Abenaki
in Vermont learned from childhood that the Creator, Tabaldac, had set aside the rivers and mountains of their homeland for their eternal use. Each landmark had a story: An enormous boulder in Lake Champlain, for instance, contained the spirit of the giant Odzihozo, who in his birth pangs had gouged out the basin that held the lake's waters. These stories, told by firelight during long winter evenings, reminded people of why things were the way there, and of their own place in the world around them.
tended to move about seasonally. Abenaki groups congregated in farm villages for planting and harvesting but migrated to waterfalls and other choice sites when salmon, shad, and alewife headed upstream to spawn in the spring.
held celebrations to mark the time of spring planting, the ripening of blueberries, the bringing in of the corn. The activity of the hunt...also required powerful rituals to ensure success. Hunters knew the habits and habitats of the animal world intimately, and they felt an almost personal bond with the animals they tracked. Before setting out, each hunter sought to discover his quarry in a dream-a sign that the creature would willingly surrender itself to his spear or arrow. After making the kill, a hunter treated the carcass with respect, ceremoniously burying the carcass with respect, ceremoniously buring the bones lest the animal's spirit take offense and depart forever from the hunting grounds.
were in the northern New England area.
sided with the French in the 17th century, however tried to remain neutral during the 1770's. In the 1780's, Abenaki...tried against all odds to maintain their ancient way of life-hunting, gathering, roaming the fringes of what had once been extensive homelands.
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Acoma Pueblo...
conversed in Keresan, a language unique to the Southwest.
In the Keres culture of Acoma Pueblo, the cacique bore the title of Inside Chief, signifying his power within the village. Beyond the pueblo walls, power passed to one or more war leaders, or Outside Chiefs, who were responsible for constructing defenses and keeping watch against invaders.
say the earth was formed when the Great Father Uchtsiti, Lord of the Sun, hurled a clot of his own blood into the heavens. In the soil of this new world, he set germinating the souls of two sisters, the Corn Mothers, who were raised to maturity by a spirit called Thought Woman. When the time was ripe, Thought Woman gave the two sisters baskets filled with seeds and showed them the way to the earth's surface. Corn was the first thing they planted. They learned to cultivate and harvest it, to grind and cook it, and to make daily offerings of cornmeal and pollen to their father, Uchtsiti. These lessons the Acomans would practice each day of their lives
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Drought in the 1100's to the 1200's was caused, as explained by Acoma storytellers, who say that one night the Horned Water Serpent, spirit of rain and fertility, abruptly left his people. No amount of prayer, no charms or dances of the rain priests, would bring him back. Unable to survive without their snake god, the people followed his trail until it reached a river. There they established a new home.
The people of Acoma-so the elders recounted-once followed the Salt Mother's (an elderly matriarch who gave herself freely to anyone who sought her) trail far into the wilderness, trekking past dry gulches and sage-purpled hills for days on end. Finally they reached a large salt lake. "This is my home," the Salt Mother declared. After that, all who traveled there read their fortune in the water, and if ailing in body they were made well again.
When the column of Spanish troops came into view on a cold winter afternoon-January 21, 1599, by European reckoning-the fighting men of Acoma fanned out from their village to guard the edge of the mesa. As the Spaniards drew closer, the defenders unleashed a barrage of insults, rocks, and arrows from more than 300 feet above. Just seven weeks earlier, a party of Spanish soldiers seeking food had been treated in a friendly manner until their demands turned aggressive-and provoked a furious reaction. When it was over, almost all the intruders were dead, including their commander, Juan de Zaldivar, nephew of the military govenror of New Mexico, Juan de Onate
Resolved to make an example of Acoma, Onate dispatched 70 of his best men under the command of Vicente de Zaldivar...These were the troops approaching the seemingly impregnable "Sky City" that January afternoon, and with them arrived a harsh new reality. Over the next 3 days the Spaniards fought their way to the top of the mesa, where they rolled out a fearsome new weapon-a cannon that spewed thundrous blasts of small stones, tearing flesh and shattering bones. The battle became a massacre. As many as 800 Acomans soon lay dead in the rubble of their ruined city. Some 500 survivors were herded into dismal captivity: all males over the age of 12 were condemned to 20 years' servitude; those over 25 were also sentenced to have one foot cut off. In time, some of the Acomans managed to escape and made their way home, there to begin the long process of rebuilding. The Sky City has been continuously inhabited since then, and never again has it fallen to an invader.
