Ottawa

• The Ottawa inhabited the lands north of Lake Huron. They were east of the Nipissing, Algonquin and Huron. They spoke the Algonquin language, the most widespread linguistic family in North America.
  
• Native communities in the region tended to move about seasonally. In the northeastern part of New England, known traditionally as the Dawnland, 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. At such times the encampments hummed with activity. Families exchanged visits, and the shouts of children playing filled the air. Then late in the year, as autumn turned to winter, family bands dispersed into distant hunting territories, and the villages fell silent.
  
• The activity of the hunt-the basis of life for peoples like the Ottawa-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 willing surrender itself to his spear or arrow. Prayers would be offered and tobacco burned. After making the kill, a hunter treated the carcass with respect, ceremoniously burying the bones lest the animal's spirit take offense and depart forever from the hunting grounds.
  
• The Ojibwa religion, Midewiwin, was spread to the Ottawa. They had developed an extensive knowledge of plant medicine and advocated balance in all aspects of life. There were medicines to attract animals to traps and snares and to lure fish; love medicines, cures for respiratory problems and a whole catalog of human ailments, as well as contraceptive and abortion-inducing medications, insect repellents, and cures for poison ivy and snakebite.
  
• No great domains or chieftains controlled the Upper Country; each village was an independent community. A village leader was selected, usually by a council of elders, on merit alone. Proven ability in hunting and warfare, courage, stamina, and generosity-these were the valued traits. So, too, was skill as an orator. Since no village leader could force a path of action, he often needed to exhort, inspire, and cajole. Decisions were made by consensus, with a highly formalized (and time-consuming) system of debate. On quesions of war and peace, talks could consume days on end. A minority faction might move to another village or even join a different tribe.
  
  Villages usually had a separate war leader, and joining a war party was a matter of choice. Even so, warfare was the bone and sinew of life in the region, deemed essential for sharpening the survival skills of the entire society. The ball games and running competitions of peacetime trained the young men of the village in attack and rapid retreat. Even small children were periodically deprived of food and water in order to inure them to the rigors of forced marches.
  
• Having decided to go to battle, the warriors would set out after spring fishing or planting. They might be gone a few weeks or sometimes the entire summer, usually breaking up into war parties of six or ten-groups small emough to test their bravery and skill by penetrating enemy territory and returning unharmed. Most commonly, they attacked an enemy hunting party away from its village; captured warriors were subjected to ritual torture and death-although a very lucky captive might be saved for adoption. Alternately, the raiders might seize women and children out gathering wood and either adopt them or hold them for ransom.  In either case, the number of victims was never large.
  
  But one thing was essential: an enemy. Every tribal group had a traditional opponent. And since the motive for battle was usually revenge and retaliation, the bloodshed could perpetuate itself for generations.
  
• The Ottawa's were hit by Iroquois warriors in the mid-1660's as a result of the dispute over land and the resources needed for trade with the Europeans known as the Beaver Wars. With their constant traveling companions, the Huron, they drifted first into Sioux country on the northern Mississippi. Driven from there, they moved in separate groups into Wisconsin, then north to  Chequamegon Bay on western Lake Superior, where they set up a trading base.
  
  For a time they seemed safe. A force of allied tribes demolished a large Iroquois war party near Sault Ste Marie in 1665, thus permanently freeing the northern lakes form the Iroquois scourge. But safety still eluded them. Threatened by attack from the Sioux, the Huron and Ottawa retreated to the north shore of the Straits of Mackinac, at a spot called Michilimackinac. There, at the cutting edge of France's New World empire, they sought protection from the friendly forces of the French king.
  
  Even as the tides of Indian warfare swirled about them, French traders and missionaries were pushing ever farther into the Upper country. The exporer Jean Nicolet, first of a long line of newcomers, had paddled through the Straits of Mackinac as early as 1634.  Nicolas Perrot, fur trader and backwoods diplomat, reached Green Bay in 1667, at the height of hostilities, in an effort to break up a long-standing Ottawa trade monopoly with the local Wisconsin tribes. Hard on his heels, Jesuit father Jacques Marquette arrived, seeking converts and founding missions at Sault Ste Marie and Michilimackinac.
  
