Bows, Guns, and Diverging Views on Indigenous and European Technology
In 1908 Indian agent James McLaughlin held a novel ceremony at Timber Lake on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota. His aim was to impress upon the Lakota men who had signed up to receive allotment lands the importance of U.S. citizenship and to mark their transition from “savagery” to “civilization.” Journalist Fergus M. Bordewich provided a vivid description of such an event:
They [the Lakota] stood resplendent in the feathers and fringed buckskin of a bygone age, facing Major James McLaughlin, a shrewd and hard man who was known to all Sioux as the Indian agent who had ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull in 1890. Ramrod-stiff, cigar in hand, McLaughlin watched as each Indian solemnly stepped from a tepee and shot an arrow to signify that he was leaving behind his Indian way of life. Moving forward, he then placed his hand on a plow to demonstrate that he had chosen to live the farming life of a white man.1
During the early twentieth century non-Aboriginal policy makers and the public at large in Canada and in the United States believed the complete assimilation of Aboriginal peoples into the dominant society to be the only valid solution to what was then perceived as the “Indian problem.” One of the measures devised in the United States to accomplish this was the allotment of reservations into parcels for individual families under the Dawes Act, or General Allotment Act, of 1887.
James McLaughlin and his colleagues in the Bureau of Indian Affairs could hardly have found a more poignant and fitting symbolism than archery gear. While to them the plow was a central symbol of civilization, the men from Washington had also hit the mark precisely concerning the central significance of the bow and arrow to the Plains peoples.
Changing Perceptions of Aboriginal Archery
By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, non-Aboriginal peoples attached increasingly negative connotations to Native American archery. At a time when social Darwinist models of cultural and ethnic hierarchies had become an integral part of intellectual culture, Native American archery was considered a relic of bygone times, representing Aboriginal technological and cultural inferiority. For example, in Ancient Society, published in 1877, Lewis Henry Morgan, then a leading American anthropologist, divided the evolutionary scale of civilizations into lower, middle, and higher savagery, lower, middle, and upper barbarism, and civilization. As the distinctive mark of higher savagery, he considered the invention of the bow and arrow. In contrast, his hallmark of civilization was the invention of writing.2
This indicates a link in scholarly and informed popular perceptions between archery and “savagery,” a cultural backwardness when comparing cultures of “higher savagery” (i.e., Native American) to those of “civilization” (i.e., Euro-American). Morgan’s notions might have at least in part informed the ideas of people like James McLaughlin and others who invented the competency ceremonies and their archery component.
To Bureau of Indian Affairs officials like McLaughlin the bow and arrow stood for “savagery,” violence, and technological inferiority while to Plains Indians it was a symbol of military prowess, economic independence, and masculinity, an expression of their role as providers and protectors.3 As early as 1754, Blackfoot or Gros Ventre people in the Northern Plains had rejected the Hudson’s Bay Company’s invitation to visit its posts on Hudson Bay to trade for guns and other goods. Presenting an archery outfit to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s emissary Anthony Henday, they stated that these weapons served them well enough.4
Fig. 1. Competency ceremony at the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota, 1916. Note the man standing underneath the flag, drawing a Plains bow and arrow, and the man on the far right resting his hands on a plow. Photograph courtesy of the National Archives.
Fig. 2. Competency ceremony at McLaughlin, Standing Rock Indian Reservation, South Dakota, 1920s. In their online catalogue, the State Historical Society of North Dakota records the following caption to this image: “Major James McLaughlin issues patents to Indians. Shooting of arrow denotes departure from Indian way of life, while the plow denotes acceptance of White man’s way of life.” Image courtesy of State Historical Society of North Dakota, 00036-003.
In spite of assessments to the contrary by later writers, fur trader and explorer David Thompson, who observed Aboriginal archery during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, confirmed the effectiveness of Plains Aboriginal bows in a skirmish between Gros Ventre des Prairies and Iroquois trappers: “The Willow Indians [Gros Ventre] were but a few more than the Iroquois and mostly armed with Bows and Arrows, which whatever maybe thought by civilized men, is a dreadful weapon in the hands of a good archer.”5
By the late nineteenth century, policy makers in Ottawa and Washington considered it necessary to suppress and eradicate most aspects of Aboriginal cultures in what they saw as an attempt to enable Aboriginal people to survive in the “modern world” by adopting Euro-American ways. Over several decades Aboriginal people were to be stripped of every important aspect of their traditional cultures, which were dismissed as “primitive” or “savage.” This process included, logically, taking from Plains Indian men the greatest symbol of their independence and self-esteem, the bow and arrow, especially because archery was deeply embedded in Plains customs, spirituality, mythology, and culture.
