See Alabama.
Plains Apaches have also been known to nonNatives as Kiowa Apaches, Prairie Apaches, Plains Lipans, and possibly Catakas, Palomas, Wetapa-hatos, and Paducas. Their self-designation is Na-i-shan Dine, "Our People." (See also Kiowa.) Plains Apaches spoke an Athapaskan language.
Ancestors of the historic Plains Apaches may have lived in northeastern Wyoming and western South Dakota as early as the twelfth century. They may also have entered the Yellowstone Valley from Canada by 1600. In the early eighteenth century, the Comanches on the west and the Pawnees on the east forced Apaches living on the central Plains to the south and southwest. Cut off from their fellow Apacheans around 1720, the people known as Plains Apaches may have joined the Kiowa for protection. Although they functioned effectively as a Kiowa band and were a Plains tribe in all senses, they maintained a separate language and never came under the jurisdiction of the Kiowa tribal council.
Sacred bundles, with their associated ceremonies, were a focus of Kiowa religious practice. Plains Apaches adopted the Sun Dance in the eighteenth century, although they did not incorporate elements of self-mutilation into the ceremony. Young men also fasted to produce guardian spirit visions.
In general, wealth remained in the family through inheritance.
Corpses were buried or left in a teepee on a hill. Former possessions were given away. Mourners cut their hair and mutilated themselves. Before the people acquired horses, they hunted nearby buffalo and ate local roots, berries, seeds, and bulbs. Buffalo became a staple after the mideighteenth century. Men also hunted other large and small game. They did not eat bear at all and fish rarely. Women gathered a variety of wild potatoes and other vegetables, fruits, nuts, and berries. Plains Apaches ate dried, pounded acorns and also made them into a drink. Cornmeal and dried fruit were acquired by trade. The buffalo and other animals provided the materials for the usual items such as parfleches and other containers. Points for bird arrows came from prickly pear thorns. The cradle board was a bead-covered skin case attached to a V-shaped frame. Women made shallow, coiled basketry gambling trays and built skin teepees.
During the eighteenth century, Plains Apaches traded extensively with the upper Missouri tribes. There was also regular trade with New Mexico, where they exchanged meat, buffalo hides, and salt for cornmeal and dried fruit. During the nineteenth century they traded Comanche horses to the Osages and other tribes. Calendric skins and beadwork were two important Native artistic traditions.
Plains Apaches are probably the Apaches del Norte named in the historical record as the group of Apaches who arrived in New Mexico by the late eighteenth century. They moved back and forth between New Mexico and the upper Missouri area
During the early nineteenth century, serving as trade intermediaries between New Mexico and the upper Missouri tribes, such as the Mandans and Arikaras. By the early 1850s, they and the Kiowas were spending more time south rather than north of the Arkansas River. They settled on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation in 1868. In 1901, this reservation was allotted in 160-acre parcels to individual tribal members, with the "surplus" opened to non-Native settlement.
See also Na-Dene Peoples; Trade.
"Arapaho" is probably from the Pawnee tirapihu ("trader") or the Kiowa and Spanish word for "tattered and dirty clothing." "Kanenavish" (various spellings), a term in use around 1800, was a corruption of the French gens de vache ("Buffalo People"). The Arapahos originally called themselves Inuna-ina, "Our People." Arapaho is an Algonquin language.
At least 3,000 years ago the Arapahos, possibly united with the future Gros Ventres and other peoples, probably lived in the western Great Lakes region, where they grew corn and lived in permanent villages. They migrated by the eighteenth century to the upper Missouri River region, acquiring horses about that time.
Medicine bundles, containing various sacred objects, were said by the people to have magical powers. Medicine men (shamans or priests) used their bundles in ceremonies; other bundles belonged to secret societies or to the whole tribe. A flat pipe some two feet long, wrapped in a bundle, was the most sacred object for the tribe. Tobacco was smoked in it only as part of the most sacred ceremonies and occasions.
Each of four bands had a chief, but there was no principal chief. Bands wintered separately, along streams, and came together in the summer to hunt buffalo and celebrate ceremonies. Although menstruating women were avoided, and the subject was taboo, there was no formal girls' puberty ceremony or menstrual seclusion. Men could marry more than one woman. Marriage was generally matrilocal. Blood relative and in-law taboos were strict. Extended family members, such as uncles and aunts, had specific responsibilities concerning their nieces and nephews.
Arapahos played the hoop-and-pole game and the cup-and-ball game and held athletic contests. Curing techniques included sweating in the sweat lodge and fumigation with roots, twigs, or herbs. There was one women's society in addition to the men's societies. The dead lay in state in fine clothing before being removed by horse and buried in a nearby hill. A favorite horse was killed. Mourners cut their hair, wore old clothes, and cut their arms and legs.
Buffalo had become a staple by the nineteenth century. Women made buffalo skin teepees. Willowframed beds covered with skins lined the interior walls. There were no permanent villages, because the tribe migrated with the buffalo herds. Men also hunted elk, antelope, deer, and small animals. Meat was boiled in a hole in the ground filled with water and hot rocks. To preserve it for the winter, women dried it and sometimes mixed it with fat and chokecherries to make pemmican. They also gathered wild mountain fruits, roots, berries, and tobacco.
Arapahos may once have made ceramics. Most raw materials came from the buffalo or other animals. They carved items such as bowls from wood, some of which had artistic and/or religious significance. They smoked black stone pipes and made shallow basketry trays. Mandan villages along the Knife River (North Dakota) were a primary regional trading center. By the early nineteenth century the Arapaho traded buffalo robes with Mexicans and Americans for items not provided by the buffalo. They also served as intermediaries in trade between northern and southern Plains Indians.
Women decorated clothing, teepees, and other items with beautiful porcupine quill embroidery and painting. Designs often included legends and spiritual beings. Designs, which often represented natural and celestial features, included diamonds with appendages such as forked trees (triangles atop a line). The Arapahos probably acquired horses in the early eighteenth century. Babies were carried on the back in a U-shaped, wood-framed buckskin cradle board. The people used oval snowshoes in the winter.
