Native Americans of North America

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Arts and Crafts

Great Plains Indians used a variety of materials for their arts and crafts. They shaped bows and arrows from wood and carved elegant pipes from stone. Yet perhaps their most valuable resource for creating tools and other objects was the bison. From bison skin they crafted tipi coverings, shields, travois platforms, parfleches, blankets, and clothing—either in rawhide form or softened into leather. They made thread and rope from bison hair and sinews, and fashioned various tools from the bones. They made rattles and other ceremonial objects from the hooves, horns, and skulls.

Great Plains women mastered the art of preparing hides. They stretched the skins on frames or on pegs in the ground and scraped away the flesh. They then worked the rawhide to an even thickness. To soften the hide into leather, they applied to it a mixture of ashes, bison fat and brains, and various plants, and then soaked it in water. Sometimes hair was left on the hides for warmth.

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Post-Contact History

The development of the Great Plains culture area is unique among all the culture areas because the indigenous way of life evolved after Europeans reached the Americas. Some indigenous peoples had contacts with non-Indians before migrating onto the Great Plains from other regions. Other peoples avoided all interaction with the newcomers. Yet they too were affected indirectly through barter with other peoples who traded with or raided non-Indians. The first horses on the Plains, for example, were obtained from Southwest peoples in the 1600s—before non-Indians reached the area. European diseases also probably first reached Great Plains Indians through other indigenous peoples who came into contact with European explorers.

During the colonial period, eastern prairie Indians acquired guns from French and English trading posts in the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys. Horse-mounted Indians with firearms could kill far more bison than those traveling on foot with spears and bows and arrows; surplus food and hides were traded with non-Indians. By the mid-18th century, the prospect of good bison hunting had drawn many tribes from other areas to the Great Plains. At the same time, following the route pioneered by the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1806) up the Missouri River, fur traders began to have extensive contacts with Great Plains peoples.

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Before and during the American Civil War (1861-1865), much of the non-Indian activity on the Great Plains was transient, with traders or migrants to California and Oregon passing through. However, the number of migrants sharply increased after the discovery of gold in California in 1848. The horses and cattle of the pioneers ate the grass needed by the bison and frightened them away, and many bison were shot by non-Indians for food and sport. In retaliation, Indians stole animals from the pioneers and sometimes wiped out entire wagon trains. The U.S. government responded by building a chain of forts across the Great Plains and by assigning the U.S. Army to patrol the main wagon routes. In addition, beginning in the 1830s many indigenous peoples from the eastern United States were forced to relocate westward to the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). This resettlement also affected the migratory hunting patterns of some Great Plains Indians.

After the Civil War ended, the U.S. government began a highly organized campaign to pacify nomadic and warlike Great Plains peoples and to force them onto reservations. Meanwhile, large numbers of settlers continued to move west, and a great many settled permanently on the Great Plains. Beginning in the 1870s, professional hide hunters equipped with large caliber guns contributed to the rapid destruction of the last major bison herds. Hostilities intensified among Indians and settlers. The Great Plains wars reached a climax in the 1870s, with such famous clashes as the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn—the last major Indian victory in U.S. territory. However, the U.S. Army soon rounded up most of the remaining nomadic Indians and put them on reservations. The annihilation of the great bison herds upon which Plains nomads lived—a process completed by the early 1880s—gave Plains peoples little choice but to remain on the reservations. The so-called Ghost Dance Uprising, a religious movement in which Indians of various tribes sought to gather and dance to bring back the bison and their earlier way of life, led to a massacre of one band by U.S. soldiers at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890. This event marked the end of organized Native American military resistance in the United States.

Some Native American unrest occurred on the Canadian Plains as well, but to a lesser degree. Attempts to eradicate Plains Indian culture in the United States and Canada through the early 1900s failed, and indigenous peoples endured. Today, many Great Plains peoples still live on reservations, where they keep cattle and tend fields; some receive income from leases to non-Indian cattle ranchers and mining interests and, more recently, casino gaming. Although many contemporary Indians living in the Great Plains suffer from poverty, they still proudly maintain their traditions.

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Subarctic

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Land and Habitat

The Subarctic culture area is an immense region that stretches from present-day inland Alaska to the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. Most lands in the Subarctic are within the continental interior; the only coastal areas are found along the Atlantic coast and on Hudson Bay. Most of the Subarctic has thick pine forests with some broadleaf trees, called taiga; it opens up on flat, treeless arctic plains, called tundra, on its northern edge. Because of minimal topsoil, most trees in the Subarctic are scraggy and short. In addition to woodlands, the Subarctic contains thousands of lakes, ponds, swamps, rivers, and streams. Mosquitoes and black flies breed in the swamplands. Winters in the Subarctic are long, with deep snow covering the woodlands and thick ice on the lakes. Short summers and poor soil conditions make agriculture impractical.

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Peoples and Languages

At the time of European contact, Subarctic peoples were linguistically separated into two groups. Peoples native to the western Subarctic spoke Athapaskan languages. They included the Chipewyan, Beaver, Kutchin, Ingalik, Kaska, and Tanana, among others. In the eastern Subarctic lived Algonquian-speaking groups, including the Cree, Algonquin, Montagnais, Naskapi, and some bands of Ojibwa (Chippewa). The Churchill River extending northeast to Hudson Bay from western Saskatchewan formed the approximate dividing line between these language groups. The Beothuk of Newfoundland and Labrador were the only exception to this linguistic pattern. They spoke a language known as Beothukan, which some experts believe was distantly related to the Algonquian language. The geographic distribution of the two language families has led some scholars to divide the Subarctic culture area into the Western Subarctic and Eastern Subarctic.

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Early Peoples

Nomadic bands of hunters first roamed the Subarctic region at least 8,000 years ago following game animals, including herds of caribou. There were few peoples in this vast, rugged, and often cold landscape. The peoples of the eastern Subarctic, those of the Algonquian language family, probably arrived in the region first, possibly before 5,000 years ago. They migrated from the west or from the south in ancient times. The majority of their ancestral relatives came to live in the more forgiving environment of the Northeast culture area to the south. The peoples of the western Subarctic, those of the Athapaskan language family, were probably among the last peoples to arrive in the Americas, reaching the Subarctic perhaps about 3,000 years ago. Some Athapaskan peoples eventually migrated southward to warmer climates, including the Apache and Navajo (Diné) of the Southwest culture area sometime before ad 1500. Yet most Athapaskan groups remained in the rugged western Subarctic.

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Diet and Subsistence

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