"Abenaki" or more properly "Wabenaki," means "Dawn Land People" or "Easterners." The Abenakis were a group of Algonquin tribes, sometimes discussed as Eastern Abenaki (including Kennebecs, Penobscots, Arosagunticooks, and Pigwackets) and Western Abenakis (including Penacooks, Win-nipesaukees, and Sokokis). There was also a seventeenth - and eighteenth-century Abenaki Confederacy consisting of these and other tribes, such as the Maliseets, Micmacs, and Passamaquoddy.
Abenakis lived near major rivers of northern New England and southern Quebec in the early seventeenth century. There were perhaps 10,000 eastern and 5,000 western Abenakis at that time. They spoke dialects of eastern Algonquin languages.
Western groups tended to believe in a supreme creator, and both eastern and Western Abenakis enjoyed a rich mythology. Many ceremonies were based on crops or the hunt as well as on greeting visitors, weddings, and funerals. At least among the western group, boys might seek the help of supernatural beings by obtaining a guardian spirit through a vision quest around the time of puberty. Dances were often associated with the spirit power. Shamans, often employing drums, foretold the future, located game, and cured illness.
Authority was gained as a result of leadership qualities, although there was also an element of patrilineal descent. Eastern chiefs of extended families were also sometimes shamans and after the seventeenth century were known as sagamores. Western groups recognized lifelong civil and war chiefs as well as a council of elders. The chiefs' powers were relatively limited.
Several related nuclear families living together made up a household, which was the basic social and economic unit. Descent was patrilineal. Social status was somewhat hierarchical, especially in the east, where chiefs might have more than one wife. In general, men provided animal foods, fought, and made tools and houses; women grew crops, gathered foods, prepared and cooked food, made clothing, and took care of children. Men engaged in frequent races and archery contests.
The use of stories and gentle group pressure was sufficient to discipline children. Marriage, considered official after gifts were given to the bride's family, was celebrated by feasting and dancing (as were many occasions). The dead were buried as soon as possible with weapons and/or tools for use in the afterlife.
Villages were located along streams and, among the western group, near meadows. Easterners lived in dome-shaped and square houses with pyramid roofs shingled with bark. There were smoke holes at the top, and deerskins covered the two doors. Westerners tended to live in birchbark longhouses with arched roofs. Several families lived in each house. They also built dome-shaped sweat lodges.
A shorter growing season and poorer soil meant that Abenakis depended less on crops than did southern Algonquins. In small family groups they
Hunted caribou, deer, and bear and trapped beaver and other small game as well as birds. Western groups called and ran down moose.
Women gathered berries, nuts, potatoes, and wild cherries and other fruits. They also boiled maple and birch sap for syrup and sugar. In spring, the eastern group fished along the coast for salmon, shad, eel, sturgeon, smelt, and other fish. They also gathered shellfish and other marine foods and hunted sea mammals. Fish were also important to the western group, who grew more corn, beans, squash, and tobacco.
Men made birchbark and dugout canoes, snow-shoes, and toboggans. Many items, including pottery and bark containers, were carefully decorated. From the early seventeenth century on, wampum beads were used to record treaties and major council decisions. Abenakis generally traded with neighboring groups until the beginning of the fur trade period, when they traded furs for corn from southern New England. At that time, wampum became a medium of exchange and political status.
Women tanned skins to make most clothing. Men wore beaver pelt breechclouts and belts. Western women wore skirts and blouses in addition to cold weather gear. Both wore moccasins, leggings, moose hide coats, and fur robes and caps. Tunics were also common. Both sexes painted their faces and bodies and wore their hair long.
Abenakis originally came from the Southwest, according to their legends. They may have met early explorers such as Giovanni da Verrazano in the sixteenth century. They were definitely visited by Samuel de Champlain and others, including missionaries, early in the seventeenth century, shortly after which time the Abenakis became heavily involved in the fur trade. Western groups traded with the Dutch and entered the fur trade later than the eastern groups.
Almost immediately, many eastern villages disappeared as a result of war (mostly Micmac attacks) and disease. Among the survivors, material culture and subsistence economy changed rapidly with the availability of non-Native items. Indians and the French regularly intermarried. Western groups came into conflict with the Iroquois from the mid - to late seventeenth century. Abenakis first arrived in Quebec from Maine in the late seventeenth century. They lived on the banks of the Chaudiere River before moving to their present territory in the early eighteenth century.
Abenakis were staunch allies of the French in the colonial wars, although eastern groups needed to cover their bases with the British in the interest of preserving trade. Fierce Abenaki fighters sacked many British settlements throughout New England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The Western Abenakis, in particular, played a significant role in much of the history of New France, including fur trading, exploring, and fighting the Senecas and Mohawks.
The Indians steadily lost land during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Penob-scots slowly emerged as the strongest eastern tribe. When the town of Norridgewalk fell to the British in 1724, many Eastern Abenakis withdrew to Quebec. Although the Penobscots urged Abenaki neutrality in the French and Indian War, other Eastern Abenakis, now living in Quebec, fought with the French. The Penobscots were eventually drawn in: The treaty of 1763 marked the British victory and the Penobscot defeat. Meanwhile, after the fighting ended in 1763, Western Abenakis returned to their territory to find British squatters. They abandoned most of these lands after 1783, settling near a reserve on the Ste. Francois River in Quebec.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most Western Abenakis sought to avoid anti-Indian sentiment by speaking French, selling ash splint baskets to tourists, and keeping to themselves. Some hunted in a large territory north of the Saint Lawrence River, and some returned to northern New England for seasonal cash work and subsistence activities. Many Western Abenakis attended Dartmouth College in the nineteenth century.
In 1941, the establishment of a wildlife refuge by the state of Vermont ended the people's ancient hunting and fishing rights. A postwar resurgence of the western group was based on controversies over fishing and hunting rights and a lack of official recognition. These groups held fish-ins to dramatize their situation. State recognition in 1976 was withdrawn the following year.
