in Albany, New York.
He came away inspired by the successful model of independent states united under one rule of law.
Soon after he would propose a similar union of colonies.
[Background Music] Twenty-two years later these united states would declared their independence
from England.
In that year, 1776, events swirled toward the American Revolution.
10,000 strong and strategically located between the colonies and the British
in Canada the Haudenosaunee were seen as a key to victory.
British and American diplomats met repeatedly with representatives of the Grand Council trying
to pull the Indian nations to their side, but the Grand Council guided by the principles
of peace laid down by the Great Law declared their neutrality.
Although they would not ally with either power in a diplomatic gesture,
a deligation from the Grand Council traveled to Philadelphia.
There the Haudenosaunee, the oldest democracy in North America,
officially recognized the fledgling American government.
The deligation had been lodged Independence Hall above the chamber of the continental congress
where representatives were drafting the declaration of independence.
[Background Music] During that same critical summer
of 1776 a young Mohawk named Joseph Brant returned from England.
A protege of the British agent for Indian affairs, sir William Johnson,
Brant's family had long standing ties to the British.
Traveling among the Haudenosaunee nations Brant passionately argued for an alliance
with the British as their only hope to prevent being overrun by the Americans.
>> He started to go amongst the nations of the Mohawks, the Oneidas,
the Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas.
Trying to entice the young men to go on the side of the British.
>> In an act that threatened the very existence of the confederacy,
Joseph Brant in open defiance of the Grand Council called a meeting in the summer
of 1777 to argue the British case.
Black Snake, a young Haudenosaunee man from the Seneca nation listened closely.
>> Brant came forward and said "That if we did nothing
for the British there would be no peace for us.
Our throats would be cut by the red coat man or by America.
That we should go and join the Father.
This is the way for us."
>> Black Snake's uncle, a respected Seneca leader named Cornplanter rose
to challenge Brant.
Cornplanter was a veteran of the French and Indian Wars and had participated
in the critical council decisions of his time.
He wanted no part of a war that was not his to fight.
>> "You must all mark and listen to what I have to say.
War is war, death is death, a fight is a hard business.
Here America says not to lift our hand against either party.
I move therefore to wait a little while to hear more consultation between the two parties.
But the British say everything he is going to say to us.
We then can see clear where we are going and not be deceived."
Cornplanter, Seneca.
>> In shocked disbelief, Black Snake and the others watched as Brant rose to his feet.
He ordered Cornplanter to stop speaking then called him a coward.
>> The men had a great deal of controversy among themselves with some
for Brant and some for Cornplanter.
They begin to say that we must fight for somebody
because they could not bear to be called cowards.
>> The following day the gathering, predominantly Mohawk and Seneca,
broke with the Grand Council and agreed to fight with the British.
Cornplanter resigned himself to the majority will and rallied his men.
>> Every brave man show himself now.
Hereafter we will find our many dangerous times.
I therefore say to you, you must stand like good soldiers against your own white brother.
Because just as soon as he finds out that you are against him, he will show no mercy on us.
>> But as factions broke from the Grand Council not all joined the British.
The Oneida heavily influenced by American missionaries were moving toward an outright
alliance with the Americans.
The horror of civil war loomed over the confederacy.
[ Music ]
[Background Music] In the midst of the American Revolution a Haudenosaunee's civil war began.
On August 6th 1777, Oneida fighting men and their American allies clashed at Oriskany Creek
with British troops and their Seneca and Mohawk allies.
[ Gunshots and Shouts ]
At day's end, [Background Music] hundreds lay dead on the battlefield.
[ Music ]
[Background Music] As the war raged across the eastern continent,
Mohawk and Seneca forces allied with the British wreaked havoc
on frontier settlements draining American economic
and military resources away from the war effort.
In retaliation, George Washington sent an army against the Haudenosaunee capital at Onondaga,
one nation still clinging tenaciously to neutrality.
After Washington's army ransacked the capital, the Onondaga also plunged angrily
into the war on the side of the British.
>> You call George Washington the father of your country.
We call George Washington Hanadegaies, which means "town destroyer".
>> In August 1779, Washington sent General John Sullivan
into Haudenosaunee country with 5,000 men.
Entering territory few white men had ever even seen, Sullivan carved a chilling swath
of destruction forcing those in his path to flee their homes.
Sullivan's soldiers could not help but marvel at the prosperity
of the deserted towns they were destroying.
>> We reached the town which consisted of 128 houses, mostly very large and elegant.
>> The Indians live much better than most of the Mohawk River farmers.
Their houses very well furnished with all necessary household utensils,
great plenty of grain, several horses, cows and wagons.
It appears to be a very old settlement.
There are a great number of apple and peach trees here, which we cut down and destroyed.
>> A group of Haudenosaunee mercenaries who guided Sullivan's army
into the territory were captured by the Seneca.
One man recognized his own brother among the captives.
>> Brother, you have merited death.
When those rebels had drove us from the fields of our fathers to seek out new homes it was you
who would dare to step forth as their pilot and conduct them to the doors of our homes
to butcher our children and put us to death.
No crime can be greater.
But though you have merited death and shall die
on this spot my hands shall not be stained in the blood of a brother.
Who will strike?
>> A Seneca chief killed the prisoner instantly.
But even the powerful Seneca could not stand against Sullivan's massive army.
Old and young grabbed what few possessions they could carry and fled.
>> "The part of our corn they burnt and threw the remainder into the river.
They burnt our houses, killed what few cattle and horses they could find,
destroyed our fruit trees and left nothing but the bare soil.
What were our feelings when we found that there was not a mouthful of any kind
of sustenance left, not even enough to keep a child one day from perishing with hunger?"
Dehgewanus, Seneca.
>> In retaliation for the American destruction of Onondaga, Mohawk, Seneca and Cayuga villages.
Joseph Brant attacked the Oneida and neighboring Tuscarora, allies of the Americans.
In the end, all of the five nations were ravaged.
Out of scores of Haudenosaunee towns only two survived unscathed.
And it was already fall with no way to replace the lost crops.
The tragedy heightened with the coming of winter.
It was the coldest in memory, snow fell five feet deep.
Many homeless Haudenosaunee died of hunger, cold, and disease.
[ Music ]
Less than four years later in 1783, the British government surrendered at the Treaty of Paris.
With no concern for the sovereignty
of Indian nations even their allies the British ceded control of the continent as far west
as the Mississippi to the new American nation.
In post war treaties, the United States government seized vast Haudenosaunee lands.
Even those belonging to their allies, the Oneida, whose women had brought life-saving corn
and blankets to George Washington's starving troops at Valley Forge.
But the five nations of the Haudenosaunee would heal the wounds of civil war and remain defiant.
In 1790, they forced concessions from the United States at the Treaty of Canandaigua
which allowed them to keep their core homelands.
The Haudenosaunee would survive and rebuild, drawn together by the great law
and their grand council, a union that endures to this day.
>> If the Haudenosaunee was destroyed at the revolutionary war then why am I sitting here?
If we were not destroyed, our council fire still remained, our council's fire has remained all
of these years and the history and the culture of the Haudenosaunee, its political
and spiritual structure is still intact and we sit here traveling around the world
on our own passports as sovereign people.
We were not destroyed by the revolutionary war.
>> No sooner had the United States come into being than its people hungry for new land
and opportunity poured west,
across the Appalachian Mountains, to open up the new frontier.
But imagine the movement as the Indian people must have seen it.
This was their home where their ancestors were buried, where they were raising their children.
They had already experienced the disruptions of trade, alcohol, missionaries, disease and war.
Now, their lands were at stake.
Indian people fought to preserve their freedom and in their aggressive defense stories
of frontier violence came to define them as hostiles and savages.
Armed with this distorted image, the same cycle
that had dispossessed the Indian nations of the East, was underway again.
We begin part six in the Ohio River Valley where on the atmosphere of frontier chaos,
one of the great leaders of North America would emerge with a message of hope.
His name was Tecumseh and he would try to change the course of history.
[ Music ]
>> "When we passed through the country between Pittsburgh and our nations, lately Shawnee
and Lenape hunting grounds, where we could once see nothing but deer and buffalo,
we found the country thickly inhabited and the people under arms.
We were compelled to make a detour of 300 miles.
We saw large numbers of white men in forts and fortifications
around Salt Springs and buffalo grounds."
Cornstock, Shawnee.
>> In the aftermath of the American Revolution,
the lands of the powerful Haudenosaunee nations were shrunk
to a little more than reservation islands.
The front lines of the invasion moved west to the nations of the Ohio Valley,
the Lenape, Shawnee, Miami, and others.
[Background Music] Settlers flooded west.
Many of them revolutionary war veterans paid with land grants
by the government left bankrupt from the war.
Supported by the new United States, they came prepared to fight for the land.
[ Horses Galloping and Neighing ]
>> "The people of our frontier carry on private expeditions against the Indians
and kill them whenever they meet them.
[Gunshots] And I do not believe there was a jury in all Kentucky who would punish a man for it."
John Hamtramck, major, United States Army.
[ Music ]
>> Over the next 20 years, through a series of battles and dubious treaties,
the New United States laid claim to Indian lands on the frontier, vast tracks receded
to white settlement including the future sites of Detroit, Toledo, Peoria and Chicago.
>> "My heart is a stone, heavy with sadness for my people, cold with the knowledge
that no treaty will keep whites out of our lands.
Hard with the determination to resist as long as I live and breathe."
Blue Jacket, Shawnee.
[ Rain Drops ]
[ Fire Blazing ]
[ Chanting ]
>> In this atmosphere of despair and frontier violence, missionaries undermine the cultural
and religious values of Indian communities.
>> Our life is who we are, our identity, our language, our ceremonies, our way of how we used
to dress and how we related to each other.
Those are the makeup, part of the makeup of our people.
And so when Christianity came about, it's started to change.
They were trying to make us become what we were not.
>> "You have got our country but are not satisfied.
You want to force your religion upon us.
The Creator has made us all but he has made a great difference between us.
