Pre-16th Century
- The first “Asian Americans” may have been North and East Asians and Siberians who settled in the American landmass before there was an America or Asia. These people, who may have been of diverse races, are likely the ancestors of the Amerindians of the Americas. Further, there might have been multiple migrations involving groups carrying different DNA markers. By one account, the peoples of the northern and southern American hemispheres have different ancestries. Most likely, the early Asians in America were of mixed race and ethnicity.
Current DNA research on Asian ancestry is still too preliminary to draw firm conclusions on the DNA relations between Asians and American Indians. For example, one very recent study indicates that today’s Chinese are not much related genetically to the people who might have come over a land bridge from Asia to America. DNA studies, of course, don’t tell us anything about the religious beliefs and practices of early ancestors.
The Tianyuan Man, a 40,000-year-old individual discovered near a famous paleoanthropological site in western Beijing, has a genetic sequence that does seem to mark him as an early ancestor of today’s Asians and Native Americans.
The Tianyuan Man, a 40,000-year-old individual discovered near a famous paleoanthropological site in western Beijing, seems to be an early ancestor of today’s Asians and Native Americans.
Farther south, two 4,000- to 8,000-year-old Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers from Laos and Malaysia associated with the Hòabìnhian culture have DNA that, like the Tianyuan Man, shows that they are also early ancestors of Asians and Native Americans.
However, the DNA markers from these early Asians have mostly been obliterated in China by a group of rice-planters who moved out from the Yellow River valley.
A clearly written, nuanced book on this subject is Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (2018) by David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. The latest scientific paper is “Genomic insights into the formation of human populations in East Asia,” February 22, 2021.
- An alternative history of Asia Americans from the Brooklyn Museum!
Could America be “the Cradle of Asia?” asked Brooklyn Museum ethnology curator R. Stewart Culin in January 1903. Was America the Old World and Asia and Europe the New World? The ethnologist came to this conclusion through the study of the religious origins of culture. Like a mirror image, his theory was the reverse image of the standard historical ideas of Asian-European diffusions into North America.
Culin and a Smithsonian Zuni Indian expert Frank Hamilton Cushing noticed that American Indian divination practices and symbols of throwing and picking up arrows seem to resemble and predate such practices as counting sticks, divining rods, and throwing the I-Ching. These divination practices became replicated in Indian gambling games, then into Chinese games like fantan and mahjong, and through a long historical trail, ended up as cards with different numbers of clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades in European card games. “Playing cards existed in China in or before the twelfth century, were introduced from China into Europe in the thirteenth century…,” Culin wrote. And all these games go back to a format devised for American Indian religious practices.
For the ethnologist, a visit to Chinatown games was a visit to places for the preservation of early American Indian culture. Culin’s first scholarly publications were on the life and games of Chinese Americans in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. He published “Chinese Games with Dice” in 1889, a side-journey to “Street Games of Boys in Brooklyn” in 1891, and culminated with the books Korean Games With Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan in 1895 and his classic Games of North American Indians in 1907. I have heard that much later after his death, the Brooklyn Museum discovered that Culin had a secret room there to store his work and artifacts.
- 499 AD Hui Shen with a party of Buddhist monks legendarily reached America.
The Legend of Fusang recounts how the Buddhist missionary Hui Shen with a party of monks reached lands beyond the known ocean. Some earlier scholars speculated that this story records the first appearance of Buddhism in North America. Although this identification is now discounted, the story well illustrates the ebb and flow of religious interests between Asia and America. The Mountains and Seas Classic (Shan Hai Jing, around 4th Century BC) identifies Fusang as the Tree of Life.
16th century
- 1587 Christianity from the Philippines is one of the earliest occurrences in the historical record of Asian American religion. In the 16th Century, Filipino sailors aboard the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Esperanza (Our Lady of Hope) under the command of Spanish Captain Pedro de Unamuno with the Catholic priest Martin Ignacio de Loyola landed on the California coast, probably at Morro Bay near modern San Luis Obispo. At that time, the Spanish called the Filipinos, “Luzon Indians,” or “Manila Men.”
A young Japanese, who may have been training to take vows with a Catholic religious order, is also the first known Japanese person in America.
- 1595, The Filipino sailors aboard a Spanish “galleon” the San Agustin, which was commanded by Captain Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeno, are shipwrecked on the shores of Point Reyes outside the mouth of the Bay Area.
17th century
- Spain brings the Virgin of Antipolo to the Philippines. The icon was carved out in Mexico of dark wood so that it physically looked like a Filipina. The icon is given the name Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage to represent the safety she gives to trips between the Americas and the Philippines. In early 1998, the Filipino-American community at St. Robert Bellarmine Church in Queens enshrined a smaller, wooden replica of Our Lady in their parish. New York City Filipinos celebrate her at a festival of prayers, performances, and food.
- 1607 Gregorio Garia, in Origen de los indios de el Nuevo mundo e Indias occidenteles, proposes that an Asian migration was one possible origin of Amerindians and their religions.
On the other hand, in Notes on the State of Virginia Thomas Jefferson proposes that “the red men of America” migrated to Asia, thereby becoming the first Asians.
- 1635 An “East Indian” is listed as one of the first settlers in Jamestown, Virginia.
A 2003 study prepared by Martha W. McCartney, a project historian for the National Park Service’s Jamestown Archaeological Assessment, concluded that Captain George Menefie, who was assigned 1,200 acres of land in Jamestown in 1624, used “Tony, an East Indian,” as a headright. Every Englishman who “imported” a laborer or servant to the colony received a 50-acre land grant, which was called a “headright.”
First Asian American settler in history: “Tony, an East Indian”
Often, the East Indians that were recruited to come to America were sailors, called “lascars” by British ships, who were paid per voyage and got stuck in London without enough money. They were also recruited in India and Africa and were sometimes captives from raids on other ships.
Most of the extant evidence indicates that these early East Indian arrivals were Christians, a fact that enters into court fights about whether they could be made slaves. For example, Thomas India petitioned the county court of Prince George, Maryland in March 1729 to be freed from slavery. He noted that he was free-born, baptized in England, and imported with his mother into Maryland under an indenture.
Many East Indians came to early America as indentured servants, some as slaves. After a set number of years, indentured were supposed to be free men and women. Bad decisions, intermarriage with slaves, and unscrupulous bosses sometimes converted their status into slaves.
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