See also Canoes; Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act.
Algonquin "Algonquin" or "Algonkin" probably comes from a Micmac word meaning "at the place of spearing fish and eels from the bow of a canoe." It is the name of a
A 1645 portrait of a 23-year-old Algonquin man wearing necklace and head ornaments, and with facial markings. (Library of Congress)
Northeastern group of bands that also gave its name to an important language family. The original selfdesignation was Anishinabeg, or "true men." Principal Algonquin bands included the Weskarinis (the Algonquins proper), Abitibis, and Temiskamings. In the early seventeenth century, Algonquins lived in the Ottawa Valley of Quebec and Ontario, particularly along the northern tributary rivers. Algonquins spoke an Algonquin language.
The people believed in a great creator spirit and a host of lesser spirits, both good and evil. Both shamans and hunters sought guardian spirits to help them with their work, which included interpreting dreams and healing the sick. Small bands were composed of one or more clans with local chiefs. People smoked tobacco silently before council meetings. Algonquins entertained visitors with the annual Feast of the Dead, a dance with a war theme. When entertaining guests, the host did not eat. Clan descent as well as the inheritance of hunting territories may have been patrilineal. Bands tended to come together in the summer and disperse in the winter. People lived in cone-shaped, teepee-like dwellings. They also built rectangular birchbark hunting shelters.
Men fished in both the summer and winter (through holes cut in the ice). They hunted game such as moose, deer, caribou, and beaver. Agricultural crops played a small role in their diet. Important material items included birchbark containers sewn with spruce roots, basswood bags and mats, wooden cradle boards, bows and arrows, and double-headed drums. Algonquins imported fish nets and cornmeal from the Hurons and traded extensively with Iroquoian tribes. They traded animal pelts and porcupine quills to nearby groups in exchange for corn, tobacco, fishing gear, and wampum.
Men made birchbark canoes, snowshoes, and toboggans. Dress varied according to location. Most clothing was made of buckskin or moose skin. Clothing included breechclouts, skirts, ponchos, leggings, robes, and moccasins; moccasins were often dyed black. Fur garments were added in cold weather.
Algonquins lived on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River from about 1550 to 1650. They began trading with the French in the early sixteenth century and later provoked a war with the Mohawks. The Algonquins won that skirmish with the assistance provided by the French in order to maintain an important trade partner.
However, the French had made a powerful enemy in the Mohawks, and within a few decades the local military situation had been reversed, with the Iroquois now firmly in control. Meanwhile, the Hurons had replaced the Algonquins as the key French trade partner. The Mohawks, needing to expand their trapping area, soon attacked again. The Algonquins were forced to abandon the upper Saint Lawrence and, after about 1650, the Ottawa Valley. They returned in the 1660s when peace was reestablished. An epidemic in the 1670s left them further weakened.
During the late seventeenth century, some Algonquin bands merged with the Ottawa Indians. French trading posts were established, and missionaries became a permanent presence in their territory by the early eighteenth century. Some Algo-nquins traveled to the far west to trap for Canadian companies. After the final French defeat in 1763, the Algonquins became staunch British allies. Reserves
For the group were created in the nineteenth century, when their lands were overrun by British settlers. The decline of the fur trade and of their hunting grounds (mainly owing to local logging operations), as well as a growing dependence on non-Natives, led many Algonquins to adopt a sedentary lifestyle.
See also Canoes; French and Indian War;
Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Political System;
Wampum.
"Anishinabe" means "People." The Anishinabes are also variously known by the band names Ojibwe/ Ojibwa/Ojibway/Chippewa, Mississauga, and Salteaux. The name "Ojibwa" means "puckered up," probably a reference to a style of sewn moccasin. Northern groups had a Subarctic as well as a Woodlands cultural orientation. In the early seventeenth century, at least 35,000, and maybe double that number, of Anishinabes lived north of Lake Huron and northeast of Lake Superior (present-day Ontario, Canada). The various Anishinabe groups spoke dialects of Algonquin languages.
Some groups may have believed in the existence of an overarching supreme creative power. All animate and inanimate objects had spirits that could be good or evil (the latter, like the cannibalistic Windigo, were greatly feared). People attempted to keep the spirits happy through prayer, by the ritual use of tobacco, and with the intervention of shamans. Tobacco played a significant role in many rituals.
By fasting and dreaming in a remote place, young men sought a guardian spirit that would assist them throughout their lives. In general, dreams were considered of extreme importance. There was probably little religious ceremonialism before people began dying in unprecedented numbers as a result of hitherto unknown diseases of Old World origin. The Midewiwin, or Medicine Dance, was a curing society that probably arose, except among the northern Ojibwas, in response to this development.
Men led autonomous bands of perhaps 300 to 400 people on the basis of both family and ability. Band headman were often war captains but had little direct authority before the fur trade period; for their own advantage, traders worked to increase the power of the headman. These efforts ultimately led to the creation of a patrilineal line of chiefs.
About fifteen to twenty-five patrilineal clans were linked into the larger divisions. Bands came together in villages during the summer and dispersed for the winter hunting season. Within the context of a social organization that was relatively egalitarian, there were people with higher status than others, such as chiefs, accomplished warriors, and shamans.
Although a special feast was held to celebrate a boy's first kill, the major male puberty rite was the vision quest, which entailed a four-day fast deep in the forest to await a propitious dream. Girls might also have visions, but they were not generally required to undergo a quest.
Corpses were washed and well presented. Wrapped in birchbark, they were removed from the wigwam, after a period of lying in state, through an opening in the west side. A priest gave a funeral ceremony, after which the body was buried with tools and equipment. The soul was said to travel for four days to a happy location in the west. The mourning period lasted one year.
The Anishinabes enjoyed regular visiting as well as social dancing (although on such occasions men often danced apart from women). They also enjoyed various sports, such as lacrosse and a game in which they threw a pole along frozen snow, and contests; gambling invariably played a part in these activities. Lacrosse was rough and carried religious overtones.