He has given us a different complexion and different customs.
Since he has made so great a difference between us and other things, why may we not conclude
that he has given us a different religion according to our understanding?
We do not wish to destroy your religion or take it from you.
We only want to enjoy our own."
Red Jacket, Seneca.
>> But the pressure on Indian people was unrelenting, their land, livelihood,
culture and very beliefs under attack.
Frustrated warriors traded scarce resources for alcohol.
>> And now reality is in your face.
You're slapped in the face with reality.
What's the best way to escape that kind of reality?
During those times, our people began to take up the rum to numb their feelings
because that feeling that hurt was so strong.
>> [Background Music] "The men revel in strong drink and are very quarrelsome.
The families become frightened and moved away for safety.
Now, the drunken men ran yelling through the village
and have weapons to injure those whom they meet.
Now there are no doors in the houses for they have all been kicked off.
Now, we men full of strong drink alone track there."
Handsome Lake, Seneca.
>> One young Shawnee man, Lalawethika, like many demoralized young men
of his generation, had succumbed to alcoholism.
He was completely dependent on his older brother, Tecumseh.
Tecumseh and Lalawethika had grown up in the world of frontier violence.
Their father was killed fighting the British.
Their older brother died at the hands of Tennessee settlers.
The village of their birth had been laid waste by Kentuckians.
Now, in 1803, determined to maintain his traditions, Tecumseh led Lalawethika
and the people of their village west into Indiana in an effort to put distance
between themselves and white settlers.
But in Indiana, Lalawethika's drinking worsened.
[Background Music] He sunk into a deep depression but his life was about to turnaround.
One day while in his home, Lalawethika fell to the floor.
For a time Tecumseh and others in the village believed he was dead, but he was not dead.
Lalawethika had had a revelation, a divine message that responded
to the unbearable conditions of his people.
Suddenly and clearly, he saw a path for renewal, abandoned the ways of the white men
and returned to the old teachings.
From that moment forward, Lalawethika would be known as Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee prophet.
Tenskwatawa never drunk again and he urged his followers to shun alcohol and all other ideas
and things that came from white men.
>> "Have you not heard at the evenings and sometimes in the dead
of night those mournful sounds that steal
through the deep valleys and along the mountainsides?
These are the wailings of those spirits whose bones have been turned up by the plow
of the white men and left to the mercy of the rain and wind."
Tenskwatawa, Shawnee.
>> Tenskwatawa promised that if the people return to their own ways,
the whites would be pushed back and prosperity would return.
Tecumseh embraced his brother's vision of cultural renewal
and together they spread the message to every Ohio Valley nation.
Hundreds traveled to Indiana to hear them speak in person.
Shawnee, Odawa, Wyandot, Kickapoo and other families converged
on a new settlement established by the prophet and Tecumseh near the intersection of the Wabash
and Tippecanoe Rivers, Prophetstown.
Tenskwatawa preached to visitors in the council house every night followed
by dancing and singing.
White frontiersmen claimed to be able to hear the drums all night long.
But it would be Tecumseh who would challenge the course of history
by transforming his brother's message into a political and military movement.
Using Prophetstown as his base Tecumseh would emerge the most powerful Indian leader
of his time.
[ Music ]
>> "Brothers, we are friends.
We must assist each other to bear our burdens.
The blood of many of our fathers and brothers has run like water on the ground
to satisfy the avarice of the white men.
We ourselves are threatened with a great evil.
Nothing will pacify them but the destruction of all the red men."
Tecumseh, Shawnee.
>> In 1808, while the Shawnee prophet, Tenskwatawa, preached the cultural renaissance
at Prophetstown, his brother Tecumseh traveled throughout the territory spreading the prophet's
message along with a political and military vision of his own.
>> "The whites have driven us from the sea to the lakes, we can go no farther.
The way, the only way to stop this evil is for us to unite in claiming a common and equal right
in the land as it was at first and should be now for it was never divided but belongs to all.
Unless every tribe unanimously combines to give a check to the ambition and avarice
of the whites they will soon conquer us apart and disunited.
And we will be driven away from our native country and scattered
as autumnal leaves before the wind.
Tecumseh, Shawnee.
>> Tecumseh electrified his audiences.
At one gathering a nervous white observer reported seeing young men shaking with emotion,
a thousand tomahawks brandished in the air.
William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory, recognized Tecumseh's personal power
and charisma and saw the Shawnee leader as a singular threat.
>> "The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay
to him is really astonishing and more than any other circumstance bespeaks him one
of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions
and overturn the established order of things.
If it were not for the vicinity of the United States, he would perhaps be the founder
of an empire that would rival in glory that of Mexico or Peru."
Governor William Henry Harrison.
>> Prophetstown's population swelled.
But, despite the Tecumseh's growing influence he could not control the actions
of all Indian leaders.
In 1809, at one of many treaty conferences Governor Harrison convinced leaders
of the Miami, Lenape and Potawatomi
to sell three million acres of land in Indiana and Illinois.
Tecumseh was outraged considering those who signed the treaty guilty of treason.
>> No tribe has the right to sell a country even to each other much less to strangers.
Sell a country, why not sell the air?
The great sea as well as the earth?
Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?
>> Tecumseh went to Harrison and, in a volatile meeting, confronted the governor face to face.
>> "Brother, I look at the land and pity the women and children.
I'm authorized to say that they want to save that piece of land.
We do not wish you to take it.
It is small enough for our purposes.
I want the present boundary line to continue.
Should you cross it I assure you it will be productive of bad consequences."
>> But the settlements continued to expand even onto the newly ceded lands.
Tecumseh was convinced that only force would stop the American advance.
To build a military resistance he continued to traveled tirelessly among the nations
of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, while Harrison kept a nervous eye on his movements.
>> No difficulties deter him.
For four years he has been in constant motion.
You see him today on the Wabash and in a short time you hear of him on the shores of Lake Erie
or Michigan or the banks of the Mississippi.
And wherever he goes, he makes an impression favorable to his purpose.
>> In 1811, Tecumseh traveled south in an effort to bring the powerful Choctaw,
Chickasaw and Creek into the alliance.
There in village after village, he argued that Indian nations stood at the brink of disaster.
>> Where today are the powerful tribes of our people?
They have vanished before the avarice and oppression
of the white man as snow before the summer sun.
Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without making an effort worthy of our race?
Shall we, without a struggle give up our homes, our lands, the graves of our dead
and everything that is dear and sacred to us?
I know you will say with me never, never.
>> But Tecumseh's passion and presence alone could not overcome a growing cultural rift.
Many Southern Indian leaders were encouraging their nations
to emulate mainstream white society.
Others saw military conflict with the US as suicide.
Although Tecumseh found passionate supporters everywhere,
his hope that Southern Nations would join in a unified resistance was not to be.
In January of 1812, Tecumseh returned to Indiana
to find Prophetstown destroyed, its people dispersed.
Governor Harrison had waited until Tecumseh, the military leader of the movement,
had departed for the South before moving on Prophetstown.
But Tenskwatawa with a much smaller force attacked the Americans before they reached the
town allowing the residents to evacuate.
[ Music ]
The following day, Harrison entered the deserted town
on the Tippecanoe River and burned it to the ground.
Although his army suffered twice the casualties of the Indian force Harrison claimed the victory
that would eventually propel him to the presidency.
Despite the loss of Prophetstown Tecumseh
and the Prophet began immediately to rebuild their movement.
[Background Music] Then the War of 1812 broke out between the British and United States.
Suddenly, there was a new opportunity to push back the Americans
through an alliance with the British.
The two brothers moved north to Canada with a thousand men.
There, they were joined by allies from throughout the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes.
[ Music ]
After years of tireless effort, Tecumseh's unified resistance was now a reality.
The British and Indian force laid siege to the fort at Detroit quickly forcing its surrender.
American forts fell at Mackinac and Dearborn.
In January of 1813, Tecumseh and his allies forced the surrender
of the Americans at Frenchtown.
Tecumseh hoped to push the campaign into the Ohio Valley but the following May,
British and Indian forces suffered their first defeat.
Then, during the summer the war began to turn against them
and Tecumseh could see the British will failing.
He confronted the British commander, General Proctor.
>> You always told us that you would never draw your foot off British ground.
But now we see you are drawing back.
We are very much astonished to see you tying up everything and preparing to run away
without letting us know what your intentions are.
>> Without informing their Indian allies the British made plans to abandon Detroit
as a large American force approached.
At the head of the American Army rode the man
who destroyed Prophetstown, Governor William Henry Harrison.
Tecumseh demanded that General Proctor make a stand.
>> "Listen, we wish to remain here and fight our enemy.
You have got the arms and ammunition.
If you have an idea of going away, give them to us and you may go and welcome.
As for us, our lives are in the hands of the Creator.
We are determined to defend our lands and if it be his will,
we wish to leave our bones upon them."
Tecumseh, Shawnee.
>> Faced with Harrison's 3000-man army Tecumseh was forced
to fall back with the British 80 miles.
They halted their retreat along the Thames River.
There, Tecumseh would make his stand.
On October 5th 1813, the Shawnee leader rallied his men
as he inspected the lines from horseback.
He urged General Proctor to do the same.
>> Tell your men to be firm, and all will be well.
>> Tecumseh dismounted and joined his troops at their position in a swampy thicket.
The night before, he had had a premonition about the battle.
And in it, he had foreseen his death.
Tecumseh removed the scarlet British military jacket he always wore
and dressed in traditional Shawnee clothes.
He handed his sword to a trusted friend and instructed him to give it to his son
when he grew up and to tell him what his father stood for.
In midafternoon, Harrison's cavalry charged.
The British lines immediately collapsed and ran with the British general
on horseback passing his own troops as they fled.
Tecumseh did not run.
And neither did his men.
From a nearby hillside the Shawnee Prophet watched
as the Americans charged his brother's position.
Tecumseh received a gunshot wound to the chest [gunshot] and fell.
Thirty minutes later, the battle was over.