While by this time to Euro-Americans bows and arrows in the hands of Native peoples held connotations of “savagery” and “backwardness,” they had also become one of the strongest symbols of “Indianness” to non-Aboriginal audiences at events such as the Banff Indian Days. According to historian Laurie Meijer Drees, the Banff Indian Days “included foot races and bow and arrow competitions. The marksmanship contests typically involved twenty or thirty Indian marksmen, armed with bows and arrows and simultaneously shooting at a single sheep or goat target. The event was simple but had enormous appeal. Again, the attraction of the events appears to have lain in the ‘traditional’ nature of the events. Bows and arrows were a central part of that ‘traditional Indian’ image that lent the Days their great appeal.”6
In the Central Subarctic, archery seems to have held far less prominence. The symbols of Subarctic Aboriginal men’s independence and prowess were both assimilated from Europeans: metal knives in elaborately decorated sheaths, and later, firearms. Following contact with Europeans, bows and arrows remained in use for killing birds and small game, but by the 1800s, firearms had long since achieved dominance for Subarctic big game hunting and as a combat weapon, and their Aboriginal users had imbued them with meaning and contexts of their own. Accordingly, archery and firearms coexisted in very different spiritual and social contexts in the Subarctic as compared with the Northern Plains.
European Metal Weapons and Firearms: Catalysts of Momentous Change or Overrated Gadgets?
Why did the Plains peoples hold on to their traditional distance weapon for so long, even though from the mid-eighteenth century on, they had increasing access to muzzle-loading firearms? Why did bows and arrows remain in use as the preferred big game hunting weapons in the Plains well into the 1870s, until breech-loading firearms became available?7 How and why did these transition processes play out differently in other Aboriginal cultures and notably in the Subarctic? Examining these questions can shed light on processes of technology diffusion and changing Aboriginal-European relations.
The Europeans’ introduction of metal weapons, such as axes, daggers, arrowheads, and firearms, has often been thought to be a cause of momentous changes in political, economic, and military relations among different Aboriginal groups and also between Aboriginal people and Europeans. During the first half of the twentieth century, scholars suggested that initial contact between Indigenous cultures of North America and European cultures, represented by explorers and fur traders, led to a rapid collapse of Aboriginal economies and social organization and subsequently to their dependency on European goods.8
The availability of metal weapons and firearms through trade with Europeans was also said to have instantly revolutionized hunting and fighting methods because of their alleged superiority over Indigenous North American tools and weaponry.9 As John Clapham put it in the 1940s: “The Cree Indians were living about the southern end of the Bay. Armed by British and French traders, they ultimately became one of the great conquering tribes and fought their way, in bloody Indian fashion, right across the continent. They knew why they wanted ‘metal wares.’”10
Critics of such views, however, have pointed out the many disadvantages of early firearms, when compared to Aboriginal North American weapons systems such as the bow and arrow.11 For example, Brian Given went so far as to state: “Until the development of breech-loading, and later, repeating rifles during the nineteenth century, the gun offered no practical advantage over Native weapons in terms of its utility as a projectile weapon.”12
These controversies have revolved around the question of whether differences in technology alone are sufficient to account for unequal sociopolitical relations between Indigenous peoples and European newcomers. They relate to two central topics, the role of European technology disseminated through the fur trade in shaping Aboriginal history and the nature of violent conflict in pre-state societies.
Older historical studies often emphasized issues of European-perceived technological superiority and inferiority as critical, explaining social change among postcontact Indigenous societies as a process of rapid cultural deterioration caused by the influence of European technologies, weapons, and materials. These views emphasized alleged weaknesses of Indigenous technology, while the assumed superiority of European weapons, tools, and materials was seen as the key element to later European domination of North American Aboriginal peoples.13 Indeed, both European and Indigenous observers often considered firearms to have had a major impact on military relations between different Aboriginal groups.14
On the other hand, numerous writers have indicated the many technical flaws and logistical problems connected to muzzle-loading, single-shot firearms. These arguments present contradictions that seem especially stark for the Northern Plains, where the introduction and use of firearms has been connected to momentous changes in the military relations between different Indigenous groups, but where bows and arrows remained in use alongside firearms as combat and hunting weapons until the destruction of the bison herds in the late nineteenth century.15
Similarly, in the Subarctic, the introduction of firearms and edged metal weapons supposedly revolutionized Omushkego-Cree material culture, hunting methods, and subsistence patterns. Living on the western and southern shores of Hudson Bay and on the west coast of James Bay, the Omushkego, known to English speakers as the Swampy Cree, were at the source of the Hudson’s Bay Company fur trade from its very beginning in 1668–69. Of all the Aboriginal groups in northern and western Canada, they probably had the longest exposure to Europeans and their technology. Omushkego communities supplied guides for European missions of inland exploration and trade and later came to form the core of the so-called homeguard bands of mostly Cree people who lived near the trading posts and worked closely with fur traders. European traders also depended on the central Cree as guides and mediators with other Aboriginal groups to the west of them, using the river systems coming from the Rocky Mountains to access the western Plains and its fur resources. Without such guides and mediators, much of the western fur trade would not have been possible.