The Acoma 16th century pueblo-settlement still survives west of the Rio Grande in midwest New Mexico.
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Aleutians...
were descended from the Anungulas thought to have migrated from Siberia and are closely related by language and facing similar challenges were the Inuit, known to white as Eskimos.
divided into two cultures around 4000 BC, the Norton (spreading out from Norton Sound along Alaska's perimeter) and Dorset (reaching eastward from the Mackenzie River).
The Nortons contrived the first toggle harpoons and light, maneuverable kayaks they built to ply the frigid coastal waters. The Dorset people moved eastward all the way to the Atlantic and Greenland.
An Orthodox priest, Ivan Veniaminov, arrived in Aleutian territoy in 1824. He built a church, founded schools, and devised an Aleut alphabet.
inhabited the islands that arc 1,000 miles west from Alaska. They were superb kayakers; in fog, they would navigate by wind direction, the cries of gulls, the crash of surf, wave shapes, and shifts in water currents. They also hunted birds, gathered roots and berries, and wove beautiful watertight baskets from the tall grasses that grew on the beaches.
While hunting, a kayaker invoked the spirit of the animals he pursued. Sometimes he wore a visored helmet made of steam-bent wood, painted with signs that would call the animals to him. Plumes of sea-lion whiskers each marked a successful catch, testifying to his hunting prowess.
By 1763 people of several islands had suffered enough from Russian fur traders. They waited until 5 Russian ships came within striking distance; then they attacked-and in one stroke destroyed 4 ships and killed most of the crew members. The Russian retaliation appeared in the person of a ruthless and determined navigator name Ivan Soloviev. Moving swiftly, Soloviev destroyed 18 villages on one island, every native dwelling on a second island, and several more on a third....Prisoners faced terrible abuses. By one account, Soloviev, wondering how many bodies a musket ball could penetrate, tied a dozen Aleuts in a row, front to back, and fired a shot. The bullet stopped at the 9th man.
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Anasazi
were of the Southwest and built apartmentlike dwellings of a size and complexity not matched until the cola-powered urbanization of the 19th century.
The Anasazi community of Pueblo Bonito was built by AD 900 in Chaco Canyon, NM
Within an area of 32 square miles are nine old Anasazi towns, each containing hundreds of rooms capable of housing thousands of people. The communal dwellings were "solar powered" in that their dressed stone walls were built to take maximum advantage of the sun's heat in winter and to limit exposure in summer.
were reknowned basket makers. A basket discovered in a cave in Arizona was made of sturdy yucca fibers and decorated with plant and mineral pigments, still had 48 ears of corn stored in it.
Chaco was considered a "capital of capitalism", for it appears to have been the center of a turquoise-based economy...and was also a center of learning, certainly in astronomy as well as architecture. But it remains an enigma. Why was it abandoned in the 15th century? Why have few human remains been found there? Why did Chaco have the capacity to house a population several times larger than what the land surrounding it could possibly support? Only one thing seems clear...the reason for Chaco's abandonment which occurred around 1450's...decades of drought.
Chaco Canyon was the center of a far-flung cultural area, its parts connected by a star-burst of roads that stretched as far as 400 miles unerringly straight lines. Sometimes several yards wide, these roads ignored topography, running in carved steps straight up and down canyon walls. Since the Anasazi had neither vehicles nor beasts of burden, the design of these roads must have had symbolic importance; they manifested community and communication at least as much as they carried freight.
No one knows what language the Anasazi spoke or even what they called themselves. Their modern name is Navajo meaning "enemy ancestors."
Their heartland was a lofty, semi-arid plateau in the Four Corners region. Here, after centuries of nomadic hunting and foraging, they settled in and began to raise corn, make pottery, and acquire the amenities of permanent habitation.
They planned their farming and ceremonial cycles by watching the skies, noting the position of the sun, moon, and stars. Notches were cut into sticks.. .Carved symbols on these calendar sticks indicated the dates of rituals. Each morning at dawn the village high priest would make careful note of the place on the horizon where the sun's first rays appeared....The priest's observations served as a kind of landscape calendar, allowing him to calculate the time for planting crops or for staging certain festivals.
