Native American Architecture

B

Relationship to the Universe and Nature

A more profound difference between European American and Native American perceptions lay in how human beings saw themselves in relationship to the universe and in what they believed their responsibilities were to the natural world and to each other. Most European Americans saw themselves as separate from creation and adversaries of nature, ever struggling to conquer and subdue nature and force it to yield to their will. Native Americans saw themselves as one component of nature, sharing a living spirit that pervaded everything, animate (living) and inanimate (nonliving) objects alike.

Virtually all animate creatures were thought of as human, with some, as it happened, taking the form of people. Thus, native peoples undertook every action with respect for the spirit of the land, the forest, the animals taken for game, the plants harvested for food, and so forth. Peoples of the Great Plains, for example, felt it was a privilege to live in dwellings covered with the skin of the buffalo and thus to partake of the spirit of the animal that provided nearly all their food. Before peoples of the Pacific Northwest built a house, they asked permission of the earth to disturb the ground, so they could make the house. They would offer prayers to the red cedar if they needed a log for the house. To take animals or trees without making these supplications, or to take more than was needed, was to act irreverently. Such action put the relationship between human beings and the rest of nature in a state of imbalance that could lead only to problems. European American settlers found this all-pervasive animism and deep spiritual interconnectedness with the world nearly impossible to understand.

C

Distinct Culture Areas

Links among individual Native American groups were based on similarities in language and geographic situation. Ten distinct areas of shared culture evolved, each of which corresponded with a geographic and climatic zone. Each area had a dominant language family, social customs and religious practices held largely in common, and a broadly shared cosmology (view of the universe). The dwellings and other structures within a geographic and cultural area also tended to follow common patterns characteristic of that area.

In each of the ten geographic and cultural regions, one or at most two distinctive house types tended to prevail. These traditional dwellings, unique to a region, evolved over thousands of years in response to a way of life, to readily available building materials, and to local climate. Houses built in one region would have been impractical and uncomfortable if built in a different region. More important, because houses served as models of the cosmos they would have no meaning in another region.

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Traditional Native American houses began to disappear, often under strong pressure from the United States government, after American traders and missionaries entered native communities in the 1700s and 1800s. Native peoples were soon forced to live in American-style houses, which held no cultural meaning for them and which they often resented. During the last quarter of the 20th century, however, various groups have revived traditional native house forms, especially those rich in imagery and meaning, for ceremonial use. The descriptions of native building forms and town organization in this article rely on descriptions made by European American observers, anywhere from 1500 to 1870.

IV

Southeast Culture Area

Woodlands covered the entire eastern portion of North America when Europeans reached the continent. During the 1500s and 1600s continual battles with European explorers and settlers, and the introduction of smallpox and other European diseases, caused turmoil and dislocation among Native American tribes. By 1700, however, the tribes in eastern North America occupied established areas, and travelers, historians, and others recorded their ways of living.

The Southeast Culture Area extended from what is now the Carolinas south to Florida and west to Louisiana. Most of the tribes in the region spoke Muskogean languages. They included the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. Mound building and ceremonial use of mounds continued in a limited way in the Southeast until the early 18th century. The Etowah Indian Mounds, an important group of flat-topped pyramidal mounds from about 1400 ad, still survive in Georgia.

The tribes in the Southeast generally lived in villages and towns. An early description of Creek towns, written by American naturalist William Bartram during his travels in the 1770s, mentions three essential features in the center of a town. The first was a large circular meetinghouse with a domed roof. Next to it was a square plaza enclosed by four buildings, which was used as a community meeting ground. The third feature was a large court or plaza for ritual ball games. Around this town center, individual houses and agricultural plots were located. The residential compounds of Creek tribal chiefs consisted of a smaller version of the town meeting ground: four buildings arranged around a small square.

Wood was the most available building material in the Southeast. Families typically lived in rectangular houses built of slender wooden poles, made from straight young trees, which were spaced at intervals and placed directly in the earth. Small branches, woven like basketwork, filled the space between the supporting poles. Clay covered the branches and formed a kind of plaster that plugged holes. On many dwellings finely woven mats of reeds or rushes covered the plastered walls, inside and out. Locally available plant materials, such as rushes or straw, were used for the roof. This construction method, of wooden frames filled in with plaster, resembled a medieval European system known as wattle-and-daub. With their thatched roofs, native dwellings of the Southeast somewhat resembled in appearance traditional English cottages of the 15th and 16th centuries.

V

Northeast Culture Area

The Northeast Culture Area began north of the Southeast Area and ran from Virginia through New England and into Canada. The Northeastern woodlands extended westward as far as the Mississippi River. Many of the tribes in the Northeast spoke Algonquian languages. They included the Delaware, Mohegan, and Narragansett in the East and the Fox and Shawnee around the Great Lakes. The Iroquois and other tribes, who spoke Iroquoian languages, also lived in the Northeast, in what is now New York State and southern Canada.

Around the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, native peoples built houses of slender wooden poles pushed directly into the ground in two parallel lines. The poles opposite one another were bent over and tied together at the top to form a rounded roof. Saplings (young, small trees) were attached horizontally to this structure. Mats woven from rushes, or slabs of bark, were sewn together to cover these light frames in overlapping patterns. In The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), English colonizer John Smith described these native houses as being comfortably snug and able to withstand hard rains. Such dwellings could house two or three families.

A

The Wigwam

The most common house type among Algonquian tribes of New England was the wigwam, which means “dwelling” in Algonquian languages. Wigwams resembled Chesapeake Bay houses, but they were circular rather than rectangular in shape. These one- or two-family dwellings were made of saplings placed in the ground in a circle, bent over, and tied together. Additional saplings were then wrapped horizontally around this frame, forming smaller circles as they approached the top to create a dome-shaped structure. The dome was covered with slabs of bark, mats of rushes or reeds, or—in more northern areas—sheets of birch bark. In areas of heavy rainfall, people might add a covering of animal skins, sewn together, to form a more watertight roof. Some wigwams had a cone-shaped frame, made of unbent poles that leaned inward and met at the top. Animal skins also covered these dwellings. Algonquians tended to live in groups in small villages. Communities moved seasonally between a summer town, built near their fields, and a winter town, built in a forested area where game was more easily found.