  French military posts sprang up all across the region, from the forests north of Lake Superior, along Lake Michigan, to the rivers of central Illinois. The focus of activity remained Michilimackinac, however. New native villages sprang up around the spires of Marquette's St Ignace mission and under the ramparts of Fort de Baude. More than ever, the Straits became the place to gather, to swap news and barter trade goods, to celebrate festivals and organize war parties, to mingle with other tribes, drink brandy, and peddle furs.The large band of Ottawa at Michilimackinac became the principal middlemen for the Ojibwa in supplying furs to the French.
  
• One of the first of the escalating string of armed clashes that led to the French and Indian W ar was a French attack on a British trading post at Pickawillany, newly opened for business among the Miami in western Ohio. By reaching this far west, the British were, in effect, expanding their American empire into the realm of New France-and this the French could not allow. So in 1752, a force of Ottawa and Ojibwa warriors under French command swept down and obliterated the post, killing a British trader and 13 Miami defenders. They seized the Miami leader, La Demoiselle, and-as the chronicle puts it-"made a broth" of him.
  
• Listening to the Delaware Prophet, Neolin, was an Ottawa chief named Pontiac, who had fought beside the French. (Neolin delivered a scathing verbal assault on all whites, inflaming the tribes with a charismatic call for a return to the old ways-no more guns, no more trade goods, no more brandy or rum.) A powerful orator in his own right, Pontiac traveled about the Upper Country, rising to speak persuasively at the camp fires and in councils. He envisioned an Indian confederation spanning the forests and valleys from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. And summoning up the feelings of pan-Indian unity that had prevailed in the recent war, he called for the restoration of the French and renewal of the anti-British alliance.
  
  Then in May of 1763, Pontia made his move. Leading a multitribal force that included Ojibwa, Potawatomi, non-Christian Huron, and Menominee-as well as his own Ottawa-he laid siege to the British garrison at Detroit. Within a matter of weeks eleven frontier British forts had fallen to allied Indian warriors. The attacks came so swiftly that often the defenders had no idea a rebellion had begun. At Ft Sandusky, on Lake Erie, the raiders simply asked for a meeting with the commander, then seized control.
  
  By July only two besieged garrisons-Ft Pontchartrain at Detroit and Ft Pitt at the forks of the Ohio-still held out.To relieve Ft Pitt, Lord Amherst sent a task force of 450 veteran soldiers under Col Henry Bouquet. Then, on his instructions, the fort commander invited the Delaware attackers to parley and presented them with a handkerchief and two blankets that had been infected with smallpox. Amherst's sinister experiment-perhaps the first use of germ warfare in American history-accomplished its goal. The epidemic spread through the Indian ranks and into their villages along the Ohio Valley.  By autumn the siege had collapsed.
  
  At Detroit the siege was also breaking up. An early freeze began driving its attackers to winter hunting camps, and the French, who up to now had been supplying Pontiac's forces with arms and encouragement, withdrew their support. Bowing to the inevitable, Pontiac called off his men.
  
  But the rebellion had sent shock waves of alarm through Britain's Colonial administration. An estimated 2,000 British soldiers and settlers had lost their lives. Lord Amherst was recalled. Facing the prospect of extended off-and-on conflict in the west, the British began to build the same complex system of alliance and gift exchange that the French had maintained for a century and a half before them.
  
• In addition, the British took a major step to calm Indian concerns about the threatened influx of white settlers. In October 1763, even before the fighting had ended, England's George III issued a proclamation limiting Colonial habitation to the region east of the Appalachian Mountains. Everything beyond the Proclamation Line, including most of the lakes and river valleys of the Upper Country, was officially designated as Indian territory.
  