Certain sun rituals were common to all Anasazi groups. They greeted the morning sun by facing east and offering a pinch of cornmeal. Mothers held newborn babies up to the dawn to receive the sun's blessing. As with all things, the Anasazi knew their bond with the sun was based on mutual obligation: show it proper respect, and it would reward you with the gift of fine weather.
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Apache
speak the Athabscan language, which originated in their former homeland: the vast subarctic taiga of northwestern Canada.
arrived in the Southwest during 15th & 16th centuries. They set up camp on the outskirts of the pueblos, dressed in animal skins, used dogs as pack animals, and pitched tentlike dwellings made of brush or hide, called wikiups.
They exchanged buffalo hides, tallow and meat, bones that could be worked into needles and scrapers, and salt from the desert with the Pueblos for pottery, cotton, blankets, turquoise, corn and other goods. But at times they simply saw what they wanted and took it. They became known among the Pueblo villages by another name, apachu, "the enemy". However, the Apache and Pueblos managed to maintain generally peaceful relations. But the arrival of the Spaniards changed everything.
One source of friction was the activity of Spanish slave traders, who hunted down captives to serve as labor in the silver mines of Chihuahua in northern Mexico. The Apache, in turn, raided Spanish settlements to seize cattle, horses, firearms, and captives of their own.
Their prowess in battle became the stuff of legend. An Apache warrior, it was said, could run 50 miles without stopping and travel more swiftly than a troop of mounted soldiers. During the mid-1700's, one Apache raid caused as many as 4,000 colonists to lose their lives. In the late 1800's, one U.S. Army general who had fought them meant it as a grudging compliment when he described the Apache as "tigers of the human species."
The Apache saw themselves differently, they faced constant struggle to survive. When they raided a village, they did so from pure necessity, to provide corn for their families when game was scarce. Most of the time they went their own way, moving from camp to camp in pursuit of deer and buffalo, collecting roots and berries, sometimes planting seeds that they later returned to harvest.
They called themselves Nide, an Athabascan word meaning "the people."
Apache lived in extended family groups, all loosely related through the female line. Generally speaking, each group operated independently under a respected family leader....settling its own disputes, answering to no higher human authority. The main exception to this occurred during wartime, when neighboring groups banded together to fight a common enemy. Unlike ordinary raiding, where the main object was to acquire food and possessions, war meant lethal business: an act of vengeance for the deaths of band members in earlier raids or battles. Leaders of the local family groups would meet in council to elect a war chief, who led the campaign. But if any one group preferred to follow its own war chief, it was free to do so.
Apache bands that roamed the same area admitted to a loose cultural kinship. Thus, the Jicarilla of northeastern New Mexico hunted buffalo in the plains, planted corn in the mountains...By contrast, the Mescalero to the south were hunter-gatherers who developed an appetite for the roasted heads of wild mescal plants. The Chiricahua, fiercest of all tribal groups, raided along the Mexican border, while the more peaceble Western Apache of Arizona spent part of each year farming. Two other tribal divisions, the Lipan and Kiowa-Apache, lived as plainsmen in western Kansas and Texas. Despite these differences, all Apache groups spoke variations of the same Athabascan language. And all subscribed to certain common customs and beliefs.
A strict code of conduct governed Apache life, based on strong family loyalties. The most important bond led from an Apache mother to her children and on to her grandchildren....Beyond this code of propriety and family obligations, the Apache shared a rich oral history of myths and legends and a legacy of intense religious devotion that touched virtually every aspect of their lives.
In 1861, the cooperation between the Americans and Apache evaporated when the Chiricahua Apache chief Cochise (who had granted the Americans use of Apache Pass) was falsely accused of stealing cattle and kidnapping a child. Cochise arrived with his brother and two nephews at Apache Pass under a flag of truce to discuss the accusations against him with an army officer-who promptly tried to take them all prisoner. Cochise managed to escape and soon seized three civilian captives to exchange for his relatives, but the offer was refused, and Cochise, enraged, killed the hostages. The army in turn hanged his brother and nephews, triggering the furious vendetta known as the Cochise War. Before it was over, some 150 whites were dead, and the combined forces of Cochise and his father-in-law, Mangas Coloradas-"Red Sleeves,"...had brought all California-bound traffic through Apache Pass to standstill.
