How We First Got Here
The immigration issue in North America has been here as long as people have
The immigration issues on this continent didn’t begin with ‘Remain in Mexico’ or the Afghan evacuation or Trump’s family separation policy. They didn’t begin with DACA or Ellis Island or the Declaration of Independence, either.
People have been moving for as long as people have been people, and they’ve been moving into and around North America for nearly as long. Throughout that time, there have been conflicts and threats and collapses of civilizations. And there have been travesties and tragedies, too.
The Very First Americans
The first people who lived around the region where I’m writing, the Ohio River basin, were migrants. They probably came from Asia across the Bering land bridge, but they may have come even earlier by boat. Either way, they gradually spread down the Pacific Coast and, probably later, out across North America.
Nomadic at first, they traveled around the Ohio River basin in search of game and vegetation in those harsh, cold days when mastodons and saber-tooth tigers still roamed around modern-day Cleveland and Columbus. (Now that’s an image.)
The oldest traces we have of humans around this area were discovered at Meadowcroft Rockshelter, a sandstone overhang along Cross Creek in southwestern Pennsylvania (about sixty-seven miles from where I’m sitting). This site is sometimes described as “a Paleo Holiday Inn” because it appears to have been used for rest and shelter by people traveling along the Ohio River and its tributaries 16,000 to 19,000 years ago.
At the time, this evidence of human occupation of North America so long ago unsettled conventional archaeological wisdom. More recently, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of even earlier human occupation, including human footprints in New Mexico from 23,000 years ago and a mastodon skeleton 37,000 years old that appears to have been deliberately broken, presumably by humans.
There’s even a controversial report of a mastodon skeleton that may show evidence of a human predator as much as 130,000 years ago. If true, that would mean the Paleoindian homo sapiens at Meadowcroft Rockshelter could have been part of the first serious migrant threat in North America, competing for dominion against a human species much older than our own (perhaps Neanderthals).
The Mound Builders and Their Mysterious Fate
If this incursion of homo sapiens was the first great immigration conflict on this continent, it wasn’t the last. The Paleoindians who ended up in the Ohio River Basin evolved, gradually, into the mound builders of the various Woodlands periods that began around 2,800 years ago. The mound structures, like Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio, were only the most visible remnants of this vibrant culture.
But the mound builders’ villages were empty by the time Europeans began arriving in and keeping records of the area. The archaeological record doesn’t clearly explain what happened to them, but some anthropologists theorize that they were decimated by two intersecting migration effects. On the one hand, migrants from the southwest introduced maize into the mound builders’ diets. Maize produced far more calories than previous crops but also led to drastically declining health over time. Seven hundred years later, deadly European germs may have begun arriving in the Ohio River Valley through trade routes decades ahead of Europeans themselves. This may have resulted in a one-two punch that nearly wiped out the mound builders, causing survivors to flee to other regions.
Settlers and Promises (Mostly Broken)
When Europeans arrived in the Ohio River Basin in the 18th century, they met members of modern tribes like the Miami, Delaware, and Shawnee. Those tribes claim ancestral roots in the area, but in the 18th century they had recently moved there (or moved back) from other regions. The tribes did not always welcome these uninvited (by them) European newcomers to their land. Hostilities were common, but the most restless or intrepid or outcast Whites continued to move across the Ohio River and pressure Indian populations.
In the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, officials of the young United States brokered an agreement with the Ohio tribes that they would live in northwestern Ohio, leaving the southern part to settlers (and, for the feds, providing a useful buffer against the British threat hovering over them in Canada).
But the treaty’s promises to limit the zone of settler migration didn’t hold for long. As settlers flooded in and pushed north and Indians felt increasing pressure, further treaties limited Indian territory to tiny reserves or moved them further west, where they were promised the right to live their traditional lifestyles forever. In Ohio, the last Indian tribe was removed to Oklahoma after the 1842 Treaty with the Wyandots.
100,000 Years of (Im)migration
You could argue that “migration” in these examples is different from the “immigration” debate of today. But the distinction seems a little arbitrary when you consider the wildly fluctuating boundaries, national identities, and membership rights over the long course of this deep history. Perhaps “migration” becomes “immigration” simply when one dominant group draws lines on a map and says so.
I don’t think history means we have to resign ourselves to intractable immigration conflict. Maybe the lesson is that we’re only likely to find rational resolutions to our current versions of these conflicts if we drop one-sided views and get serious about it. Yes, immigration can threaten an existing way of life – if you doubt it, ask a Shawnee. On the other hand, if Trump fears an immigration “invasion,” he might be invited to look in the mirror. The problems aren’t simple and the solutions won’t be either, so less distortion and more dialogue may be the only way forward.
Comments
What’s your take on this ancient story of migration? Did I mischaracterize or leave out critical events? Does my response under- or overstate the potential consequences of modern immigration? I’d like to hear your views. I’ll collect and respond to them in a future post.