- The Sioux inhabited a large portion of the northern Great
Plains. The Crow were directly to the west, Mandan and Hidatsa to the north,
and Ponca, Omaha, Pawnee to the south.
Across more than 750,000 square miles, the heartland of the continent was a vast sea of grass, interrupted here and here by mountainous terrain and winding, forested river bottoms. The land continuously tranformed itself as it extended south from Alberta, Canada, to the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plain, of western Texas and New Mexico. From the region's eastern boundary along the Mississippi River, a rider on horseback might travel for weeks before running up against the western wall of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains.
- "Sioux" is short for the Ojibwa term nadouessioux,
meaning "adders"; the oldest primary designations are Lakota
and Dakota, variant words for "allies."
- 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. The creative energies
of nature are clearly at work here. As rain falls on the mountains and
sinks down into the warm rock, minerals dissolve while the underground
heat sterilizes and filters out impurities in the liquid. The water seeps
slowly through the porous andstone on the lower west side of Hot Springs
Mountain until it flows out through cracks in the rock at a rate of about
850,000 gallons a day-the end of an eventful 4,000 year journey through
the mountain.
- The Sioux were ancient enemies
of the Fox and the Ojibwa. Seasonal warfare was constant in the area west
of the Great Lakes.
- While the Huron were being driven
from their homes during the Beaver Wars, they drifted first into Sioux
country on the northern Mississippi. The Sioux drove them from there and
they settled in separate groups into Wisconsin and north. The Sioux again
drove them further to the north shores of the Straits of Mackinac. During
this time, the Fox, deeply concerned that European rifles were being traded
to their arch-enemy, the Sioux, joined forces with the Iroquois in order
to disrupt that deadly flow of merchandise.
As the bloodshed abated in the Upper Country, the governors of New France took advantage of the lull to consolidate their position. Ambassadors went out from Montreal, inviting all the tribes to gather for a mass celebration of friendship and peace....Finally the day arrived. In midsummer of 1701 the canoes started landing on the beach at Montreal-Sauk, Fox and Wineebago, Potawatomi and Miami, Huron and Ojibwa, Kickapoo and Sioux in their eagle feathers and buffalo robes. In addition to these French allied tribes came their former enemies, the Five Nations of the Iroquois League-Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk.
Close to 1,300 people attended, represting 39 separate tribes, and together they feasted and parleyed and smoked the calumet. the delegates worked out some last-minute details. The Iroquois received the right to hunt in Ontario country, and western Indians wee given free access to trade in New York. But important issues remained unresolved. Far more difficult was the matter of the Fox. All through the peace negotiations the Fox protested bitterly that French traders were still supplying their Sioux enemies with guns. Already the arms deals had driven them into a secret alliance with the Iroquois.
Forced to play both sides in the high-stakes game of woodland power politics, the Fox did not take kindly to insult or neglect. French arms continued flowing to both the Sioux and the Ojibwa. And no matter how loudly the Fox objected, the French refused to listen.
Afterwards, the Fox war parties staged lightning raids on key French outposts, crippling trade in the Upper Country, nothing was safe. Isolated villages, canoe portage routes...Fox raiders hit them all. The French trie dt ocrush them-repeatedly but eh Fox always seemed to slip away....Adroit Fox diplomacy enhanced their battlefield prowess. They made peace with the Ojibwa in 1724 and allied themselves in 1727 with their former enemies the Sioux.
- The Sioux assisted Tecumseh (Shawnee)
and joined sides with the British in the War of 1812, the new conflict
between the US and Britain. Multitribal towns sprang up along the Illinois
River in support of the war effort. By the fall of 1812, virtually the
entire Great Lakes region had been brought under Indian control. The initial
triumph did not last. Unfortunately for the Indians, the British appointed
a new general, Henry Procter, to command their western front. Indecisive
and overly cautious, he frittered away the early British advantage. When
an American naval victory on Lake Erie severed his supply routes in September
1813, Procter decided to retreat to Canada.
- In the spring of 1931, the famed
Oglala Lakota holy man, Black Elk, walked some visitors to a hill he called
Remembrance Butte on his personal allotment of land in the northwestern
corner of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Now an old man of
78 winters, Black Elk wanted to pray where he could see the traditional
lands of the Lakota-or Sioux, as his people had come to be called.