  Any hope that the Proclamation Line would stop anyone soon proved illusory. Settlers streamed west as though the ban had been an invitation. By the end of 1765, some 2,000 families, mostly squatters with no legal title to their holdings, had taken up residence along the forks of the Ohio River near Ft Pitt. Five years later there were 10,000 families. Farther south the frontiersman Daniel Boone hacked out the Wilderness Road through the Appalachians' Cumberland Gap to open a route into Kentucky and Tennessee. Boone's primitive trail would accommodate nothing larger than a pack mule, but it opened the way for an endless stream of settlers. (The Indians called them chemokoman, "Long Knives," because of their readiness to defend their newly claimed homesteads.)
  
  The headlong rush to settlement prevailed in the Great Lakes region, as land developers carved out territory in northern Ohio and New York. In an attempt to impose order, the Indian superintendent in the area, Sir William Johnson, cobbled together a series of land treaties. In the fall of 1768, Johnson orchestrated the largest treaty conference ever-gathering 3,400 Iroquois and other Eastern Indians, along with Shawnee and Delaware from Ohio country, at Ft Stanwix in upstate New York. On the Colonial side were governors from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Virginia, along with land speculators, missionaries, and traders seeking compensation from losses during Pontiac's uprising.
  
  The resulting agreement opened all the land east of the Ohio River to white settlement. As it happened, however, the only Indians who signed it were leaders of the Iroquois Confederacy, acting without the knowledge or consent of the others. When the Delaware and Shawnee got down to examining the treaty's fine points, they discovered that most of the lands being given up fell within their own hunting grounds-and that the Iroquois were being well paid for this betrayal.
  
• Before the gun smoke had cleared from the American Revolutionary War battles, settlers were again streaming west across the mountains. By 1780 the forests of Kentucky and Tennessee resounded with the crash of falling trees as more than 50,000 Americans began clearning farmland and building towns. In Ohio, where few white people had lived before, land speculators were busy surveying tracts along the Muskingum River. More than 45,000 people would surge into Ohio over the next two decades; another 5,000 pushed on into Indiana. Not surprisingly, the onslaught provoked a reaction.
  
  Serious resistance was offered by a new coalition-militant factions of Ottawa, Wyandot, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Ojibwa, Miami, and others who were determined to maintain control of their villages and hunting grounds. Indian raids between 1783 and 1790 took the lives of as many as 1,500 settlers.
  
  The new Amerian government could not tolerate these losses, and in 1790 Pres Washington ordered his commander in the Northwest Territory (as the Americans now called the region) to put a stop to them. So Gen Josiah Harmer set out from Ft Washington, at present-day Cincinnati, with nearly 1,500 troops. Harmer had served with distinction during the Revolution, but in this campaign he managed to stumble disastrously....Washington dispatched his army's highest-ranking soldier, Maj Gen Arthur St Clair, to try again. St Clair set out in the fall of 1791 with 2,300 men, many of them raw recruits. As they marched through Ohio in pursuit of the Miami leader, Little Turtle, he detached some of the troops to build new forts; others deserted...Little Turtle attacked...When the carnage was over, 650 Americans lay dead and nearly 300 more wer wounded. In the annals of Indian warfare, "St Clair's Shame" would take its place as the greatest loss ever suffered by American troops.
  
  Washington turned to Gen Anthony Wayne to do the job right. Wayne recruited a 2,000-man force and spent a full year training it.  He also added 1,000 mounted Kentucky sharpshooters and a detachment of Chickasaw and Choctaw scouts, traditional enemies of the Great Lakes tribes.
  
  On learning that the British were supplying the Indians with food and firearms, Wayne prepared to attack. Before he could move, a band of Ottawa fighters hit Ft Recovery in June 1774-only to be repulsed by heavy cannon fire. It was the coalition's first defeat. In council meetings afterward, Little Turtle laid out the new realities. The American forces had grown so large, he said, that further resistance would be futile; better to withdraw and seek some sort of accommodation. With that, he handed overall leadership of the confederacy's 1,500 warriors to Shawnee chief Blue Jacket, his close ally in the cmapaign. From now on, Little Turtle would leade only his 250 Miamis.
  
