As larger numbers of Native Americans encountered white settlers, the number of names for these visitors increased. The one generic term was “pale face,” but other names abounded, and were generally a description of some aspect of the white man which might include the ships he traveled in, his clothes, or the goods that he brought.
The color of skin, of course, provided a range of names. For the Arapaho, the incomers were “yellow hide” or “white skin.” The Iroquois, too, used the term “white hide,” and the Wyandot used the lyrical “morning light people.” Other aspects of the white men’s appearance inspired names, too. For the Miami, he was “hairy chest”; for the Kiowa, “hairy mouths,” probably describing their beards or mustaches.
The tools and weapons carried by the colonists also resulted in names: the Sioux had “big knife,” “iron maker,” and “long knife,” a term that was used generally by the Indians of the East and was probably in reference to swords. These peoples also called the white settlers the “coat men.”
An important trickster-figure in Ojibwe mythology and the reputed founder of Midewiwin as well as one of the creators of the world. Nanabozho, a spirit-character said to be born to a human mother and a spirit father, is prominent in the creation myths of the people and has parallels with Glooskap. Sent to earth to educate mankind, his skills include an ability to shapeshift; most commonly, Nanabozho appears in the form of a rabbit or hare.
Among the gifts Nanabozho gave to mankind include the names of all plants and animals, the invention of the symbols of the alphabet, and fishing.
Located in Winston County, Mississippi, Nanih Waiya is an ancient earthwork and a sacred site, believed to have been constructed by the mound-building culture of the Middle Woodland period, sometime in the 300-year period after the birth of Christ.
The mound itself rises some 25 feet from the surrounding ground, is around 140 feet wide, and 220 feet in length. Formerly there was a further circular earthwork bounding it on three sides, the whole construction occupying almost one square mile of land. Archeologists theorize that the mound would have been used for religious and ceremonial purposes; ancient myths from the Choctaw support this idea.
One of these myths describes how the Choctaw had wandered as nomads for some generations, carrying with them the bones of their dead ancestors. They chose their route according to the direction of a magic staff belonging to the medicine man which, plunged into the ground at night, would the next morning be pointing in the direction they should take. When they came to the spot now occupied by Nanih Waiya, the magic staff, for the first time standing upright in the ground, indicated that they should stay put. The mound was built as a thanks to the fertile land that the Choctaw made their home.
For the Choctaw, Nanih Waiya is a crucial part of their creation myth, the “mother mound” and the place where the first Choctaw person emerged, either from the mound itself or from a nearby cave, as though from a womb.
The territory upon which Nanih Waiya stands was part of the overall lands ceded to the United States in 1830. The sacred status of the mound meant that many Choctaw were distressed at the apparent loss of the land. However, in 2008 the land was officially given back to them. The anniversary of this momentous occasion, August 18, is held by the Choctaw as a day of feasting, thanksgiving, and celebration.
Belonging to the Algonquian language family, the Nanticoke lived close to Chesapeake Bay in what is now southern Delaware and Maryland. Their name originates in an Algonquian word meaning “people of the tide water.”
The Nanticoke gathered in small villages of wigwams, sometimes surrounded by palisades, and each ruled over by its own chief. These chiefs came under the rule of one sachem. The tribe hunted and gathered, fished, and collected the shells with which to make wampum.
The Nanticoke were well-disposed toward the white settlers, and were visited by Captain John Smith in 1608. However, relationships soured when the tribe started to contract the European diseases to which they had no natural immunity. Leaders were also angered by the white men plying alcohol to the Nanticoke. Things deteriorated to the point that the white settlers in Maryland declared the Nanticoke hostile in the early 1640s, and accordingly the tribe were attacked by the settlers from time to time, and were also among those persecuted by one Nathaniel Bacon. When some of his pigs were stolen, the appropriately named Bacon mounted a series of random attacks on Native tribes; these attacks included the Nanticoke, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the incident. Peace prevailed, however, despite the settlers continuing to harass the Nanticoke, not only taking away parcels of their land but accusing them of planning an uprising. This resulted in the colonists removing the tribes’ right to elect their own chief. No doubt tired of such treatment, in the 1740s the Nanticoke relocated themselves to Wyoming, and a few years later settled with the Onondaga, becoming part of the Haudenosaunee in 1753.
Although the Natchez spoke an isolate language, it was close to the Muskhogean language family to which the tribe belonged. The Natchez lived on the lower Mississippi River in Louisiana. Unusually, the Natchez had a hierarchical system, at the top of which was a king, known as the Great Sun. When he died, his wives were expected to commit ritual suicide so that they could meet with him in the afterlife. Other members might also choose to reunite with their king in this way, and it was considered extremely honorable to do so. Sometimes, mothers killed their babies or small children when the Great Sun died.
