Introduction

For the Europeans who explored and colonized the Americas after 1492, the two continents constituted a new world, but for the native peoples whose known histories dated back hundreds of years and whose physical presence extended back thousands of years, these vast lands composed an ancient and familiar world. They had long intimacy with the peoples and environments around them. Trading networks, political alliances, and cultural influences were often far-reaching. Though these peoples divided themselves into a great number of ethnic groups and a variety of political arrangements, they routinely interacted with the societies around them. The relative isolation that characterized many of them by the nineteenth century resulted from the most deleterious effects of European settlement and did not reach back into precontact times. In fact, oftentimes such isolation did not appear even in the early decades after conquest by Europeans. Rather, it developed only gradually.