  Wayne led his soldiers slowly up the trail in pursuit of the remaining coalition, intentionally delaying his arrival by three days. On August 20, 1794, as Blue Jacket's half-starved fighters (they had been fasting and praying before battle), Wayne attacked-sweeping in so quickly that he earned the Sawnee name Big Wind. The warriors fell back to Ft Miami, hoping for help from their British allies. It never came: the Britsih comamnde,r ordered to stay out of the fighting, bolted the door to the stockade. Hundreds were slaughtered.
  
• For the native people of the Great Lakes, the War of 1812 was not exceptionally traumatic. The opening of the Erie Canal in the 1830's produced a modest influx of newcomers, but the Americans arriving by that route-New Yorkers and New Englanders whom the Indians called Saganash (Englishmen) or Bostonais-proved relatively easy neighbors. Most important, American financiers were more interested in lumbering and mining around the Great Lakes than in land development. The north country was too sandy, swampy, or rocky for proserous farming and so the Ojibwa, Ottawa, Menominee, and Winnebago, and many Potawatomi were left comparatively undisturbed until after the Civil War. Even then, despite some shifting around, Great Lakes groups managed to stay close to their traditional homelands.
  
  Many remain there today. The region is hardly the same unspoiled, naturally balanced realm it was before the French explorers appeared four centuries ago.  Yet through all the dark history that followed-the tragic violence and irretrievable losses-descendants of the Upper Country's first nations have preserved a living connection with those forebears from one generation to another, noursihed by the conviction that they still belong to the land, and the land to them.

Paiute

• To survive in a desert world, people must ration water, as the ancestors of the Paiute did while inhabiting an inhospitable realm and pursuing a life that hardly changed in the course of a few thousands years before the Europeans came. Life was a very different experience for ancestors of the Paiute in the Great Basin, one of the least hospitable places on earth, an arid expanse bounded by the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Sierra Nevada on the west. These people were on the move more or less constantly, traveling in small bands, carrying most of their wordly goods with them as season by season they ranged across the landscape in search of edible plants and game.
  
  Periodically some of these mobile bands joined forces to hunt and socialize. Each family owned a net made of twisted fiber, and several of these could be tied together into a single barrier that might be several hundred years long. Then the people beat the desert bushes and drove rabbits into the net, hundreds and sometimes thousands of them. The bag would then be divided among the families, and doubtless a celebration ensued. When the hunt and festivities were done, the family bands parted again to go their separate ways.
  
• Hemmed in by the mountains, the tribes of the Great Basin-Shoshone, Bannock, Paiute, and Ute-were among the most isolated in the American West. The Western Shoshone and Paiute inhabited the Great Basin's drier regions, where no more than a few inches of rain might fall in a year and summer temperatures of 110 degrees were common. But even in the driest zones, mountain ranges created small, scattered oases where plants and animals-and the humans who relied on them-could flourish.
  
  Like the Claifornia tribes, the Basin peoples gathered plant foods, but instead of acorns, they had pinon nuts, mesquite beans, and agave plants. Limited food resources kept Great Basin populations in check-in all, they numbered perhaps 40,000. They lived in small groups, each with its own established foraging territory.
  
  Great Basin Indians believed in a supreme being, as well as spirits who governed natural and human events. It was important to establish a personal relationship with a spirit who could bring success in hunting or other endeavors. As elsewhere, Great Basin shamans drew their healing powers from communion with the invisible world.
  
  Like many other societies across the continent, the Great Basin tribes saw their land as the center of the universe. The Southern Paiute, for example, believed that the Kaibab Plateau was the middle of the earth and that beyond the Pacific Ocean there rose a ring of high mountains (much like the ones that surrounded their own territory) upon whose peaks the sky rested.
  
  Occupying a relatively harsh and inaccessible region, the Great Basin tribes were among the last native people on the continent to lose their lands to permanent white settlers. But the Ute were probably among the first to come into possession of that most prized European import, the horse, by about 1700.  The Shoshone and other Basin tribes quickly developed substantial horse herds as well, and the Basin became a highway for horse-mounted commerce in all directions.
  
• Unlike the horse, however, another of the white man's innovations-the fur trade-posed a dire threat to the ways of the Great Basin peoples. As the fur trade became increasingly important throughout North America, Eastern tribes fought to obtain larger trapping grounds, pushing other tribes westward and extending the fur trade itself.  In exchange for furs, traders offered manufactured goods, including metalware, textiles, iron tools, and guns.
  
