Native Americans of North America

Article Outline

Introduction; Population: Past and Present; Earliest Peoples; Culture Areas; Traditional Way of Life; History; Native Americans Today

Recreation and Games

Sports and games were an important part of many Native American cultures. Many games held a central place in ceremonies, and many popular sports began as religious rites. Often games prepared participants for such activities as war and hunting. Nearly all Indian games required the participants to prepare spiritually and to demonstrate high standards of sportsmanship. Indians often lavishly decorated their game equipment and wore body paint or decorations during the game. Wagering on the outcome of games was very common. Gambling was not considered to be a moral issue, but rather was part of the social life of the community.

Competitive team sports, such as ball games and foot races, were the most widespread and popular games. The most prevalent ball game was lacrosse, one of a variety of stickball games in which players could not touch the ball with their hands. Played with a single netted racket or stick by the Iroquois and with two rackets by Southeastern tribes, lacrosse is considerably tamer today than its original form. The original form was such a violent game that it was considered to be a peacetime substitute for war, and nearly any strategy was acceptable, including stomping, butting, and biting. Players were often killed in the melee. As many as 700 players participated in the Choctaw version of lacrosse, running, leaping, and tripping each other in their efforts to catch the ball in their sticks and throw it to their goal. Played between the residents of neighboring Choctaw villages, the games were major social events that drew over 1,000 spectators, many of whom wagered skins or furs on the outcome.

Even more popular than lacrosse was the hoop-and-pole game, which required players to stop a rolling hoop by hitting it with a wooden pole or spear. Two players or teams could play, and the highest score was awarded for stopping the hoop with the pointed end of the pole. Played on a smooth, level course roughly 45 m (150 ft) long, the hoop-and-pole game tested fleetness, eyesight, and skill in spear throwing, all essential skills for warfare and hunting. A similar game called chunkey (also spelled chungke or tchung-kee) was played with a stone disk or ring as the target; further variations used netted hoops as targets or darts or arrows instead of poles. Other athletic games included archery, wrestling, foot racing, and after the acquisition of horses, horse racing. Snow snake, a game played in colder northern climates, involved hurling a long, smooth stick on a course of ice or packed snow; the player whose stick slid farthest was the winner.

Men and women devoted a great deal of leisure time to playing games of chance, such as dice games or guessing games. The hand game was a guessing game played throughout much of North America. Teams would take turns guessing which of an opponent’s hands held a marked object. A correct answer won a counting stick (used to tally the score), and the team that won all of the counting sticks claimed a prize. Guesses were often accompanied by singing and drumming. Another guessing game, the moccasin game, required the winner to identify which moccasin hid a stone. The moccasin game was integral to the Navajo (Diné) creation story. In this story, night animals and day animals played the moccasin game to determine whether the Earth should be in total darkness or total light. Neither side won, so each day was divided into periods of darkness and daylight.

Transportation

The most common form of Native American transportation was foot travel. The backpack was the primary means of carrying loads, whether a single woman was carrying home the food that she had gathered for her family or an entire group of people was shifting camp. Women consistently carried heavier loads than men because men had to be prepared to pursue game at any moment and to defend their families. The wheel, used in the Middle East as early as 3500 bc, was absent in the Americas before Europeans arrived.

Canoes were used for transportation nearly everywhere in North America, except for arid regions such as the Great Basin and Southwest. In the Arctic, Subarctic, Northeast, and on the Plateau, most canoes were built of wooden frames covered by bark or animal hides. The Iroquois of the Northeast used elm bark to cover their canoes. Canoes were an essential means of long-distance travel for Iroquois warriors, who might leave their villages for as long as three months at a time on military expeditions, and, soon after their return, go on hunting or trading expeditions that took them far from home. The lightest and most maneuverable canoes, however, were made by the Algonquian Indians, who lived north of the Iroquois in lands where white birch trees were so plentiful that the light of the noonday sun barely reached the forest floor. Bark from the birch trees was sewn into sheets large enough to make a canoe. These exceptionally light, waterproof vessels so impressed French fur trader Samuel de Champlain that he encouraged his men to replace their clumsy French skiffs with birchbark canoes.