Eight military societies were graded according to age. One, the Crazy Dog Society, was noted for its extreme bravery and valor. Traditional enemies included the Shoshones, Utes, Pawnees, Crows, Lakotas, Comanches, and Kiowas. The latter three tribes had become allies, with the southern Cheyennes, by the 1840s. Counting coup, or touch-
Buffalo meat dries at an Arapaho camp near Fort Dodge, Kansas, in 1870. Once an agricultural people, the Arapaho migrated from Minnesota to the Great Plains in the late 1700s, when they began to hunt buffalo. (National Archives and Records Administration)
Ing the enemy with the hand or a stick, was highly prestigious, much more so than killing an enemy. Up to four people could count coup, in descending order of prestige, on the same enemy.
In the nineteenth century, the groups separated and divided into northern and southern Arapahos. The northern branch settled around the North Platte River in Wyoming and the southern branch in the area of Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River in Colorado. The two groups remained in close contact. By this time, the Arapahos had adopted the classic Great Plains culture: They were master horse riders, buffalo hunters, and raiders.
Early Anglo traders found the Arapahos very friendly and disposed to trade. Although fur traders entered the area in the 1730s, they merely observed intertribal trade of items of European manufacture, especially knives and guns but also metal tools and other items. Furs were not an important trade commodity until around the turn of the century. Traders also brought alcohol and disease into the region, both to devastating effect. Still, powerful chiefs like Bear Tooth, favorably disposed to non-Indians, kept the peace in the early nineteenth century.
In 1837 a major war broke out, with the southern Arapahos and southern Cheyennes fighting against the Comanches. Peace was established in 1840, largely on Arapaho-Cheyenne terms. However, the opening of the Oregon Trail brought more non-Indians to the Plains and encouraged growing conflict, based on ignorance of Indian customs, land hunger, and race hatred.
Arapahos played a major role in the nineteenth-century wars for the Plains. The northern branch fought along with the Lakotas and the southern branch with the southern Cheyennes and occasionally with the Comanches and Kiowas. Although Arapahos signed the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, major gold finds in 1858-1859 caused further friction between Indians and non-Natives. Despite the existence of the treaty, in 1864 a group of southern Arapahos and Cheyennes, mostly
Women and children, were attacked, massacred, and mutilated by U. S. Army troops at Sand Creek, Colorado, as part of a successful campaign to drive all Indians out of Colorado. Cut off from the rich Colorado buffalo herds and under further pressure from the United States, the Cheyennes and Arapa-hos in 1867 signed the Medicine Lodge Treaty, under which they formally ceded their lands north of the Arkansas River and were placed on a reservation in the Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Little Raven, a skilled orator and diplomat, represented his people in these negotiations.
By the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty (1868), the northern Arapahos were supposed to settle with the Lakotas on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Holding out for their own reservation, the northern Arapahos remained in Wyoming, refusing also to settle with the southern Arapahos in the Indian Territory. They finally agreed in 1878 to become part of the eastern Shoshones' Wind River Reservation.
In the eighteenth century, the annual Sun Dance became the most important single ceremony. Its purpose was the renewal of nature and tribal prosperity. Some Arapahos adopted the Peyote religion in the 1890s. Many Arapahos, especially those on the Wind River Reservation, adopted the Ghost Dance religion in the late 1880s. By this time the enormous buffalo herds had been virtually wiped out. In 1890, the Ara-pahos and southern Cheyennes agreed to exchange their 3.5-million-acre reservation for allotments of 160 acres each. The group formally organized in 1937 as the Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribe.
See also Buffalo; Fort Laramie Treaty (1868); Sand Creek Massacre; Sun Dance; Trade.
"Arikara" means "horn," referring to a traditional hairstyle. Their self-designation is Tanish, "Original People." The Arikaras migrated from the central Plains into central South Dakota in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Arikara is a Caddoan language.
The Arikaras believed in a supreme deity who shared power with four lesser gods. Most religious festivals were associated with corn, which they originally acquired from the south and southwest. Medicine men possessed particularly fine, generations-old ears of corn, within which resided the spirit of "mother corn." Religious activity included fasting, acquiring visions, and the possession and use of personal sacred bundles. Certain religious positions, such as the priesthood and the keeper of the sacred tribal medicine bundles, were hereditary within families.
Political centralization was weak among the Arikaras. Villages combined in a loose confederation of named bands. Village chiefs made up the band council, which assisted the head chief. The Arikaras were excellent swimmers; hauling trees out of the Missouri River provided them with firewood in an area short of trees. The game of shinny (a variation of hockey) was particularly popular, as were feats of dexterity, skill, and magic.
Families owned farms and dogs as well as dwellings. There were a number of mens' societies, focused on the hunt and on keeping order, as well as women's societies. Men hunted and provided protection; women were in charge of vegetable foods (garden plots), preparing hides for clothing as well as baskets and pottery, and caring for the lodge. Descent was matrilineal, and residence was matrilo-cal. Social rank was hereditary to a significant degree. The dead were buried sitting, wrapped in skins, their faces painted red. A year of mourning followed a death.
Arikaras located their villages on bluffs over the Missouri River. Partially excavated earth lodges measured about forty feet in diameter and held two or more extended families. A wooden framework supported woven willow branches and grass covered with earth. A lodge might last up to twenty years. Skin teepees served as temporary field dwellings. Later villages were strongly reinforced by wooden stockades and ditches.
Women grew corn, squash, beans, and sunflowers, fertilizing their crops and rotating their fields. They also cultivated tobacco. Men hunted buffalo and other large and small game. They also fished and gathered berries and other plants. Material items included willow weirs (fish traps); farm equipment, weapons, and utensils from buffalo parts; stone mortars; pottery cooking vessels; a variety of baskets; and leather pouches and other containers.
