The indigenous peoples of America, those people north of the Gulf of Mexico, Rio Grande, and Sonoran Desert in what is today the continental United States and north into Canada stretching from the Gulf of St. Lawrence east to Nova Scotia, south to New Brunswick, and west to Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, featured hundreds of tribes of people scattered throughout North America; their lifestyles depended in part on the geographic peculiarities of the environment they inhabited. In general, however, American Indians were typically either hunters and gatherers, agriculturalists, or a combination of the two. In most tribes, women gathered and cultivated; men, considering themselves hunters and warriors, abhorred agriculture. Some tribes were patriarchal, others matriarchal: which type would determine how women were treated. Women would butcher animals, skin animals, prepare the hides for clothing, sew, mend, raise children, prepare food, set up temporary shelters and bring them down, pack up everything for journeys. In some tribes, women were bought and sold; divorced at will; females who committed adultery could be killed, mutilated, or abandoned; husbands who committed adultery were only punished by the cuckold; women were sometimes offered to guests to spend the night with them. Some indigenous tribes lived in communities during the spring/summer/fall, but then hunted in the winter. Warriors during these long winter hunts sought buffalo, deer, and beaver. They would lay in a stock of food for the remainder of winter and early spring. Native Americans were excellent fishers. Tribes made superb nets to catch fish. Northeastern and northwestern tribes were adept at catching spawning salmon. Fish would be split and dried in the sun on a wooden rack. Fishers used lines and hooks, or they would spear fish, or use bow and arrow. Some engaged in night fishing from canoes with the light of a pine resin torch. Some tribes cooked fish in baskets or in holes in rocks, putting water in the basket or hole and dropping a series of heated rocks into the water until it boiled. Weapons varied throughout America but they were universally made with wood, bone, ivory, and stone. Ash was a good strong wood for arrows and war clubs. As the Europeans would discover, the big limitation of North American tribes was their technology–they lacked the knowledge of how to smelt metals. Europeans had discovered the use of bronze, made by superheating copper and a small amount of tin, as well as iron, which required a higher melting point.

Tribal organization lacked the structure of European government. Many ceremonies and traditions were organized around patriarchal or matriarchal clans and tribes that were intermarried in the distant past. Families were the basic social institution. Men would often meet in council smoking the calumet (pipe). Filial piety (ancestor veneration, respect for elders) dominated clan and tribal traditions. Lacking set laws, indigenous people had personal obligations toward one-another. Traditional customs dominated relationships and ethics. They were oriented toward the past. Their sense of time was based on tasks, seasons, day or night. Their society was organic, close to the land. The indigenous mindset was focused on the organic and alive, on feelings and beliefs, the oneness of life and being, nature as an extension of self, the mythical and mystical, the subjective mentality. Living close to nature, they were observant people seeking understanding of a living, spiritual, natural world.

The majority of North American Indian tribes were celestial and spirit worshippers. Sunrise elicited a pious response from the tribe. The rays entered the eastern-facing teepees or huts at first light. The people bowed to the sun, and offered the celestial body the first fruits of the pipe bowl, and such prayers as were uttered. After this sun rite, they also bent knee toward the earth and the holy things of the tribe, the pouhahantes. The Comanche Indians went into battle with a shield (chimal) made of thick buffalo hide decorated with feathers or certain types of “medicine,” or pouhahantes, which were the skins of small animals attached to the shield that could provide magical powers of warding off enemy arrows or spent musket balls. If the amulet did not work, the problem was only temporary, and could be reinvigorated with the correct enchantments. The pouhahantes were like the manitous of northern tribes and were common among the Indians of North America. A shaman could become a pouhahante himself, using the supernatural power for good or evil, and even normal people could obtain the power of the pouhahante if they performed various religious rites such as fasting. A person might seek a particular revelation by going into the wilderness or atop a hill and there spending the night in solitude with the pouhahante. Otherwise, there were few religious buildings, religious inspiration coming from one’s experience in nature. The Pawnee plains tribe called themselves the “star people of the plains,” as they worshiped the morning star as means to reach the great spirit, Titiwa. Indeed all of their ceremonies involved worship of the morning star and the great spirit. They were great dancers; a dance was not a social occasion but a healing, spiritual activity. The sun dance involved human suffering, such as flesh hooks to tear the muscle and skin. When the skin and muscle broke the prayer would be answered. Other ways to rid oneself of evil was self-mortification, such as scratching the body, or purging the body with emetics. A medicine man had a dance bag with four smudge objects. Smudges were means to approach the divine. Smudges included tobacco, sweet grass, “the hair of mother earth,” sage, and cedar. Burning of tobacco was a means to carry prayers to the great spirit. Eagles also carried prayers, hence eagle feathers were important religious implements to possess.^[1]

The American Indians were great watchers of the stars and planets. The Hopi of the Southwest were astronomers observing the living sun going across the sky, day after day. Solstices they interpreted as the sun needing rest and Hopi ceremonies provided the energy. Hopi paid strict attention to solstices to begin ceremonies. Some rooms in buildings were solstice markers: catching rays of the sun on precise days of solstices. The Mayans used calendars and astronomical alignment of temples and buildings; at Chichen Itza a tower called El Caracol had windows oriented toward solstices and the path of Venus through the heavens. Tribes used petroglyphs. For example the Pueblos of New Mexico drew sun daggers wherein at solstices the sun rays shined on two petroglyphs drawn on the stone wall. Medicine wheels aligned items in the sky or certain celestial events with spokes on a wheel; the wheel was designated medicine because they had astronomical as well as spiritual significance. The directions of the medicine wheel were: north—body, plants and animals, infancy of humans; east—mind, air, adolescence of humans; south—fire, heat, adulthood of humans; and west—spirit, water, final stages of life. The American Indian pharmacoepia involved identifying plants that had certain medicinal properties; Indians learned by watching the effects of plants on animals. Their belief was that the plant was alive and as a living being had not just a physical but a spiritual impact on humans. Plants were prayed to as they were collected.

Other aspects of the American Indian worldview included: morality was personal, based on personal affronts rather than a universal code of justice and ethics; justice was typically based on vengeance, to right a wrong done to oneself or one’s family; the Great Spirit was akin to a world soul: a pantheistic, animistic belief that the world/universe is alive with spirits and souls—material objects had a spiritual dimension. Each human, like everything else, had a soul and an afterlife. There were good spirits and evil spirits. Healing of bodily diseases occurred through intercession with the spiritual world. The shaman or medicine man was an intercessor between the spiritual and material world.

American Indians did not practice science according to European standards; nevertheless their practical experimentation and observation resulted in some astonishing accomplishments, such as the domestication of corn, which began 7000 years ago in Central America. About 3000 years ago sunflower and ragweed were domesticated in North America. Indians tested the cultivation of various seeds, used irrigation, and developed a systematic practice based on observation. Their practical inventions included birch-bark and dugout canoes; reed boats; snow-shoes; weirs for fishing; sophisticated traps; and numerous lethal weapons. In short, indigenous peoples combined an intuitive understanding of the natural environment with long term observation and reason.

American Indians were not “civilized” according to European standards, which required metallurgy, codes of law, writing in verse and prose, hierarchical government, and Christianity. The tribes of Mexico, the Yucatan peninsula, and western South America were more sophisticated than the tribes of Central America, western and northern Mexico, and North America north of the Rio Grande, Gulf of Mexico, and Baja California. The range in the sophistication of society was comparable to other cultures throughout the world in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Some indigenous people were technologically, economically, socially, politically and intellectually primitive compared to the advancements of other American Indians, such as the Maya, Aztec, and Inca peoples, as well as European cultures.

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