This week we begin our singing journey around the United States and Canada in earnest by traveling back to the earliest earliest earliest days to enjoy music of First Nations Peoples and Native Americans, the first human inhabitants of these lands.
How did humans arrive in North America in the first place? Did people first come to North America as migrants from Siberian Russia, moving southward in the years when Asia and Alaska were connected by a “land bridge” known as Beringia that is now submerged beneath the waterway known as the Bering Strait? Or, according to a different theory known as the “Early Entry” model, were people on the continent well before the era of the bridge? If humans were present in the Americas thousands of years before there was a bridge, how did they get here? By boat, perhaps, from Asian lands? Through some kind of earlier land migration? So far the evidence is unclear. Until we know more, let’s just say people first came to North America a long, long time ago. And chances are that when they came, they were singing.