Women traded surplus crops, pots, and baskets to the Cheyennes, Kiowas, Lakotas, and other groups for buffalo and other animal products. There was also some cultural and material exchange among the Arikaras, the Mandans, and the Hidatsas. People used boats constructed of buffalo hide stretched over
A willow frame (bull boats) to cross the Missouri. They also wore snowshoes and used dogs and later (mideighteenth century) horses to pull travois. Women made blankets, robes, and moccasins of buffalo hide. They also made clothing of white weasel or ermine skin and made winter turbans of various animal skins.
Around the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Arikaras separated from the Skidi Pawnees in Nebraska and moved north along the Missouri River, spreading knowledge of agriculture along the way. They arrived in the Dakotas in the late eighteenth century.
Contact with French traders was established in the 1730s. During the early to mideighteenth century they acquired horses and ranged even farther west, to eastern Montana, to hunt buffalo. In the 1780s the people suffered a smallpox epidemic but continued to live relatively well, despite harassment by the Teton, Dakota, and other bands.
As a result of wars with the United States, the Arikaras retreated south to join their Pawnee relatives on the Loup River in Nebraska from the early 1820s through about 1835. A devastating smallpox epidemic in 1837 brought them to the verge of extinction. About 1845, the weakened Arikaras moved farther north and occupied land formerly under Mandan control (the latter having recently moved up the Missouri River with the Hidatsa).
In 1862, the Arikaras also moved up the Missouri to the Mandan/Hidatsa village of Like-a-Fishhook and joined politically with those two tribes. Like-a-Fishhook Village was a center of trade and commerce at that time. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 recognized tribal holdings of more than 12 million acres.
In 1870, the United States established the 8-million-acre Fort Berthold Reservation for the tribes. This land was reduced, mostly by allotment, to about a million acres during the 1880s. By this time, Like-a-Fishhook had been abandoned, the people scattering to form communities along the Missouri River. The Arikaras lived in Nishu and Elbowwoods, on the east side of the river.
In the 1950s, against the tribes' vehement opposition, the United States built the Garrison Dam on the Missouri. The resulting Lake Sakakawea covered much of their land, farms, and homes. This event destroyed the tribes' economic base and permanently damaged their social structure.
See also Agriculture; Trade.
"Assiniboine" means "those who cook with stones" (Algonquin). Canadian Assiniboines are also known as Stoneys. Their traditional self-designation is unknown. (See also Nakota.) Assiniboines/Yankton-ais speak the Nakota dialect of Dakota, a Siouan language. The Siouan people probably originated in the lower Mississippi Valley and moved north through Ohio and into the Lake Superior region (northern Minnesota/southwestern Ontario). In the seventeenth century, the Assiniboines lived near Lake Winnipeg. Since the eighteenth century, they have lived in present-day Montana and Saskatchewan.
Male and female specialists provided religious leadership. In the eighteenth century, the annual Sun Dance became the people's most important religious ceremony, although the custom of self-torture was not generally present. Wakonda was worshiped as a primary deity, although the Assiniboines also recognized natural phenomena such as sun and thunder. Sweat lodge purification was an important religious practice. Spirit visions could be obtained through quests or in dreams. Some ceremonies featured masked clowns.
The Assiniboines were composed of up to thirty bands, each with its own chief. The chieftainship was based on leadership skills and personal contacts rather than heredity. Each band also had a council, whose decisions were enforced by the akitcita, or camp police. The people valued hospitality highly. There were a number of men's and women's dance societies with various social and ceremonial importance. There may have been clans.
The dead were placed on tree scaffolds with their feet to the west. When the scaffolds fell through age, the bones were buried and the skulls placed in a circle, facing inward. Cremation was also practiced. All burial areas were treated with great respect. Dead warriors were dressed in their finest clothes. Their faces were painted red, their weapons placed beside them, and one of their horses was killed for use in the next life. Women's tools, such as those used for dressing skins, were placed beside them.
Pubescent girls were secluded for four days, during which time they observed dietary and behavioral restrictions. Brides were purchased. Marriage consisted of a simple gift-giving ceremony between parents. The people played lacrosse and games of skill and dexterity, such as shinny (a variation of hockey) and the cup-and-ball game, and held
Athletic competitions. Most games were accompanied by gambling.
A village might contain up to 200 skin lodges or teepees. The average, which held two to four families, had roughly a thirty-foot circumference and was constructed of about twelve sewn buffalo hides. Assiniboine teepees had a three-pole foundation. A temporary brush field shelter was also used.
Assiniboines on the high plains lived mainly on game such as buffalo, elk, and antelope. Women often accompanied hunters to butcher the animals and cut the meat into strips to dry. Fresh meat was usually roasted on a spit, although it was sometimes boiled with hot rocks in a skin-lined hole. Other foods included wild berries, roots (turnip), fruits (grapes, plums), and nuts. The buffalo was the basis of all technology. Most items, such as clothing, tools, and utensils, were made of buffalo and other animal products. The flageolet (flute) was used in part to convey surreptitious messages between young lovers. Assiniboines also played the rasp and the drum.
The people were known as shrewd traders. Before trade began with non-Indians, they generally traded pelts and meat with farming tribes for agricultural products. Significant art included decorative beaded quillwork (nineteenth century) and designs on tree bark. Dogs (later horses) carried saddlebags and travois. The people acquired horses in about the 1730s. They also used snowshoes.
The Plains Crees were traditional allies, with whom the Assiniboines regularly fought the Dakotas, Crows, Gros Ventres, and Blackfeet. The Assini-boines were recognized as highly capable warriors. Counting coup was more important than killing an enemy; four people might count coup on the same enemy, in descending order of prestige. Weapons included war clubs (a stone in a leather pouch attached to a stick), bow and arrow, and buffalo hide shields.
Assiniboines separated from the northern Yank-tonais by perhaps the late sixteenth century, moving north from the Ohio Valley through Wisconsin and Minnesota, along the edge of the Woodlands into southern and southwestern Ontario. They became involved in the French fur trade in the early seventeenth century.