The traditional Anishinabe dwelling was a domed wigwam of cattail mats or birchbark over a pole frame. There were also larger, elliptical wigwams that housed several families. Hunters also used temporary bark-covered A-frame lodges, and people built smaller sweat lodges, used for purification or curing, as well as menstrual huts and Midewiwin, or Medicine Lodge Society, lodges.
Women grew small gardens of corn, beans, and squash in the south. Men hunted and trapped a variety of large and small game, mostly in the winter, as well as birds and fowl. Meat was roasted, stone boiled, or dried and stored. Some was dried and mixed with fat and chokecherries to make pemmi-can, an extremely nourishing, long-lasting food. Men fished year round, especially for sturgeon, sometimes at night by the light of flaming birchbark torches. People also ate shellfish where available.
In the fall, women in canoes gathered wild rice, which became a staple in the Anishinabe southwest and important as well around Lake Winnipeg. They also gathered a variety of berries, fruits, and nuts, and some groups collected maple sap for sugar, which they used as a seasoning and in water. Northern Ojibwas had access neither to wild rice nor to maple sap.
Trade items included elm-bark bags and assorted birchbark goods, carved wooden bowls, food, and maple sugar. As they expanded west, the people began to trade Woodland items for buffalo-derived products. Clothing and medicine bags were decorated with quillwork. Men carved wooden utilitarian as well as religious items (figurines). They also made birchbark canoes and snowshoes. Northern Ojibwas used toboggans and canoe sleds, sometimes hauled by large dogs, from the nineteenth century on. The Anishinabe were also known for their soft elm-bark bags. Lake Winnipeg women made fine moose hide mittens, richly decorated in beads. As with many Native peoples, storytelling evolved to a fine art.
Dress varied according to location. Most clothing was made of buckskin. Ojibwas tended to color their clothing with red, yellow, blue, and green dyes. In the southwestern areas, women wore woven fiber shirts under a sleeveless dress. Other clothing included breechclouts, leggings, robes, and moccasins, the last often dyed and featuring a distinctive puckered seam. Fur garments were added in cold weather.
The Anishinabes probably came to their historical location from the northeast and had arrived by about 1200. They encountered Frenchmen in the early seventeenth century and soon became reliable French allies. From the later seventeenth century on, the people experienced great changes in their material and economic culture as they became dependent on guns, beads, cloth, metal items, and alcohol.
Pressures related to the fur trade, including Iroquois attacks, drove the Anishinabes to expand their territory by the late seventeenth century. With French firearms, they pressured the Dakotas to move west toward the Great Plains. They also drove tribes such as the Sauks, Foxes, and Kickapoos from Michigan and replaced the Hurons in lower Michigan and extreme southeast Ontario. With the westward march of British and especially French trading posts, Ojibwa bands also moved into Minnesota and north central Canada, displacing Siouan and other Algonquin groups. Many people also intermarried with Cree Indians and French trappers and became known as Metis, or Mitchif. By the eighteenth century, Anishinabe bands stretched from Lake Huron to the Missouri River.
The people were most deeply involved in the fur (especially beaver) trade during the eighteenth century. They fought the British in the French and Indian War and in Pontiac's Rebellion. In 1769, in alliance with neighboring tribes, they utterly defeated the Illinois Indians. They fought on the British side in the Revolutionary War. Following this loss, they kept up anti-American military pressure, engaging the non-Natives in Little Turtle's War, Tecumseh's Rebellion, and the War of 1812.
By the early nineteenth century, scattered, small hunter-fisher-gatherer bands of northern Ojibwas and Salteaux were located north and west of the Great Lakes. These people experienced significant changes from the early nineteenth century, such as a greater reliance on fish and hare products and on non-Native material goods.
The Plains Ojibwas (Bungis) had moved west as far as southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba and North Dakota and Montana. They adopted much of the Great Plains culture. The southeastern Ojibwas (Mississaugas), living in northern and southern Michigan and nearby Ontario, were hunters, fishers, gatherers, and gardeners. They also made maple sugar and, on occasion, used wild rice. Their summer villages were relatively large. Finally, the southwestern Ojibwas had moved into northern Wisconsin and Minnesota following the departing Dakotas. They depended on wild rice as well as hunting, fishing, gathering, gardening, and maple sugaring.
The Anishinabes living in the United States ceded much of their eastern land to that government in 1815 upon the final British defeat. Land cessions and the establishment of reservations in Wisconsin and Minnesota followed during the early to midnineteenth century. Two small bands went to Kansas in 1839. In the 1860s, some groups settled with the Ottawas, Munsees, and Potawatomis in Indian Territory.
Michigan and Minnesota Anishinabe groups (with the exception of the Red Lake people) lost most of their land (90 percent or more in many cases) to allotment, fraud, and other irregularities in the mid - to late nineteenth century. They also suffered significant culture loss as a result of government policies encouraging forced assimilation. In the late nineteenth century, many southwestern Ojibwas worked as lumberjacks. Many in the southeast
Concentrated more on farming, although they continued other traditional subsistence activities when possible. Transition to non-Native styles of housing, clothing, and political organization was confirmed during this period.
Plains Ojibwas took part in the Metis rebellion of Louis Riel in 1869-1870. These groups were finally settled on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in the late nineteenth century and on the Rocky Boy Reservation in the early twentieth century. Around the turn of the century, the Turtle Mountain Chippewas, led by Chief Little Shell, worked to regain land lost in 1884 and to reenroll thousands of Metis whom the United States had unilaterally excluded from the tribal rolls. In 1904, the tribe received $1 million for a 10-million-acre land claim. Soon thereafter, most of the Turtle Mountain land was allotted. One result of that action was that many people, denied adequate land, were forced to scatter across the Dakotas and Montana. Most of the allotments were later lost to tax foreclosure, after which the tribal members, now landless, drifted back to Turtle Mountain.