Some 20 miles to the south loomed the Paha Sapa, the Black Hills, sacred heart of the Great Plains, with the pointed crest of Harney Peak barely visible. The peak, he had been told by a spirit guide long ago, was the very center of the world. It was there-many lifetimes earlier, it seemd to Black Elk-that he had experienced a life-changing vision at the age of nine. In it he met the great powers of the world and received special abilities from them. But he could also see four generations into the future, and what he saw included adversities awaiting his people that he would have no power to change.
Black Elk gestured toward the grassless, broken up landscape immediately surrounding his visitors. They knew this dry and craggy place as the Badlands, but his name for it was mako sika, "strange lands of the world." Then the old man swept his arm in the direction of what the Lakota called awanka toyala, "greenness of the world," the graceful rolling breadth of the shortgrass prairie.
He remembered the shallow, wooded ravines in that expanse-places where his people had gathered currants, plums, buffalo berries, coral berries, and the much-sought-after chokecherries that were collected by the hideful in late summer. In the springtime he had accompanied his family to look for the violet colored blossoms on the exposed green flats that showed where sweet prairie turnips, called tinpsila, were ready to be uprooted with digging sticks. Eaten raw like carrots, they also were boiled to thicken buffalo stew and could feed a family through the winter if properly dried.
Finally, Black Elk looked to the east, to the flat, undulating tall grass prairie known to his people as oblayela, "wideness of the world." The old holy man had been born at a time when his people felt themselves to be custodians of this entire domain. Yet within the brief span of his own lifetime, everything had changed. Black Elk had witnessed the bitter end of the Sioux's terrible wars with US troops and had seen his people reduced to impoverished isolaton on four small reservations, a meager fraction of all that had once been theirs. As a desendant of renowned Lakota healers and medicine men, however, Black Elk still clung to a vision of his people's greatness, refusing to let it die.
Now with his visitors, looking over a landscape he know like the back of his wrinkled hand, Black Elk prayed that his people might survive and might yet reclaim their ancient connectons to this wide world with its many different spirits.
- When Black Elk was born in 1863,
his people were among some 30 distinctive Native American nations known
collectively as Plains Indians who called some portion of the open grasslands
their home. For all the peoples of the Plains, the landscape itself had
tales to tell.
According to tradition, an oval valley that rings the Black Hills came into being as a great racetrack, dug into the earth when all the world's creatures--two-legged, four-legged, and winged--ran in a race that established their various destinies, including the two-leggeds' right to hunt buffalo.
Plains hunters, traveling on foot and armed with stone-tipped spears, could kill their swifter, stonger prey only with ingenuity and coordinated effort. They used two basic techniques. One method was to frighten animals out of the brush and ravines into wide channels created between two makeshift fences. Corralling the terrified prey into a circular enclosure at the end of this chute, they could then kill the animals at close range.
The other method was the "buffalo jump." At the start, hunt leaders would position women and children behind piles of stones arranged in a V-shaped 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 butchering parties.
- Along the borderlands of the western
Great Lakes, the Dakota-the eastermost tribe of the Sioux-and the Ojibwa,
largest of the Great Lakes woodland tribal groups, found themselves in
bloody competition over the same inventory of natural resources. Both peoples
harvested wild rice in the fall, hunted in the winter, made maple sugar
in the spring, and farmed in midusmmer. Their neighbors include Lakota
tribes-branches of the great Siouan-speaking brotherhood-who preferred
a buffalo-hunting way of life.
- By the 1770's the Santee Sioux
of central Minnesota had become an equestrian people. Horses were stolen
and traded from tribe to tribe by way of routes east and west of the Rockies.
Before long there were herds of run-away horses, and eager tribesmen snagged
their own wild mounts.
In the summer young Sioux horse catchers ventured into the Platte and Arkansas country, pursuing the herds in relays-riding one wild horse until it gave out, then hopping onto another, relentlessly driving the animals until they were utterly exhausted and easily lassoed. A second method took advantage of box canyons: relays of riders herded horses into narrow canyon passageways and then, tossing a loop attached to a stick, noosed them and tied them down.