  Captive women and children also could be sold to white traders, who wanted wives and labor to keep house and dress furs. Slavery had long existed among Indians before the arrival of traders, but the new competitive pressures of the fur trade made slaves far more valuable commodities than in the past. Almost everywhere in the West, raiding and counterraiding for horses and slaves disrupted relations among neghboring tribes.
  
• Walkara, son of a Ute chief, emerged as one of the premier slave traders in the Great Basin during the 1830's and 1840's. He preyed especially on the docile, generally defenseless Paiute but was feared, with good reaon, by all the tribes.
  
• When California was admitted to the union in 1850, its first governor promptly called on the state militia to attack Indians, whom he deemed to be a thrreat to miners and immigrants. But the rancheros still needed workers, so a state law was passed allowing courts to sentence Indians caught "loitering"-that is, Indians not already working for a white man-to work for farmers. This law, which remained in effect until 1863, also authorized the indenture of native orphans or children whose parents gave their consent. For the sake of appearances, the measure outlawed the kidnapping and abuse of Indians, but this provision was widely disregarded. In northern  California state militia units and marauding kidnappers roamed the countryside, killing parents and stealing their children for sale to farmers in the Central Valley.
  
  Outside California the Gold Rush also took its toll. Wagon trains on the overland trails passed through tribal homelands whre resources were sparse enough to being with.  Immigrants' livestock ate the forage that ordinarily fed Indian ponies.  Hungry overlanders killed game at a rate that was fast depleting the supply and scavenged the courntryside for firewood.  Naturally enough, Shoshone and Paiute bands turned to stealing from the wagon trains that were impoverishing them-and inevitably turned against each other to fight for the remaining grazing lands.
  
• One of Geronimo's outbreaks across the border, in 1881, had been sparked by the killing of a highly regarded medicine man on the  San Carlos Reservation by US soldiers. The doctrine espoused by this man-that dead Indians would return and a new world free of whites would soon dawn-apparently originated in the Walker Lake area, on the California-Nevada border, and had been circulating among different Western tribes for years.
  
  When the Walker Lake Paiute staged their regular pine nut harvest festival in 1869, a man name Wodziwob or "Fish Lake Joe" went into a trance. Afterward he told the others of his visit to their loved ones in the land of the dead and prophesied that they would soon return. This mystical promise inspired a new religious fervor in California, known as the Ghost Dance of 1870. Everywhere tribespeople awaited the coming flood or fire that would wipe the world clean of white people and their polluting culture.
  
  Back in Nevada this doctrine apocalyptic destruction and cultural renewal was taken up by Wodziwob's assistant, name Tavibo, a well-known shaman who was said to possess the power to affect the weather. But it would be Tavibo's son, the messianic figure Wovoka, who would inspire the Plains Indian version of the Ghost Dance, with its compelling message of tribal resurrection. Born around 1858 and known as Jack Wilson to the local ranchers for whom he worked, Wovoka had a mystical experience in Nevada during a solar eclipse that occurred on New Year's Day, 1889.
  
  "I went up to heaven and saw God and all the people who had died a long time ago. God told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and not fight, or steal, or lie.  He gave me this dance to give my people."-Wovoka, Paiute shaman
  
  After this he was said to have worked many wonders. By pointing his pipe at the sun, he brought heavy downpours to end a drought that year; he cured the many sick who flocked to see him; he could even withstand being shot at point-blank range.
  
  Tribal emissaries came from far away to hear Wovoka's preaching and receive his blessing. During his vision Wovoka had seen those throngs of deceased Indians "engaged in their old-time sports and occupations, all happy and forever young." And the dance he had brought back to his people would make them happy too-and hasten the day when living and dead Indians would all be reunited in a native homeland in the West while the whites remained with their kind in the East.
  
  Was it any wonder that a final glimmer of hope rose in the breasts of the Plains tribes when these accounts came in from Nevada country? They pondered the words of this great healer who had envisioned the ancestors returning, the buffalo once again teeming on the Plains, their Western land purged of the white man.
  
