Survival and Adaptation of Aboriginal Archery and European Firearms
A wide range of factors influenced Aboriginal peoples’ perceptions and decisions about the uses of their own technology in comparison with the new tools and weapons introduced from Europe. With growing experience, they recognized the capabilities and advantages that edged metal weapons and firearms offered, especially as these weapons improved. In a gradual process, they integrated these weapons into their material culture and belief systems and adapted them to their specific needs and purposes.
Metal axes, knives, arrowheads, and firearms were not superior in every respect to Aboriginal weapons, but they offered advantages that Aboriginal people considered worthwhile. During the late eighteenth century, Plains people increasingly traded processed bison meat to the fur traders, and in the 1830s the trade in bison robes began to dominate the fur trade in the Plains. Unlike the trade in beaver pelts, this trade complemented Plains peoples’ subsistence activities and enabled Aboriginal people, by killing bison in excess of what they needed for survival, to obtain metal arrowheads in exchange for bison products. The inventory of Fort Benton in Montana for the 1850s listed the price for metal arrowheads at one and a half cents each. For a single dressed bison robe, Plains Indians could obtain dozens of such arrowheads.1 Such low prices provided a strong incentive to give up the time-consuming manufacture of stone points and adopt metal ones. Even though they were not as sharp as stone points, metal arrowheads were more durable and could often be used more than once, which was usually not possible with stone arrowheads.
Similarly, firearms were not superior or inferior to Indigenous distance weapons in absolute terms. Rather, they enabled Aboriginal people to accomplish objectives and fulfill purposes in specific situations that could not, or could only with difficulty, be accomplished with Indigenous weapons. However, guns were cumbersome in other situations where Indigenous weaponry prevailed with few alterations. The adoption of European tools and weapons had as much to do with environmental limitations on Indigenous technology as with Aboriginal hunting and combat methods, forms of leadership, and military organization.
In the Central Subarctic, the limited availability of suitable woods for bow making, and the increasing emphasis on trapping and hunting of individual animals, favored the use of firearms. When guns became available more consistently to Central Subarctic Aboriginal people, they quickly replaced the lance and caused a gradual shift away from archery for big game hunting and combat. However, archery remained in use to hunt small game and birds. Bows used for such purposes did not have to be as powerful as bows intended for big game hunting and combat. These had to accommodate strain close to, or sometimes exceeding, the capabilities of the woods they were made of, while self bows intended for small game could be built with lower draw weights that accommodated the shortcomings of locally available woods and made these bows safer to use. The decline of bows as a big game hunting weapon may have led to design changes in Subarctic self bows, away from the wide, flat bows to narrower, more easily constructed bows; because this latter type of bow was sufficient to hunt small game and birds, it continued in use in the Central Subarctic well into the twentieth century. In a seemingly paradoxical way the adoption of firearms contributed to the survival of archery in the Subarctic, although in a different form.
In the Northern Plains, the development was different. Even though the availability of suitable raw materials for bow and arrow making was limited, the Plains provided more usable hardwood species than the Subarctic. Ingenious construction methods such as sinew backing allowed Plains peoples to manufacture powerful and dependable bows from locally available materials. Furthermore, most Aboriginal people of the region adopted horses and mounted bison hunting before they gained consistent access to firearms on a large scale. By the time firearms became available in greater numbers, the bow and arrow was already well established as the main weapon for mounted bison hunting, and it remained in that position well into the last quarter of the nineteenth century. When the bison herds were destroyed, and reserves were established, Plains Indians gave up most of their traditional economy and subsistence patterns and had to venture into agriculture and ranching. Hunting declined in importance as a subsistence activity, and Plains peoples preferred firearms over bows and arrows to hunt deer and small game. Possibly because archery was so deeply connected to the Plains peoples’ old autonomous life, it may also have been shunned as a reminder of loss and defeat after the establishment of reserves.