[ Music ]
For the Ohio Valley nations the eventual British defeat in the War
of 1812 would simply underscore the tragic loss of Tecumseh.
In the years before the war, he had traveled the Indian roads stretching
in every direction from Prophetstown.
In every village, his warning had been the same, "The Americans will not stop
until they have taken all our land."
Tecumseh had seen the future.
>> "While strong it has been our obvious policy to weaken them.
Now that they are weak and harmless and most of their lands fallen
into our hands they must be taught to improve their condition."
William Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs.
>> For decades, federal agents and Christian missionaries had pressured Indian nations
to abandon their traditions and assimilate into white society.
The policy, promoted by Thomas Jefferson and others after him, advocated intermarriage,
religious conversion and financial incentives to turn Indian people into Americanized farmers.
In the South, US policy was succeeding.
Traditionals had been eliminated as a serious military threat
and American culture was spreading.
The large Southern nations, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole came
to be known as the "Five Civilized Tribes."
To the Americans, the most civilized of these were the Cherokee.
>> We call ourselves Aniyunwiya which is translated into "the Principal People."
When the Creator made the world he created these beautiful mountains here in the Smokies.
And he needed someone to live here, someone who would take care of what he'd made
and what he gave to us so he chose the Cherokee people.
>> The ancient Cherokee nation flourished in
and around the Great Smoky Mountains building their capital of Echota
in the foothills southwest of present day Knoxville, Tennessee.
Echota was a peace town, where no one could be harmed.
But with each passing generation there were fewer and fewer who clung
to the traditional Cherokee-life way.
[ Music & Rooster Crowing ]
[Background Music] Many Cherokee became successful modeling themselves
after their American neighbors living in two-story houses on plantations,
raising European crops, owning slaves and educating their children in American schools.
In 1817, a new national council formed
with wealthy landowner John Ross as its principal elected chief.
The centuries-old clan-based government was replaced
with a republican state modeled after the American system.
Echota, the venerated Cherokee peace town was replaced as seat
of government by New Echota in Georgia.
In 1821, a man named Sequoya completed an alphabet
that committed the Cherokee language to writing.
Soon they had their own newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix.
But despite Cherokee efforts to coexist and United States government policies
to bring Indian nations into the American way it was a relationship marred by racism and greed.
In the middle of a booming slave economy built around cotton demand for land was growing
and the Southern Indian nations still controlled vast areas.
In 1828, Andrew Jackson, like William Henry Harrison, used his reputation
as an Indian fighter to propel himself to the presidency.
>> Greed usually is a thing that makes people do things they wouldn't do otherwise.
Gold was discovered down in Georgia.
[ Music ]
[Background Music] Hundreds of miners illegally swarmed
across the Cherokee border to lay claim to the vein.
The Cherokee turned to the United States for protection.
But President Jackson, himself a land speculator, removed federal troops
from the area, telling Georgia officials "Build a fire under the Cherokee.
When it gets hot enough, they'll move."
>> The greed of the white man grew and the first thing that came into his mind was,
"We must obtain this land at any cost."
And that idea of the removal started there.
>> For the Indian people who believed their salvation lay in emulating American society,
the most bitter betrayal came on May 28th, 1830.
Under Jackson's advocacy the Indian Removal Act was passed.
Nations east of the Mississippi were to give up their homelands forever and move
to a special Indian territory in Oklahoma.
>> "The Americans said the land shall be yours forever.
Now they say, the land you live on is not yours.
Go beyond the Mississippi.
There is game.
There you may remain while the grass grows and the water runs.
Brothers, will not our Great Father come there also?"
Speckled Snake, Creek.
>> At New Echota Cherokee leaders felt deeply betrayed.
Principal Chief John Ross and wealthy Cherokee landholder Major Ridge both had fought alongside
President Jackson in a war against traditional factions of the Creek Nation.
Meeting in violation of Georgia state law the Cherokee Council vehemently opposed removal
and reminded the nation of their law that carried the death penalty for anyone
who sold Cherokee lands without authorization.
>> "Even if report was favorable as to the fertility of the soil in Indian Territory,
if the running streams were as transparent as crystal and the silver fish abounded,
we should still adhere to the purpose of spending the remnant
of our lives on the soil that gave us birth."
Cherokee Council.
>> Indian protests fell on deaf ears.
The Choctaw were the first made to bend.
>> "Painful in the extreme is the mandate of our expulsion.
I ask you in the name of justice for a repose for myself and my injured people.
Let us alone.
We will not harm you.
We want rest.
We hope, in the name of justice, that another outrage may never be committed against us
and that we may, for the future, not be driven about as beasts
who benefit from a change of pasture.
We go forth, sorrowful, knowing that wrong has been done."
George Harkin, Choctaw.
>> Between 1831 and 1832, 13,000 Choctaw made the long and difficult trek to the West.
Two thousand were to die along the way.
>> "My voice is weak.
You can scarcely hear me.
It is not the shout of a warrior but the wail of an infant.
I have lost it in mourning over the misfortunes of my people.
Their tears came in the raindrops and their voices in the wailing winds.
Our land was taken away."
Colonel Webb, Choctaw.
>> The Creek were next.
In the spring of 1836, the American Army forced them to surrender all their land.
One-third of the Creek died on the journey west.
>> The way I feel is there is a wound in our hearts.
And that was a wound in our ancestors' heart.
And that wound will never be healed.
And I feel like that whatever they do for us will never pay up.
>> "Last night I saw the sun set for the last time and its light shine upon the treetops
and the land and the water that I am never to look upon again."
Menewa, Creek.
>> Every year, from 1830 to 1838 Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross visited Washington
attempting to forestall removal.
>> "We have been made to drink of the bitter cup of humiliation.
Treated like dogs, our lives, our liberties, the sport of the white man.
Our country and the graves of our fathers torn from us in cruel succession
until we find ourselves fugitives, vagrants and strangers in our own country."
John Ross, Cherokee.
>> Ross wrote hundreds of letters.
He met several times with President Jackson, with whom he had served in war.
He petitioned Congress and brought two lawsuits before the US Supreme Court.
>> "We are not ignorant of our condition.
We are not insensible to our sufferings.
We feel them.
We groan under their pressure and anticipation crowds our breasts with sorrow yet to come."
John Ross, Cherokee.
>> Ross did win one victory when the Supreme Court ruled
that the Cherokee were a sovereign nation and not subject to Georgia's jurisdiction.
But President Jackson disregarded the ruling and belittled the power of the Supreme Court
by challenging the chief justice to enforce the law himself.
Georgia held lotteries for Cherokee lands.
State troops forced people from their houses.
Cherokee government buildings at New Echota were sold off along
with the residence of Principal Chief John Ross.
Cherokee leader Major Ridge also lost his plantation.
He now became convinced of the futility and peril of resistance.
>> I know the Indians have an older title than the United States.
We obtained the land from the living God above.
They got their title from the British.
Yet they are strong and we are weak.
>> Major Ridge, as I understand it he advocated for a good period of time
that no more Cherokee lands would be sold or ceded under penalty of death.
And then later, he wound up doing the same darn thing.
As a matter of fact, worse.
>> Ridge traveled to Washington without the authorization of the Cherokee Council.
There, he met with federal officials.
Ridge privately negotiated a treaty ceding Cherokee lands for $5 million,
new land in the Oklahoma-Indian territory, and removal assistance.
>> We had been a country for 500 years before they were and we were on an equal status.
And every time we had a treaty from then
on we got a little less status, and they got a little more land.
>> Ridge returned home to convince the national council to accept the treaty terms.
>> I would willingly die to preserve the graves of our fathers but any forcible effort
to keep them will cost us our lands, our lives and the lives of our children.
There is but one path of safety, one road to future existence as a nation.
That path is open before you.
Make a treaty of cession.
Give up these lands and go over beyond the great Father of Waters.
>> The national council rejected the treaty.
But Ridge, with no legal authority to represent the Cherokee nation met secretly
with US officials.
Defying the council's death sentence for the selling of Cherokee lands, Ridge, his son,
and others signed the removal treaty.
On May 17th, 1836, the US Senate ratified the treaty by a single vote.
The Cherokee Nation was given two years to move west.
In that time, Ridge and 2,000 Cherokee emigrated to Oklahoma while the vast majority
of the nation ignored the illegal treaty and remained on their lands.
[ Music ]
In late spring of 1838 as the deadline for removal passed,
General Winfield Scott arrived in Georgia with 7,000 soldiers.
His orders were to remove the Cherokee by any means necessary.
>> "Think of this, my Cherokee brethren.
I am an old warrior and have been present at many a scene of slaughter.
But spare me, I beseech you, the horror of witnessing the destruction of the Cherokees.
Do not even wait for the close approach of the troops."
General Winfield Scott.
>> Thousands of Cherokee were rounded up at bayonet-point unable to carry with them anything
but the most necessary belongings then held in stockades to await removal.
>> My great-great-grandmother, when they came to take them away,
they drove them out of the house, didn't even let the kids get their shoes or anything.
They were sitting down at dinner and they got outside and they were kind of roughing her
around and my great-great-grandfather kind of fought back.
They throwed him in chains and took him off one way, took her and the children off another way.
>> Conditions inside stockades were terrible and many died.
>> "We have been made prisoners by your men but we do not fight against you.
We have never done you any harm.
We are Indians.
We have hearts that feel.
We do not want to die.
We are in trouble, sir.
Our hearts are very heavy.
Very heavy.
We cannot make talk."
Cherokee Council.
>> Sixteen thousand Cherokee were removed from their homeland.
Principal Chief John Ross left with his family on the last convoy.
His wife, along with one-quarter of the nation, would die on the forced exodus
that would be known as the "Trail of Tears."
>> The non-Indian people who came here did not view the Cherokee people as human beings
which made it easy to dishonor and desecrate these people.
>> People sometimes say I look like I never smile.
Most of the time, I keep thinking of the old nation and wonder how the big mountain now looks
in springtime and how the boys and young men used to swim in the big river.