By the early 1700's, a common currency had entered the Plains in the form of the horse. Aspiring leaders won followers and status as their personal stables multiplied. Inevitably, as horses became the new index of wealth and warriors sought them by any possible means, the frequency of intertribal raids skyrocketed. Young men clamored to go out on these expeditions, often disobeying older chiefs to do so.
Stealing horses was even more exciting than capturing them wild. The seizure of enemy horses conferred honor comparable to that of killing an enemy. It offered the raiders a triumphant return to camp, past admiring women, galloping in with a string of snorting and whinnying trophies behind them.
Horses tranformed Plains Indian life by eliminating the uncertainties of food supply almost overnight. If buffalo could not be found nearby, hunters simply rode to wherever they were. Shooting at a thundering herd of buffalo from horseback was not only far less risky than running after them on foot and driving them off a cliff but also took less time and required fewer participants. Small bands or even individuals could locate a small herd and within a few hours slaughter enough to feed their people for months. It was then that true nomadism, a rarity in North America, began to flourish and tribal bands could come and go with few restraints.
While the horse enabled men to hunt independently, the women-whose role in forming the buffalo surrounds had previously been essential to the hunt-were now able to devote their time to processing the hides. After every successful hunt there was now an excess of tanned buffalo skins, which translated into tradable goods and greater prosperity.
- Warriors on horseback wielded small shields painted with
powerful symbols such as medicine bears and birds to protect them from
enemy fire. Bows were shortened and laminated for greater power, and clubs
and short lances were crafted for close combat. The use of firearms in
warfare was not adopted throughout the Plains Indian world as readily as
that of horses. Before the arrival of repeating rifles, warriors had to
rely on smooth-bore muzzle-loaders, which were not very accurate and could
not be fired as rapidly as arrows in the heat of battle. And to renew his
gunpowder, lead shot, and spare parts, an Indian needed steady access to
the white man's trading posts.
Highest honors were accorded the daring warrior who risked all to "count coups." A French word meaning "stroke" or "blow," coup could signify any sort of damage or humiliation inflicted upon an enemy in war. Coups were the means by which a warrior gained status in his tribe, and they were scrupulously ranked-striking an enemy with a gun, bow, or riding quirt, for instance, might be considered a higher achievement than actually killing him. Other honors were granted for stealing horses, riding down an enemy, recovering his weapon, or scalping him.
Warriors proudly recollected their notable coups on formal occasions and recorded them with appropriate insignia, such as specially trimmed feathers, marks on their horses' flanks, beaded or quillwork strips on the war shirts, or pictographs painted on buffalo robes and tepee covers.
- Maintaining peace on an intertribal basis, however, called
for more formalized rituals that centered on the use of tobacco. Adopted
by all Plains tribes, ceremonial smoking established neutral ground among
horseback tribes that found themselves in ever closer and more contentious
proximity to one another. Animal-shaped or flat-disc pipe bowls carved
from soapstone were originally used for the purpose. Later, when the westward-migrating
Sioux took control of western Minnesota's quarries of brick-red pipestone,
distinctive T-shaped stone pipe bowls gained acceptance as a badge of chiefly
office throughout the Plains. Beaded pipe bags became an essential feature
of male regalia, and the time-consuming etiquette that evolved around the
ceremonial sharing of the pipe would often exasperate visiting white traders
and diplomats.
- As men became increasingly preoccupied with horse raiding
and coup counting, the women of some Plains tribes were compelled to find
new ways to assert their roles. Especially among the tribes that had formerly
worked the land, the new nomadic lifestyle of increased warfare and year-round
hunting eroded the women's traditional power base. As planters and harvesters
of the village gardens in earlier times, they had enjoyed a relatively
high position as providers and as guardians of domestic space.
Now a woman's worth to her family and community increasingly came to rest upon her ability to manufacture and decorate a wide number of items not only for family use but also for trade. Throughout the Plains, women based their reputations upon the artistry they brought to the making of pots, baskets, cradleboards, robes, moccasins, and beadwork. The burgeoning fur trade provided a ready market for the hides and pelts that women processed for export. Women's products were also coveted items on the intertribal trading network: 18th century Europeans witnessed the Crow and Sioux trading decorated shirts, leggings, and animal-skin robes with the Mandan-Hidatsa for squash, corn, beans, tobacco, and guns.