Although in the Central Subarctic firearms replaced bows and arrows as the main distance weapon for combat during the eighteenth century, in the Plains bows and various types of firearms were used together, from the adoption of muzzle-loading firearms until the late nineteenth century. Accounts by Aboriginal people and by fur traders and other travelers, such as Peter Fidler, George Catlin, and Prince Maximilian, frequently mentioned the combined use of bows and arrows and firearms in warfare.2 Plains Cree and Blackfoot people used bows and arrows alongside firearms in combat as late as the late 1850s.3 However, in the Plains, firearms were mainly a combat weapon, while the bow and arrow remained the preferred weapon for mounted bison hunting. The bow and arrow was more convenient to use, and it saved ammunition for firearms that could be used in combat.4 When interviewed in 1941, the Siksika Crooked Meat Strings ranked the most important objects that could be captured in battle. He ranked guns first but added that before guns were available, the capture of an enemy’s bow and arrows was ranked highest. In his youth, during the late nineteenth century, capture of bow and arrows already ranked second.5
In the Plains, warfare held great importance as a means to obtain prestige and social standing. Plains Indians developed elaborate and precise systems to record and compare military achievements such as touching an enemy under fire (“counting coup”), capturing horses or enemy weapons, or killing enemies and taking scalps. This well-established system was largely absent in the Subarctic, leading some scholars to believe that warfare in the Plains was a highly ritualized sport or contest with few casualties and little impact on the societies involved. However, warfare in the Plains was not uniform and ranged from exciting contests or “war games” to bloody battles and the destruction of entire communities.6 Horses greatly facilitated Plains warfare and led to a higher frequency of raids. Horses provided easier and faster transportation, and the capture of enemy horses became a strong incentive to go to war.
The devastating effects of European epidemic diseases, combined with the uneven introduction and distribution of horses and firearms, led to the displacement of Aboriginal groups like the Eastern Shoshone, Kutenai, and Salish (Flathead) from the western Plains by the Blackfoot, Sarcee, Gros Ventre, Plains Cree, and Assiniboine.7 This happened mainly during a period when the number of firearms per band was lower than in later times. From HBC account books, Arthur Ray and Heinz Pyszczyk compared the number of firearms the HBC traded inland to Plains Indians, using population estimates by European traders and travelers. According to these figures, from 1720 to 1774 the HBC traded a total of 6,551 firearms to an estimated 1,380 lodges of Plains Indians in the Saskatchewan district, amounting to a ratio of 0.09 firearms per lodge per year.8 This suggests that only relatively small numbers of firearms reached Aboriginal communities in the Plains. However, this small number of sometimes problematic weapons had a significant effect on intertribal military relations. The bow and arrow offered clear advantages in regard to shooting speed, availability of ammunition, absence of noise and smell, and ease of handling on horseback. Nonetheless, considering penetrative force, even the most basic firearms were far superior to even the most advanced historic archery equipment.
This alone is not enough to explain the popularity of firearms as combat weapons and their effect on intertribal military relations. The issue is not so much one of the inherent “superiority” of these weapons but rather how Aboriginal people adapted them in combat in combination with traditional weapons such as bows and arrows. Ambush tactics and surprise attacks with firearms as initial “artillery” at close distances were highly effective. Archers could also provide cover for warriors with firearms shooting at Aboriginal opponents lacking firearms, as suggested by Saukamappee’s and Kootana Appe’s accounts and by Arikara and Pawnee ledger drawings depicting line formations of warriors in combat.
Aboriginal concepts of leadership in warfare also contributed to the effect of firearms. According to Saukamappee’s account, even before the introduction of firearms, the primary objective of the leader of a war party was to bring back alive every member of his party.9 Among most Plains peoples, war leaders had only limited authority. They were not in a position to give and enforce orders that would result in a number of casualties in the course of accomplishing a short-term military objective. For example, when fur trader Finan McDonald accompanied a party of Salish from the Rocky Mountains onto the plains to hunt bison in the summer of 1810, they fell in with a large Blackfoot war party. The Salish eventually drove the Blackfoot to take shelter in a thick cluster of trees from where they kept up constant gunfire, killing and wounding a few Salish. McDonald and the leader of his party tried in vain to induce the Salish warriors to storm the trees and drive the Blackfoot from their cover.10 This example indicates that the limited authority of Aboriginal war leaders made them unlikely to launch concerted attacks against an entrenched foe that had even just a small number of muzzle-loading firearms. Such attacks could not be accomplished without at least a few casualties, which would damage a leader’s reputation. Even if a leader had initiated such an attack, most of the warriors likely would not have followed.
