Masaryk University Faculty of Education Department of English Language and Literature The culture and life of the Indians of the Great Plains Bachelor thesis Brno 2007 Mgr. Zdeněk Janík, M.A. Mgr. Linda Libenská 1 Content: 1. Introduction.................................................................................................................. 2 2. General information on the Indigenous People of North America ........................... 3 3. The Indians of the Great Plains .................................................................................. 5 3.1 The general characteristics……………………………………………………5 4. The history of the Plains Indians.................................................................................9 4.1 The influence of the buffalo on the life of the Plains Indians………………10 4.2 The role of the Big Dog……………………………………………………….12 4.3 The intertribal contacts among the Great Plains Indians…………………15 4.4 The trade between the white man and the plains tribes……………………19 4.5 The impact of trade, buffalo and intertribal wars on clothing……………21 4.6 The religion, spirits and ceremonies…………………………………………24 4.7 Language………………………………………………………………………30 5. The Plains Indians today ........................................................................................... 33 6. Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 35 7. Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 36 8. Appendix..................................................................................................................... 38 9. Resume........................................................................................................................ 43 2 1. Introduction It is difficult to characterize one race of people because the world is full of people of different nations.Humans form the civilization.People differ inappearance, language,culture,customsandotherfeaturesthatmakeeachindividual unique. I have decided to write my final paper on the life and culture of Plains Indians. This group of North American Indians is rapidly losing the traces of the aboriginal character and is destinedtobecome assimilatedwiththe ‘superior race’.This was said about native people of North America, about Indians. The indigenous were livingontheir lands till ‘white people’ came andtookover the power andchangedtheir lives. My final paper outlines the general information on the Indians in the first chapter.The secondchapter is focusedfirstlyon the general characteristics of the Plains Indians andthenonthe description of the individual tribes.The next chapter discusses the history of the Indians of the Great Plains,the hunting tradition,trade,religion and language.There are describedthe mainevents andcircumstances that have influenced the life of the Plains Indians.The present situationof the native people is the subject of the fifth chapter. The appendix contains a piece of poetry, a short story about the creationoftheSioux,thenumberof PlainsIndianstodayandsomePlainsvocabulary. The image of the aboriginal Indianthat comes tomindtodayis of some painted apparitionwholivedina far distant past.It means more thanone hundredyears ago. Yetthe past isonlyyesterday. 3 2. General information on the Indigenous People of North America At the time of Europeandiscoveryof the NorthAmericancontinent was the area occupied by several million people who came to be called Indians. Columbus who discoveredAmericanamedthemlikethis becausehethoughthehadreachedIndia. The followingaccount of the general characteristics of NorthAmericantribes is based on E. Curtis “Ina Sacred Manner We Live”. In this book Curtis describes the originoftheIndiansandtheirmigrationover the years. The ancestors of the Indians came in the end of Pleistocene 20,000 – 45,000 years ago. They migrated across the land bridge from Siberia, through Bering land bridge toAmerica.The immigrationtookthousands of years andwas interruptedbythe increaseoftheSealevel andthesubmersionoftheBeringlandbridge. The Indian is a general name for native people of America except for Inuits. Theyare members of a Mongoloid yellow-brownrace.They have a yellow-brownskin, straight,black,stiffhair,darkeyes,andthinhairy,salientfacial bones. The variety of Indian people, languages, culture, housekeeping forms, social organizations andreligions was high. There existedmanyforms of them from hunters, pickers to nomads. The Indians spoke several hundred different languages that anthropologists later classifiedintosome fiftyeight language families.The cultures of the Indians were equally various, usually closely adapted to the different ecological areas inwhichthey lived- the easternforests,the Plains,the mountains anddeserts of theGreatBasinandthe