- Among the Plains tribes, artisan "guilds" controlled
the production of all quillwork and beadwork. Members controlled
the highly specialized knowledge needed for certain techniques, and instruction
required payment. Those women who were fortunate enough to possess such
knowledge were well paid for their creations. A quilled robe made by a
member of a quilling society, for example, could easily be traded for a
pony from the Arapaho or the Mandan-Hidatsa.
The quilling societies of the Sioux were orgainzed by women who had dreamed of Double Woman, a supernatural figure who, according to legend, had first taught Lakota women how to dye quills and perform intricate quillwork. Double Woman possessed two contrasting natures: one industrious and virtuous, the other idle and lascivious. She offered the dreamer a choice between the productive practice of special skills in craftwork and the ability to wreak havoc by stealing other women's men.
- Througout the Plains, men and women alike sought spiritual
power through dreams, visions, sacred objects, and songs that could impart
special luck or the ability to alter events in their favor. The Oglala
Sioux called this power wakan. A Lakota shaman named Sword described it
this way: "Every object in the world has a spirit, and that spirit
is wakan. Thus the spirit of the tree or things of that kind are also wakan.
Wakan comes from the wakan beings. These wakan beings are greater than
mankind in the same way that mankind is greater than animals. They can
do many things that mankind cannot do. Mankind can pray to the wakan beings
for help."
To this end, at the time of puberty almost every Plains Indian boy set out on vision quests-periodic wilderness retreats in which the initiate hoped to receive guidance from the spirit world. Only with the aid of special power beings-such as the spirits of eagles, hawks, or bears-it was believed, could a person gain that extra jolt of supernatural assistance needed to succeed in war, curing, love, or tribal leadership.
After a purifying "sweat" in a bowl-shaped sweat bath framed with willows, shrouded with buffalo hides, and steam-heated with hot rocks splashed with water, the young quester shouldered his sleeping hide and trekked to a sacred butte. At the summit he fasted for four days, wept and prayed naked before the elements, and sometimes went so far as to cut off a finger to entice a spirit to grace him with an empowering vision.
After the quester returned to camp and again entered a purifying sweat bath, elders helped him assemble objects that his spirit guide had instructed him to collect. Wrapped in a skin, these items were known as a medicine bundle and were a warrior's dearest possessions. They might be unwrapped prior to any perilous enterprise when a man needed the sacred protection that had been granted him during his original vision.
- Most Plains tribes, in addition, had sacred objects that
were unique to their history and as essential to their ocllective identity
as their language. The Sioux had a White Buffalo Calf Pipe.
- As proliferaton of horses allowed closer contact among
various plains tribes, many of them came to observe the same ritual, one
of profound importance. It was the Sun Dance: a four-day religious festival
in which singers, drummers, dancers, and spectators gathered to seek communally
the sort of power that they sought as individuals in their private vision
quests.
Some historians suggest that the Sun Dance appeared around 1700, possibly originating with the Cheyenne. To the Plains Indians, however, the ceremony was ageless-a divine gift from the supernatural world. In any case, by 1750 virtually every Plains tribe practiced some variation of the Sun Dance. To the Sioux it was known as the Gaze at the Sun Dance. Regardless of the name, all the tribes erected a central Sun Dance Medicine Ledge, which served as the sacred ceremonial space. Within a circular framework of poles constructed around a central sacred cottonwood tree, which was loosely walled with leafy boughs, young painted "pledgers" fasted and danced continuously.
Attended by tribal shamans, the youths prayed to their creator as the wind tossed banners hanging from the rafters of the lodge and rawhide effigies dangling from the center pole. Then the pledgers' skin was pierced with skewers, which were attached by rawhide thongs to the center pole. As the young men danced, they tore their flesh as a sacrificial expression of the sincerity of their prayers for a powerful vision-not only for their personal well-being but for the happiness and prosperity of their people as well.