And then there comes before me the picture of the march.
Maybe someday we will understand why the Cherokees had to suffer.
>> While the body of the nation was forced west several hundred Cherokee evaded Scott's men
and retreated to the deep recesses of the Smoky Mountains.
The Army, ineffective at locating the free Cherokee, was recalled from the mountains.
As the troops were withdrawing one cavalry detachment stumbled upon a small camp
of 12 free Cherokee.
Among them was an older man Tsali, his wife, brother and sons.
When the Cherokee refused to submit to the soldiers Tsali's wife was jabbed
with a bayonet, and a struggle ensued.
Two soldiers were killed.
Tsali and his family fled deeper into the Smoky Mountains.
But US soldiers had died and now General Scott would have to make the Cherokee pay at any cost.
With winter approaching, Scott delivered an ultimatum to Tsali.
Surrender or 7000 soldiers would be unleashed on the free Cherokee until the last
of their nation was captured or killed.
[ Music ]
Tsali made a fateful decision.
He offered to surrender if Scott would let the rest of the Cherokee resistance remain
in their Smoky Mountain homeland.
Scott agreed and Tsali surrendered along with his family.
>> Charley approaches and offers the gun holding both ends with each hand.
General Scott takes the gun and they are to be monitored.
>> They were taken to a place at the mouth of the Tuckasegee River.
There, Tsali, his brother, and his two oldest sons, would be executed by a firing squad.
Tied to a tree awaiting death, Tsali had a last request of a friend.
>> Euchella, there's one favor I wish to ask of your hands.
You know I have a little boy who was lost among the mountains.
I want you to find that boy if he is not dead and tell him the last words of his father
where that he must never go beyond the Mississippi, but die in the land of his birth.
It is sweet to die in one's native land and be buried by the margins of one's native stream.
>> On November 25th, 1838 Tsali died for the freedom of the Eastern Cherokee people.
>> And when he died he was a victor.
He accomplished the thing which was upper most in his mind that his people might go free.
>> Seven months later in the new Oklahoma Indian territory, Major Ridge, his son,
and nephew who had all signed the removal treaty were assassinated
for selling the Cherokee homelands.
>> Our next program moves West to Great Plains and the famous horse culture that has come
to define the first nations of this content throughout the world.
Join us when 500 Nations returns with Struggle for the West.
[ Music ]
[ Silence ]
[ Music ]
[ Pause ]
Welcome back to 500 Nations.
I'm Kevin Costner.
For a lot of us, the most vivid picture of the Indian world has come from movies,
screen heroes fighting armies of hostile Indians.
The tide has changed in movie making thankfully but the image of Indian warriors riding
across the Great Plains still remains the universal symbol of all American Indians.
That even with his vivid image we know little about the people and the legendary individuals
who led them, men who fought and sacrificed everything for their nations.
In this hour, we'll see the people of the Plains in a different light.
But first, we'll travel even further West to a place where hundreds of thousands
of Indian people lived in one of the most beautiful
and peaceful region of the content, California.
Welcome to Part 7 of 500 Nations, Struggle for the West.
[ Music ]
>> 300,000 people lived in the diverse environments of California.
They spoke 80 languages, worked, worshiped, and raised children on lands occupied
by their ancestors since before the dawn of the European civilization.
Many California nations had evolved into highly structured societies.
Among them, one of the largest was the Chumash, living on the coastal islands
and along the coast in the area of present day Santa Barbara.
Large Chumash towns supported a professional class of the astrologers,
priests, government leaders, and healers.
Workers belonged to centuries old craft guilds of basket and canoe makers.
Workers also manufactured the flat shell beads that were the currency of the region.
Production and control of the money supply placed the Chumash nation at the center
of the Southern California economy.
In the late 18th century, this complex world of the ancient Chumash
and their coastal neighbors would be changed forever.
In 1772, Spanish missionaries led by Father Junipero Serra, arrived in Chumash territory.
>> Believe me, when I saw their general behavior, their pleasing ways
and engaging manners, my heart was broken to think
that they were still deprived of the light of the Holy Gospel.
Father Junipero Serra, Spanish Missionary.
>> Ignoring the beauty and complexity of Chumash society, the Spanish set out to convert them
to Christianity by whatever means necessary.
>> I and two of my relatives went down to the beach to catch clams.
We saw two men on horseback coming rapidly towards us.
My relatives were afraid.
They fled with all speed.
It was too late.
They overtook me and lassoed and dragged me for a long distance.
Their horse is running.
When we arrived at the mission, they locked me in a room for a week.
The father told me that he would make me a Christian.
One day, they threw water on my head and gave me salt to eat.
And with this, the interpreter told me that now I was Christian, that I was called Jesus.
>> The building up of the mission into a coercive labor force didn't happen overnight.
It was gradual thing.
But eventually, they began forcing Indians to remove from their freeway of life
in their home villages, and to be reduced to one central mission site to be controlled.
Once a family was taken into the missions, the emissary separated children from their parents.
All the little boys and the little girls at age of six were locked up in children's barracks.
So, it was work, religion, and work all day long.
Highly structured, highly supervised.
Indian people were put to work tanning, blacksmithing, and caring for the mission herds.
They made candles, bricks, tiles, shoes, saddles, and soap.
Labor was strictly enforced under the discipline of the lash.
>> And thus, I existed 'til I found a way to escape.
But I was tracked.
They caught me like a fox.
They lashed me until I lost consciousness.
For several days, I could not raise myself from the floor where they had laid me.
And I still have on my shoulders the marks of the lashes.
Janitil, Kumeyaay.
>> For over 50 years, the mission system backed by Spanish arms,
exerted control over the California coast crushing every revolt.
Inside the missions, disease and harsh living conditions contributed
to a genocidal death rate.
>> The average life of a mission Indian was about less than 12 years.
For children, it was less than six years.
And so, there was a constant need to feed this beast with laborers.
And one of the sad legacies of the missions of California is that when people go
to them today, they don't think about Indians.
They say the padres built the missions.
That's nonsense.
The California Indians built the missions.
>> At the Santa Barbara mission alone, over 4,000 Chumash names filled the burial registry.
Their bodies discarded in large pits near the church.
In 1821, control of California transferred to Mexico
after it gained its independence from Spain.
The Mexican government secularized the missions.
Indian people were free to leave.
But 50 years had completely transformed their world.
[ Music ]
Old villages were gone.
In their places were large Mexican estates.
Even the mission lands they had worked and lived on became parts of vast private ranches.
>> To stand by and watch these men takeover the missions which we have built,
the herds we have tended, to be exposed incessantly together with our families,
to the worst possible treatment and even death itself is a tragedy.
Mission San Luis Rey, Neophyte.
>> Homeless and left with few choices for survival, mission Indians were forced
to exchange one master for another, becoming peasant workers on the rancherias.
>> Many of the rich men of the country had from 20
to 60 Indian servants whom they had dressed and fed.
Our friendly Indians tilled our soil, pastured our cattle, cut our lumber, built our houses,
made tiles for our homes, ground our grains, slaughtered our cattle, dressed their hides
for market, while the Indian women made excellent servants,
took good care of our children, made every one of our meals.
Salvador Vallejo, Mexican Landowner.
>> In 1848, after the Mexican-American War,
California passed from Mexican to American hands.
Soon after, gold was discovered in the North, bringing a rush of miners onto the lands
of interior nations who had been out of the reach of coastal missions and Mexican ranches.
>> The majority of tribes are kept in constant fear on account of the indiscriminate
and inhuman massacre of their people.
They have become alarmed by the increased flood of immigration much spread over their country.
It is just incomprehensible to them.
Adam Johnson, Indian Agent.
>> Miners came into Indian communities looking for women.
Vigilante parties opened fire on men, women, and children wiping out entire villages.
It was open season on Indian people derisively referred to as "diggers".
>> The Humboldt Times, Eureka, April 11.
Headline, "Good Haul of Diggers.
One White Man Killed, 38 Bucks Killed, 40 Squaws and Children Taken".
>> January 17th headline "Good Haul of Diggers, Band Exterminated".
>> In the 1850s while the American nation was on the verge of Civil War over the issue
of slavery, demand for agricultural labor in California was so high
that the state legislature passed an act legalizing Indian slavery.
>> A company of United States troops attended
by a considerable volunteer force has been pursuing the poor creatures
from one retreat to another.
The kidnappers follow at the heels of the soldiers to seize the children
when their parents are murdered and sell them to the best advantage.
W.P. Dole, Indian Agent.
>> Only 30,000 native Californians survived the gold rush.
10 percent of what had been most densely populated Indian area, North of Mexico.
>> Upon on my last visit to Ventura, I saw the last of the Ventura Indians.
They were living in a tiny hut east of the mouth of the river.
One of the old men told me they were very glad
that I was not ashamed to talk the Indian language.
They told me to continue in the use of it and keep the beliefs.
If I did so, I would live a long time.
Fernando Librado, Chumash.
>> Fernando Librado lived to be 111-years old.
>> I once went over to Donaciana's house.
I wanted to learn the Swordfish Dance.
After the meal, I asked her to teach me the old dances saying,
"For you are the only ones left who know the old dances."
Donaciana began to cry and I left saying nothing more.
Fernando Librado, Chumash.
[ Music ]
[ Noise ]
>> For thousands of years, the buffalo thundered across the Great Plains,
a vast sea of grassland rising from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains.
Living off the herds were a scattering of nomadic Indian nations.
>> My grandmother told me that when she was young the people themselves had to walk.
In those times, they did not travel far nor often.
>> In 1680, the Spanish were driven out of the Southwest by the Pueblo nations.
As they fled, they left behind their horse herds, an animal that would change the way
of life for Indian nations across the continent.
>> When they got horses, they could move more easily from place to place.
Then, they could kill more of the buffalo and other animals.
And so, they got more meat for food and gathered more skins for lodges and clothing.
Iron Teeth, Cheyenne.