The pecking order went down from the Great Sun through to other chiefs, who were referred to as Suns, then Nobles, then Honored People, and ended with the “commoners,” also known as “stinkers.” Although the Natchez had a king, the lineage was matrilinear. Leadership passed from the king to the eldest son of his sister.
The current city of Natchez is not far from what was the center of the Natchez civilization, a great mound just to the west of the city. Emerald Mound was built sometime between A.D. 1200 and 1730, is 36 feet high, and spans an area of eight acres. Abandoned in the 18th century, the Emerald Mound was an important center for ceremonies and rituals.
After an initial period of hostility, the French and the Natchez lived peacefully enough. The French population increased from the 1690s to the second decade of the 1700s from a few missionaries and traders to almost 1,000 colonists and their slaves, and these settlers started to cultivate tobacco. Initially the Natchez benefitted by leasing land to the new settlers. However, there was increasing conflict between the French and the Natchez. This culminated in the Natchez War of 1729, when the Native Americans destroyed a number of French settlements, killing 200 settlers. This war flared up when a French settler wanted the Natchez to clear out of one of their villages, White Apple, so that he could use the land for tobacco. The Natchez did not take kindly to being ordered around and invited other tribes, and some of the French slaves, to join them in an uprising. As well as the murder of the 200 settlers, the Natchez captured a further 300 women, children, and French slaves. However, the French made an allegiance with the Choctaw, and together they drove the Natchez away from their hereditary lands.
The Natchez split, some joining the Creek and some the Cherokee or Chickasaw, or even the English settlers. Others were captured by the French and sold into the slave trade. Those captured included the Great Sun, who was also enslaved and sent to the Caribbean to work on the plantations.
The term used, originally, by the French colonists to describe the Native peoples of Quebec. Later the word was applied by other European settlers to large confederacies of tribes. “Nation” became the official way to describe several tribes, including the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole peoples after they were relocated to the Indian Territory in the 1830s. Sometimes, Nation means the same as tribe, and is a term that is preferred by many of the Native peoples themselves, since it implies autonomy. First Nation is used in Canada to describe the indigenous peoples of North America.
Among the foods introduced to Europe from the Americas were potatoes (which were taken to Europe in a freeze-dried state), tomatoes, manioc, beans, peanuts, yams, sunflowers, and corn, or maize.
See also Food
Calling themselves Dine, meaning “People,” the name “Navajo” was given to this people by the Spanish explorers who first arrived in America; the word, first used in the 1620s, refers to the stretch of land that they originally occupied and which is now part of New Mexico and Arizona. The Navajo are part of the Athabascan language group, and it’s likely that they, along with the Apache, originated in eastern Alaska and northwestern Canada, where the Athabascan language also originated.
What we know about the early days of the Navajo is that they, like the Apache, were seminomadic, ferocious fighters, who regularly led raids on the Pueblo people and, later, the Spaniards. However, it was from the Pueblo that the Navajo learned the skills of farming, growing the “Three Sisters” of corn, beans, and squash. They also learned to breed livestock, and sheep became an important asset to their livelihood, both for meat and for wool. In fact, the Navajo developed spinning, weaving, and dyeing wool into a fine art, and are still renowned for their beautifully made blankets. Navajo jewelry, too, made of silver and turquoise and shellwork, became popular. A Navajo man named Atsidi Sani, who lived between approximately 1830 and 1918, has the honor of being considered the first Navajo silversmith, the art having been taught to him by a Mexican jeweler. Perhaps the best-known Navajo jewelry design is the “squash blossom” necklace, which features turquoise “buds.”
The Navajo lived in hogans—lodges constructed of timber and covered with packed earth. These homes tended to be scattered individually rather than grouped in villages. The traditional religious belief of the Navajo holds the hogan itself to be a sacred space, and a myth tells how the beaver showed men how to build them. Originally the hogan was circular, but later they were designed to be octagonal or hexagonal. Today they are used mainly for ritual practice rather than as dwelling places.
A matrilineal society, it was the Navajo woman who owned the land and the livestock, and after she married, her husband would live with her and her people. The children belonged to the clan of the mother, with the eldest brother of their mother playing an important role in their upbringing. Any inheritance would be passed on to the girls rather than the boys.
The Navajo and the U.S. Army negotiated a peace treaty in 1846, but the young Navajo raiders evidently found it difficult to alter their habits, and continued to raid both the white settlers and the Mexicans, who reciprocated by stealing Navajo livestock as well as their womenfolk and their children, whom they sold as slaves.
