Presentation. 6th grade. Native Americans

Native AMERICANS

Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska,

and the island state of Hawaii.

They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as intact political communities.

The terms used to refer to Native Americans are controversial; according to a 1995 US Census Bureau set of home interviews, most of the respondents with an expressed preference refer to themselves as American Indians or Indians.

In the last 500 years, Afro-Eurasian migration to the Americas has led to centuries of conflict and adjustment between Old and New World societies.

Most of the written historical record about Native Americans was made by Europeans

after their immigration to the Americas.

Many Native Americans lived as hunter-gatherer societies, although in many groups, women carried out sophisticated cultivation of a variety of staples: maize, beans, and squash. Their cultures were quite different from those of the agrarian, proto-industrial immigrants from western Eurasia.

The differences in culture between the established Native Americans and immigrant Europeans, as well as shifting alliances among different nations of each culture, caused a great deal of political tension and ethnic violence. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of what today constitutes the U.S. vary significantly, ranging from 1 million to 18 million

The first European Americans encountered western tribes as fur traders.

As United States expansion reached into the American West, settler and miner migrants came into increasing conflict with the Great Plains tribes.

These were complex nomadic cultures based on using horses and traveling seasonally to hunt bison.

They carried out strong resistance to American incursions in the decades after the American Civil War, in a series of "Indian Wars", which were frequent up until the 1890s.

The coming of the transcontinental railroad increased pressures on the western tribes.

Over time, the U.S. forced a series of treaties and land cessions by the tribes and established reservations for them in many western states.

U.S. agents encouraged Native Americans to adopt European-style farming and similar pursuits, but the lands were often too poor to support such uses.

Natural freedom is the only object of the policy of the [Native Americans]; with this freedom do nature and climate rule alone amongst them ...

[Native Americans] maintain their freedom and find abundant nourishment... [and are] people who live without laws, without police, without religion.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau,  Jesuit and Savage in New France

The majority of Native American tribes did practice some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America, but none exploited slave labor on a large scale.

In addition, Native Americans did not buy and sell captives in the pre-colonial era, although they sometimes exchanged enslaved individuals with other tribes in peace gestures or in exchange for their own members. "Slave" may not be an accurate term for their system of using captives.

The conditions of enslaved Native Americans varied among the tribes.

In many cases, young enslaved captives were adopted into the tribes to replace warriors killed during warfare or by disease.

Other tribes practiced debt slavery or imposed slavery on tribal members who had committed crimes; but, this status was only temporary as the enslaved worked off their obligations to the tribal society.

Among some Pacific Northwest tribes, about a quarter of the population were slaves. Other slave-owning tribes of North America were, for example, Comanche of Texas, Creek of Georgia, the Pawnee, and Klamath.

Native Americans and African American slaves

There were historical treaties between the European Colonists and the Native American tribes requesting the return of any runaway  slaves .

For example, in 1726, the British Governor of New York exacted a promise from the  Iroquois  to return all runaway slaves who had joined up with them. There are also numerous accounts of advertisements requesting the return of African Americans who had married Native Americans or who spoke a Native American language. Individuals in some tribes owned African slaves; however, other tribes incorporated African Americans, slave or freemen, into the tribe. This custom among the  Seminoles  was part of the reason for the Seminole Wars where the European Americans feared their slaves fleeing to the Natives. The  Cherokee  Freedmen and tribes such as the Lumbee in  North Carolina  include African American ancestors.

After 1800, the Cherokees and some other tribes started buying and using black slaves, a practice they continued after being relocated to Indian Territory in the 1830s. The nature of slavery in Cherokee society often mirrored that of white slave-owning society. The law barred  intermarriage  of Cherokees and blacks, whether slave or free. Blacks who aided slaves were punished with one hundred lashes on the back. In Cherokee society, blacks were barred from holding office, bearing arms, and owning property, and it was illegal to teach blacks to read and write.

Culture

Though cultural features, language, clothing, and customs vary enormously from one tribe to another, there are certain elements which are encountered frequently and shared by many tribes. Many American Indians upheld  hunter-gatherer   nomadic  ways of life, following the herds which sustained them. Among all of the Native American ethnic groups, the most common implements were the bow and arrow, the war club, and the spear. Quality, materials, and designs varied widely.

