ulture (for example, the wheel, firearms, horses, the Roman Catholic or Protestant Christian faiths) led many Europeans and their descendants to conclude -- erroneously -- that the Indians had no culture at all, or at least none that Europeans were bound to respect. This perception has, as noted above and emphasized below, distorted most later accounts of Indian history. In studying the Indians of the Americas, the first task that a modern scholar or teacher must carry out is to clear the ground of the discarded rubble of former "scholarship." II. Indian History and Culture We begin American history with a great mystery and a great challenge. The mystery surrounds the people who were standing on the shores of the American continents and the Caribbean islands when the European explorers landed there -- by some recent estimates , over ten million people in South America and about four million in the region of North America that became the United States. Who were they? Where did they come from? What were they like? Too often in the past, the Indians have been part of the background for the grand, sanitized pageant of "discovery and settlement" -- the American continents have appeared in older histories as "empty," waiting for settlement, despite the presence of mill ions of indigenous inhabitants. Even when historians have acknowledged Indians' sufferings at the hands of European colonizers and conquerors, or their role in aiding or even saving those colonists, they are largely voiceless; we see them and hear them through European eyes and ears. We all are aware just how controversial and difficult it is to do justice to Indian history and culture. For one thing, there is no clear agreement even as to what we are to call the peoples who originally populated the Americas. As the leading colonial ethnohistorian James Axtell has pointed out, most Native Americans now prefer the term "Indians," even though we all know how it evolved as a misno...