By later in that century they had made peace with the Plains Crees, joining them near Lake Winnipeg, and were trading with Hudson's Bay Company posts there. Assiniboines ranged over an extremely wide territory during that period, from near the Arctic Circle to the upper Missouri River and from James Bay to the Rocky Mountains. When trade with the Hudson's Bay Company declined in the late eighteenth century, the Assiniboines became fully nomadic, continuing the westward migration and hunting around the Saskatchewan and Assini-boine Rivers and across much of the northern Plains.
Major smallpox epidemics struck the people in 1780 and 1836, and alcohol and venereal disease also took a heavy toll. During that period, the Assini-boines divided into a lower and an upper division. Decimation of the buffalo herds as well as their own sharp population decline forced them to sign the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, limiting Assiniboine lands to parcels in western Montana.
Some Assiniboines worked as scouts for the U. S. and Canadian Armies in their Indian wars. In 1887, upper division Assiniboines (and the Gros Ventres) were confined to the new Fort Belknap Reservation; Fort Peck, which they shared with the Yanktonais, was created in 1873. Several hundred Assiniboines died of starvation at Fort Peck in 1883-1884.
Meanwhile, in Canada, unregulated whiskey sales were taking a great toll on Indian people. In 1877, as a result of national police intervention in the whiskey trade, the Stoneys and some other tribes signed Treaty 7, exchanging their traditional territory for reserves in Alberta and Saskatchewan, although some groups attempted to maintain their autonomy. Much of the reserve land was alienated in the early twentieth century owing to allotting and permitting of non-Indian homesteads.
See also Buffalo; Counting Coup, Trade.
See Gros Ventres.
The Blackfeet are a confederacy of three closely related Plains tribes: the Pikunis (known as Peigans in Canada, where the Blackfeet are also known as "Blackfoot"), meaning "small robes" or "poorly dressed robes"; the Kainahs, "blood" or "many chiefs"; and the Siksikas, the Blackfeet proper. "Sik-sika," a Cree word meaning "Blackfeet People," may have referred to their moccasins, blackened by dye
Or by the ashes of prairie fires. All three tribes were called the Sakoyitapix, "Prairie People," or the Nitsi-tapix, "Real People." The Piegans were further divided into northern and southern branches. The Blackfeet Confederacy also included the Sarcees and, until 1861, the Gros Ventres. The Blackfeet groups spoke Algonquin languages.
The Blackfeet envisioned a world inhabited by spirits, some good and some evil. Deities included sun and thunder as well as all animals. Prayers were offered regularly throughout the day. Some people had visions to benefit the tribe as a whole. Medicine bundles, including sacred pipes, were owned by individuals, societies, and bands. They were thought to ensure a long, happy, successful life and thus could be quite valuable if sold.
Ceremonies included the Sun Dance, probably acquired from the Arapahos or the Gros Ventres around the mideighteenth century. Unlike most Plains tribes, women participated in the Blackfeet Sun Dance. Religious societies were responsible for healing and curing. Individual religious activity focused on the acquisition of guardian spirits through prayerful vision quests in remote places. Sweating was considered (for men) a religious activity as well as a preparation for ceremonials.
The constituent tribes of the confederacy were completely autonomous, although all were closely related and occasionally acted in concert. The tribes were in turn organized into autonomous bands of between twenty and thirty families (200 people) before the early eighteenth century. Each band had a civil headman, or chief, chosen on the basis of acts of bravery and generosity. Each band also had a war chief, who exerted power only during military situations. All headmen together constituted a tribal council, which in turn selected a temporary tribal chief when the bands came together. All decisions were made by consensus.
Men were members of one of seven age-graded military societies. In addition, men and women could belong to numerous other religious, dance, and social societies, each with its own symbols and ceremonies. There was also a society exclusively for women. Membership in all societies was drawn from all bands and functioned mainly when the tribe came together in the summer.
Virginity in women was held in high esteem. Depending on his wealth, a man might have more than one wife. Residence after marriage was generally patrilocal. Wedding formalities centered on gift giving. Divorce was possible on the grounds of
Blackfeet man painting on skin stretched on frame as a boy watches in 1912. (Library of Congress)
Laziness or infidelity (men) or cruelty or neglect (women).
Names were sometimes given by the mother but more often by a male family member based on his war experiences. Boys usually earned a new name around adolescence. Despite beliefs about the danger of contact with menstruating women, there was no particular ceremony when a girl reached puberty.
Public ridicule was generally an effective deterrent to socially unacceptable behavior. Winter nights might be filled with storytelling, gambling, or allnight smokes during which people sang their religious songs. Childrens' games included hide and seek, archery and other contests, throwing balls, playing with toys, or sledding.
The dead were placed on scaffolds in trees or in teepees if death took place there; horses were generally killed to help in the journey to the next world. Women mourners cut their hair, wailed ritualisti-cally, and slashed their limbs. Men cut their hair and left the band for a while.
Women constructed teepees from twelve to fourteen buffalo skins over pine poles. Teepee entrances always faced east. Larger teepees, of up to
Thirty buffalo skins, were a sign of wealth. Teepees were smaller when dogs pulled the travois. Food was generally abundant, although droughts or blizzards could bring hunger or even starvation. Plains Blackfeet ate mostly buffalo but also other large as well as small game. Buffalo were driven over cliffs, surrounded on foot and shot, communally hunted with bow and arrow (the most common approach after the Blackfeet acquired horses), and individually stalked. The Indians also ate waterfowl and the eggs. They did not eat fish or dog. In addition to the usual wild fruits, nuts, and berries, Blackfeet women gathered camas roots, which they steamed in an underground oven. Some tobacco was grown for ceremonial purposes.
