Story Planning Post: The Journey to the Americas

 For my story planning post I want to do more research about how Native Americans came to North America. This interests me because I remember as a kid I watched a few documentaries on Discovery Channel (back before it was trash) on how Native Americans came to settle in North America. There are two main theories that I want to explore. The first is the Land Bridge theory and the second is the coming by boats theory.

The Creation story by the Osages rekindled my interest in the topic because it had a lot of details that could be construed as appearing there because it was a real story that was passed down by the original Osages that crossed the Beringia land bridge.

I found this link on DuckDuckGo of the History of Bering Land Bridge Theory. I think it is important as well to understand the history of the theory to see how it was criticized when it first came out to how it is defended today. Some of the original theories of Native American settlement of the Americas were crazy! The website even mentions that one of the original theories was that Native Americans came from Atlantis and that the island of Atlantis was the origin of life in the New World. That is crazy to me that, that was even considered. Seeing as how Atlantis was made up by Plato. It definitely is interesting though.

(Inupiat Family from Noatak, Alaska courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

This other article I found on DuckDuckGo shows how genetic evidence shows that the first Native Americans lived on the Bering Land Bridge for thousands of years before leaving for the Americas. This is an interesting perspective that I can take on my story because now it allows me to write the story in a way that doesn't explicitly show the passage of time but rather implies it. Perhaps I can mention it in the passing of seasons or in the melting of the glaciers.

A link to my original Reading Notes can be found here.

Bibliography: This reading note comes from stories covered in the Great Plains unit. This particular story comes from Myths and Legends of the Great Plains by Katharine Berry Judson (1913). The story is The Creation.