>> A new culture developed based on the relationship between man and horse.
>> My horse fights with me and he fasts with me because if he is to carry me
into battle he must know my heart and I must know his, but we shall never become brothers.
I've been told that the white man was almost a God,
and yet a great fool does not believe that the horse has a spirit.
This cannot be true.
I have many times seen my horse's soul in his eyes.
Plenty Coups, Crow.
>> With the coming of the horse, the nations of the Plains would become legendary.
The Crow, Cheyenne, Sioux, Blackfeet, Arapaho, Pawnee, Kiowa, Comanche,
and for generations their way of life flourished.
Then in 1858, gold was discovered at Pike's Peak, Colorado.
Four years later, the Homestead Act opened the region to white settlement.
Almost instantly, the invasion became a flood.
In one year alone, 100,000 immigrants swarmed across the Plains
over two main roads spreading a wide swath of destruction.
To protect travel on the immigrant roads, the United States erected a network of forts
across the Plains and churned out cadets at West Point specially trained for Indian warfare.
It was the Army's mission to force mobile nations who hunted over large territories
onto confined areas, reservations.
Indian people were faced with only two options, to give up their homelands
and way of life or fight the American Army.
Although some chose armed resistance, many Indian leaders responsible for the protection
of large villages of women, children, and elderly saw little hope in fighting.
Among these were two Cheyenne leaders, Black Kettle and White Antelope.
They were willing to give up lands to maintain peace
and bring their people safely through the dangerous era.
[ Music ]
>> White Antelope and Black Kettle had a duty to their people to try to protect them.
And to do this, they had to maintain peace.
So they felt that it was their duty to go out and make peace with the United States.
So, they did.
>> Black Kettle and White Antelope ceded vast Cheyenne lands to the United States in 1861
and agreed to confine themselves to a reservation in exchange for protection
from soldiers and settlers and assistance of food and money to replace lost hunting lands.
They then traveled to Washington to meet with President Lincoln.
Lincoln presented Black Kettle with a large American flag
and White Antelope with a Medal of Peace.
But over the next three years, continued unrest
on the Plains fanned rumors of an impending Indian war.
In Denver, Governor John Evans inflamed public opinion by fabricating stories
of Cheyenne hostilities and encouraged civilians to take up arms against them.
Seeking protection for there peaceful bands, Black Kettle
and White Antelope undertook the dangerous trip to Denver to meet with Governor Evans.
>> All we ask is that we may have peace with the whites.
I want you to give all the chiefs of the soldiers here to understand that we are
for peace, and that we have made peace, that we may not be mistaken by them for enemies.
Black Kettle, Southern Cheyenne.
>> Black Kettle and White Antelope were promised safety for their people
if they camped near Fort Lyon in Southern Colorado.
But the military commander of Colorado, Colonel John Chivington,
had no plans for peace with any Indian people.
>> Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians.
I have come to kill Indians and believe it as right and honorable
to use any means under God's heaven to kill them.
Colonel John Chivington.
>> Black Kettle and White Antelope had been told where to camp
and that they had nothing to fear from the US army.
>> Why would they worry?
They were under the protection of the American flag.
They were under the protection of the international peace sign, the white flag.
>> At dawn on November 29th, 1864, Chivington's Colorado Volunteers rode
through the snow toward Black Kettle and White Antelope's sleeping camp at Sand Creek.
>> The women were out picking up wood when they think what they thought was buffalo
but it wasn't buffalo and they threw down their sticks
and started screaming and running towards the camp.
>> Cheyenne George Bent was startled awake.
>> I heard shouts and the noise of people running about the camp.
I jumped up and ran out of my lodge.
From down the creek a large body of troops was advancing at a rapid trot.
[ Music & Noise ]
I looked toward the Chief's lodge and saw Black Kettle
at a large American flag tied to the end of a long large pole.
He was standing in front of his lodge holding the pole.
>> Chief Black Kettle, he's about there in front protecting his people
to show them that he wasn't afraid.
He's trying to tell them that, you know, we made peace.
We're at peace.
>> Then the troops opened fire from two sides of the camps.
The woman and children were screaming and wailing.
And men running to their lodges for their arms
and shouting advice in directions to one another.
White Antelope saw the soldiers shooting the people and he did not wish to live any longer.
>> My great, great grandfather, White Antelope, he felt heartbreak
that he know the treaty had been broken, a peace that they have been sticking for so long time,
for a long time had been shattered, had been broken.
>> White Antelope stood in front of this lodge with his arms folded
across his breast, singing the death song.
>> And he cried.
He sang his song.
Nothing lives long by with his arms, nothing lives long but the earth and the mountains.
>> White Antelope wearing the peace medal given him
by President Lincoln was shot dead in front of his lodge.
Black Kettle and his wife ran toward the creek bed
where people were desperately digging into the sand for protection.
Before they could reach it, Black Kettle's wife was shot.
Believing her dead, he ran on without her.
>> Most of us who were hiding in the pits had been wounded before we could reach the shelter.
And there we lay all that bitter cold day from early in the morning until almost dark
with the soldiers all around us keeping up a heavy fire most of the time.
They finally withdrew about 5 o'clock.
As they retired down the creek, they killed all the wounded they could find.
That night will never be forgotten as long as any of us who went through it are alive.
Many who had lost wives, husbands, and children, or friends went back down the creek and crept
over the battleground among the naked and mutilated bodies of the dead.
Few were found alive for the soldiers had done their work thoroughly.
George Bent, Southern Cheyenne.
>> Over 500 Southern Cheyenne people died.
Black Kettle found his wife with nine bullet wounds
in her body, but miraculously she was alive.
The survivors struggled into another Cheyenne camp while Chivington returned
to Denver with over 100 Cheyenne scalps.
>> My people were massacred.
Terrible thing.
Their spirits are still there at the massacre site.
They'll never rest.
>> Despite his loss, Black Kettle saw no hope in resistance.
In 1868, his beleaguered band was camped along the Washita River on a government reservation.
At dawn on November 27, 1868, almost four years to the day after the Sand Creek massacre,
US Army troops under the command of George Armstrong Custer attacked the sleeping village.
Black Kettle, his wife, and over 100 of his people were killed.
The Cheyenne leader's quest for peace had come to a final bitter end costing him his lands,
his freedom, and the lives of the people he had tried so desperately to protect.
[ Music ]
>> I was born upon the prairie where the wind blew free,
and there was nothing to break the light of the sun.
The white man has the country which we loved.
We only wish to wander on the prairie until we die.
Ten Bears.
>> South of the Cheyenne, the Kaui-gu or Kiowa nation lived on lands including parts
of present day Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
They were also being pushed under reservations by treaties and the United States Army.
But the message of Black Kettle's betrayal resounded across the plains.
>> The good Indian, he that listens to the white man, gets nothing.
The independent Indian is the only one that is rewarded.
Satanta, Kiowa.
>> To many, the only path open was armed resistance.
A growing number of Kiowa rallied behind an uncompromising leader, Satanta.
>> A long time ago, this land belonged to our fathers.
But when I go down to the rivers, I see camps of soldiers on its banks.
These soldiers cut down my timber, killed my buffalo.
And when I see that, my heart feels like bursting.
Satanta, Kiowa.
>> Satanta was a deepening thorn in the war department's side.
In 1871, after leading a raid on a mule train in Texas, he was brought before General Sherman.
Satanta defiantly accepted responsibility for the raid.
>> I led about a 100 men to Texas to teach them to fight.
This is our country.
We have always lived in it.
We were happy.
Then you came.
We have to protect ourselves.
We have to save our country.
We have to fight for what is ours.
>> Satanta was placed under arrest shackled and held
in the crawl space below a Fort Sill barracks for 12 days.
Finally, he was taken to Texas for trial.
There, he was imprisoned.
It would be two years before the Kiowa nation was able to barter his release
by surrendering their guns and horses.
When Satanta returned to the reservation where his people were confined,
he found that the money, food, and supplies promised by the government as payment
for their lands had not come through.
And the lifeblood of the nation, the buffalo, were fast disappearing.
>> Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo.
Our teepees were made of buffalo hides, so were our clothes and moccasins.
We ate buffalo meat.
The buffalo were the life of the Kiowas.
>> The US recognized that without the buffalo, the Plains nations could not survive
and would have little choice but to remain on reservations
and live off the meager government rations.
White buffalo hunters with high-powered sharps rifles were encouraged
in and the slaughter began.
[ Music & Noise ]
>> Has the white man become a child that he should recklessly kill and not eat?
When the Kiowa slay game, they do so that they may live and not starve.
Satanta, Kiowa.
>> The slaughter proceeded at an astonishing pace.
Thousands of animals were killed everyday.
>> The buffalo hunters have done more
to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army.
For the sake of lasting peace, let them kill, skin,
and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.
General Phil Sheridan, US Army.
>> In a desperate struggle for survival,
the Southern Plains nations went to war to save the buffalo.
In the summer of 1874, thousands of Indian people flooded off the reservations.
And in that moment of freedom, Satanta and others led an allied Indian force in an attack
on a buffalo hunters' camp at Adobe Walls, Texas.
But they were no match for the hunters with their powerful buffalo guns.
Defeat was followed by massive military expeditions by the United States Army
to force the Southern Plains nations back onto reservations.
In the fall, Satanta was forced to surrender and was returned
to the penitentiary at Huntsville, Texas.
Later, it was reported that he had committed suicide by leaping out of a window.
The Kiowa believed he was murdered.
>> They killed Satanta.
That's what all was thinking of the Kiowa people.
They killed him.
He didn't kill himself.
He's too much of a man to do anything like that.
He's too much of a chief to do.
Chiefs don't do that.
>> By winter, all Kiowa bands had been forced back to the reservation.
The following spring, the last of the Cheyenne surrendered followed soon
after by the last free Comanche.
Determined to break the Southern Plains nations forever,
the army rounded up 10,000 Indian horses.
Almost 1,000 were shot.
The rest, sold at auction.