Dugout canoes made from large hollowed-out logs were common in much of North America. The peoples of the Northwest Coast were the masters of this method, and some tribes made as many as seven different types of canoes. The largest and most impressive of these types was the Haida war or ceremonial canoe, a seagoing vessel that was as long as 21 m (70 ft) and could hold up to 60 people. The canoe was made by splitting a giant red cedar log lengthwise, shaping it, and hollowing it out with controlled burning and hand tools. A tall prow, elaborately carved and painted, improved the canoe’s stability and repelled wave action in stormy seas. Other Northwest tribes, such as the Nootka and the Makah, also built large seagoing dugout canoes for whaling, seal hunting, and trading. Northwest Indian canoes were highly prized and often used for trade.

Bullboats were round, basin-shaped boats made and used primarily by Mandan women of the Great Plains to transport goods across shallow rivers or streams. To construct a bullboat, several women worked together to stretch bison hide over a willow frame. A single paddler could successfully steer a bullboat. The vessel was kept on a straight course using a drag of driftwood attached to the bison tail that had been left on the hide.

The Ojibwa and other Subarctic peoples used toboggans and snowshoes for winter travel. An Ojibwa family had to move at least once or twice during the winter to new hunting grounds because fresh game was so hard to find. They loaded their goods onto toboggans that were as much as 2.5 m (8 ft) long and were often pulled by dogs. Even with toboggans hauling supplies, women shouldered loads of up to 64 kg (140 lb) on their backs, while men ranged through the woods in search of game. Snow remained on the ground until early spring, so snowshoes were necessary. Their usage determined their shape. Most northern groups preferred long, narrow snowshoes for use on already traveled trails, while more southern groups were partial to rounded snowshoes for traveling over fresh snow. Spruce, birch, or willow provided the frames, and snowshoe webbing came from partly tanned strips of hide. With the proper type of snowshoes to keep him on top of the snow, a hunter could easily keep pace with caribou or moose as the animals moved with difficulty through high drifts.

Until horses became available in the mid-1700s, moving camp on the Great Plains was a lengthy and exhausting experience, and groups were only able to cover 8 to 10 km (5 to 6 mi) per day. Each family used a dog to pull a travois (pronounced truh-VOY), an apparatus that consisted of two poles on either side of the animal that were harnessed to its chest, shoulders, and back. Crossbars covered with hides joined the poles behind the dog and served as the cargo platform; the rear end of the poles dragged on the ground. The family tipi and other belongings were lashed securely to the travois; the travois poles also served as the main poles for the tipi. Because dogs could only carry about 34 kg (75 lb), tipis had to be relatively small. Dogs were also unreliable because they often disappeared while chasing rabbits or were injured during fights with each other.

Horses could travel twice the distance and carry four times the load of a dog. Before the introduction of the horse, old and sick people had to be left behind, but with horses, they could be carried on a horse-drawn travois. Horses could haul heavier, longer poles, so tipis became taller as well as wider. Originally, tipi covers were made to suit the dog’s carrying capacity of 6 to 8 hides, but with horses carrying the weight, tipi covers expanded to 12 or more bison hides. The amount of food, clothing, and household objects Plains Indians could keep also increased because larger loads were easily transportable on horseback.

To learn more about the transportation methods of Native Americans in a specific geographical area, see the Culture Areas section of this article.

Trade

Before European Contact

Trade was extremely important among Native American tribes long before European contact. Some of the earliest evidence of trade within North America comes from copper tools, ornaments, and utensils found at archaeological sites from the Great Plains to the Ohio Valley and New York. Evidence shows that these artifacts were produced by Native Americans in the northern Great Lakes region some 6,000 to 7,000 years ago. At the Indian Knoll site in Kentucky, which is between 3,000 and 7,000 years old, archaeologists have found shell ornaments and copper items. The site is far from the coast and far from any copper source, which means that the people of the Indian Knoll region must have participated in an extensive trade system.

