Plains Indians

8 Key excerpts on "Plains Indians"

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  The Archaeology of the North American Great Plains

  • Douglas B. Bamforth(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In the preceding section, I used the word “Indians,” which is the term we often use to describe the indigenous people of North and South America. This is a racial term that has meaning mainly as a social construct and that especially has meaning as a social construct only in reference to other socially constructed racial groups. Whatever the salience of the concept of “Indians” in recent and modern history, Echohawk (2007) points out that it was a meaningless term before Europeans knew that there was a New World that had people in it and before those people knew there were Europeans. Prior to European coloniza- tion, the only social constructs that existed on the Great Plains were the divisions among local linguistic and sociopolitical groups; the concept of “Indians” as we talk about them today developed in the Western imagination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The next section discusses how Plains archaeologists have tried to identify local social groups, but it is import- ant to note that I have worked to write about communities and people. Indians appear only in the Chapter 10, which addresses the period of time in which that concept first appeared in the world. However, while I write in terms of people, I largely avoid singling out men and women. The popular view of Plains people is spectacularly male-oriented. Some aspects of the archaeological record (rock art, for example), as well as ethnographic data on recent groups, indicate that male status was very import- ant in many Plains societies. Human lives and the archaeology that those lives create, though, equally involve women. Many people have argued that male and female areas of life on the Plains were different but equally significant and that they changed over time (i.e., authors in Albers and Medicine [1983]). Most kinds of archaeological evidence, though, are notoriously difficult to read in terms of gender.

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  Native American History

  • Britannica Educational Publishing, J.E. Luebering(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Britannica Educational Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Earth-lodge villages were the only settlements on the Plains until the late 16th century; they were found along major waterways that provided fertile soil for growing corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco. The groups who built these communities divided their time between village-based crop production and hunting expeditions, which often lasted for several weeks and involved travel over a considerable area. Plains villagers include the Mandan, Hidatsa, Omaha, Pawnee, and Arikara.

  By 1750 horses from the Spanish colonies in present-day New Mexico had become common in the Plains and had revolutionized the hunting of bison. This new economic opportunity caused some local villagers to become dedicated nomads, as with the Crow (who retained close ties with their Hidatsa kin), and also drew agricultural tribes from surrounding areas into a nomadic lifestyle, including the Sioux, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Comanche, Arapaho, and Kiowa.

  Groups throughout the region had in common several forms of material culture, including the tepee, tailored leather clothing, a variety of battle regalia (such as feathered headdresses), and large drums used in ritual contexts. The Sun Dance, a ritual that demanded a high degree of piety and self-sacrifice from its participants, was also found throughout most of the Plains.

  The Plains is perhaps the culture area in which tribal and band classifications were most conflated. Depictions of indigenous Americans in popular culture have often been loosely based on Plains peoples, encouraging many to view them as the “typical” American Indians.

  MANDAN

  The Mandan were Plains Indians who traditionally lived in semipermanent villages along the Missouri River in what is now North Dakota. They spoke a Siouan language, and their oral traditions suggest that they once lived in eastern North America. According to 19th-century anthropologist Washington Matthews, the self-name Numakiki means “people.”

  In the 19th century the Mandan lived in dome-shaped earth lodges clustered in stockaded villages. Their economy centred on raising corn, beans, pumpkins, sunflowers, and tobacco and on hunting buffalo, fishing, and trading with nomadic Plains tribes. The Mandan also made a variety of utilitarian and decorative items, including pottery, baskets, and painted buffalo robes depicting the heroic deeds of the tribe or of individuals. At this time Mandan culture was one of the richest of the Plains. The tribe hosted many prominent European and American travelers, including American explorers Lewis and Clark, Prussian scientist Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, and artists Karl Bodmer and George Catlin.

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  An Introduction to Native North America

  • Mark Q. Sutton(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Dorsey, and George Grinnell, all of whom worked with Great Plains Indians who had lived a traditional lifestyle. Other significant work was accomplished in the early twentieth century by Robert Lowie and Clark Wissler. Subsequent researchers have worked with new generations of Great Plains Indians, and some Indians themselves are providing a new perspective on their own societies. Important summaries of Great Plains culture can be found in Wissler (1948), Lowie (1954), Wedel (1961), Taylor (1994), Carlson (1998), and Gelo (2012). However, the most comprehensive coverage of all aspects of Great Plains culture was provided in the two-part Volume 13 of the Handbook of North American Indians (DeMallie 2001). The discussion presented next was summarized from these sources, and the groups are described as they were in about the mid-nineteenth century. A Broad Portrait of Great Plains Groups There are some 32 Great Plains groups, not including the tribes from the east that were forced by the federal government to relocate to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Many groups that lived on the High Plains entered the region after acquiring horses, adding considerable linguistic complexity to the Great Plains, with six major language families being present. The settled farmers on the southern and central Great Plains spoke languages of either the Caddoan (e.g., the Pawnees and Arikara) or Siouan (e.g., the Mandan and Hidatsa) families, while most bison hunters of the northern Great Plains (e.g., the Blackfoot) spoke Algonquian languages. After about 1800, a number of other Siouan (e.g., the Sioux) and Algonquian (e.g., the Cheyenne) groups entered the Great Plains from the north and west, as did groups speaking Athabaskan languages (e.g., the Apache)