The growing poverty of Michigan bands was partially reversed after most accepted the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) in the 1930s and the United States reassumed its trust relationship with them. Many of these people moved to the industrial cities of the Midwest, especially in Michigan and Wisconsin, after World War II, although most retained close ties with the reservation communities.
See also Fur Trade; Indian Reorganization Act;
Lacrosse; Riel, Louis; Tecumseh; Trade.
See Pequot.
The Cayugas, from their word for "People of Oio-gouen," were one of the five original tribes of the Iroquois League. The name Iroquois ("real adders") comes from the French adaptation of the Algonquin name for these people. Their self-designation was Kanonsionni, "League of the United (Extended) Households." Iroquois today refer to themselves as Haudenosaunee, "People of the Longhouse." There were about 1,500 Cayugas in 1660 and possibly as many as several thousand or more a century earlier, among perhaps 20,000 members of the Iroquois League. Cayugas spoke a northern Iroquois dialect.
The Cayugas recognized Orenda, a supreme creator. Other animate and inanimate objects and natural forces were also considered of a spiritual nature. They held important festivals to celebrate maple sap and strawberries as well as corn planting, ripening (Green Corn ceremony), and harvest. These festivals often included singing, male dancing, game playing, gambling, feasting, and food distribution.
The eight-day new year's festival may have been most important of all. Held in midwinter, it was a time to give thanks, to forget past wrongs, and to kindle new fires, with much attention paid to new and old dreams. A condolence ceremony had quasi religious components. Curing societies also conducted ceremonies, since illness was thought to be of supernatural origin. In the early nineteenth century, many Iroquois embraced the teachings of Handsome Lake.
The Iroquois League comprised fifty hereditary chiefs, or sachems, from the constituent tribes. Each position was named for the original holder and had specific responsibilities. Sachems were men, except when a woman acted as regent, but they were appointed by women. The Cayugas sent ten sachems to meetings of the Iroquois Great Council, which met in the fall and for emergencies. Their symbol at this gathering was the Great Pipe.
Tribes were divided into two divisions within the league, the Cayugas belonging to the "younger brothers." Debates within the great council were a matter of strict clan, division, and tribal protocols, in a complex system of checks and balances. Politically, individual league members often pursued their own best interests while maintaining an essential solidarity with the other members. The creators of the U. S. government used the Iroquois League as a model of democracy.
Locally, the village structure was governed by a headman and a council of elders (clan chiefs, elders, wise men). Matters before the local councils were handled according to a definite protocol based on the clan and division memberships of the chiefs. Village chiefs were chosen from groups as small as a single household. Women nominated and recalled clan chiefs. Tribal chiefs represented the village and the nation at the general council of the league. The entire system was hierarchical and intertwined, from the family up to the great council. Decisions at
All levels were reached by consensus. There were also a number of nonhereditary chiefs ("pine tree" or "merit" chiefs), some of whom had no voting power. Their existence may have been a postcontact phenomenon.
The Cayugas recognized a dual division, each composed of two matrilineal, animal-named clans. The Cayugas probably had nine clans. Each owned a set number of personal names, some of which were linked with particular activities and responsibilities. Women enjoyed a high degree of prestige, being largely equated with the "three sisters" (corn, beans, and squash), and they were in charge of most village activities, including marriage. Great intravillage lacrosse games included heavy gambling. Other games included snowsnake, or sliding a spear along a trench in the snow for distance. Food was shared so that everyone had roughly the same to eat.
Personal health and luck were maintained by performing various individual rituals, including singing and dancing, learned in dreams. Members of the False Face medicine society wore wooden masks carved from trees and used rattles and tobacco. Shamans also used up to 200 or more plant medicines to cure illness. The condolence ceremony mourned dead league chiefs and installed successors. A modified version also applied to common people.
Boys began developing war skills at a young age. Prestige and leadership were often gained through war, which was in many ways the most important activity. All aspects of warfare, from the initiation to the conclusion, were highly ritualized. Women had a large, sometimes decisive, say in the question of whether or not to fight. Male prisoners were often forced to run the gauntlet: Those who made it through were adopted, but those who did not might be tortured by widows. Some captives were eaten.
In the early eighteenth century, Cayugas lived in at least three villages of thirty or more longhouses, each village with 500 or more people. The people built their villages near water and often on a hill after about 1300. Some villages were palisaded. Other Iroquois villages had up to 150 longhouses and 1,000 or more people. Villages were moved about twice in a generation, when firewood and soil were exhausted.
Iroquois Indians built elm-bark longhouses, fifty to 100 feet long, depending on how many people lived there, from about the twelfth century on. The longhouses held two or three or as many as twenty families, as well as their dogs. The people also built some single-family houses.
Women grew corn, beans, squash, and gourds. Corn was the staple and was used in soups, stews, breads, and puddings. It was stored in bark-lined cellars. Women also gathered a variety of greens, nuts, seeds, roots, berries, fruits, and mushrooms. Tobacco was grown for ceremonial and social smoking. After the harvest, men and some women took to the woods for several months to hunt and dry meat. Men hunted large game and trapped smaller game, mostly for the fur. They also caught waterfowl and other birds, and they fished.
Iroquois used porcupine quills and wampum belts as a record of events. Wampum was also used as a gift connoting sincerity and, later, as trade money. Other important material items included elm-bark containers, cordage from inner tree bark and fibers, and levers to move timbers. Men steamed wood or bent green wood to make many items, including lacrosse sticks. Elm-bark canoes were roughly twenty-five feet long. The people were also great runners and preferred to travel on land. They used snowshoes in the winter.
Women made most clothing from deerskins. Men wore breechclouts and shirts; women wore skirts. Both wore leggings, moccasins, and corn-husk slippers in the summer. Clothing was decorated with feathers and porcupine quills. Both men and women tattooed their bodies extensively.