Large mammals like mammoths and mastodons were largely extinct by around 8000 B.C.E., and the Native Americans switched to hunting other large game, such as buffalo. Early hunter-gatherer tribes made stone weapons from around 10,000 years ago; as the age of metallurgy dawned, newer technologies were used and more efficient weapons produced. The Great Plains tribes were still hunting the bison when they first encountered the Europeans. The acquisition of the horse and horsemanship from the Spanish in the seventeenth century greatly altered the natives' culture, changing the way in which these large creatures were hunted and making them a central feature of their lives.

Many tribes had a chieftain or village leader known as a sachem. Many tribes had no centralized form of government or chief, but would band together with neighboring communities that shared similar lifestyles. The right of electing its sachem and chiefs was done often either by a democratic and unanimous vote, usually one who was widely known in the tribe for conquests in war and hunting, or by hereditary inheritance. The right to bestow any name upon the tribal children as well as adopting children and marrying outside of the tribe was also a common facet. Many ethnic groups celebrated very similar oral traditions of story-telling, religious practices, and ritualistic dancing. Subdivision and differentiation took place between various groups. Upwards of 40 stock languages developed in North America, with each independent tribe speaking a dialect of one of those languages. Some functions and attributes of tribes are the possession of a territory and a name, maintaining the exclusive possession of a dialect.

Housing

In many instances, American Indian beliefs were symbolized in their dwelling structures. The more migratory tribes such as the Omaha lived in  earth lodges , which were quite ingenious structures with a timber frame and a thick soil covering. At the center of the lodge was a fireplace that recalled their creation myth. The earth lodge entrance faced east, to catch the rising  sun  and remind the people of their origin and migration upriver. The circular layout of tribal villages reflected the tribe's beliefs. Sky people lived in the north half of the village, the area that symbolized the heavens. Earth people lived in the south half which represented the earth. Within each half of the village, individual clans were carefully located based on their member's tribal duties and relationship to other clans. Earth lodges were as large as 60 feet in diameter and might hold several families, even their horses. The woodland custom of these earth lodges was replaced with easier to build and more practical  tipis . Tipis are basically tents covered in  buffalo  hides like those used by the  Sioux . Tipis were also used during buffalo hunts away from the villages, and when relocating from one village area to another.

Religion

Native American spirituality includes a number of stories and legends that are  mythological . Many Native Americans would describe their religious practices as a form of spirituality, rather than religion, although in practice the terms may sometimes be used interchangeably. Shamanism was practiced among many tribes. Common spirituality focused on the maintenance of a harmonious relationship with the  spirit world , and often consisted of worshiping several lesser spirits and one great creator. This was often achieved by ceremonial acts, usually incorporating sandpainting. The colors—made from  sand ,  charcoal , cornmeal, and  pollen —depicted specific spirits. These vivid, intricate, and colorful sand creations were erased at the end of the ceremony.

Some tribes in the prairie regions of the United States and Canada permanent structures that were apparently used for religious purposes. These  medicine wheels , or "sacred hoops," were constructed by laying stones in a particular pattern on the ground. Most medicine wheels resemble a wagon wheel, having a center  cairn  of stones surrounded by an outer ring of stones, and then "spokes," or lines of rocks, coming out from the cairn. The outer rings could be large, reaching diameters of as much as 75 feet.

Music and Art

Native American  music  is almost entirely monophonic, but there are notable exceptions. Traditional Native American music often includes drumming and/or the playing of rattles or other  percussion  instruments but little other instrumentation.  Flutes  and whistles made of wood, cane, or bone are also played, generally by individuals, but in former times also by large ensembles (as noted by Spanish conquistador de Soto). The tuning of these flutes is not precise and depends on the length of the wood used and the hand span of the intended player, but the finger holes are most often around a whole step apart and, at least in Northern California, a flute was not used if it turned out to have an interval close to a half step.

The most widely practiced public musical form among Native Americans in the United States is that of the pow-wow. At pow-wows, such as the annual Gathering of Nations in Albuquerque, New Mexico, members of drum groups sit in a circle around a large drum. Drum groups play in unison while they sing in a native language and dancers in colorful regalia dance clockwise around the drum groups in the center. Familiar pow-wow songs include honor songs, intertribal songs, crow-hops, sneak-up songs, grass-dances, two-steps, welcome songs, going-home songs, and war songs. Most indigenous communities in the United States also maintain traditional songs and ceremonies, some of which are shared and practiced exclusively within the community.