- As horse-rich tribes staked out their favored roaming
and hunting territories in the Plains, they forged mlitary alliances based
sometimes on shared cultural traditions and sometimes purely on the existence
of common enemies. One early partnership arose between the Siouan-speaking
Assiniboin people and the Algonquian-speaking Plains Cree. Opposing them
was the mightly Blackfeet alliance, whose constituent tribers-Piegan, Blood,
and Northern Blackfeet (also called Siksika)-had long standing bonds of
language and custom. A third alliance, that of the earth-lodge communities
along the middle Missouri River, was less a military than a self-protective
and cultural coalition.
But there was a fourth great alliance that threatened all the others with aggressive militarism and overwhelming numbers: the "seven council fires" of the Sioux. Altogether they amounted to some 25,000 loosely affiliated tribesmen in the 1790's. The four Eastern groups were known collectively as the Dakota, or Santee Sioux. In the middle were the Yankton and Yanktonai, keepers of the sacred pipestone quarry. Full 40% of the alliance belonged to the Teton, or Western, Sioux.
For good reason, then, the earth-lodge tribes-whose horses, dried squash, and corn the Sioux coveted-together with the Sioux's traditional enemy, the Crow, were constantly vigilant about survival. Once the Sioux bolstered their numbers with Cheyenne and Arapaho allies, they became the most forrmidable fighting force on the northern Plains.
- Just after the turn of the 19th century, a major outbreak
of small pox and cholera struck again, nearly exterminating the Omaha,
Ponca, Oto, and Iowa peoples. The vicious diseases spread north and south,
heading up the Missouri River to decimate the Arikara, Gros Ventre, Mandan,
Crow, and Sioux, and down the Mississippi to wreak havoc among the Kiowa,
Pawnee, Wichita, and Caddo....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.
- There were other disturbing signs that the glory days
of Plains Indian horsemen were on the wane. The 1804-06 expedition of Lewis
and Clark to survey and document the landscapes, plants, animals, and Indian
tribes of the West constituted a sort of scientific forerunner for the
territorial takeover by the US government that was soon to follow. The
next government probe into the Plains Indian world came in 1825. That year
Brig Gen Henry Atkinson and Indian agent Benjamin O'Fallon sought out chiefs
for negotiating treaties concerning trade and friendship. Some 15 Cheyenne
individuals put their thumbprints to a document acknowledging US political
and commercial authority over their region. As would happen time and again
in Indian-white frontier diplomacy, what US officials considered a legally
binding agreement, the great majority of Indians neither understood nor
accepted.
- In the north, traffic on what whites called the Oregon
Trail was producing no fringe benefits for the native populations. By 1843
the road shoulders on both sides of the North Platte and Sweetwater sections
of the Oregon Trail were virtually devoid of grass-and wagon traffic west
had only just begun....The buffalo were scared off, the meager stands of
river-bottom timber were depleted, and streambeds were made muddy from
cattle tracks.
Many tribesmen also noticed disturbing changes in the populations and habits of the animals they depended on. Traders paid some Indians in liquor to hunt wholesale-a gruesome practice described in one case by George Catlin. Native hunters, Catlin reported in 1832, were wiping out a herd of 1,500 buffalo near Ft Pierre. Only the tongues were saved for transport to St Louis; the meat and raw hides were left to the wolves. But with the demise of the beaver trade due to overtrapping in the 1830's, a new market for buffalo robes filled the vacuum in the late 1840's. An Indian agent foresaw that the buffalo would soon be hunted to extermination and that, in his words, "the Indians will have great difficulty in procuring sufficient for their own clothing and food."
The times were changing, and many Plains Indians read the signs with foreboding. The Cheyenne war leader named Yellow Wolf observed that buffalo were harder to find and confided a deeper fear that unless his people adopted the white man's ways and found some alternative to their hunting way of life, they would disappear forever.
In fact, another 40 years of Indian rebellion still lay ahead-years of whole tribes removed and resettled, of pitched battle and pitiless massacres and violent deaths of many good-hearted Indians like Yellow Wolf, who feel at the age of 85. On all horizons of those Great Plains-the same vistas a somber Black Elk would point out to his visitors nearly a century later-there loomed the gathering storm clouds of violent and irreversible change.