Early, pre-Plains Blackfeet may have made pottery. The buffalo provided more than sixty material items, which the Blackfeet traded as far south as Mexico in all seasons save the winter. Skin containers were often decorated with painted designs. Musical instruments included a rattle of skin around wood as well as a flageolet (flute). The people also used stone pounding mauls and war clubs attached to wooden handles, chipped stone knives, and brushes of porcupine bristles or horsehair bound with rawhide. They also made backrests of willow sticks tied with sinew and supported by a tripod.
Men painted teepees and other leather items with stars and designs such as battle events. Women made beaded quillwork, usually on clothing. In general, the people were known for the high quality of everyday items such as clothing, tools, teepees, and headdresses. Women wore long, one-piece skin dresses, later fringed and beaded, and buffalo robes in the winter. Men dressed in skin shirts, leggings, and moccasins, as well as buffalo robes in the winter.
All men were members of age-graded military societies known as All Comrades. Blackfeet Indians were considered among the best fighters, hunters, and raiders. Although the three divisions were politically autonomous, they acted in unison to fight their enemies. Weapons included three-foot horn, sinew-backed bows, stone clubs, arrows, and buffalo hide shields. Rather than counting coup with a stick, Blackfeet warriors gathered high war honors by wresting a gun or other weapon from an enemy. Taking a horse or a scalp merited honors but of relatively low caliber.
The Blackfeet people may have originated in the Great Lakes region but had migrated to between the Bow and North Saskatchewan Rivers well before the seventeenth century. During the eighteenth century they completed their move southward into Montana, displacing the Shoshones.
Like many aboriginal peoples, the Blackfeet were transformed by the horse and the gun, both of which they acquired during the early to mideighteenth century. One result was that they had surplus buffalo products to offer for trade. Raiding, especially for horses, became an important activity. They joined in alliance with the Assiniboines, Arapahos, and Gros Ventres and were frequently at war during the historic period.
Blackfeet people first felt the influence of non-Indians in the seventeenth century. By the late eighteenth century they were engaged in the fur trade and were known as shrewd traders, playing American and British interests against each other. The people experienced severe epidemics in 1781-1782, 1837, 1864, and 1869-1870. After one of their number was killed by a member of the Meriwether Lewis and William Clark expedition in 1804, the Blackfeet fought all Americans whenever possible until they began trading with them again in 1831.
The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty gave the Blackfeet lands south of the Missouri River, although their traditional lands had all been north of the Missouri. Still, in various treaties between 1851 and 1878 they ceded land to the United States and Canada. Epidemics, the decline of the buffalo, and, later, whiskey hurt the Blackfeet more than anything, although in 1870 they were the victims of a U. S. Army massacre in which 173 peaceful Indians, mostly women and children, were killed.
The Blackfeet Reservation was established in 1855 in northern Montana. In exchange for the northern Montana plains, the southern Piegans received fixed hunting grounds bordered by the Canadian, Missouri, and Musselshell Rivers and the Rocky Mountains; they also received promises of payments and annuities. From the 1870s into the 1890s, the United States took away much of the huge Blackfeet Reservation. In Treaty 7 (1877), the Blackfeet (and others) ceded much of southern Alberta for a number of small reserves. Roughly 600 Blackfeet, mostly southern Piegans, died of starvation in 1883 after the last great buffalo herd was destroyed.
After a farming experiment failed, the Piegans began a program of stock raising around 1890, on land individually assigned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A few Indians became prosperous, but the majority leased their land to non-Indians, who often did not pay. A combination of events in 1919 left the people in dire poverty and dependent on
Government rations. During this period, over
200,000 acres of Indian land were lost through the nonpayment of taxes and allotments that were sold to fend off starvation. Blackfeet on both sides of the United States-Canadian border were also subject to having their children kidnapped and sent to missionary boarding schools. Log houses replaced teepees during this time. Most Canadian Blackfeet lost large portions of their reserves from 1907 to 1921.
Stock raising returned during the 1920s, accompanied by grain farming and some subsistence gardening. U. S. Blackfeet adopted an Indian Reorganization Act constitution in 1930s. Income rose as the government provided credit for ranching enterprises. After World War II, up to one-third of the population was living off-reservation. Conditions on the reservations began to improve at that time, a trend that accelerated during the 1960s. Among most people, English replaced Blackfeet as the daily language in the 1970s. At the same time, many traditions severely declined.
See also Blackfeet Confederacy; Buffalo; Economic Development; Fort Laramie Treaty (1868); Horse, Economic Impact; Sun Dance; Welch, James.
See Blackfeet.
"Cheyenne" is a word of Lakota origin meaning "red talkers" or "foreign talkers." Their self-designation is Tse-tsehese-staestse, "People." In the early nineteenth century, Cheyennes lived from the Yellowstone River to the upper Arkansas River. Cheyenne is an Algonquin language.
The Cheyennes conceived of a universe divided into seven major levels, each with resident spiritual beings that were also associated with earthly plants and animals. They also believed in a creator of all life. Through fasting and prayer, both men and women sought visions in remote places to acquire guardian spirit helpers, whose associated songs, prayers, and symbols would provide special skills or protection in times of crisis. Priests and doctors (shamans) used plants to cure disease. Annual ceremonies included the Renewal of Sacred Arrows, the Sun Dance (New Life Lodge), and the annual, five-day Sacred Buffalo Hat ceremony.
On the Plains, traditional government consisted of the Council of Forty-Four: a group of forty exceptionally wise, generous, brave, and able men, four from each of the ten bands, plus four elders/religious authorities held over from the previous council. The latter four men, plus a tribal chief chosen by them, were known as the five sacred chiefs. Council terms were ten years. Each band also had its own chief. Six military societies helped to carry out council directives and maintain strict internal discipline.