This deterring effect was enhanced with the appearance of firearms with greater long-range accuracy, such as muzzle-loading rifles or the Sharps guns used by non-Aboriginal commercial bison hunters in the second half of the nineteenth century. These new weapons often had a devastating effect on Aboriginal war parties, even though Aboriginal combatants far outnumbered their opponents. In such encounters even a small number of firearms could demoralize warriors to a point where they simply gave up and abandoned the fight, leading to the dissolution or collapse of the entire war party. For example, in 1853 on the Southern Plains a large war party estimated at fifteen hundred Comanche, Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, Osage, Arapaho, and Cheyenne set out to attack Sauk and Fox people whom the U.S. government had deported to the eastern fringe of the Southern Plains. However, the Plains Indians suffered a devastating defeat by the Sauk and Fox, who were mostly armed with rifles.11 Similarly, on June 27, 1874, fewer than thirty hide hunters entrenched in an old post at Adobe Walls on the Canadian River in Texas, and armed with long-range bison hunting guns, repelled a war party of several hundred Southern Plains Indians, losing three of their own and killing nine warriors.12 In both cases, the vastly more numerous Plains Indians refused to attack their enemies in a massed charge against precise rifle fire.
The introduction of firearms to the Northern Plains and their adoption by Aboriginal peoples coincided with several outbreaks of European epidemic diseases in the Great Plains and beyond. The smallpox epidemics of the early 1780s and late 1830s were especially devastating. Hardest hit in the Northern Plains were probably the agricultural Arikara, Hidatsa, and Mandan in their densely populated earth-lodge villages along the Upper Missouri River, while more mobile bison-hunting peoples of the Plains were also devastated by the disease. After each epidemic, many Aboriginal communities were in shambles, and most groups were barely able to hunt to feed their families. Aside from the cultural loss, and the interruption of numerous traditions through the loss of elders and specialized crafts people, the population losses inflicted by the epidemics left Aboriginal communities more vulnerable to attack.
During the first years after epidemics, Aboriginal warfare seems to have become less frequent. However, when it gained momentum again, the lives of individuals counted even more than before, since the substantial population losses could not easily be compensated for. This may have led war leaders to take a more cautious approach in combat, accepting even fewer risks of losing people under their leadership. If such a mindset prevailed, firearms may have become even more important in Aboriginal warfare as powerful offensive weapons or as the means of deterring attacks and bolstering communities’ defenses.
Because of their great penetrative force, firearms rendered ineffective the large formations of shield-bearing warriors described by Saukamappee, thus contributing to Plains peoples’ increasingly individualistic approaches to warfare and combat. Firearms’ advantages bolstered their importance even when there were few and they were technically problematic. Had Aboriginal people used firearms according to European military concepts, involving massed formations and hierarchical command structures, these weapons might have had less of an impact. For example, Joan Townsend pointed out that on European battlefields in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where armies massed large formations of soldiers, muzzle-loading smoothbore firearms were often not very effective at longer ranges.13 However, because Aboriginal people employed these weapons differently and often at close range, they could use these weapons to their fullest potential, which meant that even small numbers of firearms could confer a decisive advantage in battle.
In contrast to the Plains, Subarctic peoples placed less emphasis on individual “war honors” as a means of determining social standing. Warfare in the Subarctic seems to have been motivated primarily by desire for revenge and access to resources and trade. While warfare was less frequent, available data suggest that it was also more aggressive than in the Plains. In combat, Subarctic Aboriginal people employed firearms in ways similar to those of the Plains peoples, using ambush tactics and sudden fire at close range. However, because they primarily hunted different kinds of animals, such as caribou, moose, and water birds, Subarctic people embraced firearms technology more thoroughly for hunting than did the peoples of the Northern Plains. Despite outside pressures for cultural and economic assimilation, hunting continued to be an important means of procuring food for many Aboriginal communities in the Subarctic until the present, largely because other economic options were few, and because much of their environment was still intact and had not yet undergone massive transformations comparable to those of the Plains area. In contrast, hunting as an economic mainstay lost its importance to the Aboriginal people of the Northern Plains. The extermination of the bison herds and the environmental, cultural, and economic changes forced on the Plains people made it impossible for hunting to continue to be a major contributing factor to their livelihood.