Yet, to earlier researchers, this long exposure of the Omushkego-Cree to European traders and their goods, culture, and diseases was proof enough of their early and growing dependency on the Europeans. Many of these early studies, however, suffered from a lack of attention to detail. Often they did not differentiate between different types of firearms, such as smoothbore weapons and rifles, or muzzle-loading single-shot firearms and repeating firearms. Their authors tended to assume a general superiority of every type of firearm over Aboriginal weaponry and drew almost exclusively on source documents that supported their views.16 They rather uncritically left out the many disadvantages that early firearms suffered from, and they also ignored the advantages that Aboriginal weapons such as bows and arrows, lances, or stone cutting tools could have under certain circumstances and in certain environments.
A major limitation of these studies was their reliance on mainly materialistic explanatory models for technological change in Aboriginal North America. They also often overlooked the fact that technologies were exchanged in both directions. European newcomers frequently adopted Aboriginal technologies and implements because these were better suited to specific tasks than European items were. Well-known cases in point are the adoption of Aboriginal footwear, snowshoes, and birchbark canoes by European explorers, traders, and settlers, but Plains Indian archery gear and tipis were also adopted by non-Aboriginal sojourners.17 Thus, a closer examination of Aboriginal weapons and equipment, and also the nonmaterial connotations and meanings around them, can contribute to a more precise understanding of the nature of survival and conflict among Indigenous societies in the Northern Plains and Central Subarctic.
Indigenous and European-Introduced Weapons Technology: Sources and Research Approaches
Because the impact of firearms and iron-based edged weapons was supposedly greatest in the contexts of survival and conflict, this work closely examines the big game hunting and combat methods and technology utilized by select groups of Aboriginal people in the Northern Plains and Central Subarctic, focusing on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The research presented here is based on the comparison and evaluation of a variety of sources. Written historical documents left mostly by non-Aboriginal observers, such as explorers, travelers, traders, and soldiers, for example, from the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg, are among the principal sources utilized.
However, such documents present specific challenges to interpretation. Each observer’s cultural background and bias influenced the content of the documents they created, as well as their views on the Native people they encountered. Furthermore, these documents were not created for the same target audiences. Various motives, from fostering trade between fur traders and Native people to higher book sales of exotic travel literature, may have influenced the writing, editing, and final content of these documents.18
Ethnographic accounts present other interpretive challenges. They often contain normative information, reflective of cultural ideals. This information was either filtered through the value systems of the Indigenous people presenting the information, or it consisted of isolated observations by non-Aboriginal outsiders who came to spend a limited and often relatively brief amount of time with a particular Native community. Therefore, the range and scope of such accounts can be limited and may only contain a small part of the variations of cultural and technological practices of a particular Aboriginal community. Furthermore, some accounts may contradict each other, which could either represent the range of variation that occurred in a specific community, or may reflect changing practices over time. Thus, relying on a single ethnographic source may lead to a rather limited understanding of a particular community’s practices in regard to the manufacture and use of weaponry.19
Historical photographs provide another important source of information. To document their visits for posterity, Native American dignitaries invited to seats of government in Washington DC, Ottawa, or Europe commonly had their portraits painted. After 1850, photography increasingly replaced painting for this purpose. At the same time, the first amateur and professional photographers began to arrive in the Trans-Mississippi West and Canadian Plains, producing some of the earliest photographic images of Native people in their homelands. As anthropologists began to conduct fieldwork on western reservations and reserves during the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photography came to be of increasing importance as a means to document their work.20
However, these images present certain interpretive problems. Similar to painters such as George Catlin, Karl Bodmer and Paul Kane, who had traveled through western North America earlier in the nineteenth century, some early photographers claimed as a major motive the documentation of Native lifeways before they would be changed and permanently altered by approaching non-Aboriginal settlement. Much like painters, early photographers commonly chose to arrange their subjects and compose their images. To some extent the long exposure times in early photographic techniques made this necessary. Just like paintings by eyewitnesses of western Native life, these early images were not unaltered “snapshots” but often highly composed, intended for a specific non-Aboriginal audience and a specific purpose. For example, some photographers sought to document conflicts between Native peoples and the U.S. military in the western United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. Others accompanied scientific or surveying expeditions in the western half of North America, attempting to create ethnographic documentation of Native cultures in the areas they traversed.