Bands lived separately in the winter so as to hunt more effectively in a wider space. In the summer, the bands came together for the communal buffalo hunt and for sacred ceremonies. At these times, the camp consisted of a large circle, within which each band had a designated position. Murder was considered among the most reprehensible of crimes as well as a sin; murderers were ostracized for life or exiled. Bravery was highly valued, as was female chastity. Games, generally accompanied by gambling, included lacrosse and the cup-and-ball game. In addition to the men's military societies, the highly prestigious buffalo society was open only to women who had embroidered at least thirty buffalo hides. Corpses were dressed in their best clothing, wrapped in robes, and placed on a scaffold, usually in a tree. While still in the northern Mississippi Valley, Cheyennes lived in bark lodges and, in North Dakota (Shyenne River area), in earth lodges. By the late eighteenth century they had begun living in buffalo hide teepees.
The Cheyennes grew corn, beans, and squash; gathered wild rice; fished; and hunted in the northern Mississippi and Shyenne valleys. From the late eighteenth century on, as the tribe became nomadic hunters, their diet depended largely on the buffalo. Cheyennes also ate other large game as well as dog. The Plains diet was supplemented by wild turnips, berries, and prickly pear cactus. The Cheyennes made pottery prior to their move to the Plains. Once there, the buffalo provided most of their clothing, dwellings, tools, containers, and utensils. They also made small, shallow basketry trays, primarily used for gambling. Cheyennes traded at both pre-contact trade centers of the northern Plains: Mandan villages on the Knife River and the Arikara villages in present-day South Dakota.
An Edward S. Curtis photo from 1910 shows Cheyenne scouts riding horses. (Library of Congress)
Traditional artists worked with leather, wood, quills, and feathers. They also carved pipes. Women dressed the skins for clothing. They made moccasins, leggings, breechclouts, shirts, and robes for men, and for themselves they made two-piece dresses and moccasins with leggings and robes in the winter. Clothing was usually decorated with beaded quillwork.
During the late eighteenth through the midnineteenth centuries, the Cheyennes were great warriors and raiders. Six interband military societies, such as the prestigious Dog Soldiers, selected a war chief. As Plains dwellers, counting coup in battle by touching an enemy counted for more prestige than killing him. Weapons included the horn bow, arrows, clubs, shields, and spears.
The Algonquin people may have come north from the lower Mississippi Valley shortly after the last ice sheet receded. Sixteenth - and seventeenth-century Cheyennes lived in the upper Mississippi
Valley in permanent villages and grew corn, beans, and squash. They also fished and hunted game, including buffalo.
Some bands encountered Rene-Robert de La Salle in 1680, on the Illinois River. The French fur trade in the Great Lakes region was responsible for arming local Indian groups such as the Ojibwas with guns; these groups began attacking Cheyenne villages, eventually forcing them to abandon the region and undertake a slow migration westward throughout the eighteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, well armed Ojibwas (Anishinabes) had destroyed a main Cheyenne village. The surviving Cheyennes moved farther west, to the upper Missouri River, joining some of their number who had gone there several years earlier.
By the early nineteenth century, raids from Siouan tribes forced the Cheyennes completely out onto the Plains, where they gave up farming entirely, becoming nomadic buffalo hunters as well as fierce
Fighters. Allied with the Arapahos, they settled primarily near the Black Hills and then in the upper Platte-Powder River area, where they eventually became allied with Lakota bands. About 1832, some bands moved south, attracted by trade centered around Taos, New Mexico, as well as Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River in southern Colorado. The move precipitated a tribal split into northern and southern Cheyennes. In alliance with the southern Arapahos, the southern Cheyennes controlled most of the buffalo country between western Kansas and eastern Colorado and the Platte River.
In 1837 a major war broke out, with the southern Arapahos and southern Cheyennes fighting against the Comanches; peace was established in 1840, largely on Arapaho-Cheyenne terms. The Cheyennes signed the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, which reaffirmed their right to land between the North Platte and Arkansas Rivers. The treaty also formalized the separation of the Cheyenne groups. Meanwhile, non-Indian leaders of territorial Colorado had decided to force all Indians from that region. Pressure against the southern Cheyennes was increased, especially after the Pike's Peak gold rush of 1859. Under Chief Black Kettle (Moketavato), the southern Cheyennes repeatedly compromised in an effort to avoid war. However, the 1864 massacre and mutilation of several hundred of their people at Sand Creek, Colorado (where they had been told to camp under the protection of the U. S. Army and met the soldiers flying a white surrender and an American flag), forced the southern Cheyennes to cede their lands in Colorado.
Black Kettle continued to seek peace but was shot down with his tribe, who offered no resistance, in the Washita Valley, Oklahoma, in 1868. At this point, the Cheyennes divided again. One group went north to the Powder River Country, and most of the rest settled on the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation, established in 1869 in Indian Territory. This roughly 4-million-acre reservation was eliminated through allotment and non-Indian settlement by 1902. Some southern Cheyennes continued to fight with the Kiowas, Comanches, and Arapahos, until the few survivors were forced to surrender in 1875.
In the meantime, the northern Cheyennes tried to resist the onslaught of the gold seekers and land grabbers who invaded their lands, ignoring the terms of the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty. Formerly among the tribes who held out for peace, they turned to war following the Sand Creek massacre.
The resulting Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) affirmed the exclusion of non-Indians from the Powder River region of Montana. In 1876, the northern Cheyennes joined with other Plains Indians in defeating the United States in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Shortly thereafter, however, the U. S. Army caught and defeated the northern Cheyennes, rounding up almost 1,000 of them and forcing them south to the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation in Indian Territory. Though exhausted after their forced march, sick and dying from malaria, and starving, roughly 300 desperate northern Cheyennes under Dull Knife and Little Wolf escaped and headed toward home north of the North Platte River. Fighting valiantly for their freedom, they were pursued by soldiers and had to cross lands now inhabited by white farmers and ranchers. The people were recaptured with much loss of life and relocated to the Pine Ridge area of South Dakota in 1881. Three years later, the Tongue River Reservation in eastern Montana was established for this now decimated people. Although this land was never opened to non-Indian purchase, allotments fragmented the reservation, causing long-term legal and cultural problems.
