In far western Nebraska, Signal Butte rises 120 feet above the North Platte River valley. Generations of archaeologists are familiar with the Scotts Bluff County site. It is Nebraska's richest source of information about some of the state's earliest inhabitants.
Native peoples lived there long before our present time, long before the arrival of the first white people — thousands of years before, archaeologists say. Carbon dating at Signal Butte indicates habitation perhaps as far back as 3,000 B.C.
"Prehistoric peoples during this period developed sophisticated hunting and foraging techniques following a prolonged drought on the Great Plains," the Nebraska State Historical Society says.
Other Nebraska sites also reveal the many centuries of Native habitation — centuries in which Indian life was rich with culture, with joys and sorrows, and with deep connection to ancestors and the land they knew well. When Christ and his disciplines were sharing their religious vision in the ancient Middle East, Native people in what's now Valley County in central Nebraska lived in lodges along the North Loup River. Those ancient Nebraskans made some of the earliest pottery known in the state. And they had notable contact with the wider world: Artifacts include trade goods from as far away as the Gulf of Mexico.
This is only a small sampling of the rich Native history in Nebraska, but it shows why, in the present day, designers were right to make a change in the video game "Oregon Trail." Generations of Nebraska schoolchildren are familiar with the game, which invites them to make the 2,170-mile trek westward in the face of numerous challenges. Now the game will include appreciation for the Native peoples found throughout the region at the time of Oregon-bound settler travel.
Adding this important nuance provides a fuller understanding of our region and its past — and of the lasting effects into the present era.
Being considerate toward one's neighbors and their perspectives is part of a responsible approach to life. It's also part of a responsible understanding of our region's past. "The Oregon Trail" video game now rightly helps young people develop such a mature perspective.
The vast expanse of Great Plains grasslands and buttes that 19th-century settlers saw as virgin wilderness, for example, Native inhabitants understood and appreciated — from centuries of experience — as a complex ecosystem. Native peoples didn't see the area as an unknown, mysterious territory. They saw it as home.
"Right under our wheat fields and city streets," University of Nebraska-Lincoln scholar David Wishart has written about our state, "lie the bones of hundreds of generations of Plains Indians, slowly turning into soil, then geology, still belonging to the place."
Native American heritage isn't secondary to Nebraska's history — that heritage anchors our region. How fitting and rewarding it is, in the 21st century, to acknowledge and honor that abiding connection.
FROM AN EDITORIAL IN THE OMAHA WORLD-HERALD