From the late 1800s to the 1940s, anthropologists began to take anthropometric photographs as databases for their research.21 Wild West shows and pageants, such as the Calgary Stampede and Banff Indian Days, as well as the burgeoning motion picture industry, provided further material for early photographic images. With these developments the influence of non-Aboriginal expectations and stereotypes about Native people on the creation and composition of photographic images grew. Thus, such images need to be carefully assessed within the cultural and historical context that led to their creation. They do not necessarily constitute unaltered depictions of Native life at a specific time. Frequently, photographers provided their own props and accoutrements to adorn their subjects according to their own preferences and ideas. For example, photographs taken in the context of the Powell Expedition in 1873 show Paiute people from the Grand Canyon area in Plains Indian clothing that originated with the White River Ute in Colorado and was supplied to the expedition from the collections of the Smithsonian Institution.22
Because Aboriginal points of view are essential for a more accurate understanding of this period, this study also draws on the traditions of Aboriginal peoples as they have been documented through close cooperation with Aboriginal elders. For example, Louis Bird has been active in recording Omushkego-Cree oral histories and traditions from his elders, as well as his own life experiences as a hunter, hunting guide, and trapper in the Central Subarctic for over thirty years. The result of Bird’s extensive research and collecting activity is several hundred hours of audio material, much of which has been transcribed and published through projects based at the Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies at the University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and is partially accessible through the World Wide Web at www.ourvoices.ca.
Linda McEvoy (Sioux Valley First Nation, Manitoba), Margaret and William Dumas (Fox Lake Cree Nation, Manitoba), Horace Massan (Split Lake First Nation, Manitoba), Jerry Potts (Peigan First Nation, Alberta), Clifford Crane Bear (Siksika First Nation, Alberta), and Mike Bruised Head (Kainai First Nation, Alberta) shared their knowledge in personal communications. A large number of typescripts of interviews with Blackfoot and other Aboriginal people from the Rocky Mountain Plateau and Northern Plains, some of them available at the Glenbow Archives in Calgary, were important sources of information. Comparing this information to fur trade documents and surviving artefacts makes it possible to gain insights about cultural and technological change among the peoples of the Northern Plains and Central Subarctic from Aboriginal perspectives.
A major portion of the research in this study involved a close examination of archery artefacts collected from Central Subarctic and Northern Plains peoples, now housed at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg, the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the McCord Museum in Montreal, the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa-Hull/Gatineau, the Montana Historical Society in Helena, Montana, the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture in Spokane, Washington, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, the Lindenmuseum in Stuttgart, Germany, and the Ethnologisches Museum (Museum of Ethnology) in Berlin, Germany.
With Louis Bird, I examined Aboriginal weapons and tools from the ethnological and Hudson’s Bay Company collections at the Manitoba Museum, and with Siksika elder Clifford Crane Bear, I studied collections at the Glenbow Museum. The collections of Duke Paul von Württemberg and Prince Maximilian of Wied, who traveled in the Great Plains in the 1820s and 1830s, and of Edward Hopkins, secretary to Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, were especially important. Research with these collections provided crucial information on the material culture of Aboriginal people over a period when they experienced substantial change.
For this study, I examined 113 bows and 502 arrows.23 The recording of construction details through sketches and/or photographs and the gathering of provenance information and collection history of each artefact, wherever possible, provided a substantial base for interpretation. Comparing the measurements of original bows to those of contemporary reproductions, whose performance data have been recorded, allows inferences about the likely performance of original bows. Based on the examination of these artefacts and on information from Aboriginal people, I manufactured and tested working reproductions of Aboriginal bows and arrows to develop a realistic understanding of the capabilities of Aboriginal artefacts and technology from a practical perspective.24
Provenance information about Aboriginal artefacts can be very limited, incorrect, or absent. Furthermore, artefacts did not necessarily always originate in the communities they were collected from. Nonetheless, Aboriginal people living in the same region experienced the same climatic and material constraints and faced similar challenges in regard to archery. Therefore, when interpreting documents, oral sources, or artefacts, sometimes the information gained can to some extent be extrapolated to other groups in the same culture area or region.
The archaeologist and anthropologist Frederic W. Gleach referred to this technique as “controlled speculation.” Comparative materials are selected from the most closely analogous historical or cultural contexts. Using techniques from history and anthropology, speculative inferences can be developed where information is lacking or obscured in the original sources. However, these inferences have to be carefully grounded in the historical, ethnographic, oral, and archaeological records.25 In regard to text documents generated by non-Aboriginal traders, travelers, and sojourners, historian David Smyth referred to this approach as “upstreaming,” or “to forecast retrospectively.”26
The following chapters closely examine and compare Plains and Subarctic peoples’ use of firearms and their most widespread distance weapon, the bow and arrow, in regard to technical aspects, efficiency in combat, and modes of use. The comparison and combination of documentary sources, Aboriginal oral traditions, actual artefacts, and the practical experience of reproducing and testing Aboriginal archery gear afford new insights into the workings and efficiency of this major traditional North American hunting technology and its significance for Aboriginal history.