Christian missionaries, especially Mennonites, Catholics, and Southern Baptists, became active among the Cheyennes toward the end of the nineteenth century. Around the same time, the Peyote religion and the Ghost Dance became popular among the northern Cheyennes. Following confinement to reservations, most Indians lived on government rations (often inadequate at best) and marginal gardening and wage labor. In 1911, the United States organized a fifteen-member Northern Cheyenne Business Council, largely under its control. The tribe adopted an Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) constitution in 1935. In 1918, southern Cheyennes were among those who formally incorporated the Peyote religion into the Native American Church.
See also Black Kettle; Buffalo; Dull Knife; Horse,
Economic Impact; Fort Laramie Treaty (1868);
Native American Church of North America;
Sand Creek Massacre; Sun Dance.
"Comanche" is a name derived from either the Ute
Komantcia, "People Who Fight Us All the Time," or the Spanish camino ancho, "broad trail." Their
Comanche camp ca. 1890. (Library of Congress)
Self-designation was Numinu, "People." The Comanches lived in the Rocky Mountain regions of Wyoming and northern Colorado until the mid - to late seventeenth century, when the people moved into the central and southern Great Plains. Today, most Comanches live in Oklahoma. Comanche is part of the Uto-Aztecan language.
Comanche deities included numerous celestial objects such as the sun and moon. The Eagle Dance and Beaver ceremony were important, but Comanches did not adopt the Sun Dance until 1874. Young men undertook vision quests in remote places, hoping to attract a guardian spirit helper. When they returned, shamans helped them to interpret their visions and to prepare their personal medicine bundles.
Membership was fluid in each of the roughly thirteen bands, including four major ones. Each band had a chief or headman, who was assisted by a council of the leading men of the band. In contrast to most other Plains Indians, the fiercely independent Comanches maintained virtually no police to keep order in the camp. Leaders for buffalo hunts maintained authority for that hunt only. Men might have more than one wife. Corpses were dressed in their best clothing, face painted red and red clay on the eyes, and buried in a flexed position in a cave or shallow grave. Mourners cut their hair, arms, and legs. They gave away the dead person's possessions, burned his or her teepee, and never mentioned his or her name again.
Buffalo was the main staple on the Plains. They were driven over cliffs, stalked individually, or, most commonly after the people acquired horses, surrounded on horseback. Men also hunted other large and small game. Women gathered wild potatoes,
Fruit (plums, grapes, and currants), nuts, and berries. Babies were cradled in beaded skin pockets attached to V-shaped frames. Comanches also made shallow basketry gambling trays.
Comanches frequented both northern Plains aboriginal trade centers: Mandan villages on the Knife River and the Arikara villages in present-day South Dakota. By the early eighteenth century, Comanches were trading at Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico, although they also raided these areas mercilessly. Having acquired horses during the late sixteenth century, probably from the Utes, the Comanche became among the most highly skilled horse riders on the Plains. They were excellent breeders and trainers as well as raiders and maintained some of the largest horse herds on the Plains. Both boys and girls began riding around age five.
Women made moccasins, leggings, breech-clouts, shirts, and robes for men, and for themselves they made two-piece dresses and moccasins with leggings and robes in the winter. Clothing was often decorated with beaded quillwork. Comanches used red paint for battle on their horses' heads and tails as well as themselves. Other battle gear included buffalo horn headdresses, high buffalo hide boots, and horsehair extensions to their already long hair. Weapons included feathered lances, buffalo hide shields, and bows, mainly of Osage orange wood. The people adopted military societies beginning in the eighteenth century as well as many other features of Plains warrior culture.
The Comanches were originally part of the eastern Shoshones, who had lived along Arizona's Gila River from about 3000 BCE to about 500 BCE. At that time, a group of them began migrating north toward Utah, growing a high-altitude variety of corn that had been developed in Mexico. When a drought struck the Great Basin in the thirteenth century, these people, known then as Shoshones, spread out north of the Great Salt throughout much of the Great Basin.
By about the late seventeenth century, some Shoshone bands, from the mountainous regions of Wyoming and northern Colorado, later known as Comanches, had acquired horses. The bands began migrating into New Mexico and toward the Arkansas River on the central Plains. They adopted the cycle of buffalo hunting, raiding, and fighting characteristic of Plains life. By about 1750 they had acquired vast horse herds and dominated the central high plains.
In 1780-1781 the Comanches (as well as most other Plains tribes) lost a large number of their people, perhaps as many as half, to a smallpox epidemic. In about 1790, several thousand northern Comanches and Kiowas joined in a lasting alliance. The Comanches continued southward throughout the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century, pressured from the north by the Dakota/Lakota and other tribes and drawn by trade and raiding opportunities in the Southwest and beyond in New Spain/Mexico. During this period they continued to drive Apachean groups from the Plains. They also prevented the Spanish from colonizing Texas extensively, and they acted as a brake to French trade expansion into the Southwest.
By the midnineteenth century, Comanches were roughly separated into three divisions. The southern group lived between the Red and Colorado Rivers in Texas. The middle group wintered in Texas but followed the buffalo in the summer north toward the Arkansas River. The northern group wintered on the Red River and wandered widely during the summer. In 1840, the northern Comanches made peace with the southern Cheyennes and Arapahos, after the latter had staged several successful raids against them. As part of this agreement, the Comanches gave up land in western Kansas north of the Arkansas River.
A cholera epidemic in 1849-1850 took a heavier toll on the Comanche population than had all the battles to date. During the 1840s and 1850s, the Comanches fought bitter wars with the Texans, the latter bent on exterminating all Indian groups. The Comanches defeated Kit Carson in 1864, but they and the Kiowas signed a treaty in 1865 that reserved much of western Indian Territory (Oklahoma) for them and their allies. When the U. S. government failed to keep non-Indians out of these lands, the Indians rebelled. In the ensuing 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty, some Comanche bands agreed to accept a reservation in southwestern Indian Territory with the Kiowa and Kiowa Apaches. Hostilities over non-Indian squatters and the difficulties of life in captivity continued for another eight years. However, by the late 1860s the Comanches were in serious trouble. The great buffalo herds had been hunted to near extinction and the U. S. Army was pursuing Indians relentlessly.