  They would send more messengers to this man; they would clasp hands and dance the large circle dances he taught them; and they would induce their own visions in which they would see again the fathers and mothers who had died at Sand Creek and on the Washita River and at a hundred other tragic places.
  
  Maybe the clock could be turned back and their people might once again be free to hunt and trade and fight and survive on their own. Maybe there still was hope.
  
• Having heard of the Paiute prophet Wovoka, several northern Plains tribes sent a delegation to Nevada late in 1889 to learn more about his prediction of a new age without white men. The emissaries returned the following spring to introduce the Ghost Dance religion to the Sioux and other tribes; by autumn of 1890 virtually all activities-trading, schooling, farming-came to a standstill as the people took up the frenzied ritual.
  
  Understandably, perhaps, the whites grew alarmed; predictably, Sitting Bull was blamed for the unrest. Barred from visiting other reservation in South Dakota, Sitting Bull led the Ghost Dance at Standing Rock, once gathering about 100 followers to dance for 200 spectators. By mid-December, McLaughlin had received orders to arrest him.
  
  The chief put up no struggle, but one of his irate supporters shot the officer in charge, Lt Bull Head. As he fell, Bull Head fired his revolver, wounding Sitting Bull in the chest. A second police officer, Sgt Red Tomahawk, shot the prisoner in the back of the head. Sitting Bull fell dead to the ground.
  
  More details on Wounded Knee can be read in Sioux II .
  
  Half a continent away, in Nevada, the prophet Wovoka went into mourning for the bloodshed brought on by his messianic religion. "My children, my children, " he cried. "in days behind many times I called you to travel the hunting trail or to follow the war trail.  Now those trails are choked with sand; they are covered with grass; the young men cannot find them. My children, today I call upon you to travel a new trail, the only trail now open-the White Man's Road."  It was a road toward which Native Americans had been directed by the federal govenment with ever-increasing insistence in the quarter century since the end of the Civil War.
  
  Peering westward in the aftermath of that great conflict, government officials in 1885 realized that the future of the newly reunited nation lay in developing the states and territories beyond the Mississippi. The recently passed Homestead Act was beckoning individual farmers. Texas ranchers were expanding the beef cattle industry north in to Kansas and beyond. Gold miners, loggers, and others sought access to the land. But the path of expansion for some Americans ran straight through the domain of others.  In order to develop the West, Indians had to be confined. If not already on reservations, they had to be put there-despite Gen William T Sherman's scathing appraisal of the typical reservation as "a parcel of land set aside for Indians, surrounded by thieves." Armed conflicts claimed many casualties in the years after the Civil War. There were also battles of a different kind-in some ways more devastating than any fought with guns-that echo through Indian country to the present day.
  
  Conventional wisdom of the period held that Indians would disappear.  "All we can do is to smooth and make decent the pathway to the grave," a Massachusetts newspaper editor intoned. There was more than a little wishful thiking in this view.  It would certainly have been more convenient for native people to vanish; then they would not hinder westward expansion and the government would no longer have open-ended responsibilities and expense to worry about.
  
  Nevertheless-despite centuries of disease, warfare, forced removals, and the destruction of whole societies-in 1865 there were still at least 300,000 Indians by official count living in the US and its territories. The US Indian Peace Commission, established in 1867, secured treaties with the Plains tribes and the Navajo in a period of feverish activity lasting through 1868.
  
  

Pawnee

• The Pawnee were of the Plains Indians, inhabiting the area of the Platte River, south of the Omaha, north of the Wichita.
  
• Most Plains tribes had sacred objects that were unique to their history and as essential to their collective identity as their language. The Pawnee, who traced their origins to star deities, possessed a Morning Star bundle. Clans or religious socieites paid homage to these special medicine bundles, which they owned collectively, opening them in religious gatherings held during the first thurnderstorm of spring or the first snowfall of autumn.
  