During a pitched battle in July 1862, an estimated 500 Apache fighters...engaged the Californians in ferocious combat until the enemy howitzers forced them to retreat. In a later skirmish Mangas, then in his seventies, was struck by a bullet in the chest. Surviving but in fragile health, Mangas sought to parley for peace. In January 1863 he agreed to meet with an officer of the California militia - a trap, as it turned out. Mangas was lockd up at Ft. McLane, and when some soldiers began to taunt him one night with heated bayonets, he rose to protect himself and was shot dead-trying to escape, the official report said.
Cochise assumed leadership of the hostiles. From his stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains of sourthern Arizona, he and about 200 warriors renewed their attacks on white settlements. At this point another US commander, Gen. George Crook, tried a strategy that proved more effective than any firearm-using Apache scouts as diplomats who traveled from band to band, cajoling their kinsmen to move onto federal reservations. Reassured that his people would not be forced to relocate to the dreaded Ft. Tularosa in western New Mexico, but instead could retain their ancestral lands on a reservation in the Chiricahua mountains, Cochise and his followers relented in the fall of 1872.
A peaceful interlude for the Apache held until 1875, when the government sought to consolidate all the Apache bands on the San Carlos Reservation along the Gila River. Many independent-minded fighters among the Warm Springs and Chiricahua groups balked at the idea. Leading the Warm Springs renegades was Victorio who fled from San Carlos in September 1877 with more than 300 folowers. Recaptured a month later, he staged another breakout with 80 warriors within a year. Victorio's swift-moving bands crossed the Rio Grande repeatedly-until a sharpshooter killed him in Chihuahua, Mexico in October 1880.
Shortly after Victorio's death the appalling conditions on the San Carlos Reservation sparked a further series of Apache breakouts...a new leader emerged from among the Apache guerrillas, a seasoned fighter who had fought alongside Cochise and Victorio. He was named Goyathlay, or "One Who Yawns," but he was better known as Geronimo. Geronimo led about 70 Chiricahua warriors along with their families across the Rio Grande....But this time a regiment of Mexican troops managed to cut off most of the Apache women and children and slaughtered them all. General Crook ...was back in Arizona territory. War-weary and losing followers, Geromino managed to evade the paid Apache scouts Crook used to track him down until May 1883, when Crook located his base camp and took the women and children hostage. The last of Geromino's band finally gave themselves up in March 1884.
In May 1885 Geronimo and other leaders were caught consuming home-brewed corn beer, a violation of army rules. While the authorities debated his punishment, Geronimo cut the telegraph wires, killed a ranching family, and slipped back into his old haunts in Mexico's Sierra Madre with 134 warriors. In March 1886, Crook finally managed a two-day parley with Geronimo in Mexico's Canon de los Embudos. Geronimo agreed to surrender and accept a two-year imprisonment at Ft Marion, 2,000 miles away in Florida. But along the way, while being led to Ft Bowie by Apache scouts, Geronimo and a handful of his followers broke free again.
The army at this point replaced Crook with Gen. Nelson Miles, who committed 5,000 troops and 400 Apache scouts to the recapture of Geronimo. Even when confronted by a force of this magnitude...Geronimo's band of 38 men, women, and children still eluded their pursuers for six months. When Apache scouts finally talked Geronimo into laying down his gun in early September 1886, the surrender was bloodless and strangely anticlimactic.
Recounted Geronimo's cousin Jason Betzinex:"Kayitah [an Apache scout] delivered General Miles' message. The general wanted them to give themselves up without any guarantees. The Indians seemed stunned. Finally Geronimo's half-brother, White Horse, spoke out. 'I am going to surrender. My wife and children have been captured. I love them, and want to be with them.' Then another brother said that if White Horse was going, he would go too. In a moment the third and youngest brother made a similar statement. Geronimo stood for a few moments without speaking. At length he said slowly, "I don't know what to do. I have been depending heavily on you three men. You have been great fighters in battle. If you are going to surrender, there is no use in my going without you. I will give up with you.'"