After the 1868 Battle of the Washita, in which the United States massacred a group of Cheyenne Indians, a few Comanche leaders surrendered their bands at Fort Cobb, Oklahoma; these roughly 2,500 people were later moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and began farming corn. Several bands, however, remained on the Plains, holding on to the free life for
Several more years. The Comanches adopted a modified version of the Sun Dance in 1874. At about the same time, a short-lived religious movement led to an unsuccessful battle against the United States at Adobe Walls.
In 1874, War Chief Quanah Parker led the last free Comanche bands, along with some Kiowa and Cheyenne refugees from Fort Sill, into Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, site of the last great buffalo range. There they lived traditionally until the Army found and destroyed their camp and horses. In 1875, Parker surrendered to mark the end of Comanche resistance.
Parker continued as an important leader on the reservation, overseeing favorable land leases and playing a major role in bringing the Peyote religion to the Comanche and many other Indian tribes after 1890. Reservation lands were allotted beginning in 1892. Nonallotted lands were sold to non-Indians, and nothing remained of the reservation by 1908.
See also Buffalo; Horse, Economic Impact; Parker, Quanah; Trade.
Plains Crees belong to a division of the Cree Indians of central Canada. The name comes from the French Kristenaux, a corruption of a Cree self-designation. (See also Cree.) Early in the seventeenth century, Crees inhabited the forests between Lake Superior and Hudson Bay. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, groups of Crees had moved into western Saskatchewan and eastern Alberta and south to northern Montana. These were the northernmost of the Plains Indians. All nine Cree dialects belong to the central division of the Algonquin language family.
Cree shamans used their spirit powers to cure illness. In midsummer, bands (either individually or collectively) celebrated the Sun Dance. There were from eight to twelve bands of fluid composition among the Plains Cree, each with a headman and a loosely defined hunting territory. The leadership position required excellent hunting and speaking skills, as well as the traits of bravery and generosity, and it could be hereditary. Each band also had a warrior society.
A child's name was associated with the name givers' spirit vision. Most people also had nicknames. Girls were secluded for four nights at the onset of puberty, when they often acquired their spirit visions; a feast followed this initial period of seclusion. Married women also withdrew when menstruating. There were no male puberty ceremonies, except that boys were encouraged to fast and undertake a vision quest. For marriage gifts, the bride's family gave the couple a fully equipped teepee. The groom received a horse from his father-in-law as well as moccasins from his new wife. Plains Cree sons-in-law observed the taboo of not speaking directly to their mothers-in-law.
Corpses were dressed in their best clothing, and their faces were painted. They were taken out the side of the teepee, not the door, and buried in the ground, in log chambers, or in tree scaffolds. Some eastern bands built gabled-roof grave houses. Bundles containing ancestral locks of hair were considered extremely important and were carried by the women when the camp moved. The possessions of the dead were given away.
Plains Crees lived in buffalo hide teepees with three-pole foundations. Buffalo was the staple food. Men hunted in small groups during the winter and communally in the summer. Buffalo were driven into brush impoundments or, in the winter, into marshes or deep snow. Men also hunted other large game. Women snared a variety of small game, fished, and caught birds (and gathered their eggs). They also gathered roots, berries, fruits, and tubers. Most of these were dried and stored for the winter. At least as early as the early nineteenth century, some Plains Crees maintained gardens and even kept cattle to help ensure a constant food supply.
Crees acted as intermediaries between nonIndian traders and Indian tribes such as the Black-feet in the late seventeenth century. Like many Plains Indians, the Crees made beaded quillwork and painted hides. Dogs carried extra goods with the help of a strap across the chest before the advent of the travois. After about 1770, horse-drawn travois were used to transport goods. The Crees also used snowshoes and canoes, which they abandoned during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in favor of crude, temporary buffalo hide rafts. In general, the upper body remained bare except for a robe or ceremonial garments. The people also wore one-piece moccasins as well as rawhide visors against the sun. Unlike many Plains tribes, the Cree placed a high value on scalping. One customarily gave away much of the booty captured in a raid. Weapons included sinew-backed bows and war clubs consisting of a stone in a bag on the end of a stick.
The earliest Algonquins may have come north from the lower Mississippi Valley shortly after the last ice sheet retreated from the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River regions. Their population grew until a large number of them lived north and west of the Great Lakes. Crees probably originated in central and northern Manitoba around 1100. By 1500 they were located at the forest's edge along and south of the Saskatchewan River. Cree bands began acquiring guns and other goods from the French in the midseventeenth century, trading furs, especially beaver, for them. Hudson's Bay Company opened a post in Cree territory in 1667.
During the period of the French fur trade, many Crees and French intermarried. During the later seventeenth century, the quest for furs, as well as their own growing population, pushed the Crees on toward the west until they stretched from near Labrador in the east to the Great Slave Lake and south to Alberta, northern Montana, and North Dakota in the west. During these migrations they displaced their ancient enemies to the west, the Athapaskans, and pushed Dakota bands westward as well.
Crees formed a close alliance with the Assini-boines in the late seventeenth century. They experienced severe smallpox epidemics in 1737 and 1781, particularly in the Lake Winnipeg area. By the early eighteenth century, the Crees were roughly divided into Woodland (eastern and western) and Plains divisions, having reached Lake Winnipeg and beyond. During this period they still retained much of their old Woodland culture.
Plains Crees acquired horses in the mid - to late eighteenth century and adopted much of classic nomadic Plains Indian culture. Some also intermarried with Mohawk Indians who were serving as guides for non-Indian fur trading companies, which the Crees were provisioning with buffalo meat. By the early nineteenth century, Plains Crees controlled the area north of the Missouri River and were pressuring the Blackfeet to the west and south.
World History