Between 1849 and 1859, the U.S. Government established a number of forts across the Navajo territories. The Navajo were still considered to be “troublesome,” and in 1863 the infamous colonel Kit Carson rounded up 8,000 to 9,000 Navajo, also destroying their homes, animals, and crops as he did so. In 1864 this large contingent of Navajo took an enforced walk, which became known as The Long Walk, of about 300 miles, to Fort Sumner in New Mexico, where they were destined to be forced to live on a reservation. This was nothing short of a disaster for the Navajo. The facilities were simply not adequate for such a large number of people: there wasn’t enough water, livestock, or food. The Navajo were weakened, and their population was greatly reduced. The survivors were subject to raids, not only from other Native Americans but also from white settlers. In 1868 a treaty was agreed which allowed the remaining Navajo to return to a reservation that had been established on their former ancestral lands.
The tradition of “painting” with colored sand or powders, often called “dry painting,” in which the substance is usually trickled onto a flat surface, is an ancient one. It is practiced by, among others, the Aboriginal Australians, the Tibetans, and the Asian Indians. Among Native Americans it’s considered to be a healing art form, and is carried out by the Navajo tribe in particular. To the Navajo, sandpainting is effectively a magical spell.
The Navajo medicine man—or Hatahi—has access to somewhere near 1,000 different designs which he “draws,” with a skill born of many hours’ training, either directly onto the packed earth floor of the hogan (dwelling place), or else onto a piece of hide or cloth, allowing the pigmented sand to trickle between his fingers to construct the images.
The construction of the sandpainting by the Navajo shaman is an important ritual of healing, and the images themselves are believed to have a power and a life of their own. The shaman might draw pictures of the Holy People of the tribe, and, while he is doing so, he will call them to life to attend to the healing work which needs to be done. The painting then becomes transformed into a magical doorway into the world of spirit, which allows those spirits to come and go between the two worlds. The patient will sometimes be asked to lie down on the painting, so that he or she can absorb the healing powers from the spirit world; the Holy People in the image are believed to carry the sickness away. Since the sand of the painting and the images themselves are deemed to have become toxic after absorbing the poisons that were generated by the illness, the entire sandpainting is destroyed no more than 12 hours after the healing ritual.
These paintings might not take long to destroy, but creating them is another matter. They’re made in certain sequences, called “chants”; the length of these chants depends on the nature of the ceremony. Since the creation of the sandpainting is a sacred and private matter for the Navajo shaman, naturally most of what happens will be the secret knowledge of that shaman. But there are certain taboos, and parts of the ritual we do not know about.
Because the power of the painting is such that it might harm an unborn child, women of childbearing age neither sing the chants nor attend the drawing ceremony. Another reason for the prohibition of women is that menstrual blood is considered to be too potent in such subtle spirit work. Older women, however, who are beyond childbearing age can attend the events, and are also permitted to diagnose illness.
Both the medicine man and his work are sacred and should never be imitated or mocked in any way.
It is rare for outsiders to be permitted to observe a sandpainting ceremony.
It is also a rarity for a ritual sandpainting to be photographed. However, because there’s a great deal of curiosity about sandpaintings, sometimes they are created purely for the purpose of being photographed, or for art exhibitions. Because the designs are holy and sacred, when a sandpainting is constructed for commercial purposes the artist will include deliberate errors and mistakes, to retain the integrity of the design as a religious artifact.
It is possible to buy art that has been inspired by sandpaintings, and it’s also possible to buy paintings made from sand that is fixed to the canvas. This method of working is said to have been devised by a Navajo artist named Gray Squirrel.
It is highly unlikely that anyone not directly concerned with the sandpainting ritual itself will actually ever see a genuine, spiritually charged sandpainting.
During the mid-18th century, a spiritual leader of the Delaware Indians, who was also well known as the Delaware Prophet, came to prominence. Neolin, whose name means “The Enlightened One,” was given a message which he passed on to his people. This message—that Indians should turn their backs on their growing reliance on the manufactured goods, tools, and other items that had been introduced by the French and English—would be repeated some years later by another prophet, Tenkswatawa.
Neolin called on his people to reject the musket in favor of the traditional bow and arrow, live morally upright, monogamous lives of sexual abstinence, and, very importantly, give up alcohol. He also urged his fellow Native Americans to wear the traditional animal skins. Neolin argued that the Master of Life had told him, in a vision, that only if Indians turned back to the old ways would they be able to drive out the English settlers who had started advancing into Ohio country at the end of the French and Indian War. Not only that, but by re-engaging with their traditional practices they would be able to ensure that they would enter Heaven when the time came. Hundreds of Ohio Indians became disciples of Neolin in and around 1761.
Pontiac, the great Ottawa leader, was likely to have been influenced by Neolin’s visions, but Pontiac sensibly asserted that the bow and arrow were no match for the musket, and that to stand any chance at all against the Europeans, they would have to continue using the white man’s weapon. Neolin continued to assert that the Master of Life demanded that the Native Americans should refuse to fight under any circumstances.
