---

---

---

Did Native People Really Sell Manhattan?

---

Kinship and extended family relationships have always been and continue to be essential in the shaping of American Indian cultures.

American Indian cultures have always been dynamic and changing.

Interactions with Europeans and Americans brought accelerated and often devastating changes to American Indian cultures.

There is no single American Indian culture or language.

For millennia, American Indians have shaped and been shaped by their culture and environment. Elders in each generation teach the next generation their values, traditions, and beliefs through their own tribal languages, social practices, arts, music, ceremonies, and customs.

European contact resulted in devastating loss of life, disruption of tradition, and enormous loss of lands for American Indians.

Hearing and understanding American Indian history from Indian perspectives provides an important point of view to the discussion of history and cultures in the Americas. Indian perspectives expand the social, political, and economic dialogue.

Indigenous people played a significant role in the history of the Americas. Many of these historically important events and developments in the Americas shaped the modern world.

Well-developed systems of trails, including some hard-surfaced roads, interlaced the Western Hemisphere prior to European contact. These trading routes made possible the exchange of foods and other goods. Many of the trails were later used by Euro-Americans as roads and highways.

For thousands of years American Indians developed and operated vast trade networks throughout the Western Hemisphere.

American Indians traded, exchanged, gifted, and negotiated the purchase of goods, foods, technologies, domestic animals, ideas, and cultural practices with one another.

American Indians played influential and powerful roles in trade and exchange economies with partners in Europe during the colonial period. These activities also supported the development and growth of the United States.

Major social, cultural, and economic changes took place in American Indian cultures as a result of the acquisition of goods and technologies from Europeans and others.

Much American Indian knowledge was destroyed in the years after contact with Europeans. Nevertheless, the intergenerational transfer of traditional knowledge, the recovery of cultural practices, and the creation of new knowledge continue in American Indian communities today.