As long as hunting was still feasible for the Aboriginal people of the Northern Plains, bows and arrows were used well into the last quarter of the nineteenth century as the major big game hunting weapon. The retention of archery was based on several factors. Archery had been deeply ingrained, not only in the hunting and military complex but also in socioreligious aspects of Plains Indian cultures well before horses and firearms became available to Plains peoples. When they finally utilized horses as riding animals in large numbers, most Northern Plains peoples learned to combine the use of horses with archery before they gained continuous access to firearms on a large scale. Furthermore, the specific conditions of mounted bison hunting favored the retention of archery over muzzle-loading firearms because bows and arrows were more efficient and convenient to use on horseback. Only after breech-loading and repeating rifles and revolvers became available in sufficient quantities did they gradually replace the bow and arrow in the Plains. If firearms had not become so widely used in the Plains, Aboriginal rawhide armor for people and horses, and the accompanying methods of combat, might have remained in place. Without firearms, Plains peoples might have developed different combat methods for mounted warfare, and consistent access to horses might have been the most decisive factor in military relations from the early eighteenth century to the beginning of large-scale non-Aboriginal settlement in the Northern Plains in the late nineteenth century.
The early trade between non-Aboriginal newcomers and Aboriginal peoples in the Northern Plains was sporadic. Often it was characterized by intense rivalries and competition between traders of different companies and nationalities. While Aboriginal people did use these tensions to their advantage, they also competed for middleman positions in trade and for military dominance over other groups. These continuous upheavals made trading risky, and their giving up of traditional weapons for firearms would have made them entirely reliant on the traders for items essential for defense. Thus, traditional weapons were retained, at least until every Aboriginal group in the Northern Plains had access to permanent trading posts where they could purchase firearms and bring them for repair.
In contrast to the situation in the Northern Plains, trading in the Central Subarctic was much more stable, at least since the early eighteenth century when the Hudson’s Bay Company began to operate permanent trading posts on the west coast of Hudson Bay and James Bay. There, local Aboriginal people increasingly began to be employed as hunters, guides, messengers, and manufacturers of necessary items such as winter clothing and snowshoes.14 Furthermore, Indigenous warfare, sometimes involving violence against the traders, may not have been as frequent in the Subarctic as in the Northern Plains.15 Thus firearms were more readily available to Aboriginal people in the Central Subarctic on a more continuous basis, at a much earlier time, than they were to Aboriginal people in the Plains. The shift from traditional weapons to firearms, however, was not sudden but gradual. Sales of firearms to the Swampy Cree by the Hudson’s Bay Company were infrequent at first, but by the early 1700s they had become a standard trade item, although sales remained low in the beginning. Only an average of twenty-six muskets per year were sold to the Swampy Cree from 1700 to 1704.16 It took more than another century before firearms became the main hunting weapon of these Aboriginal people.
Hunting methods also influenced the retention or loss of Aboriginal technology and the adoption of European weapons. While Plains hunters did pursue individual animals in small groups, communal hunting of bison herds was the most important hunting activity for securing the major annual portion of food. In the Subarctic, in contrast, although waterfowl and caribou were taken in large numbers at certain times of the year, hunting became more focused on fur trapping and the pursuit of individual animals, especially after the devastating smallpox epidemic of 1782–83.17 The fur trade in the Subarctic enhanced this tendency, since traders were mainly interested in obtaining high-quality beaver pelts and the furs of other small mammals, which were mostly trapped or hunted individually. In contrast, the fur trade in the Plains was until the mid-nineteenth century mainly a provisioning business. Through it, traders sought to procure bison products as portable and preservable food sources for their more northerly fur-trading operations in areas where food procurement on a large scale was impossible or at least uncertain for most of the year.