Neolin also left a legacy called the Great Book of Writing, a pictorial chart which mapped the route a soul had to take in order to ascend to Heaven.
Part of the Iroquois, the Neutrals were also known as the Attawandaron; this name was given to them by the Huron and means “people who speak differently.” They also were named by the French because they remained neutral during the long drawn-out fighting between the Iroquois and the Huron. They lived on the shores of two lakes, Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, and their territory contained an important natural resource: flint. This sharp stone was used to make arrowheads and speartips, although when the Europeans introduced the gun to Native Americans, the importance of flint paled into insignificance.
After the Iroquois eventually vanquished the Huron, their power as a confederacy increased rapidly and they turned their attentions to conquering other neighboring peoples. It was around 1650 that the Attawandaron were pinpointed by the Iroquois and, just three years later, almost the entire tribe had been obliterated.
The New Life Lodge, or Offering Lodge, was the name that the Arapaho gave to their version of the Sun Dance. Taking place annually during the time when the berries started to ripen, although the ceremony had many aspects of the Sun Dance (including a special lodge being built with a central pole, often a tree trunk, and rituals that tested the stamina of the men performing them), the extremes of self-mutilation did not form a part of the Arapaho New Life Lodge rites.
From the Pacific Northwest region, the name Nez Perce is French for “pierced nose.” The name was given to them by the French settlers, as their own name for themselves is “People” or “People walking single file out of the forest.” Curiously, the Nez Perce did not actually have pierced noses, nor did they wear any kind of nasal ornamentation; however, another tribe who lived in the same area did have pierced noses: the Chinook.
The horse was of major importance among the Nez Perce, and by the time the Lewis and Clark Expedition came their way in 1805, they had been using and breeding the animals for 100 years. At this time the Nez Perce were the largest and most important group in the area, inhabiting somewhere in the region of 70 permanent villages of differing sizes, each acting as home to between 30 and 200 people. This meant that there were some 6,000 New Perce in the area.
Lewis and Clark entrusted two of their horses into the safe-keeping of a Nez Perce chief and two of his men, since they had to continue their journey by boat. When they returned, they were pleased to find that the horses had been well looked after.
Like other Native American peoples, although the Nez Perce had permanent villages they also traveled to follow the hunt (mainly buffalo) and for fishing (mainly salmon).
When the Native American population were persuaded to relocate to reservations in the middle of the 19th century, the Nez Perce split into two distinct groups. One group agreed to relocate, while the other, which numbered some 800 people including Chief Joseph, refused, traveling instead to try to find sanctuary with the Crow. When help was refused, they decided to attempt to reach the camp of the great Lakota chief, Sitting Bull, in Canada. This led to the Nez Perce War, in which the Nez Perce were chased over 1,170 miles of rough and arduous terrain by a force of 2,000 U.S. Army soldiers. Eventually Chief Joseph was forced to admit defeat, and the Nez Perce surrendered just 40 miles from the border with Canada.
Belonging to the Salishan language family, the Nisqually lived on the river of the same name near what is now Olympia in Washington state.
They lived in houses made of planks, positioning them close to the rivers that were essential to their way of life. Transportation for the Nisqually included dugout canoes and, unusually for tribes living in the area, horses.
The Nisqually lived a peaceful existence until, in 1854, the consequences of the Medicine Creek Treaty disrupted their lives. One of the clauses in the treaty acknowledged the importance of fishing to the Native peoples, and purported to safeguard their right to fish. However, the Nisqually, along with other Indians, had been bamboozled by the treaty, whose authors had used Chinook Jargon, a language confusing to anyone other than traders, and had not realized the full extent of the lands that they had unwittingly ceded. When realization dawned, the Nisqually, who were ordered to relocate away from their familiar grassy plains to a reservation on a piece of hilly, forested ground, rebelled under their leader, Chief Leschi. Other peoples in the area joined in this rebellion, including the Squaxon and the Yakama; because the latter were the largest tribe, the outbreak came to be known as the Yakama War.
In early 1856 Leschi had amassed a force of 1,000 warriors, and attacked the city of Seattle. But they had not anticipated a ship, bearing cannons, moored offshore, and were defeated. Leschi took refuge with his Yakama allies; however, the conditions of the truce that the latter had entered into with the settlers meant that the chief could only enter the tribe as a slave; Leschi preferred to remain free, although in danger.
Leschi, in common with other Native Americans, was lured into surrender by the white men, only to find that he had been tricked. Promised his safety if he gave himself up, when Leschi did so he was captured and sentenced to death by hanging, accused of the death of a colonel during the fighting. Leschi was reprieved, however, since the hangman refused to do his job, protesting that a man killed in the heat of battle was the victim of war, not of the individual who killed him. Subsequently, though, the chief was executed after a second trial.