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- Us history to 1877
- Us history to 1877
- Ch. 1 pre-colombian era
Mesoamerican indians (north)
In what became the United States, there lived hundreds of thousands of people from dozens upon dozens of tribes or affiliations. They spoke different languages. They developed different cultural strategies, however they tended to be tied together by trade and thus what we will look at below are some of the shared characteristics of Indians who lived in the North America.Again, nearly none of these Indians embraced the written record, thus what we know about them tends to be handed down orally over time. From Indian to Indian. From Indians to Europeans. And from Europeans to historians. And of course today with the internet, nearly all of these Indians I am going to talk about maintain their own web presence. One of the more less-understood cultures was the Mississipian Society. These Indians lived along the banks of the Mississippi and their main characteristic were the mounds they built and left behind, thus they are also know as the mound-builders. Most of the mounds are just that -a mound. A few were built in the likeness of animals, such as a snake when viewed from the air. Something similar to the Nazca lines of Peru. Let's turn to the four corners of what became the United States and examine some of the Indian groups that we will be touching upon throughout this whole class. From the Northeast we have the Iroquois. From the Southeast we have the Cherokee. From the Southwest there's the Pueblo Indians, and from the Pacific Northwest, the Chinook Indians. First the Iroquois. The Iroquois were not an indian per se, but rather a political organization made up of several tribes from the Northeast: Senaca, Onondaga, Oneida, Tuscarora, Cayuga and the Mohawk. These six tribes lived in a densely populated region. Why do people go to war? Over resources is the answer. And thus these six tribes were frequently at war with each other over access to resources. Now sometime in late March or early April of 1450, an Indian named Hiawatha approached the chiefs of the six nations and told them that he wanted to create a confederation of the six tribes in order to end the fighting. Hiawatha was rebuked. So Hiawatha told them that he was so powerful he could blot out the sun and unless they created this confederation with Hiawatha in charge, he would blot out the sun.The other leaders ignored him so Hiawatha blotted out the sun sometime in late March or early April of 1450. Now, the Indians of the Northeast did not use the Julian calendar so they would have no knowledge of such devices as "March" or the year "1450." Yet historians believe that Hiawatha talked about creating this confederacy in late March or early April of 1450. So how do we know that? We know that because sometime in late March or early April in 1450 there was a solar eclipse that would have been viewable throughout the Northeast. In this case, myth and science meet. By the way, after the sun came back the other leaders decided to form the Iroquois Confederacy and made Hiawatha their leader. The Iroquois was a farming people and farming was a woman's job. The most important or powerful women in the Iroquois community farmed corn. The head of the corn farmers also selected their tribes representatives on the Iroquois council and they instructed the male representative how they will vote on council matters. In other words, Iroquois women were powerful, certainly more powerful than their European counterparts.
Cherokee, publo, and chinook
An example of an Indian tribe that lived in what became the Southeast portion of the United States are the Cherokee and one of the Cherokee war leaders was a man named Dragging Canoe who fought on the side of the British during the American Revolution. Now, most civilizations are patrilineally descendant. What's your last name? Where did you get it from? Your dad? I am not shocked. Most civilizations get their last names from their father -that's called patrilineally descendant. The Cherokee, however, were matrilineally descendant. In other words, they got their names from their mothers. Women were powerful in Cherokee society. When a man and a woman got married, the man packed his belongings and moved into his wife's house. Actually, the house belonged to her mother. So gentlemen, your mother-in-law would rule the Cherokee household and when she died, the eldest daughter took over. Cherokee had divorce, however only women could initiative the proceedings. It was a simple thing, just toss of all his clothes and stuff outside of the house. There. You are now divorced, so it's time to move back in with mom and man, you guys.