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  Prehistory of North America

  • Mark Sutton(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The western portion of the Plains is a vast, generally flat area of grassland (short grasses with shallow roots) with little surface water and few trees, often called the High Plains (it was called the “Great American Desert” by American settlers in the early 1800s). It has been estimated that some 60 million bison lived on the High Plains in 1800, plus large numbers of pronghorn antelope. This region was inhabited by mobile hunter-gatherers.

  The eastern part of the Plains consists of a number of widely spaced, broad valleys of the eastern-flowing rivers. This region, generally called the Prairies, is relatively well-watered and wooded and contains tall grasses with deep roots. Fewer bison lived on the Prairies, and after about 2,000 BP, it was inhabited by settled agriculturalists who also hunted bison. Some researchers have defined the Prairies as a separate culture area from the Plains, but the people of both regions shared a common tradition of bison hunting, horse utilization, and warfare (see Bamforth 1994).

  FIGURE 10.1 Map of the Plains showing the major subregions and the location of sites discussed in the text: 1) Bonfire Shelter; 2) Crow Creek; 3) Double Ditch; 4) Folsom; 5) Head-Smashed-In; 6) Helen Lookingbill; 7) Medicine Lodge Creek; 8) Mummy Cave; 9) Sakakawea.

  The climate of the Plains is quite variable, with much colder winters in the north and hotter summers in the south. Rainfall is also variable, ranging from less than eight to twenty inches a year, and it is very windy at times. There is considerable snow on the High Plains, especially in the north. Native agriculture was dependent on two critical environmental variables: at least eight inches of rain and a minimum of one hundred frost-free days. Corn could not be grown unless these two conditions were met.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF RESEARCH

  Although antiquities had been noted on the Plains for centuries, professional investigations began in about 1900 with work sponsored by museums and similar institutions (Wedel and Krause 2001; also see Krause 1998). Excavations were undertaken at a variety of sites all across the Plains, and a number of state historical societies and professional organizations were formed during this time. By the 1930s, several initial syntheses of Plains prehistory had been produced (e.g., Strong 1935; Wedel 1936), setting the stage for future investigations. One of the important results of the work on the Plains was the development of a method for classifying archaeological remains, called the Midwestern Taxonomic System (McKern 1939; also see Wedel 1940). This system was developed and adopted by scholars conducting research on the Plains and later over much of North America. Further, the direct connection between living native peoples and their archaeological remains on the Plains led to the development of the direct historical approach (e.g., Wedel 1938), a method widely employed throughout archaeology.

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  Turning Points—Actual and Alternate Histories

  Native America from Prehistory to First Contact

  • Rodney P. Carlisle, J. Geoffrey Golson, Rodney P. Carlisle, J. Geoffrey Golson(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Dary, David A. The Buffalo Book: The Full Saga of the American Animal. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1989. Page 80 DeMallie, Raymond J. Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 13, Plains. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001. Holder, Preston. The Hoe and the Horse on the Plains: A Study of Cultural Development among North American Indians. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Isenberg, Andrew C. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lamar, Howard R. The New Encyclopedia of the American West. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. McLoughlin, William G. Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Neihardt, John G., Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. New York: William Morrow, 1932. Sandoz, Mari. Cheyenne Autumn. New York: McGrawHill, 1953. Sandoz, Mari. Crazy Horse: Strange Man of the Oglalas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942. Sandoz, Mari. These Were the Sioux. Fern Park, FL: Hastings House, 1961. Utley, Robert M. The Indian Frontier, 1846–1890. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. West, Elliot. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998. West, Elliot. The Way West: Essays on the Central Plains. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Page 81 5 The Southwest Culture TURNING POINT The Anasazi were peoples who lived in the American Southwest. What if these Native Americans had developed better farming techniques, such as irrigation, and dominated the area? INTRODUCTION The Anasazi are thought to be ancestors of today’s modern Pueblo Native Americans.