While Aboriginal people in the Plains lived in relatively large groups most of the time, Subarctic people lived in rather small groups throughout most of the year. These differences help explain why Subarctic people adopted firearms as the major weapon for big game hunting, while Plains people favored the retention of archery. Archery held a central position in the cultures of most Plains groups. Bows, arrows, and quivers of high quality, and mastery of their use, were considered symbols of masculinity among peoples of the Great Plains. In contrast, Aboriginal peoples in the Subarctic faced a wide variety of hunting situations and game animals, which made it necessary to utilize a wide variety of hunting tools. These ranged from traps, snares, deadfalls, and nets to bolas, slings, lances, spears, bows and arrows, and finally, firearms. Firearms, more so than any of the other weapons, were credited with the kind of special social status or symbolic connotations that were attached to archery gear by Aboriginal people of the Plains. Aboriginal people in the Subarctic used whatever means were necessary in order to make a living. To them bows and arrows were simply one hunting tool among many that could be used under certain favorable circumstances. A wide variety of hunting situations required a diversity of hunting tools and weapons. For example, Samuel Hearne, traveling with a group of Chipewyan under the leadership of Matonabbee, observed their confrontation with another Déné group, referred to as “Copper Indians”:
They [the Chipewyan] not only took many of their young women, furrs, and ready-dressed skins for clothing, but also several of their bows and arrows, which were the only implements they had to procure food and raiment, for the future support of themselves, their wives, and families. It may probably be thought, that as these weapons are of so simple a form, and so easily constructed, they might soon be replaced, without any other trouble or expense than a little labour; but this supposition can only hold good in places where proper materials are easily procured, which was not the case here: if it had, they would not have been an object of plunder. In the midst of a forest of trees, the wood that would make a Northern Indian bow and a few arrows, or indeed a bow and arrows ready made, are not of much value; no more than the man’s trouble that makes them; but carry that bow and arrows several hundred miles from any woods and place where those are the only weapons in use, their intrinsic value will be found to increase, in the same proportion as the materials which are made less attainable.18
If Central Subarctic peoples such as the Swampy Cree considered bows and arrows expendable and easily replaceable (as long as proper raw materials were available), they may already have had a predisposition to adopt firearms for big game hunting. Firearms were one more useful addition to their arsenal, augmenting existing Aboriginal hunting methods and weapons. They were most useful in hunting situations where distance weapons had not been used much before, as in hunting bears or in the pursuit of caribou by individual hunters, as opposed to the large-scale communal caribou drives mentioned in chapter 2.
In the Plains, hunting situations and techniques may have been similarly diverse before the adoption of the horse. With the emergence of mounted bison hunting as the most prominent form of hunting in the Plains, however, other hunting methods declined, as did the importance of other game animals, leading to less variety in hunting tools and weapons.
While traveling across the Northern Plains in 1754, Anthony Henday noted about his Cree and Assiniboine guides: “We saw a few Moose & Waskesew [red deer or elk]; but as the natives seldom kill them with the Bow & Arrows they will not expend ammunition, while Buffalo are so numerous.”19 This indicates that Henday’s hosts preferred firearms to hunt deer, moose, or similar animals, while the bow and arrow remained their preferred weapon for bison hunting. Perhaps the preservation of ammunition for defense was an important rationale for this practice.
If bows and arrows had been of major importance in big game hunting in the Subarctic, they were replaced as a big game hunting weapon by firearms sooner and more completely in the Subarctic than in the Plains. In the Subarctic, according to Louis Bird, bows and arrows were considered expendable and would sometimes be left behind when camp was moved. Bows and arrows were thought to be awkward to carry through the bush, and people were already carrying heavy burdens of other equipment considered more essential for survival. After arriving at the new location the hunters would make themselves new bows.20 Adrian Tanner, who conducted fieldwork among Mistassini Cree people in the 1960s, noted:
Some of these activities [maintenance and repairs of locally produced equipment such as snowshoes and toboggans] are performed during the summer, but the critical importance of many of the items that the Cree manufacture themselves is not that it saves them money, or that no commercial equivalent is available, but that it can be manufactured quickly, on the spot, when it is needed. This attitude is necessary, not only because hunting groups remain out of touch with commercial outlets for most of the year, but in case of the heavier items [or bulkier items such as a long bow difficult to move through underbrush?] it means that they need not be transported everywhere the group moves. It is more efficient to manufacture them on the spot out of materials acquired as part of the hunting and trapping activities. Such items may then be cached at a campsite when it is abandoned, and recovered later, possibly years later, when the group is again in the area.21
As this information was obtained from contemporary Cree hunters, it is difficult to assess to what extent these views were prevalent during the fur trade period. However, the relatively coarse and direct manufacturing techniques of many Subarctic Cree objects such as stone arrowheads and other lithic and wooden tools, from precontact times through the fur trade era, indicate that a certain expediency was practiced in Subarctic Cree material culture even then. For example, Subarctic stone arrowheads and other lithic tools were often made just well enough to perform their tasks but were far less refined than lithic tools from other regions of North America.