The Iroquois began cultivating crops shortly after the first phase of their culture in New York was established around 800. Deganawida, a Huron prophet, and Hiawatha, a Mohawk shaman living among the Onondagas, founded the Iroquois League or Confederacy some time between 1000 and 1150. It originally consisted of five tribes: Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas; the Tuscaroras joined in the early eighteenth century.
Iroquois first met non-Natives in the sixteenth century. There were sporadic Jesuit missions in Cayuga country throughout the midseventeenth century. During those years, the Cayuga were more friendly toward the French than were some other Iroquois tribes. The people became heavily involved in the fur trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Trading, fighting, and political intrigue characterized those years. Although they were good at playing the European powers against each other, the Iroquois increasingly became British allies in trade and in the colonial wars and were
Instrumental in the ultimate British victory over the French.
Diplomatic success allowed the Iroquois to concentrate on expanding their trapping territory and increasing their trade advantages, mainly by fighting many tribes to their west and south. The Cayuga warpath led as far south as Virginia. Iroquois power blocked European westward expansion. Two Siouan tribes, the Tutelos and the Saponis, joined the Cayu-gas in 1753.
The British victory in 1763 meant that the Iroquois no longer controlled the regional balance of power. Despite their long-standing allegiance, some Indians joined anti-British rebellions in an effort to protect their land. One such rebellion took place in 1774 and was led by Logan, a Cayuga chief of the Iroquoian Mingos of Pennsylvania.
The confederacy split its allegiance in the Revolutionary War, with most Cayugas siding with the British. This split resulted in the council fire's being extinguished for the first time in some 200 years. The Iroquois suffered a major defeat in 1779. After the final U. S. victory, many Cayugas migrated to Ontario, Canada, where they established two villages on the Six Nations Reserve. Others settled with the Senecas in western New York. Still others remained for several more years in their homelands. However, by 1807 the Cayugas had sold all their land to the United States. After the Buffalo Creek and Tonawanda Reservations were sold in 1842, Indians who had been living there, including many Cayugas, relocated to the Cattaraugus and Allegany Reservations. Most Cayugas went to Cattaraugus.
The Iroquois council officially split into two parts during that time. One branch was located at the Six Nations Reserve and the other at Buffalo Creek. Gradually, internal reservation affairs, as well as relations with the United States and Canada, assumed more significance than intraconfederacy matters. In the 1840s, when the Buffalo Creek Reservation was sold, the fire there was rekindled at Onondaga.
In Canada, the Cayugas, known with the Onondagas and Senecas as the lower tribes, tended to retain more of their traditional beliefs than did the upper Iroquois tribes. Many subsequently adopted the Handsome Lake religion. Traditional structures were further weakened by the allotment of reservation lands in the 1840s; the requirement under Canadian law, from 1869 on, of patrilineal descent; and the transition of league councils and other political structures to a municipal government. In 1924, the Canadian government terminated confederacy rule entirely, mandating an all-male elected system of government on the reserve.
The Native economy gradually shifted from primarily hunting to farming, dependence on annuities received for the sale of land, and some wage labor. The people faced increasing pressure from nonNatives to adopt Christianity and sell more land. The old religion declined during that time, although on some reservations the Handsome Lake religion grew in importance.
In 1817, some of the New York Cayugas, along with other Iroquois and Delaware Indians, moved west to near the Sandusky River in Ohio. They were removed to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) in 1831. Some other Cayugas moved to Wisconsin in 1832 with a group of Oneidas. The Cayugas in Oklahoma maintained a separate tribal government until 1937. Mainly because of fraud and outright theft, their 65,000-acre reservation had been reduced to 140 acres of tribal land by 1936. In 1937, the Seneca-Cayuga incorporated under Oklahoma law, adopting a constitution and bylaws and electing a business committee. Although their land base quickly grew, almost 300 acres were later taken away as a result of reservoir construction. The tribe successfully resisted termination in the 1950s. With other members of the confederacy, the Cayugas resisted the 1924 citizenship act, selective service, and all federal and state intrusions on their sovereignty.
See also Deganawidah; Deskaheh; French and
Indian War; Handsome Lake; Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Political System; Hiawatha.
See Anishinabe.
See Lenape.
"Fox" is possibly from one of the tribe's clans. Their self-designation was Mesquaki, "Red Earth People."
The Foxes were culturally related to the Kickapoos. (See also Sauk.) In the seventeenth century, roughly 2,500 Foxes were located in a wide area on the border between the Woodlands and the prairie, centered in eastern Wisconsin near Lake Winnebago. The Fox people speak an Algonquin language.
The Fox recognized an upper and a lower cosmic region. The former was ruled by the great or gentle manitou. There were also any number of other nature-related spirits, or manitous, the most important of which were connected with the four directions. People might gain the attention and assistance of the manitous by offering tobacco, blackening their faces with charcoal, fasting, and wailing.
The vision quest, undertaken at puberty, was another way to attract spiritual power. Those who were especially successful assembled a medicine pack or bundle; certain packs represented power that affected and were the property of entire lineages. Two annual ceremonies were related to the medicine packs. The Midewiwin, or Medicine Dance, was a key ceremony. Others included the Green Corn and Adoption ceremonies. The calumet, or sacred pipe, played a vital role in all sacred activities, including peace negotiations.
Fox society was divided into bands or villages, of fluid composition, that formed in the summer but broke up in the winter. There were dual political divisions of peace and war. Officers were the main chief, subchiefs, and criers. A hereditary peace chief held authority over gatherings, treaties, peace councils, intertribal negotiations, and rituals. War chiefs were chosen by other warriors on the basis of merit, although there may have been a hereditary component.
The Foxes recognized about fourteen patrilineal clans. Membership in one of the two tribal divisions was determined by birth order. Each summer house was an economic unit as well as a social one.