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  A Nation of Peoples

  A Sourcebook on America's Multicultural Heritage

  • Elliott Robert Barkan(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Although a majority had acquired citizenship before that time, not until 1924 were Indians, as a class, considered full U.S. citizens. Midwest and Plains Removal of the southeastern nations to west of the Mississippi, of course, impinged upon the nations of the Midwest and Plains. A Sauk leader, Black Hawk, had fought the Cherokee, then returned to his Illinois farm. One day in 1829, coming home from a winter hunt, he discovered a Euro-American colonist had taken over not only his land but his very house. U.S. militia, among whom was a young Abraham Lincoln, waged war against the Sauk until, by 1832, many had been killed and refugees captured and sent across the Mississippi to Iowa, including Black Hawk. A treaty prepared in Chicago in 1833 directed all Indians still east of the Mississippi to remove to the West, although the Men- AMERICAN INDIANS 59 omini and Chippewa (Ojibwe or Anishinabe) along the northern Great Lakes, beyond maize agriculture limits, were permitted to retain portions of their home- lands as reservations. As with Cherokee, Creek, and other southeastern nations, some midwestern families of Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Miami, and others hid out in hills or forests or remained on the basis of intermarriage with traders. Plains Indians are the stereotype, one created by nineteenth-century condi- tions. European colonists introduced horses, principally by employing (or en- slaving) Indians to tend stock on New Mexico ranches. Use of horses spread northward through the Plains and to its western and eastern borderlands, reach- ing southern Canada by the mid-eighteenth century. Packhorses increased the amount of goods families could transport, encouraging more use of tipis and perhaps more reliance on extensive hunting trips; concomitantly, midwestern and prairie communities were pressured to abandon their villages and farms.

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  Daily Life during the Indian Wars

  • Clarissa Confer(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  From the 1840s through the 1880s the pressure on lands west of the Mississippi River increased dramatically. This brief, intense period brought tens of thousands of native peoples into direct and often violent contact with expanding white America. In one generation some tribes met their first white men and lost their lands and culture. It was a cataclysmic upheaval of an entire way of life. The best known conflicts of this traumatic time are often referred to as the Plains Wars because they engaged the iconic American Indian Plains culture. However, other people also fought the U.S. government’s relentless surge of “civilization” which stripped them of their lands and independence. Over five decades every tribe west of the Mississippi River had to deal with U.S. expansion, and the ensuing conflicts can be roughly divided into northern and southern regions with Kansas as the approximate border. DAKOTA WAR It was the largest mass execution in U.S. history and it came at the end of a war no one expected. The hanging of 38 men closed out the bloody conflict known as the Great Sioux War, or Dakota War. The condemned men were not the Sioux that everyone in the 19th century regarded as synonymous with warfare—the “savage, wild” Indians of the plains that whites had been taught to fear from 4 THE NORTHERN PLAINS 112 Daily Life during the Indian Wars reports about the death of Lieutenant Colonel Custer. Instead, this was an uprising of Eastern or Dakota Sioux who had been living on a reservation in Minnesota for ten years. Social Organization The name Sioux is a relatively inaccurate term for a wide ranging group of people. These woodland peoples were pushed by native conflict and drawn by resources and slowly worked their way west of the Mississippi River. They called themselves the Oceti sakowin, or Seven Council Fires, and had three divisions based on dialect and location—the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota.

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  A Companion to Custer and the Little Bighorn Campaign

  • Brad D. Lookingbill(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Native American history became increasingly important, as did studying the common soldiers who fought them. Jerome Greene’s Lakota and Cheyenne: Indian Views of the Great Sioux War, 1876–1877 (1994) was similar in approach to Powell’s earlier work on the Cheyenne, seeking to use more Native sources to examine their conflict with the US Army. Elliott West’s The Contested Plains (1998) examined the broad struggle between Indians and whites for control of the Plains in the nineteenth century, setting it against the backdrop of the white settlement of Colorado and the quest for gold. Stan Hoig’s Tribal Wars of the Southern Plains (1993) discussed Native combat in stunning detail, advancing the claim that their inability to put aside tribal strife to unite and resist the whites doomed them to eventual conquest. Where Hoig’s analysis shines is in his differentiation of how whites and Natives viewed history, with Natives viewing the past as part of a larger continuum, thus giving the conflicts of the past relevance in the present. Hoig further illustrated the change over time that came to Native warfare, both from technological changes but also from differing circumstances. He noted how prior to mass European contact Natives employed a strict regimented style to their fighting, including massed infantry facing off on open fields. Furthermore, this regimentation extended to simple journeys to trade, where groups of warriors moved in battle formations in preparation for possible attack. Hoig emphasized the importance of the horse and gun in altering the nature of fighting, similar to Secoy’s earlier analysis, while also stressing the importance of the intertribal conflict of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as stated in McGinnis’s study of the northern Plains

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