Trade networks were far-reaching and linked nearly all parts of North America. Marine shells from the coast of southern California were traded as far north as southwestern Colorado and as far east as the Texas Panhandle. The Mojave, who lived along the Colorado River in the Southwest, obtained shells and manufactured shell objects from the Angelino Indians in California and traded them to the Hopi in Arizona for textiles and pottery. The macaw, a brightly colored parrot, was highly valued for its feathers. Macaws were transported alive from their Mexican habitat 1,900 km (1,200 mi) to northern New Mexico and Arizona. Nomadic tribes of the Great Plains traded dried meat, fat, tanned hides, tipis, bison robes, and buckskin clothing for the corn, beans, pumpkins, and tobacco cultivated by sedentary village tribes.

After European Contact

Once European goods became available, they were quickly integrated into previously existing trade networks. In the Southwest in the 1850s and 1860s, the Hualapai traded their buckskins for Hopi and Zuni textiles, which they exchanged for horses from the Mojave. The Hualapai then traded the horses for guns and ammunition from the Southern Paiute, who had obtained these firearms from Utah Mormons. The Havasupai, who raised crops in a side branch of the Grand Canyon during the summer, traded their crops for Hualapai deer and mountain sheepskins. The Mojave also farmed corn, pumpkins, and beans that, during times of peace, they traded for Hualapai game. Other highly valued Hualapai commodities included basketry, mescal (a product of the agave plant prepared as food or used to make an alcoholic beverage), and, especially, the rich red ochre pigment that they collected from a cave in their territory. Navajo blankets were especially prized as trade items and were seen as far away as the Great Plains.

Many Native American groups had indirect contact with European culture through trade goods long before they actually encountered European explorers, missionaries, or traders. Metal tools and firearms probably had the greatest impact of the earliest trade items because they made it easier for Native Americans to obtain food and to make clothes and equipment. The acquisition of guns and ammunition became necessary for the survival of most Native American groups. A tribe’s survival could depend on whether it acquired firearms before neighboring rival tribes had them.

Trade with Europeans dramatically changed Native American ways of life. In the Northeast, for example, European demand for furs was so strong that Indian men spent more time trapping fur-bearing animals, especially beavers, than hunting game for their own families, and women spent time tanning them. With furs to trade, they could obtain guns, knives, horses, tools, glass beads, sugar, flour, whiskey, and other desirable trade items. But as tribes became increasingly dependent on European goods, their self-sufficient ways of hunting, gathering, and farming began to vanish. In addition, trade with Europeans exposed Indian groups to devastating diseases and introduced alcohol addiction. See Fur Trade in North America.

Money

Although no true money existed in Native American societies before Europeans came, some articles were used as media of exchange: dentalia (tooth shells) on the Northwest Coast, clamshell disk beads in California, and beaver furs in the Subarctic. In the Northeast, beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries, many tribes used wampum, cylindrical beads fashioned from the central column of seashells. Whelk shells were used for the white variety and quahog shells for the dark purple or “black” variety. The beads were woven into strings, belts, sashes, headbands, and other items. Pictographs—designs that represented figures or other forms—were sometimes woven into wampum belts. For example, the George Washington Covenant Belt, which commemorated a peace treaty between the United States and the Iroquois League, included 13 large human figures that represented the 13 founding states of the United States. The value of wampum increased as it moved farther from its place of manufacture.

Among Native Americans, the use of wampum as a medium of exchange was originally less important than its ceremonial functions. For example, among the Iroquois it was traditional to accompany important statements with a gift to demonstrate the sincerity and significance of the statement. In time, wampum became the most appropriate and customary gift because it was such a rare and prized item that took intensive labor and time to produce. In addition, wampum came to serve as a letter of introduction and a certificate of authority. Treaties between the Iroquois and other Indian nations, as well as those between the Iroquois and European nations, were accompanied by an exchange of wampum to signify the sincerity of the parties involved. Wampum beads were also sometimes used in religious ceremonies.

Beginning in the 17th century, however, wampum drew the attention of Europeans who were trying to encourage Native Americans to provide them with furs. It soon became an important medium of exchange. Indians increased their wampum production to obtain goods from Dutch and English traders, who then traded the wampum to other groups for furs. In the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s, Europeans established wampum factories on Long Island and in New Jersey to mass-produce wampum for trade.