Parents rarely inflicted corporal punishment on their children. At the onset of puberty, girls were secluded for ten days and were subject to various restrictions. Both sexes marked puberty by undertaking a vision quest. Marriages were generally arranged by the couple in question and were formalized when the families exchanged gifts. Some men had more than one wife. Adultery was generally cause for divorce. Burial took place after various rituals had been performed. All people were buried in their finest clothing, wrapped in bark or mats, with their feet toward the west.
Summer villages were located near crop fields in river bottoms. Extended families of some ten people lived in houses about fifty feet long by twenty feet wide and covered with elm bark. These houses were oriented in an east-west direction and were built in parallel rows, with an open game and ceremonial area in between. People moved the villages when firewood became scarce or when attacks forced them to move. When in their winter camps, people lived in small, dome-shaped wigwams covered with reed mats and located in sheltered river valleys. The camps ranged in size from just one or two families to an entire band.
Fox women grew corn, beans, squash, and tobacco. They also gathered a number of wild plant foods, including nuts, honey, berries, fruits, and tubers. Men hunted a variety of large and small game, especially deer, as well as buffalo from at least the eighteenth century until about 1820. Clothing was generally light and consisted mainly of buckskin breechclouts, dresses or aprons, leggings, and moccasins. Hide or fur robes were added for extra warmth. The people also tattooed and painted their bodies.
Reasons for war included conflict over territory, retaliation, and the achievement of status. War parties had to be authorized by the war council. Leaders of war parties began by fasting to obtain a vision and undertook several more ritualistic activities before the party departed. The leader carried his sacred ark, which was said to provide the party with spiritual power. Warriors were subject to a number of rituals on their return as well. Prisoners were often adopted.
The Foxes may once have lived just west and/or south of Lake Erie and, before that, along the southern shore of Lake Superior. They were driven by Iroquois raids into the upper Fox River-Chicago River area, perhaps in the early seventeenth century.
After non-Natives first appeared among them in the midseventeenth century, the Foxes quickly joined the fur trade. Unlike most Algonquins, however, they refused to settle near trading posts or missions. They also made enemies by requiring a toll from French traders plying the Fox River and were even able to block French access to the Mississippi if and when they chose.
The Foxes fought the French and their Indian allies in the early to mideighteenth century. They were almost destroyed during that period by warfare and disease, which was in fact the goal of French forces. Survivors took refuge with the Sauks in 1733,
Beginning an alliance that lasted until the 1850s. In 1769, the Sauks, Foxes, and other tribes dealt a permanent defeat to the Illinois tribes and moved south and west into some of their former territory and ultimately back into Iowa. By that time they had become highly capable buffalo hunters.
The Foxes took an active part in Little Turtle's war (1790-1794) and in Tecumseh's Rebellion (1809-1811), two defensive actions in which the tribes of the old west made a last-ditch effort to hold onto their lands. Lead mines near Dubuque, Iowa, at which the Foxes had been mining up to two tons of lead a year, were illegally seized by non-Native interests in the early nineteenth century. In 1842, the Sauks and Foxes ceded their remaining lands and were relocated to a reservation in Kansas.
Some Foxes remained with the Sauks in Kansas and went with them in 1869 to the Indian Territory (Oklahoma). However, after a series of disputes with the Sauks, most Foxes returned to Iowa in the late 1850s, settling near Tama and acquiring land there. Ownership of their own land prevented future allotment and enabled the people to maintain their physical boundaries and thus much of their traditional culture. The people generally refused to enroll their children when the Bureau of Indian Affairs opened a boarding school in the late nineteenth century, but they did accept a day school after 1912. They adopted an Indian Reorganization Act-based government in 1937. Traditional and progressive factions have struggled for control of the tribe for much of the twentieth century.
See also Algonquin; Indian Reorganization Act;
Thorpe, Jim.
See Wyandotte.
The Illinois were a group of bands, probably all Algonquins, that included but were not limited to the Cahokias, Kaskaskias, Michigameas, Moingwe-nas, Peorias, and Tamaroas. The word "Illinois" is a French adaptation of their self-designation, Inoca. The Illinois were a borderline Eastern Woodlands group, with much of their territory consisting of prairie. They were culturally similar to the Miamis. Roughly 10,000 Illinois lived south of Lake Michigan in the early seventeenth century. Illinois was an Algonquin language.
Manitou, a supreme being or creator, dwelled to the east and may have been identified with the sun. Men probably undertook a vision quest at adolescence, during which they hoped to attract a personal guardian spirit. At the onset of puberty, girls fasted in a special lodge until they received a personal guardian spirit. Shamans, or medicine people (they could be men or women and were usually older), conducted religious ceremonies. They acquired their powers from powerful animal spirits. Most ceremonies included dancing and smoking tobacco from a sacred pipe (calumet).
Each tribe was an independent entity and lived either in a separate village or in a separate section of a multitribe village. There may have been peace and war chiefs as well as criers to make announcements. Camp police during the summer buffalo hunt enforced strict discipline.
Illinois tribes recognized patrilineal clans. Hospitality was a primary value. A ritual feast followed a boy's first game kill. Boys who showed such an inclination might become berdaches (men who dressed like women and assumed all of their roles). Berdaches were regarded as having a particularly sacred element. Men usually refrained from marriage until they had proven themselves as warriors and hunters. Women could destroy the property of men who attempted to marry without the proper lineage controls. Female adultery was punished by death, mutilation, or mass rape.
Each gender was responsible for burying its own dead. After the face and hair were painted, corpses were dressed in fine clothing, wrapped in skins, and buried in the ground or on scaffolds. Tools, pipes, and other goods were set by the grave, which was marked by two forked sticks with a crossstick or, in the case of a chief, by a painted log. Various ceremonies were then performed that honored the dead by reenacting a favorite activity.
Capturing prisoners rated higher war honors than killing them. Male prisoners were usually burned and eaten, whereas women and children were distributed among the population. Some were ultimately adopted, but some maintained a slavelike identity.