Perhaps self bows, expediently manufactured on the spot when required, were sufficient to hunt with in the Subarctic boreal forest. For example, northern Athapaskan peoples often seem to have preferred simple self bows over more complex sinew-backed bows.22 Hunting with the bow and arrow in northern regions can be tedious and only marginally productive, considering the labor invested in manufacturing a bow and arrows and hunting with them.23 In the highly diversified subsistence activities of Subarctic hunter-gatherers, too high an investment in such specialized labor could have become counterproductive. For example, Joseph Wilson stated in regard to Subarctic Athapaskan peoples: “The general lack of complex bows in the Northern Athapaskan heartland was not reflective of some original primitiveness on the part of Athapaskan speakers, but was simply a natural outcome of their cultural ecological circumstances.”24
Foley Benson elaborated this point further, in regard to the Kutchin, another Athapaskan speaking people in the western Subarctic:
The bow was utilized by the Kutchin as only one of an array of hunting techniques applicable to any game resource. It is possible that given the other hunting techniques, the bow might have been dispensed with altogether. When the bow was used, it was often a supplemental tool. When it was incorporated as the primary hunting weapon, no demands were made on it for accuracy and trajectory beyond about 30 yards. It appears that there was little need for a high trajectory weapon in the Kutchin economy. In fact, such a tool may have been maladaptive in the long term.25
Such concepts would probably have been astonishing to Plains Indian hunters and warriors who considered their archery outfits their most prized possessions; bows and arrows were among the first toys for Plains boys, and finely crafted archery outfits were presented as gifts to visiting foreign dignitaries.26 Since bows were considered symbols of adult male warrior status, simply leaving them behind probably would have occurred to Plains Indian men only in the most desperate situations. This symbolism might also explain that among Plains people, women were usually discouraged from handling and especially from using archery gear.
Louis Bird mentioned in this regard that similar restrictions existed among the Omushkego-Cree, although with some exceptions. Some men let their wives or daughters touch their bows and arrows to bring them good luck in hunting and preferred their wives to attach the fletchings to arrows.27 Public sanctions against women touching and handling archery gear may have been directed to bows and arrows used for combat rather than those used for hunting. With the decline of combat archery in the Subarctic, these prohibitions may eventually have disappeared altogether because at least by the early twentieth century some Subarctic women used bows and arrows to hunt small game.28 The strong symbolism and prestige attached to archery in the Plains was largely absent in the Subarctic.
Fur traders, travelers, and later, ethnographers frequently commented on the imminent disappearance of the bow and arrow from Central Subarctic cultures and its replacement by firearms. Such comments can be found ranging in time from the mid-eighteenth century through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.29 It is possible that what these observers noted was not so much the gradual disappearance of archery but its survival in a new role in tandem with firearms. Subarctic archery technology and use may have changed considerably under the influence of the adoption of firearms. In a new form and role, the bow and arrow were maintained as a small game weapon well into the twentieth century. Perhaps this transition and survival were possible because the bow and arrow had been only one among many hunting and survival tools that could be of use in Subarctic conditions.
For firearms repairs, spare parts, and ammunition, Aboriginal people ultimately depended on Europeans’ supplies, while they could manufacture and repair most archery gear with locally available materials. This was one reason why even some non-Aboriginal people, such as mountain men and non-Aboriginal bison hunters, adopted the short Plains bow and arrows as their preferred weapon for mounted bison hunting, alongside their firearms. For example, when in the winter of 1754 and in the spring of 1755 Anthony Henday’s party ran short on ammunition for their firearms, Henday claimed to have killed two moose and a swan with his bow and arrows, possibly the archery set he had received as a gift from his Blackfoot or Gros Ventre host.30 Furthermore, bows and arrows were more convenient to use on horseback than muzzle-loading firearms.31 The presence of bows and arrows in the arsenal of Plains warriors, even as recently as the late 1860s indicates that archery was still of importance, for instance for mounted bison hunting, silent shooting, and night fighting, even in the age of repeating firearms.
The arrival of breech-loading firearms, especially repeaters and revolvers, overcame most advantages of the bow and arrow in the Plains. The new weapons offered greater penetrative force, high rates of fire, and convenience on horseback. Among the Blackfoot, firearms gained overwhelming importance as the main military weapon after the 1860s. Accounts of personal war exploits and winter counts for that time frequently mentioned the use of firearms and fortifications such as rifle pits in armed conflicts, while at the same time making little or no mention of archery in military contexts.
