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Indigenous People Invented the So-Called “American Dream”

Liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness—these values date back to well before Columbus arrived in the Americas or Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock.

The ConversationWhen President Barack Obama , the 2012 program that offered undocumented young people brought to the U.S. as children a path into society, for a moment the ideals of the American Dream seemed, at least for this group, real.

We call these kids, many of whom are now adults, “, because they are chasing the American Dream—a . Fulfilling your dreams often means following them wherever they may lead—even into another country.

The Trump administration’s decision to —now on hold while it is —aԻ has endangered those dreams by subjecting 800,000 young people to deportation.

But the —which is that “” immigrants, most of them from Mexico, are and hurting society—reflects a profound misunderstanding of American history.

On , it’s worth underscoring something that many archaeologists know: Many of the values that inspire the —liberty, equality,and —date back to well and before freedom-seeking Pilgrim immigrants arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620.

They originate with native North Americans.

A Native American Dream

The modern rendition of the American Dream can be traced back to 1774, when Virginia’s governor, , the fourth Earl of Dunmore, wrotethat even if Americans “attained Paradise, they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west.”

The actual term “American Dream” was popularized in 1931 by the businessman and historian For him, its realization depended on not just being able to better oneself but also, through movement and human interaction, seeing your neighbors bettered as well.

The first peoples to come to the Americas also came in search of a better life.

That happened 14,000 years ago in the last Ice Age when , ancestors to modern Native Americans and First Nations, arrived from the Asian continent and roamed freely throughout what now includes Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Chasing , they moved constantly to secure the health of their communities.

A more recent example of the power of migration reappears about 5,000 years ago, when spread into the American Southwest and farther north, settling as far up as western North America. With them they brought corn, which now , and a way of speaking that birthed more than 20 of the 169 still spoken in the United States today.

The Hohokam

This globalist world view was alive and well 700 years ago as well when people from what is now northern Arizona fled a decadeslong drought and rising authoritarianism under religious leaders.

Many migrated hundreds of miles south to southern Arizona, joining the Hohokam——who had long thrived in the harsh Sonoran desert by .

When the northern migrants arrived to this hot stretch of land around the then-nonexistent U.S.-Mexico frontier, Hohokam religious and political life was controlled by a handful of elites. Social mechanisms restricting the accumulation of power by individuals had slowly broken down.

For decades after their arrival, migrants and locals interacted. From that exchange, a Hohokam cultural revolution grew. Together, the two communities created a commoners’ religious social movement that , which featured a feasting practice that invited all village members to participate.

As ever more communities adopted this , political power—which at the time was embedded in religious power—became more equally spread through society.

Elites lost their control and, eventually, abandoned their temples.

America’s Egalitarian Mound-Builders

The Hohokam tale unearths another vaunted American ideal that originates in indigenous history: equality.

Long before it was codified in the ,equality was enacted through the building of large .

Massive earthen structures like these are often acts of highly hierarchical societies—think of the pyramids of the ancient Egyptians, constructed by as the final resting place of , or those of the Aztecs.

But great power isn’t always top-down. , in the lower Mississippi River Valley of what’s now Louisiana, is a good example. This massive site, which consists of five mounds, six concentric semielliptical ridges and a central plaza, was built some 4,000 years ago by hunter-fisher-gatherers with little entrenched hierarchy.

Originally, archaeologists that such societies without the inequality and authoritarianism that defined the ancient Egyptian, Roman, and Aztec empires could not have constructed something so significant—aԻ, if so, only over decades or centuries.

But excavations in the last 20 years have revealed that large sections of Poverty Point were . These Native Americans organized in groups to undertake massive projects as a communal cooperative, leaving a legacy built of equality across America’s landscape.

The Consensus-Building Haudenosaunee

The Haudenosaunee, or , offer a more modern example of such consensus-based decision-making practices.

These peoples—who’ve lived on both sides of the St. Lawrence river in modern-day Ontario and the U.S. Great Lakes states for —built their society on collective labor arrangements.

They ostracized people who exhibited “selfish” behavior, and women and men often worked together in . Everyone lived together in communal longhouses. Power was also shifted constantly to prevent hierarchy from forming, and decisions were made by coalitions of kin groups and communities.

Many of these participatory political practices .

Power was shifted constantly to prevent hierarchy from forming, and decisions were made by communities.

The Haudenosaunee sided with the British during the 1776 and were largely driven off their land after the war. Like , the Haudenosaunee Dream turned into a nightmare of invasion, as European migrants pursued their American Dream that excluded others.

Native Americans at Standing Rock

The long indigenous history of rejecting authoritarianism continues, including the 2016 battle for , North Dakota.

There, a resistance movement coalesced around a that rejected the planned .

The movement centered on an environmental cause in part because nature is sacred to the Lakota—aԻ to —but also because communities of color often .

Standing Rock was the indigenous fight against repression and for the American Dream, gone 21st century.

Redefining the North American dream

Anthropologists and historians haven’t always recognized the quintessentially Native American ideals present in the American Dream.

In the 19th century, the prominent social philosopher Lewis Henry Morgan .” And for centuries, America’s native peoples have seen their —even to an invented .

America’s indigenous past was not romantic. There were petty disputes, and slavery, namely and .

But the ideals of freedom and equality—aԻ the right that Americans can move across this vast continent to seek it out—survive through the millennia. Societies based on those values have prospered here.

So the next time a politician invokes American values to or , remember who originally espoused the American Dream—aԻ first sought to live it, too.

This article was originally published by. It has been edited for Ӱҵ Magazine.

Correction: October 12, 2018.
This version updates the location of the Standing Rock protests as North, not South, Dakota.

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