Almost immediately Gen Miles had Geronimo's band taken into custody-along with the Apache scouts who had tracked him down-and put on a train for Florida. Their destination was Ft Marion, the old Spanish fortress in St. Augustine where the army imprisoned its most dangerous Indians. There Geronimo would spend the next eight years. Released from confinement in 1894, the old guerilla accepted an offer from the Kiowa and Comanche to share their reservation in Indian Territory and spent his final years as a farmer outside Oklahoma's Ft Sill. He joined the Dutch Reformed church, where he taught Sunday school. Later, with government approval, Geronimo spent a year with a Wild West show and appeared in Omaha, Buffalo, New York, and at the St. Louis World's Fair, where he made money selling his photographs and bows and arrows. In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt invited him to Washington DC to ride in the inaugural parade. But to the day of his death in 1909, Arizona never considered Geronimo safe enough to let him set foot in his homeland again.
Around 1917 after the Selective Service Act was passed, many Native Americans had rushed to join the armed forces. By war's end, about 17,000 were in uniform-close to 30% of adult Indian males, double the national average. Commanding General John J. Pershing authorized an Apache company of scouts: some of them were descendants of warriors Pershing himself had fought on the Sothwestern frontier 30 years earlier.
In protest of Nazi Germany's aggression in Europe, the Apache along with the Navajo, Papago and Hopi, banned the swastika, an ancient native symbol, from their blanket and basket designs. Apache Miguel Flores and Hopi Fred Kabotie signed the document proclaiming the ban in February 1940.
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Arapaho
Warriors were "age-graded", boys grew up through membership in an advancing series of societies, each with increased responsibilities.
Unique to their history was the sacred object, a Flat Pipe.
They were given the name "Arapaho" from the Pawnee meaning "he buys or trades", their self designation is Hinonoeino, "Big Sky People".
In one version of the Sun Dance, the Arapaho placed a bleached and decorated buffalo skull stuffed with prairie grass on the Sun Dance altar to serve as a temporary dwelling place for the Great Spirit during the proceedings.
They allied with the Sioux during the late 18th century, where they with the Cheyenne became the most formidable fighting force on the northern Plains. The Cheyenne and the Arapaho made peace in 1840.
In 1864, the Cheyenne and Arapaho had settled along Sand Creek as ordered by a post commander at Ft. Lyon, to whom they had surrendered. Just after sunrise on Dec 28, 1864, ragtag troops, led by a former clergyman, Col John M Chivington, found their quiet encampment. In a matter of minutes Chivington delivered his infamous battle cry-"Kill them all, big and small, nits make lice"-and his men attacked. Young and old, male and female, every Indian was fair game.
"I saw the bodies of those lying there cut all to pieces," an eyewitness later testified, "worse mutilated than any I ever saw before, the women all cut to pieces...children two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors." Of 123 dead, nearly 100 were women and children....."Colorado Soldiers Have Again Covered Themselves With Glory," headlined the Denver News. At the same time, calls for peace and compassion were heard...demanded an inquiry into the events at Sand Creek. At length the government acted: In 1865, a congressional team headed by Sen. James Doolittle of Wisconsin was dispatched to interview Indians, traders and missionaries across the West. Its goals were to establish who was to blame for Sand Creek and to determine why the populations on reservations such as Bosque Redondo were declining so rapidly.
The commission's final report recommended no action against Chivington or his men. It did cite such factors as disease, lawlessness by whites, corruption by Indian agents, and the loss of hunting grounds as causes of Indian depopulation-but offered no relief for the general "Indian problem", which, it concluded, "can never be remedied until the Indian race is civilized or shall entirely disappear."
Enraged at the Sand Creek slaughter, war chiefs of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux had in the meantime held a council near the Republican River. Even as the Doolittle team was conducting its interviews, their warriors descended on stagecoaches and ranches, tore down telegraph lines, and raided with impunity from Colorado into the Dakotas.
In October 1867, the US government and the Plains Indians held the last major peace treaty negotiations. The first meeting took place in the valley of Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas. The final Medicine Lodge Creek treaty created two large reservations in Indian Territory-one for the Kiowa and Comanche in the Leased District, and one for the Cheyenne and Arapaho in the Cherokee Outlet-for the containment and pacification of these southern tribes.