By 1890, the buffalo population of 50 million had been reduced to fewer than 1,000.
The war to save the buffalo and a way of life had been lost.
>> The Kiowas were camped on the north side of Mt. Scott,
those of them who were still free to camp.
One young woman got up very early in the morning.
The dawn mist was still rising from Medicine Creek.
And as she looked across the water peering through the haze,
she saw the last buffalo herd appear like a spirit dream.
Straight to Mt. Scott, the leader of the herd walked.
Behind him came the cows and their calves, and a few young males who had survived.
As the woman watched, the face of the mountain opened.
Inside Mt. Scott, the world was green and fresh as it had been when she was a small girl.
The rivers ran clear, not red.
The wild plums were in blossom chasing the red buds up the inside slopes.
Into this world of beauty, the buffalo walked, never to be seen again.
[ Music ]
>> Sometimes at evening, I sit looking out.
The sun sets, and dusk steals over the water.
In the shadows, I seem again to see our Indian village
with smoke curling upward from the lodges.
And in the river's roar, I hear the yells of the warriors,
the laughter of the little children, as of old.
It is but an old woman's dream.
Again, I see but shadows and hear only the roar of the river and tears come into my eyes.
Our Indian life, I know, is gone forever.
[ Music ]
>> What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken?
Not one. What treaty that the white man ever made with us have they kept?
Not one. Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa.
>> The Northern Plains mirrored the South with Indian nations being driven onto reservations.
Yet, a handful of leaders refused to sign treaties
and were determined to remain free at any cost.
These defiant leaders became heroes to Indian people across the Plains.
Among them, two men from the Sioux nations stood alone.
One was the venerated Hunkpapa holy man, Sitting Bull.
The other was a young Oglala fighting man whose fierce military genius struck fear
into his enemies and inspired fervent followers.
His image would never be captured by photographers or artists but his spirit of pride
and resistance would be carried on by his people.
His name was Crazy Horse.
In the summer of 1876, thousands of Cheyenne, Arapaho,
and people from many Sioux nations fled the reservations to join Sitting Bull
and Crazy Horse in a great encampment along the Little Bighorn River in present day Montana.
The gathering, possibly the largest in Plains history swelled to 8,000
with camp circles stretching for miles.
The Indian people were well aware
that this could be their last great celebration of freedom.
[ Music ]
They're far from any white settlements.
They would hunt the last remaining buffalo, feast, race ponies, visit with old friends
and relatives, and join in a massive sun dance that would be remembered for generations.
[ Music & Noise ]
On June 25th, 1876, as the United States prepared to celebrate 100 years of freedom,
five companies of the 7th Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer advanced
on Sitting Bull's camp.
It was not until the dust from the 7th Cavalry rose over the hills
that the startled encampment learned of the troops.
Two Moons, leader of the Northern Cheyenne, was swimming in the creek.
>> I looked up the Little Horn towards Sitting Bull's camp.
I saw a great dust rising.
It looked like a whirlwind.
Women were screaming and men were letting out war cries.
We can hear old men calling, "Soldiers are here!
Young men, go out and fight them!"
>> Crazy Horse rode through the camp gathering his men
as Custer's surprise attack stirred panic among the women and children.
>> Children were hunting for their mothers.
Mothers were anxiously trying to find their children.
The air was so full of dust, I could not see where to go.
Wooden Leg, Northern Cheyenne.
>> While the young men rode into battle, Sitting Bull rallied the men still in camp
to protect the women and children.
The Hunkpapa, under Gall, and the Oglala, under Crazy Horse,
quickly rode out and counterattacked.
>> Many hundreds of Indians on horseback were dashing to
and fro in front of a body of soldiers.
The soldiers were on the level valley ground and were shooting with rifles.
Not many bullets were being sent back at them but thousands of arrows were falling among them.
Wooden Leg, Northern Cheyenne.
>> A big dust was whirling on the hill
and then the horses began coming out of it with empty saddles.
Black Elk, Oglala.
>> The battle was over in less than half an hour.
Custer, 260 men of the 7th Cavalry, and as many as 150 Indian people lay dead.
Cheyenne survivors of the massacre of Black Kettle's people along the Washita River exalted
in the death of Custer, the man they called "Woman Killer".
But that night, Sitting Bull was reflective.
>> My heart is full of sorrow that so many were killed on each side.
But when they compel us to fight, we must fight.
Tonight we shall mourn for our dead and for those brave white men lying on the hillside.
Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa.
>> The next day, firing the grass as cover the Indian forces broke camp
and headed toward the Bighorn Mountains.
News of the battle reached the outside world on July 4,
1876 dampening a giddy US Centennial celebration.
The next morning's newspapers, ignoring all evidence, called it a "massacre".
>> We felt that it was a great battle, not a massacre.
The soldiers were going to compel us to stay on our reservation
and take away from us our country.
We were trying to get away from them.
Runs the Enemy, Cut Head, Sioux.
>> Outraged by what was seen as an affront to their national pride,
the American public cried out for immediate reprisal.
Punitive expeditions were sent out mercilessly hunting
down the last free bands of the Northern Plains.
Sitting Bull's Hunkpapa escaped into Canada where they received political asylum.
Crazy Horse's Oglala took refuge in the Black Hills where the full force
of the United States Army was turned on them.
For months, the army was unable to defeat or capture the Oglala leader.
Finally, the US made peace overtures to Crazy Horse promising land, generous subsidies,
and protection if he and his starving people turned themselves in.
On May 5th, 1877 after nearly a year of successfully eluding the all-out manhunt,
Crazy Horse led nearly a 1,000 followers to surrender at Camp Robinson.
Oglala, already at the agency, lined the route, singing and cheering.
One US Army officer marveled that it was "A triumphal march, not a surrender."
The leader, who had known nothing but the freedom of the Plains,
was stripped of his horse and gun.
Then, four months later, on September 5th, 1877 believing he was going to a meeting
with the commander of Fort Robinson, Crazy Horse was led past an armed guard
to the doorway of a building.
Inside was a small barred cell, three feet wide by six feet tall.
Crazy Horse resisted.
A soldier thrust a bayonet into his back.
That night, as Crazy Horse lay dying, he told his father,
"Tell the people it is no use to count on me anymore."
[ Music ]
Crazy Horse was laid to rest near the creek called Wounded Knee.
[ Music ]
>> As Americans or people in any free society, we cherish our independence and know
that the cost to secure this hard-won commodity is often measured in human lives.
Think for a moment what would happen if your freedom was placed at risk.
Is it any wonder then that Indian nations fought to preserve theirs?
Now, imagine the unthinkable, being conquered.
You're forced onto barren land and have no choice but to live
under the control of the conquering government.
In this last hour, we'll take you to the reservations of the 1800s, to the stark,
bitter truth about the loss of freedom.
But first we go to the epic struggles of two impassioned leaders whose resourcefulness
and daring are synonymous with courage, leaders whose words remain among the most moving
in the history of the world, Chief Joseph and Geronimo.
[ Music ]
>> My father sent for me.
I saw he was dying.
I took his hand in mine.
He said, "My son, never forget my dying words.
This country holds your father's body.
Never sell the bones of your father and your mother."
I pressed my father's hand and told him I would protect his grave with my life.
I buried him in that beautiful valley of winding waters.
[ Music ]
I loved that land more than all the rest of the world.
Chief Joseph, Nez Perce.
>> Upon his father's death, 31-year old Inmutooyahlatlat, known as Chief Joseph,
became head of a band of Nez Perce, whose home was the Wallowa Valley,
250 miles east of present day Portland, Oregon.
Famed for their selective breeding of horses, particularly the appaloosa,
the Nez Perce had always been friends to the Americans.
But with the opening of the Oregon territory and the end of the Civil War, white settlers,
cattlemen, and gold miners came to covet the rich Nez Perce land.
Ignoring their long friendship with the Indian nation,
the US government supported the settlers' claims.
In 1877, General Oliver Howard entered the Wallowa Valley with orders from Washington
to remove the Nez Perce by treaty or by force.
[ Music ]
>> I did not want to come to this council but I came hoping that we could save blood.
The white man has no right to come here and take our country.
And we will defend this land as long as a drop of Indian blood warms the hearts of our men.
>> Joseph was faced with a terrible choice,
to betray his father's dying wish or to commit his people to war.
Finally, he reluctantly agreed to relinquish his Wallowa Valley homeland.
Despite Joseph's concessions, tensions remained high.
As the Nez Perce were preparing to move onto the reservation, a youth,
whose father had been murdered by settlers, gathered several friends
and killed four settlers who were known to have committed atrocities against Nez Perce people.
>> I know that my young men did a great wrong but I ask, who was the first to blame?
Their fathers and brothers had been killed.
Their mothers and wives had been disgraced.
They had been told by General Howard that all their horses and cattle were
to fall into the hands of white men.
I would have given my own life if I could have undone the killing of white men by my people.
Chief Joseph, Nez Perce.
>> When seven more whites were killed,
General Howard sent a military force against the Indian nation.
Nez Perce leaders responded by dispatching a truce delegation
under a white flag to meet Howard's advancing army.
Howard's men opened fire.
[ Gun Shot ]
[ Music ]
So began Chief Joseph's famous flight for freedom.
Over 700 men, women, and children, with sick and elderly enduring a 1,800 mile fighting retreat.
The struggle would capture the imagination of the American public.
Newspaper accounts made Chief Joseph a household name.
With a military genius born of desperation, the five Nez Perce bands outwitted
and outmaneuvered one military force after another
as they made their way toward Sitting Bull's camp and political asylum in Canada.
Circling through the mountains, canyons, and plateau prairies of Idaho,
crossing the high ridges of the Bitterroot Mountains into Montana and Wyoming,
colliding with frightened tourists in the newly created Yellowstone Park,
the Nez Perce fought off in turn four armies commanded by veteran Civil War officers.
[ Music ]
After 105 days of constant pursuit, the Nez Perce reached the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana,
one day from Sitting Bull's camp and freedom.