Furthermore, the system of military honors extended to individual Blackfoot warriors seems to have accommodated firearms. Capturing an enemy’s gun was one of the highest military honors, a fact reflected in Blackfoot personal names such as “One Gun,” “Many Guns,” or “Night Gun.” Such names seem to have become more frequent among the Blackfoot during the second half of the nineteenth century than personal names containing terms for archery gear.
However, Aboriginal archery lingered on a smaller scale in the Plains and Subarctic, even after the decline of the fur trade, extermination of the bison herds, and establishment of reserves. Residential schools on the Blood and Blackfoot reserves listed archery as a recreational activity for the students.32 In some locations, for instance at Moose Factory on James Bay, students were allowed to hunt small game near the school using bows and arrows made by their male relatives or by themselves at the school: “The [Swampy Cree] boys delight especially to shoot birds with the bows and arrows provided by their fathers, or manufactured by themselves. Every boy has a bow and arrow, and their aim is true, so many a poor little bird is carried home in triumph ‘after the hunt.’”33 Among Plains Cree children at Cowessess Boarding School in southern Saskatchewan, recreation during summer included “shooting with bows and arrows of their own making.”34 Reports from several other residential schools in Canada indicated that some of their male students practiced archery, or even bow and arrow making and the hunting of small game, as recreational activities.35 Some of the archery equipment now in museum collections may have been made and used at residential schools.
Apparently the administrators of these institutions did not view archery as detrimental to their “civilizing” efforts. This notion may have been influenced by the growing popularity of the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements that promoted self-reliance through programs involving woodcraft and wilderness survival skills, loosely patterned on non-Aboriginal perceptions of Aboriginal cultural elements.36
Fig. 57. Aboriginal youths of the mixed Ojibwa-Cree community at Caribou Lake in northern Ontario during treaty negotiations in 1930. Note the typical twentieth-century Central Subarctic archery equipment: fairly long and narrow bows and arrows with large blunt arrowheads. Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, C-068930. Image courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN No. 3366814 (Caribou Lake, Ontario).
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nostalgic and romanticizing views of the “frontier” and Aboriginal people grew among the non-Aboriginal public and policy makers in Canada and the United States. Early anthropologists and tourists flocked to reserves in the western Plains or Canadian Shield in what had become “cottage country.” This opened up new opportunities for Aboriginal people as hunting guides and laborers, as performers of “Indian pageants,” and as manufacturers of tourist souvenirs. For example, Indian agent J. B. McDougall at the Walpole Island Agency reported in September 1904 of local Potawatomi and Chippewa people that “the men make bows, arrows, canes and small canoes, which brings them in a large revenue.”37 Similarly, a photograph of Plains Indian prisoners at Fort Marion in Florida, taken after 1874, shows them manufacturing arrows. The picture’s caption reads: “Making curiosities,” suggesting that these items were intended for sale as “Indian curios.”38
With the fading importance of archery, the level of craftsmanship in bows and arrows declined. Plains Indian arrows collected during the mid- to late nineteenth century still exhibit excellent craftsmanship. They are well balanced, the shafts are often barreled, and the fletchings are long and low cut. In contrast, arrows made more recently, from the 1890s to the mid-twentieth century, often show much cruder workmanship and construction characteristics as are more commonly found on non-Aboriginal sporting arrows, such as short fletchings with a rounded (parabolic) outline. For example, two Blackfoot arrows at the Manitoba Museum, which were made in the 1930s and were once part of an entire archery set obtained from the Siksika Reserve as a “buffalo hunting outfit,” hardly resemble older Plains arrows at all.39 Apparently the maker was not familiar with bows and arrows that had actually been used in mounted bison hunting but may have tried to manufacture something that looked “traditional.”
Bows, arrows, and quivers that had once been used in hunting and combat lost their importance for these purposes after the establishment of reserves in the late nineteenth century. Many items, once highly valued as tools of survival, symbols of masculinity, or even items of spiritual significance eventually became “Indian curios” as well. The Blackfoot cowhide quiver and bow case combination mentioned in chapter 7, donated by Hugh Berry to the Glenbow Museum, was patterned after similar but older artefacts made from otter skins, which held great spiritual meaning to Blackfoot people. In comparison, the cowhide of this artefact may have been less spiritually significant, but the quiver nonetheless followed older designs in its shape, beadwork decoration, and mode of construction. Whatever its original purpose may have been, it was apparently used in a pageant where Aboriginal people reenacted aspects of their past for the entertainment of visiting European dignitaries. Afterward it may have been presented as a gift to the visitors, and eventually became the toy of a non-Aboriginal child before reaching the Glenbow Museum.