Southwest,theforestsofthe NorthwestCoast. EarlyEuropeaninfluence impingedonthe Indians from the EasternSeaboard andfrom the SouththroughMexico.The impact was dramatic andusually disastrous for the Indians. The Spanish impact into the south west began in 1540. The firm establishment of Spanishrule inthe 1600’s hada profoundeffect onthe Puebloanand other peoples living in what is now Arizona, New Mexico and western Texas. Indirectly,there was alsoaneffect onthe tribes of the RockyMountains andthe High Plains throughthe spreadof horses totribes inthose areas after 1680.One result of the spreadofhorseswasthe conversionof manyfarmersdwellingalongtheriversofthe 4 HighPlains intonomadic buffalohunters. Many inhabitants of the northernand central Rockies and the adjacent HighPlains were well equippedwithhorses andsometimes guns,longbeforetheyhadanysystematiccontactwithWhites 1. The first monitoring was made by Lewis and Clark in 180305. Thomas Jefferson dispatched Lewis and Clark to North America to find a water route and explore the uncharted West. He expected they would encounter woolly mammoths, eruptingvolcanoes anda mountaintopure salt.What theyfoundwas noless surprising. They discovered Indians all the way to the Pacific Ocean equipped with horses. Therefore,by1800Indianculture in NorthAmerica hadinsome areas beendrastically changedbythe animals andfirearms introducedbyWhites - although onlyeast of the Mississippi andinthe Southwest were various Indians indirect andcontinuedcontact withWhites prior tothat time.(Curtis19) The westwardexpansionof Whites changedall this.Between1800and1890the inexorable westward movement and “civilizing” of the trans-Mississippi area and the Far West by Whites changed Indian life completely. Every tribe was affected. Populations declined drastically from warfare and introduced diseases. By 1890 the numerous andvariedindependent nations of Indians were nomore.The survivors had become wards of the government, herded into reservations, small islands in a sea of alienculture.Onlyinlimitedareas,suchas the Southwest,were Indians able toretain some measureoftheirculturalintegrityandpoliticalindependence.(Curtis20) 1 E. S. Curtis uses the capital letter while talking about Whites in his book “In a Sacred Manner We Live.” 5 3. The Indians of the Great Plains 3.1 The general characteristics J.Wolf provides the characteristics of Indians inhis bookdescribingthe nations of the whole world.Eachoverview presents typical features of the tribe,comments on the language of individual ethnic groups, on the development of the tribe during the invasion of people from Europe. J. Wolf does not differentiate the Plains Indians accordingto their style of living.He shows onlygeneral descriptionof the tribes.Other sources such as the wikipedia encyclopedia or the chapter “In the Days of the Ancestors” by Colin Calloway in the book “Through Indian Eyes” divide the Plains Indians intotwobroadclassifications,whichoverlaptosomedegree.(Calloway24) The first groups were fullynomadic,followingthe vast herds of buffalo.They are saidtohave been part of the BuffaloCulture.Some tribes occasionallyengagedin agriculture-growing tobacco and corn primarily. These included the Blackfoot, Arapaho, Assiniboine, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Gros Ventre, Kiowa, Lakota, Lipan,Cree,Sarsi,ShoshoneandTonkawa. The second group of Plains Indians, the semi-sedentary tribes, in addition to huntingbuffalo,livedin villages andraisedcrops.These includedthe Arikara, Ioway, Mandan, Omaha, Osage, Otoe, Pawnee, Ponca, and Wichita. (Calloway 25, http://en.wikipedia.org ) ThePlains Indiansarethesetribesonthe basisofJ.Wolffindings: Blackfoot: Warrior tribe of northwestern plains. They used Algonquian language.It is the name for three NorthAmericantribes wholivedonthe plains and prairies betweenSaskatchewanandthe Missouri River.The originof their name comes from the blackmoccasins made of buffaloskintheywere wearing.Theyhuntedbuffalo. (Wolf68) 6 Dakota{Sioux}: AlsocalledSioux.The dominant tribe that was living onthe high plains near Fort Laramie. The name Sioux refers to a large group of Native Americans speakinga commonor similar language.Theyare oftendividedintothree groups basedontheir geographic distribution. Inthe 1800’s the Westerngroup,called the Lakota or TetonSioux,were the dominant tribe inthe regionaround Fort Laramie. Several bands, the Oglala Sioux, the Brule Sioux, the Hunkpapa Sioux, and the Menneconjou Sioux represented them. The Lakota Sioux were nomadic people who huntedthe buffalothat roamedthe highplains in huge herds. The buffalo providedthem withfood,clothing, the covering for their dwellings,andthe raw material for manyof their tools.The Siouxcouldbe