  Women throught the plains played key religious roles in these community rituals. Some also undertook vision quests, became respected shamans, or used their special powers to excel in battle, but many more chose to channel their spiritual gifts through sacred women's societies. Women also participated in rites associatd with tobacco planting and the lighting of the sacred Thunder Medicine Piper.
  
• Just after the turn of the 19th century, a major outbreak of smallpox and cholera struck. The vicious diseases spread north and south, heading up the Missouri River to decimate many tribes. In the Winter count of the Kiowa, the time 1839-40 is remembered by a single pictograph: a man covered with reds pots. The diseases showed no favorites, killing perhaps 8,000 Blackfeet, 2,000 Pawnee, and 1,000 Crow. People committed suicide in vast numbers when the disease descended on their villages. All across the northern and southern Plains, the bodies piled up too quickly to be given decent burial. They were heaped in mass graves or thrown into the river.
  
• During the 1700's and early 1800's, Mexican authorities conducted a thriving trade in Indian slaves-bartering arms, whiskey, and other goods for women and children destined for servitude in the homes of landowners and colonial officials. They encouraged native tribes to raid one another for slaves, assuring a lively commerce and fanning hostilities between tribes that might otherwise unite against them.  No one was safe. Apaches, Utes, Comanches, and Navajos raided each other, as well as the more peaceable Pueblos, Pawnees, and Wichitas.
  
• Watching Algonquian medicine men dance, Europeans of the colonial period mistook the name of the dancer, pauwau, for the name of the ceremony-and so, in time, the word "powwow" came to be used for any tribal gathering. In the latter part of this century, the powwow has become a dramatic public statement of a renewed Indian identity.
  
  It has roots in a religious ceremony practiced by the Pawnee early in the 19th century and adopted by the Omaha and other tribes, who transformed it into a warrior ceremony and added speechmaking, gift giving, and a concluding feast. By the 1880's some 30 Plains tribes were holding powwows, bringing one-time foes together in peace to establish new friendships and celebrate shared traditions.

Penobscot

• The Penobscot occupied the coastal lands of the Northeast, commonly called the Dawnland. As many others, they thought of their land as the center of the world.  It had been the land of their ancestors longer than anyone could remember. Life followed a natural rhythm of hunting, fishing, agriculture, and food gathering. As the men tracked deer, moose, and other game, the women combed the woodlands for wild fruit, berries, nuts, and other plants. There were onions and fiddlehead ferns, strawberries and raspberries, beach plums and beech nuts, lily roots and grapes, cranberries, elderberries, and more. In early spring, when the maple sap started running, the women would boil it down to make sugar.
  
  Except in the northermost areas, a majority of the tribes also grew corn. Men cleared the fields by girdling the trees, setting fires at their bases, and then felling the charred trunks with stone axes. Vast acreages were transformed this way; European explorers of the New England coast described open plains as much as 70 miles in length, entirely free from trees, and extensive plantations around Massachusetts Bay and elsewhere. After the timber and underbrush were burned, the women took over. They broke the ground with bone or wood hoes and planted kernels of hardy flint, flour, or pop corn in small mounds formed by hand. Like growers in the Southeast, they often planted beans in the same hillocks; the bean plant climbed the cornstalks, while roots added nitrogen to the soil. When the crops ripened, women brought in the harvest.
  
• The Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775 sent British and American agents hurrying into Indian country to recruit warriors for their respective sides. The Penobscot aided the patriot cause in Maine.
  
  In New England unpaid Revolutionary War soldiers were given Indian lands instead of currency. Massachusetts settlers pushed steadily into the hunting territories of the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy, their former allies. The two tribes appealed to the new US Congress, demanding the freedom and justice "which we have been fighting for as other Americans." Eventually Congress passed the Indian Trade and Non-Intercourse Act, declaring illegal any sales of Indian land that Congress itself had not specifically approved, but the measure had little effect. Massachusetts continued to pressure the Penobscot into giving up their territory.
  
• In the 1970's, through litigation and congressional lobbying, Maine's Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes received federal funds to buy 300,000 acres (in lieu of the two-thirds of the state they claimed); a $27 million trust fund helped them establish commercial farms and light industries.