Holmberg's Mistake: The Changing Lives Of Native Americans

Most people first learn about Native Americans in their American history classes. They learn about the arrival of British settlers in the 17th century, and how they interacted violently, and sometimes non-violently, with the indigenous groups. Later on in the course, they learn about how President Andrew Jackson forcefully relocated the Cherokee Indians in the “Trail of Tears.” Rarely do classes broach the subject of pre-Columbian America, a time when the combined population of North and South America may have become as large as 112 million (Mann, 1491, 94). Since the very moment that Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere, the lives of Native Americans began to change dramatically. In order to fully appreciate the world we live in now, we must understand how much it has changed and why. Furthermore, by studying the people who, for thousands of years, greatly changed their environment in a
In his book 1491, Charles Mann refers to this belief as Holmberg’s Mistake. Holmberg’s Mistake, says Mann, is, “the supposition that Native Americans lived in an eternal, unhistoried state,” (Mann, 1491, 12). The term is named after a researcher, Allan Holmberg, who wrote a book about the Sirionó tribe, in which he described them as always having been nomads and backwards. What the researcher didn’t know was that influenza and smallpox had wiped out so much of the population that the survivors were forced to mate with relatives. What many Europeans viewed as a savage and backwards lifestyle was largely a result of European diseases that forced many Indians to drastically change their lifestyle. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, however, Indian groups had successfully developed a wide range of ways to modify their environment to fit their