An example of a Indian tribe that resided in the American southwest is the Pueblo, named by the Spanish because of their dwellings. Women had the power of life and death over men in Pueblo society. They believed that all a woman has to do was to think bad thoughts about a man and then he would die. The good news, gentlemen, is that not every woman in Pueblo society can kill you merely by thinking about you. In fact, when your born no women can kill you, you will give that power to women. Now folks, what do you think a guy would want or want to do in exchange for granting the power of death over to a woman? Think hard. The answer is sex. The Pueblos believed that every time you had sex with a woman, you gave that woman the power to kill you. So, this was probably s strategy developed to insure monogamy. I mean, if you grew up in a society that believed that every woman you had sex with could potentially kill you just by thinking about you, you would probably limit your sexual partners to say, just one! In fact, when the Spanish invaded, it was not the Pueblo warriors who first attacked, but rather Pueblo women. Pueblo women threw themselves at the Spanish soldiers, hoping that after having sex with them they would be able to kill them. But it did not work. "When Jesus came, the Corn Mother went away," became a Pueblo saying after the fifteenth century. By the way, the COrn other was the Pueblo Indians' chief deity, chief protector and provider.Finally, we go to the Pacific Northwest. Living in the Pacific Northwest was something akin to living in a grocery store. There was an overabundance of berries, farm land, fish, and game. There were so many resources that the people of the Pacific Northwest had no need to fight over the resources. With a lot of extra time (and money) on their hands, Indians of the Pacific Northwest, such as the Chinook developed artwork. For example, they build and decorated totem poles. Chinook women made highly decorated (with beads) clothing and blankets, such as the work in the attached photo of a Chinook woman named Te-Mow-E-Ne. Indian women, because they were not supporting their men in combat, had time to develop arts and crafts. In fact, Indians of the Pacific Northwest developed a kind of an anti-war strategy they called the Potlatch. Potlatch was a week-long festival. A meeting of Indians from Alaska to California on the banks of the Puget Sound, near the city of what we call today Seattle. Indians would come from far and wide with their excess building supplies, food, canoes, fishing equipment, clothes, et cetera, and trade with the other Indians. They also traded family members. For example, you live in Alaska and your child complains to you that if she sees one more snowflake her head will explode. So at the next Potlatch you send her with an Indian family from California and over the next year your daughter is taught about the language and customs of her newly adopted family. Then they bring her back at the next Potlatch where she shares all of her newly found knowledge to her original family. Potlatch continues today in Seattle, although today Potlatch is more of a celebration of Indian culture, although you can still get your fill of smoked salmon.
Ok, time to wrap it up. As I said at the beginning, Indians of North America spoke different languages and embraced different cultural strategies, yet they shared much in common. For example, they had a pantheon of gods but their chief god was almost always female such as "Mother Earth" or the "Corn Mother." All of these Indian societies embraced powerful positions (relative to European women) in their societies. They held seasonal festivals (so too did Europeans) and they were animistic. They tended to see a spirituality in everything: rocks, birds, trees, clouds, rain and they believed in the connectivity between everything in nature and themselves. So all that's left is the big, big, big question. Why do you suppose that women played so prominently in early American Indian religious, political, and social life? Well the answer was kind of given to you above. Their prime deity was female. Indians, such as the Pueblo, called her the "Corn Mother" and believed that the reason people existed was because of her. For a long time the earth was without people. People existed, they just did not live on the Earth. Almost all of the gods did not want to populate the Earth with people, except for the Corn other, whose job it was to make sure that corn grows on the Earth. So one day the Corn Mother took a corn seed and put people inside. She panted it and the corn grew, cracked the surface, and opened up allowing all the people to spill out and populate the planet. Female deities such as the Corn Mother or Mother Earth provided the subsistence for Indians. Indians owed their lives to the actions of these female gods and thus possible women were then elevated in status in society. Now, women's strong positions in the tribes will be a major cause of strife when the English show up. First, in the English mindset men farm. To farm was a manly endeavor. Farming increased your manliness. So when they saw Indian women farming the English concluded that their men are inherently weak and thus will be easy to push aside. Second, in English society men hunted for sport, for fun. Not for sustenance. Yet in Indian societies men hunted for food and thus the English concluded that Indians were inherently poor, debased creatures. Again, someone who will be easily pushed aside. The Indian wars will start in 1492. They will come to an end on a cold, wintry day at the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation of Wounded Knee in December of 1890. That's nearly four hundred years of warfare.
Source:
OpenStax, Us history to 1877. OpenStax CNX. Jan 20, 2013 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11483/1.1
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