They knew they had put safe distance between themselves and the pursuing armies and stopped
for a last rest before moving across the border.
What they did not know was that a new army had been dispatched by telegraph
and was surrounding them as they camped.
The Nez Perce were taken completely by surprise.
The fighting was intense.
And in the first moments, Chief Joseph and 70 others were cut off from the rest of the camp.
>> With a prayer in my mouth, I dashed unarmed through the line of soldiers.
My clothes were cut to pieces, my horse was wounded, but I was not hurt.
As I reached the door of my lodge, my wife handed me my rifle saying, "Here's your gun.
Fight."
>> They ran up the hill when they were fighting.
It was going to-- they're tearing the camp down there.
She had this little baby and her girl by the hand and they said there was kind of a tree.
It's like there was a big log there.
So, she-- they crawled under that log to kind of hide from the soldiers that might come
and probably shoot them down too.
And they just stayed there 'til everything was quiet.
>> The battle raged throughout the first day with heavy casualties
on both sides including the leaders of three of the five Nez Perce bands.
By the second day, the Nez Perce were dug in and fighting from trenches.
The army could not mount an attack without heavy losses.
Finally, on October 5th, General Nelson A. Miles called Chief Joseph
to peace talks under a flag of truce.
Chief Joseph went to General Miles and gave up his gun,
only one day from Sitting Bull's camp and Canadian asylum.
>> I am tired of fighting.
Our chiefs are all killed.
The old men were all dead.
The little children are freezing to death.
I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find.
Maybe I shall find them among the dead.
Hear me, my chiefs.
I am tired.
My heart is sick and sad.
From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more, forever.
>> But the United States would not honor the terms of Chief Joseph's surrender.
The captured Nez Perce were shipped south to a malaria-infested reservation
at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas before final relocation to Oklahoma territory.
Chief Joseph had put down his gun but he had not given up the struggle for his homeland.
He would devote the rest of his life to honoring his promise
to his father and fighting for his people.
He traveled to Washington, DC where he passionately argued his case before Congress.
>> I have heard talk and talk, but nothing is done.
Good words do not last long unless they amount to something.
It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises.
>> In 1885, after eight long years and a massive campaign launched by Eastern philanthropists,
Chief Joseph's people won the right to return to the Northwest
but not to their beloved Wallowa Valley.
The cattlemen who occupied it threatened to kill Chief Joseph if he returned.
Forever banished from his country, Joseph and 150 members of his band were taken
under military escort to a reservation in Washington territory.
There, in exile, Chief Joseph would die.
>> The doctor that was there to examine to Joseph,
his plea was that Joseph lost his life account of his broken heart.
[ Music ]
>> If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian, he can live in peace.
Treat all men alike.
Give them all an even chance to live and grow.
You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man
who was born a free man should be contented when penned up
and denied liberty to go where he pleases.
Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work,
free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers,
free to think and talk and act for myself.
Chief Joseph, Nez Perce.
[ Music ]
>> When I was young, I walked all over this country, east and west,
and I saw no other people than the Apaches.
After many summers, I walked again and I found another race of people had come to take it.
Cochise, Chokonen.
>> When California became part of the United States in 1848, a new flow of military
and civilian traffic headed west.
Many bound for Southern California took a route near the Mexican border that went
through the lands of Apache nations, the Chokonen,
Bedonkohe, Nednhi, and Chi'enne Apache.
The Apache had a long and successful history of defending their lands
against aggressive Spanish and Mexican invaders.
But as the newest arrivals, the Americans crossed their lands,
most Apache held no grievances against them
and their leaders made every effort to accommodate the travelers.
>> At last, in my youth, came the white man.
Under the counsel of my father who had for a long time been the head of the Apaches,
they were received with friendship.
Soon their numbers increased and many passed through the country.
We lived in peace.
Cochise, Chokonen.
>> In February of 1861, a charismatic Chokonen leader, Cochise, was summoned to a meeting
with an inexperienced army lieutenant named George Bascom.
Bascom accused Cochise of kidnapping a child from a nearby ranch.
>> Cochise denied that any of his band had done the kidnapping.
Bascom accused the chief of telling a lie.
Cochise was very proud of making his word good
and no greater offense could have been offered him.
Daklugie, Nednhi.
>> Bascom ordered Cochise arrested but the Apache leader escaped through heavy gunfire.
The men who accompanied Cochise were held by Bascom and executed soon after.
>> At last, your soldiers did me a great wrong and I and my people went to war with them.
Cochise, Chokonen.
>> Cochise cut off the passage through Apache Pass.
The United States responded by sending General James Carleton
to establish Fort Bowie in Apache Pass.
>> There is to be no council held with the Indians.
The men are to be slain whenever and wherever they can be found.
The women and children may be taken as prisoners.
I trust that these demonstrations will give those Indians a wholesome lesson.
>> But the long and intense efforts of the United States Army would have little success.
Based at his stronghold high in the rocky Dragoon Mountains,
Cochise fought a successful guerrilla war against the US Cavalry for the next nine years.
Finally, in 1872, General Oliver Howard traveled to Cochise's stronghold to sue for peace.
Cochise agreed to lay down his arms for a promise that his people would be allowed to live
on their own land in Apache Pass.
Howard's promise would hold true through the remaining two years of Cochise's life.
Then, in 1876, the United States dissolved the Apache Pass reservation and ordered the people
to the barren San Carlos Reservation.
>> The creator did not make San Carlos.
It is older than he.
He just left it as a sample of the way they did jobs before he came along.
Take stones and ashes and thorns and with some scorpions and rattlesnakes thrown in,
dump the outfit on stones, heat the stones red-hot, set the United States Army
after the Apache, and you have San Carlos.
[ Music & Noise ]
>> Of those ordered to relocate, two-thirds refused, preferring to follow a new generation
of Apache leaders, leaders committed to freedom at all costs.
Among them were Juh, Nana, Loco, Victorio and Geronimo.
>> Juh told him that he could offer them nothing but hardship and death.
As he saw it, they must choose between death from heat, starvation,
and degradation at San Carlos and a wild, free life in Mexico.
Short, perhaps, but free.
Let them remember that if they took this step, they would be hunted like wild animals
by the troops of both the United States and Mexico.
All of us knew that we were doomed but some preferred death to slavery and imprisonment.
Daklugie, Nednhi.
>> Geronimo's strength of will had been forged much earlier when his wife, children,
and mother were killed in a Mexican raid on his village.
>> He had been away from home and came back
and found his entire family scattered all over in the yard, dead.
The Americans and the Mexicans rode horses with shoes and so he knew that they were the ones
that had come and destroyed his family.
And he made a vow then that he would kill every Mexican and every American that he saw.
>> Now, he would lead the Apache through their greatest test.
The final Apache resistance was a monumental expression of human pride and love of freedom.
>> We are vanishing from the earth.
Yet, I cannot think we are useless.
Our God would not have created us.
For each tribe of men God created, he also made a home.
In the land created for any particular tribe,
he placed whatever would be best for the welfare of that tribe.
Thus, it wasn't the beginning, the Apaches
and their homes each created for the other by God himself.
When they are taken from these homes, they sicken and die.
How long will it be until it is said, "There are no Apaches?"
Geronimo, Bedonkohe.
[ Music ]
>> For a decade, the Apache surmounted overwhelming odds.
By 1886, Geronimo's tiny band was being hunted across the mountains by 8,000 troops
from Mexico and the United States.
[ Music & Noise ]
>> He was losing all his warriors and his family.
He could never beat them because there was always somebody there and there were so many.
And he was losing his own people.
And he said, "If I keep fighting, there will never be anymore of us."
>> At that time, Geronimo's band consisted of 17 men.
He had also Lozen, known as the woman warrior.
Geronimo was handicapped by the presence too of women and children who must be defended and fed.
Nobody ever captured Geronimo.
I know. I was with him.
Anyway, who can capture the wind?
Daklugie, Nednhi.
>> On September 3rd, 1886, Geronimo turned himself in to General Miles
who had already made his reputation as the man who finally caught Chief Joseph.
As a condition of surrender, Miles promised Geronimo that his band would be taken
into custody for only a short while before being released to a reservation in the Southwest.
But Miles lied.
Geronimo's people and even Apache peacefully settled
at the San Carlos Reservation were shipped to Indian prisons in Florida.
>> I was born as a prisoner of war.
They promised us in the beginning that we would be held prisoners
for two years which went into 28 years.
And I'm almost sure we're the only tribe that ever served that many years in prison.
[ Music ]
>> Geronimo would not live to be a free man.
After 23 years as a prisoner of war, he died in 1909.
>> What is the matter that you don't speak to me?
Why don't you look at me, smile at me?
I am a man, I have the same feet, legs and hands,
and the sun looks down on me a complete man.
I want you to look and smile at me.
[ Music ]
[ Silence ]
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] By the late 1800s reservations had become virtual
concentration camps.
Most were on barren lands useless for farming and devoid of game.
Indian people were forced to live off of US food rations promised
in treaties in return for their lands.
Providing subsidies and food for over 200,000 Indian people was big business.
The distribution system quickly became a corrupt network of government agents
and their partners known as the Indian Ring.
>> "If they bring any goods for the Indians the agents live off of them.
And pay has been taken by the agents and they have put money in their pockets.
The steamboat came in the night and took away boxes of goods
so that the Indians would not know it."
Struck By The Ree, Yankton.
>> Robbing nations of their meager government subsidies,
the Indian Ring left the people in abject property.
>> And they hoped, it seems to me, to take away the spirit of the people
so that we become more docile, so to speak.
We would then only depend upon them for the way to be, we would have to go
to whoever brought out the rations.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] "I noticed a small group of Indians who sat under a tree.
All were dirty, rugged and lean.
Soon an Indian woman and a young girl hurried into the group, laid down packs and opened them.
I could see spread out there some dingy meat, evidently waste from a butcher shop,
and some discarded scraps of stale bread and another stray odds and ends of food.