Native American art comprises a major category

in the world art collection. Native American contributions include pottery, paintings, jewelry, weaving, sculpture, basketry, and carving. The Pueblo peoples crafted impressive items associated with their religious ceremonies. Kachina dancers wore elaborately painted and decorated masks as they ritually impersonated various ancestral spirits. Sculpture was not highly developed, but carved stone and wood fetishes were made for religious use. Superior weaving, embroidered decorations, and rich dyes characterized the textile arts. Both turquoise and shell jewelry were created, as were high-quality pottery and formalized pictorial arts.

Many American Indian tribes prided themselves on the spiritual carvings known as totem poles, which are monumental sculptures carved from great trees, typically Western Redcedar, by a number of Indigenous cultures along the Pacific Northwest coast of North America. The word "totem" is derived from the Ojibwe word odoodem, "his totem, his kinship group" (root -oode). The fur trade gave rise to a tremendous accumulation of wealth among the coastal peoples, and much of this wealth was spent and distributed in lavish potlatches frequently associated with the construction and erection of totem poles. Poles were commissioned by many wealthy leaders to represent their social status and the importance of their families and clans.

The beginning of totem pole construction started in North America. Being made of wood, they decay easily in the rain forest environment of the Northwest Coast, so no examples of poles carved before 1800 exist. However eighteenth century accounts of European explorers along the coast indicate that poles certainly existed at that time, although small and few in number. In all likelihood, the freestanding poles seen by the first European explorers were preceded by a long history of monumental carving, particularly interior house posts. Early twentieth-century theories, such as those of the anthropologist Marius Barbeau who considered the poles an entirely post-contact phenomenon made possible by the introduction of metal tools, were treated with skepticism at the time and are now discredited.

Traditional economy

As these native peoples encountered European explorers and settlers and engaged in trade, they exchanged food, crafts, and furs for trinkets, glass beads, blankets, iron, and steel implements, horses, firearms, and alcoholic beverages. Many and most of the American Indians were hunter-gatherers, and as such, relied heavily on the barter system rather than cash money. Over time however, many became reliant on their ability to produce arts and crafts, and highly decorative weapons in order to sustain themselves in matters of commerce with the white people.

A ceremonial feast called a  potlatch , practiced among a diverse group of Northwest Coast Indians as an integral part of indigenous culture, had numerous social implications. The  Kwakiutl , of the Canadian Pacific Northwest, are the main group that still practices the potlatch custom. Although there were variants in the external form of the ceremony as conducted by each tribe, the general form was that of a  feast  in which gifts were distributed. The size of the gathering reflected the social status of the host, and the nature of the gifts given depended on the status of the recipients. Potlatches were generally held to commemorate significant events in the life of the host, such as  marriage , birth of a child,  death , or the assumption of a new social position. Potlatches could also be conducted for apparently trivial reasons, because the true reason was to validate the host's social status. Such ceremonies, while reduced to external materialistic form in Western society, are important in maintaining stable social relationships as well as celebrating significant life events. Fortunately, through studies by anthropologists, the understanding and practice of such customs

Native Americans are the only known ethnic group in the United States requiring a federal permit to practice their religion. The Eagle Feather Law, (Title 50 Part 22 of the Code of Federal Regulations), stipulates that only individuals of certifiable Native American ancestry enrolled in a federally recognized tribe are legally authorized to obtain eagle feathers for religious or spiritual use. Native Americans and non-Native Americans frequently contest the value and validity of the eagle feather law, charging that the law is laden with discriminatory racial preferences and infringes on tribal sovereignty. The law does not allow Native Americans to give eagle feathers to non-Native Americans, a common modern and traditional practice. Many non-Native Americans have been adopted into Native American families, made tribal members, and given eagle feathers.

In the early twenty-first century, Native American communities remain an enduring fixture on the United States landscape, in the American economy, and in the lives of Native Americans. Communities have consistently formed governments that administer services like firefighting, natural resource management, and law enforcement. Most Native American communities have established court systems to adjudicate matters related to local ordinances, and most also look to various forms of moral and social authority vested in traditional affiliations within the community. To address the housing needs of Native Americans, Congress passed the Native American Housing and Self Determination Act (NAHASDA) in 1996. This legislation replaced public housing, and other 1937 Housing Act programs directed towards Indian Housing Authorities, with a block grant program directed towards Tribes.