The Illinois built semipermanent summer villages strung out for miles along river banks. The villages consisted of up to 300 or more lodges, each
With one to four fireplaces and housing up to twelve families. There were also small menstrual/birth huts and possibly an additional structure used for political or ceremonial purposes.
Large, rectangular summer houses were built of woven mats over a pole frame. Mats were also placed on the ground as flooring. The people also built temporary summer and winter hunting camps. Summer huts were bark-covered buildings, whereas winter lodges were covered with rush mats.
Meat formed the most important part of the Illinois diet. Men hunted elk, bear, buffalo, deer, mountain lion, turkey, beaver, and other animals. Women grew corn, beans, and squash. They also gathered a variety of wild fruits, nuts, berries, and roots.
Men fashioned dugout canoes of up to fifty feet in length from butternut trees. They wore breech-clouts, while women wore long dresses. Both sexes wore buffalo robes and blankets. They also tattooed and painted their bodies and wore various personal adornments of animal teeth, colored stones, feathers, and other items.
The Illinois may have come to their historic territory from the Northeast. They may have mixed with the Cahokian (Mississippian) people when they moved into Illinois in the midseventeenth century. The people fought two major wars with the Win-nebagos from about 1630 to 1645: They lost the first and won the second.
Iroquois attacks drove the people west of the Mississippi about 1660. After this time they began slaving raids on Siouan and Pawnee tribes west of the Mississippi. The Illinois tribes first met French explorers in the 1670s and became French allies shortly thereafter. The abandonment of the Illinois River region and a southward movement began around 1700, marking a general defeat at the hands of tribes such as the Kickapoos, Foxes, and Sauks, who also sought French favor. With the exception of the Peorias, who held out in the north until the later eighteenth century, most Illinois tribes became associated with specific French agricultural settlements. By 1800, the Michigameas, Cahokias, and Tamaroas merged with the Kaskaskias and Peorias.
The Wisconsin tribes maintained more or less continuous pressure on the Illinois tribes during the eighteenth century. The final battle may have come after an Illinois Indian, said to be in the pay of Britain, killed Chief Pontiac in 1769. In any case, those Illinois still free of French protection were all but wiped out, suffering upward of 90 percent casualties. Meanwhile, the southern Illinois, through their contact with the French, had become mission-ized, poor, and alcoholic.
Survivors of the wars with the Great Lakes Algonquins, mainly members of the Kaskaskia and Peoria bands, signed treaties in the early nineteenth century ceding their lands to the United States. Their culture practically gone, these people moved to eastern Kansas in 1833, where they lived with the Wea and Piankashaw (Miami) bands until 1867, when they all bought land in northeastern Oklahoma. In 1873 they took the name United Peoria and Miami. Their lands were allotted in 1893, and any remaining tribal land was lost when Oklahoma became a state in 1907. The group reincorporated as the Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma in 1940. They were terminated in 1950 but restored in 1978.
See also Algonquin; Cahokia; Termination.
See Cayuga; Mohawk; Oneida; Onondaga; Seneca, Tuscarora.
"Kickapoo" is possibly from kiwegapaw, "he moves about, standing now here, now there." The Kick-apoos were culturally similar to the Sauks and Foxes and may once have been united with the Shawnees. Several thousand Kickapoos lived around the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers (present-day southern Wisconsin) in the midseventeenth century, although they inhabited present-day Michigan and Ohio earlier and Illinois and Kansas somewhat later. Kickapoos spoke an Algonquin language similar to Sauk and Fox.
All things, animate and inanimate, contained spirits, or manitou. Kicitiata, the supreme manitou, or creator, dwelled in the sky. Tobacco facilitated communication with the manitous. Young people may have undertaken vision quests. Dreams, which may have been encouraged by fasts, also had spiritual significance.
The main ceremony was a weeklong renewal and thanksgiving in early spring, at which time sacred bundles were opened and repaired. The people also celebrated the Green Corn and Buffalo Dances. Priests were in charge of religious
A Kickapoo wichiup, Sac and Fox Agency, Oklahoma, ca. 1880. (National Archives and Records Administration)
Observances. There may have been a ritual office, held by a woman, which gave approval to hold certain ceremonies.
The Kickapoos were divided into constituent bands, which were probably led by chiefs. A council of clan heads made decisions by consensus. Kick-apoo society was organized in patrilineal clans. Furthermore, a dual division formed the basis for various cultural features such as "joking" (informal enforcement of social norms), games, races, and ritual seating. Personal names were tied to dreams or visions. Menstrual seclusion was particularly long and rigorous the first time, at which time the woman was advised by older women on how to behave as an adult. After killing their first game, boys were given a feast, which included songs and prayers.
Courting may have involved the use of a flute. Marriage was finalized by gift giving between the families. Funeral or death ceremonies included feasting, song, and prayer as well as quiet moments. People left the village for four days following a death, after which time ceremonial adoptions were often performed.
Rectangular summer and round or oval winter houses were framed with green saplings. Summer houses were covered with elm bark and often attached to an arbor. Sleeping platforms lay along the sides. Doors faced east, and there was a smoke hole in the roof. Temporary winter houses were covered with woven cattail or tule mats.
Kickapoos were heavily dependent on crops. Women grew corn, beans, and squash, and they gathered various wild foods. Men hunted deer, bear, and other game, including some buffalo, and they fished. Carved wooden prayer sticks recorded prayers and myths as well as events. Pottery containers could hold water. Kickapoos served as intermediaries in the midnineteenth century Comanche horse trade. Kickapoo dress depended largely on their location. The basic items were breechclout, dress or apron, leggings, and moccasins, although they tended to borrow local customs, especially with
Regard to personal ornamentation. Kickapoo warriors were known as extremely fierce, able, and enthusiastic fighters.