I felt a wave of fury toward our government's whole Indian policy."
Thomas Tibbles, reporter.
>> [Background Music] Many Eastern reformers were determined to break the Indian Ring.
But they believed that the only lasting solution was change not only for the bureaucrats
but for the Indian people themselves.
Indian ways were judged as backward and wrong,
that for their own good their cultures had to be erased.
Indian people were to be remade in the reformer's image.
>> "The Indians only say future can be found in merging their interests with ours
and becoming part of the people of the United States.
Their safe course is to quit being tribal Indians, to go out and live among us
as individual men, to adopt our language, our industries and become a part of the power."
Richard Pratt, director, Carlisle Indian School.
>> The policy of striping Indian people of their cultures became official
with the 1887 passage of the General Allotment Act.
The act broke apart communal land holdings assigning plots to individuals in an effort
to force them to live like white farmers.
[ Dog Barking, Horse Neighing ]
>> "As long as Indians live in villages they will retain many
of their old and injurious habits.
Heathen ceremonies and dances, constant visiting.
I trust that before another year is ended they will generally be located upon individual land
or farms."
Government Commissioner.
>> Supported by an alliance of eastern reformers and western lands speculators,
allotment attacked both the sovereignty of Indian nations and the fundamental concept
of land belonging to all the people.
>> "This is only another trick of the whites to take our land away from us.
And they have played these tricks before."
Hollow Horn Bear, Oglala.
>> The allotment system was ripe for massive fraud.
Corrupt agents declared small children,
dogs and horses as allottees then seized their lands and sold them.
Indian orphans were shuffled off to white families who adopted them
to obtain tittle to their allotments.
After allotment plots were handed out to Indian people, the US government was free
to sell the remaining reservation lands to whites.
During the allotment period, Indian nations would lose two thirds
of the little land that remained in their hands.
[ Music ]
[Background Music] Two years after the passage of the Allotment Act,
Oklahoma Indian territory was officially open to settlers.
[ Music ]
[ Gunshot ]
[ Horses Galloping and Neighing ]
What followed were the famous land rushes.
The territories of the Creek, Cherokee, and other nations were overrun.
Lands which had been promised then as permanent, unassailable refuges in exchange
for their lands east of the Mississippi.
[ Music ]
[Background Music] But of all the government policies designed
to end Indian cultures, the cruelest was yet to come.
Indian people would be robbed of even their children.
Across the country Indian children, some as young as four years old,
were taken from their parents often by force and sent to boarding schools.
[ Music ]
At the boarding schools, children were stripped
of all outward appearances linking them to their Indian past.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] Our belongings were taken from us.
Even the little medicine bags our mothers had given us to protect us from harm.
Everything was placed in a heap and set afire.
Next was the long hair, the pride of all the Indians.
The boys one by one would breakdown and cry when they saw the braids thrown on the floor.
Lone Wolf, Blackfeet.
>> [Background Music] Children were forbidden to speak of their traditions and severely punished
if they used their native languages.
Fed distorted images of evil Indians, many came to doubt their own identity.
>> I remember growing up that I never really felt good about myself.
We were taught to be ashamed of who we were and who we are.
And it hurts when you're young and you're trying to understand.
>> [Background Music] We all wore white man's clothes and ate white man's food.
And went to white man's churches and spoke white man's talk.
And so after a while we also begin to say Indians were bad.
We laughed at our own people and their blankets
and cooking pats and sacred societies and dances.
Sun Elk, Taos.
>> Many boarding schools were set up in converted military posts
where for decades soldiers had been trained to fight Indian people.
Students slept on cots and cement barracks and were drilled daily in strict military regimen.
>> It was like an army barracks.
They marched us like they do in army when you first go into the army.
We marched to school, we marched to eat.
They took us to church, we marched to church.
We lived kind of an army style life.
And we went to school that way.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] If we thought the days were bad, the nights were much worse.
This was the time when real loneliness set in.
Many boys run away but most of them were caught and brought back by the police.
We were told never to talk Indian,
and if we were caught we got strapping with a leather belt.
I remember one evening when we were all lined up in a room
and one of the boys said something Indian to another boy.
The man in charge caught them by the shirt and threw him across the room.
Later we found out his collar bone was broken.
>> The priest would take a leather harness strap and he would beat my husband.
And every time that strap would come down on him, how he would repeat
to himself I'll never forget my language, he was thinking that.
I will never forget my language.
>> The boy's father, an old warrior came to the school, he told the instructor
that among his people children were never punished by striking them.
That that was no way to teach children.
Kind words and good examples were much better.
Lone Wolf, Black Feet.
>> Each day stretched into another endless day.
Each night for tears to fall.
Tomorrow, my sister said, tomorrow never came.
And so the days passed by and the changes slowly came to settle within me.
Gone were the vivid pictures of my parents, sisters and brothers.
Only a blurred vision of what used to be.
Desperately I tried to cling to the faded past which was slowly being erased from my mind.
[ Music ]
>> For traditional cultures, the effect was devastating.
Boarding school graduates returned to the schools and encouraged new students fresh
from the reservations to give up their traditions.
>> Don't look back, all that has passed away.
This country through her is all improved.
You saw when you were coming, cities, railroads, houses, manufactories.
Boys, this was once all our country but our fathers had not their eyes open as we have.
Now, the only way to hold our land is to get educated ourselves.
Henry Jones, Creek.
>> But the home cultures were not altogether powerless against boarding school invasion.
Many held firmly to their traditions and returning graduates
who did not readopt found they had no place in their old world.
[ Train Whistle ]
>> [Background Music] It was a warm summer evening
when I got off the train at Taos Station.
The first Indian I met I asked him to run out to the Pueblo and tell my family I was home.
The Indian couldn't speak English and I have forgotten all of my Pueblo language.
Next morning, the governor of the Pueblo and two war chiefs came into my father's house.
They did not talk to me.
They did not even look at me.
The chief said to my father, your son who calls himself Rafael has lived with the white men.
He has been far away.
He has not learned the things that Indian boys should learn.
He has no hair.
He cannot even speak our language.
He is not one of us.
Sun Elk, Taos.
>> These things that made life for us, the most important thing,
these were the things they took away from us and today so many
of our Indian children have forgotten their language even here on our reservation
because they took that language away from us.
Our language that God gave us.
>> When we started this series we wanted to make sense of how our continent
of some 500 Indian Nations became what it is today.
What we found was an ironic path.
New commerce looking for freedom and tolerance but showing little
of those virtues to the people they encounter.
Many Indian nations have survived.
Today, there are over 10 million Indian people in North America
with two million in United States alone.
They no longer face conquistadors or invading settlers.
But they continue to deal with the complex struggle
to maintain their cultures and quality of life.
>> It's difficult to explain like the native people are like a root.
You know, where everything grows there.
It's their community, it's their land.
That's where they live.
That's where they are born.
That's where they have their grandparents buried, the ancestors were there.
The language is there, everything is there.
And then you ask them to change their way of life so you carry them away.
I say it's just like when you try to plant a tree, let's say, a spruce tree in a desert land,
even though you put water in it, it's going ot dry.
It's going to die.
>> Our people, our families had been telling us all these stories all these many years,
and at last we finally set foot and walked in the areas and slept in the country
where our grandmothers and grandfathers started from.
[ Music ]
And I can just imagine how my grandmothers and my grandfathers would have felt
if they had come back like I did.
And I saw those places for them.
I was able to return.
>> I think a lot of times the general public doesn't understand where the Native Americans,
their feelings of what's happened to them in the past, and where they're coming from.
And why they're sometimes withdrawn.
Why they haven't really jumped into the mainstream life.
>> I think what present-day Americans have to learn is that our heroes are not their heroes,
and their heroes are not our heroes.
And when I went to school, just as you and everyone else in this land,
we've all been exposed to the same value system, the same perspective on history.
The lesson that is there, the very important lesson, today,
for all people is to realize the value
of an alternative perspective and that is why we are here.
That is why the creator allowed some of us to remain in spite
of all the attempts to destroy us.
[Background Music] Every tribe has had their Great Swamp in that process.
Every tribe has had their Sand Creek.
Every tribe has had their Wounded Knee.
The list is endless, and we've all shared in that same experience.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] I went to a meeting at Wounded Knee in November,
when there was snow all over all over the ground.
And we were on our way to the burial site.
I could not help but think back.
And there was a feeling there.
There was a feeling that those that were there in the grave were trying to tell me something.
And it brought tears to my eyes.
And I stood there, and there was a spirit that came over and I could feel that spirit.
It was the spirit of God.
[ Music ]
>> There is a mightier power than kings and presidents who guides the minds of the people.
A higher power.
>> The mandates are very simple, you know, that we must live in the land that the Creator gave
to us and look after his gifts so that our great-great-grandchildren will be able
to enjoy the same things that we enjoy today.
If you look at natural laws in a very simplest form is that you must drink water to survive.
So if you pollute the water so that you can't drink it then you will perish.
And there's no appeal to this if you violate the natural laws.
>> Someday I fear that the land that we have here now will be taken because some
of the treaties state that as long as the water flows
and the grasses grow, that we will be here.
But our rivers are drying up and when the water's gone what will happen then?
What's going to happen to my children?
>> Our cultures have been assaulted, our lands have been stolen.
But we're still here as a people.
And we're fighting the same battles that have been fought for the last 300 years.
They're unresolved.
And it's up to us to resolve them in a fair and honorable manner.
Destiny is not a matter of fate.
It's a matter of choice.
And we have some choices to be made here.
We have the choice of continuing to survive on this planet as Indian people.
That's our goal, and we're going to accomplish that.
We're going to be here for many, many years to come.
[ Music ]
>> Tall Oak of the Narragansett Nation said it was his destiny,
perhaps that of all native people, to be the conscience of America, to see that the tragedy
of the past would never be repeated.
Hopefully, now that we've had a glimpse of the other side
of the American story we too can be a part of that collective conscience.
Thank you for joining us.
[ Music ]