Bows and arrows came to be seen by Europeans as primitive, a symbol of Aboriginal peoples’ defeat by Europeans and their technology, especially in the Great Plains. Even before the height of the “Indian Wars” of the 1860s and 1870s, non-Aboriginal people unacquainted with Indigenous technology held negative views of Aboriginal archery. For example, the missionary, writer, and lecturer George Copway (1818–1869) from Trenton, Ontario, who was of Missisauga Ojibwa descent, observed during his travels among non-Aboriginal people in the 1840s and 1850s:
During my travels in the east, I have met with individuals whom I found it difficult to convince that the Indian’s arrow could execute so much, and doubted me when I told them that with it they killed deer, bears and such like.
Several years ago, in the state of New York, an elderly gentleman, a farmer, and myself were entertained by a kind family to tea. The gentleman monopolized all the time for conversation with questions about the Indian mode of life. I answered them as well as I could. . . . He seemed satisfied with all my answers except those in relation to killing deer with bow and arrow. He doubted. He could not bring his mind to believe such a thing possible. . . . I held my tongue, half mad; and made the proposition that the next day I would make a bow and a couple of arrows, and as I understood he was a farmer, I should get him to furnish a yearling calf, and if in shooting I did not hit it, I would pay him the price of the calf if he desired it; but if, on the contrary, I should hit it, and kill it, then it should be mine! While our friends at the table could not wait till the morrow to know the result, my friend, the doubting gentleman, coolly declined, saying he [believed] we could kill deer at sixty paces if we hit it at all. I and my friends endeavoured to provoke him to accept my proposition, but failed to accomplish our purpose, his avarice overcoming his unbounded curiosity!40
Negative views of Indigenous technology were then instilled into Aboriginal people, and non-Aboriginal scholars fostered them with their emphasis on an alleged superiority of European technology, which was said to have been crucial in determining the course of Aboriginal peoples’ history after contact. For example, in 1913 a groundbreaking ceremony was held in New York Harbor for a planned but never completed memorial to the American Indian. A bronze statue of a Native man was to top the memorial. To symbolize the military subjugation of Native peoples by whites, the subjugated figure was to hold a bow in his lowered left hand.41
To some extent, such views have persisted in popular perception into the present. As late as 1993, the late Jay Massey, a bow maker and outfitter operating in Alaska, observed:
Not long ago I visited a photo lab in Anchorage, Alaska to pick up some colour prints of my archery hunting clients. One of the photos showed a great bull moose one of my hunters had killed with a recurved bow. The moose had an antler spread of 67-inches and had weighed approximately 1600 pounds on the hoof. One wood arrow tipped with a sharp broadhead had killed the moose within seconds; the bull had run but 35 yards after being hit.
A young man who worked at the photo lab said that he was an archer. He expressed amazement when he saw the photo. “I didn’t know you could kill a moose with a recurve bow!” he exclaimed with genuine surprise.42
However, as this study has demonstrated, these traditional weapons and tools were well adapted to meet Aboriginal peoples’ needs in providing sustenance as hunting tools and protection as combat weapons. At least in the Plains, they had also acquired spiritual importance and social connotations. Considering the restrictions that the limited availability of raw materials and the often severe climate conditions placed on options for the manufacture of weapons and tools, Aboriginal people were still able to get the best performance possible from their weapons through various ingenious construction methods and weapons designs.
When European tools and weapons became available, Aboriginal people integrated them into their material culture and adapted them to fit their needs. These processes were not uniform throughout North America. Different environments, subsistence activities, social organization, and economic pressures demanded different adaptive strategies and shaped Aboriginal peoples’ responses to European technologies. However, in both the Northern Plains and Central Subarctic, Aboriginal people saw the advantages as well as the disadvantages that the new technologies from Europe offered. They tried to achieve a functional balance by employing edged metal weapons and firearms together with Indigenous technology, so that these could complement one another. By using firearms differently from Europeans—in ways suited to their own diverse needs—they achieved the best results possible with the equipment available.