The Kickapoos may have originated in southeast Michigan. In the seventeenth century, pressure from the Iroquois drove them west to southern Wisconsin, where they encountered French missionaries. They may have shared villages with the Miamis at that time. Kickapoos entered the fur trade, but throughout the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries they resisted pressure to assimilate and cede their lands. They were often at war with the French during that period, although the two groups established an alliance in 1729. They also fought various Indian tribes.
In the early eighteenth century, the Kickapoos joined tribes such as the Ojibwas, Ottowas, Sauks, and Foxes to defeat the Illinois Confederacy and occupy their territory. The Kickapoos moved south to the Illinois River, where the tribe soon divided. One group headed farther south to the Sangamon River. Known as the Prairie band, they increased their buffalo hunting. The other group moved east toward the Vermillion Branch of the Wabash River. This band retained their forest hunting practices. The band also absorbed the Mascouten, or Prairie Potawatomi, tribe of Indians.
Part of the Prairie band moved into southwest Missouri in the mid-1760s. Following the French defeat in 1763, the Kickapoos transferred their allegiance to the Spanish. They participated in Pontiac's Rebellion and later accepted British aid against the United States, with whom they never had good relations.
The early nineteenth century saw greatly increased non-Native settlement in the region. Most Kickapoos participated in Little Turtle's war. The Vermillion band also supported Tecumseh's Rebellion, which the Prairie band opposed. Both groups, however, were drawn into the War of 1812. Some chiefs of each band ceded the people's Illinois land in 1819, a move that forced most Kickapoos to join the group already living in Missouri.
Some Kickapoos, however, under Chief Mecina and the prophet Kenakuk, continued to resist relocation by passive means as well as guerrilla tactics. They were finally forced to move to Kansas in the early 1830s following their defeat in Black Hawk's war. Most Missouri Kickapoos had accepted a reservation in Kansas in 1832. Some later fought with the United States against the Seminole in 1837.
From their base in Kansas, the tribe broke into several smaller groups, some remaining in Kansas and some migrating to Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico. Horse-stealing raids, particularly in Texas, were an important activity throughout much of the nineteenth century. In 1862, some Kickapoo land was allotted and some was sold to a railroad company.
In the early to mid-1860s, fighting erupted between Mexican Kickapoos and Texas Rangers attempting to prevent some Kansas Kickapoos from crossing Texas to join their relatives. In the 1870s, the U. S. Army illegally crossed the Mexican border and destroyed the main Kickapoo village in Mexico. They also brought a group of women and children back to the Indian Territory as hostages; many men then agreed to leave Mexico and join them there.
In 1883, these people were granted a 100,000-acre reservation in Oklahoma. However, when that reservation was allotted ten years later and pressure to assimilate increased, many people returned to Mexico, first to Nacimiento and then to northern Sonora. In 1908, the Kansas reservation was allotted to individuals. In 1937, the Kansas Kickapoos reorganized under the Indian Reorganization Act. They successfully resisted termination in the 1950s.
See also Agriculture; Algonquin; Horse, Economic Impact; Termination.
"Lenape," or Leni Lenape, means "Human Beings" or "Real People" in the Unami dialect. The Lenapes were part of a group of Algonquin speakers from North Carolina to New York. This group numbered around 10,000 in 1600. The Lenape tribes who lived around the Delaware River are more commonly known as Delaware Indians. This central group of northeastern Algonquin Indians was referred to as "grandfather" by other Algonquin tribes, in recognition of its position as the group from which many local Algonquin tribes diverged.
Like many Algonquins, the Lenapes believed in a great spirit (manitou) as well as the presence of other spirits in all living things. Personal guardian spirits were acquired in adolescence and were said to be connected with future success. The bear sacrifice, held in the midwinter, was the most important of at least five annual religious festivals. Others revolved around foods, such as maple sugar (early
Spring), corn (late spring and late summer), and strawberries (early summer), as well as curing.
After death, spirits were said to travel to an afterlife. Names were given with the benefit of a personal vision by the name giver, which enhanced his or her status. Chiefs often served as religious as well as political leaders of the village. Shamans of both sexes were responsible for holding the curing ceremonies.
Each of the three autonomous divisions maintained its own territory; there was never any political unity. Each village group of several hundred people had its own hereditary chief (sachem or sagamore). The chief had no coercive powers, instead acting as mediator, adviser, and hunt leader. With the chief, other lineage leaders and elders formed a council. Village groups were autonomous, but they often acted in concert for purposes of hunting drives and defense.
There were traditionally three matrilineal clans. Women grew and prepared foods, took care of children, gathered firewood, and prepared skins. Men hunted, fished, traded, fought, cured, made houses and most tools, and served as chiefs. People from the coast tended to visit the interior in the spring, when they moved to fishing and hunting camps, whereas people from the interior visited the coast in the summer. Murder was generally expiated by a payment.
Premarital girls were secluded and observed strict behavioral taboos during their periods. Premarital sexual relations were condoned, but adultery was not, except when consent was given, such as in wife lending on the part of a polygynous chief. Divorce was easily and frequently obtained. Corpses were buried in a sitting position with some possessions. Mourners blackened their faces and visited the grave annually.
Each of thirty to forty villages, located on river and tributary meadows, was surrounded by fields and hunting grounds. Houses were circular, domed wigwams or thirty - to sixty-foot (but up to 100-foot) multifamily, grass or bark-covered, single-doorway longhouses with both pitched and arched roofs. Both dwellings contained smoke holes. Interior longhouses may have been palisaded in times of war.
From at least about 1300, inland groups depended mostly on corn; beans and squash were also important. Game hunted in seasonal trips included deer, elk, bear, raccoons, rabbit, wolves, squirrel, and fowl. Fire surrounds were used as part of a general practice of burning the undergrowth of certain lands. Men also trapped various small mammals, turkeys, and other birds. Coastal people depended mainly on fish and shellfish (generally dried and preserved), seaweed, birds, berries, and meat and oil from stranded whales. Women gathered various roots, greens, wild fruits, and nuts as well as maple sap. Tobacco was also grown.
World History
