Native Peoples of North America

Assignment: Blog Entry for Monday, October 7, 2013 Dan Grigsby

Online resource: Maps of Native American Tribes in the United Sates

http://www.native-languages.org/states.htm

Since our readings for this module started with the native peoples of the arctic and the subarctic and because they are the native peoples I know the least about, I decided to do a short study of those territories and the customs the tribes that make those areas their home. My study starts with the web source listed in the heading of this blog provided to us by Native Languages of the Americas website. I think this link was provided to show the diverseness of cultural geography, as it exists in all the regions of North America. One thing I found is that the harsher the environment the more harsh the lifestyles turned out to be. Looking at the maps online and seeing where these people made their living was quite a surprise to me. I didn’t really realize how different the climate could be in just a short distance in the Arctic Circle. Some areas have enough of a warm season to make vegetation a viable form of sustenance for the natives who lived in those subarctic areas. However, in just a distance of fifty to a hundred miles or so the cultural geography would show evidence of some distinctive changes, some you might see as being mild and some that I feel will be viewed as extremely harsh. I do understand however that these harsh cultural practices are influenced by the environment and have come about over thousands of years of living under such conditions but will, without a doubt, seem somewhat gruesome and a bit ghastly to must of us in this class.

There are some similarities as well and those similarities seem to draw a common thread from the subarctic areas lifestyles to the far more harsh western arctic areas’ lifestyles.

Allow me to put what I see as “the best foot” forward and then we can talk about the harder to accept issues. All the native peoples of both the western arctic and subarctic territories relied greatly on local game ranging from caribou, moose, bears and various birds along with fish and sea mammals for their food, housing and most importantly, their clothing. “Arctic peoples were organized socially and politically to maximize the individual and communal procurement, distribution, and consumption of food . . . no family could survive without the combination of a good hunter and a skilled woman. Both group and individual hunting were important and food was always shared . . . People generally ate almost every part of the animal that was possible to eat . . . upon a successful hunt, they would divide the meat among the crew and then distribute what was left to the rest of the people . . .Hunters were required to be respectful and thankful to the animals they killed, as the souls of the animals would eventually be reborn and, if they were unhappy about their treatment, would not allow themselves to be killed for food again.”[1]

“As clothing was very important, considerable time was spent in its production and maintenance. Ugandan clothing needed to be warm and waterproof especially for the men who worked on and near the water much of the time. Hooded shirts and full-length parkas were commonly used and were typically made from gut, the intestines of sea mammals . . . woman generally wore clothing of seal or otter skin. Both sexes carried small pouches for personal items.” [2]

They all used dogsleds as a mode of transportation however less in the subarctic areas then in the arctic and western arctic areas. In the subarctic areas where the winters were more seasonal, dogs were used but more to pull toboggans. Also the natives developed snowshoes for winter use but when the weather was permitting the main mode of transportation was often in canoes.

[1] An Introduction to Native North America, Mark Sutton, pages 56-57.

[2] An Introduction to Native North America, Mark Sutton, page 69.

Even the western arctic and arctic natives used and developed boats made ingeniously from natural materials to travel and more importantly to hunt for food. In all three regions what was their the “technology” was dominated by the use of skins, kayaks and or canoes to hunt for food, make their clothes and to build their homes. Another thing that they all seemed to have in common was what I refer to as the native one-two punch. That is to say the all became, at one time or another, reliant or dependent on relationships with white trading posts and experience devastation of their native populations through foreign diseases.

Those native peoples who lived in the harshest of environments practiced the harshest of cultural lifestyles. The Unangan natives, for example, of the western arctic were forced at times to practice infanticide and very rarely cannibalism. I found it ironic that most of the time the babies that were killed were female babies but by the same token most all the adult conflicts or arguments were over women. Perhaps if there were more women, there would have been fewer conflicts? Being someone who is planning to earn a Masters in Ethnomusicology I found it intriguing that they settled there deputes most often with singing.

This was something that I did not know, the practice of infanticide among the natives of the arctic regions. I was a little shocked by it. I can, with some amount of thought and survival rationale, see why but I just can’t rap my head around it completely. I imagine the site of such a thing to a missionary would have been horrendous and savage. But would it be any less humane to have watched a small child starve and/or freeze to death slowly over a period of months? These people have come to this practice after thousands of years of survival experiences and hardships. Can we really judge this behavior, I think not. The people of the western arctic who had the harshest cultural geography were directed by nature to live a lifestyle as harsh as their surroundings. They were called the Unangan. The native people of the slightly milder cultural geography had it a little better but still very close to the western arctic dwellers. They were called the Quebec Inuit. The people who seemed it have the most agreeable cultural geography also seemed to have the most agreeable lifestyles and they were the Athapaskan and the Algonquian. As if it were a celebration of life all of these peoples made highly decorative clothing in contrast to the hard lives they lived.