In 1876, Gen Philip Sheridan, proposed to confront the Indian hostiles-composed of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho, who had been raiding angry over the promised but undelivered goods from the Medicine Lodge treaty and also the deep, abiding hatred of white men that the Sand Creek Massacre had planted. His three army columns, amounting to about 2,500 men, would include Gen. Alfred Terry and Col. George A Custer. Custer made an impulsive and fatal decision. Dividing his troops into three attacking groups, he positioned them on a ridge above the camp. In the course of an hour, Custer and every one of his men perished; only a horse name Comanche, belonging to one of Custer's captains was left alive.
On the reservation, the Arapaho at Wind River, Wyoming, a weekly ration in 1884 included 4 lbs of beef and 1.6 lbs of flour per person. But widespread corruption in the BIA siphoned off a sizable amount of the money appropriated by Congress each year; by 1890 the weekly ration at Wind River was down to 14 oz of beef and 8 oz of flour-and only about half the eligible people received even that.
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Blackfeet
Would travel to the Arkansas' hot springs to gather together with other tribes to hunt, trade, and take the healing waters. Even when their peoples were at war, individuals of opposing tribes could come together here in safety and peace.
According to Blackfeet storytellers, their forefathers successfully goaded buffalo to their deaths by "buffalo jumps" only when a gifted shaman oversaw the proceedings. At the start, hunt leaders would position women and children behind piles of stones arranged in a V-shape that narrowed to a point at the edge of a sheer cliff. The buffalo were enticed to enter the wedge by a slow-hobbling man disguised in a fur robe. Other people brought up the rear, yelling and flapping robes and waving the scented smoke of burning cedar in the air. This gave the impression of a terrifying forest fire, causing the great beasts to stampede over the edge of the cliff. Down below, a makeshift enclosure prevented wounded animals from escaping, while arrows and spears rained down from all sides until the lifeless carcasses could be approached by the butchering parties.
Nearby, on the flat prairie, there would be a campsite where women quartered and finally "flaked" the fresh meat, slicing very thin strips and drying them on pole racks. The dried meat was later prepared in various ways; a favorite and highly nutritious method was to pound it with granite pestles, blending in dried berries and buffalo tallow, and finally packing the mix into rawhide containers later winter consumption.
They survived by hunting and gathering in the wooded pockets and broad grasslands of southern Manitoba and western Saskatchewan.
The horse effigy were often used to honor specially trained warrior horses that had distinguished themselves in battle.
Told of an orphan boy, considered dim-witted, who sought this mysterious creature in a spirit lake. After undergoing a series of ordeals, he finally reached the lake and plunged into its waters. Underneath was a sacred landscape, where a spirit chief led him to galloping, lively pono-makita, or "elk dogs." From the spirit chief the boy requested part of the elk dog herd. When he rode back into his home village, his people thought he was some half-man, half-animal monster. The boy turned the horses over to the people, saying, "Now we no longer need be humble footsloggers, because these animals will carry us swiftly everywhere we want to go. Now buffalo hunting will be easy. Now our tepees will be larger, our possessions will be greater, because an elk dog travois can carry a load ten times bigger that that of a dog."
After the appearence of horses, tepees doubled in height and Blackfeet women began sewing such large tepees that their hide covers had to be tailored in two halves, with store-bought brass buttons used to fasten them up the western side, while old-fashioned willow pins were used to lace them together on the eastern doorway side.
Blackfeet boys were "age-graded" as they grew up through membership in an advancing series of societies, each with increased responsibilities.
Among the Blackfeet, buffalo-calling ceremonies were performed by members of the all-female mutokaiks, or Buffalo Bull Society.
A Blackfeet four-pole tepee floor plan shows the doorway facing the rising sun. Its steeper rear side braces the tilted structure against prevailing westerly winds, allowing the fire to be directly below the smoke flaps.
In 1839-1840, small pox broke out, killing as many as 8,000 Blackfeet. In 1883-1884, the Montana Blackfeet, already reduced to little more than 2,000 in all, were unable to locate any game due to the buffalo "vanishing", and were helpless to prevent 600 of their tribe from freezing or starving to death
