Who ARE the Indians?

Today, they are accurately called Native Americans - but I can't stop thinking of them as Indians because what would a cowboy be without an Indian to go along with him?  What would the Lone Ranger be without Tonto??

But, just to be sure we all get it, Native Americans are not all one people, using one language, nor do they live their lives the same way.  What Europeans discovered as they arrived and spread across the North American continent was that some Native Americans were gentle and receptive; other Native Americans would just as soon slit your throat as look at you.  The more intrusive Europeans became, the more negative the Indians would become.

In North Dakota, as I said in an earlier blog post, the Europeans found the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Chippewa, but also the group of Indians known as the Oceti Sakowin.  Individually you might recognize their names:  Lakota, Nokota, and Dakota - the great Sioux Nation!

Each of these tribes got to North Dakota by different routes and for different reasons:

Mandans - as early as the 1200's came here by traveling up the Missouri River.  (Wait a minute!  I thought the native Americans got here by crossing the land bridge between Russia and Alaska?  Oh. That was thousands of years ago.  By the 1200's they had spread across the North American continent to the east coast and were now in the process of migrating back toward the west.  And don't think of the United States yet - it didn't exist for another 500 years.  North America was, uh, north America, so mentally erase the U. S. Canadian border.) The Mandan were an agricultural based society living in fixed earthlodges.  Until the smallpox invaded they were receptive to Europeans.

Hidatsa - came to the Missouri River Valley from the east 2-300 years after the Mandans in three different groups (Awatixa, Awaxawi, Hidatsa Proper) .  The Awatixa passed the Mandan and settled upriver from them with the Hidatsa Proper coming a hundred years later.  They also lived in fixed villages and traded their crops with other tribes in the area.

Chippewa (or Ojibwa if you're in Canada) seems to have migrated west with the French fur traders.  They fought with the Sioux (using firearms from the French) for what is now Minnesota's (Land of 10,000 Lakes) abundant fur bearing animals for almost 100 years.  That's how the Lakota branch of the Sioux tribe became Plains Indians - the Chippewa pushed them south.  How bad were the battles between the Indian tribes?  They actually went to the American government in 1804 and asked THEM to establish tribal boundaries to end the warring!  The Chippewa were traders rather than hunters or crop growers for food, though when they also got pushed onto the Plains, they depended on the buffalo as much as the Lakota for so-o-o many of their daily needs.

The Great Sioux Nation - probably originated in North Carolina, moseyed west and ended up hundreds of years later in what we now know as Wisconsin and Minnesota.  (Hey!  John and I went across the river into Minnesota just last weekend to shop at Cabela's and see a movie!)  This is when the Sioux split into the Lakota, Nokota and Dakota.  As the Chippewa pushed the Lakota, the Lakota pushed the Cheyenne - farther west and south.

The Lakota both hunted game and grew crops, but were more into tent-camping than living in fixed housing.

A-l-l Native American tribal society was organized along family lines, relied on their elders to pass on their individual oral histories, were very spiritual, very flexible in that they had to adjust to new homelands as circumstances moved them geographically, and finally, they were all impacted by the white man's incursion on their lives and lands.  (But how was that different from the Chippewa incursion on the Sioux?)

Simply transitioning tribes from the east to the west changed their diet from wild rice, fish and forest game, to buffalo, and to access the buffalo the tribes had to become more nomadic, their lodges transitioned from permanent wigwams to moveable tipis, the canoe was given over to horses, breakable pottery gave way to skin pouches which were lighter, easier to pack, and essentially unbreakable, soft-soled moccasins were uncomfortable on the plains and so they evolved into hard-soled moccasins.

The endless flow of Europeans onto the North American continent literally overran the Native Americans, brought epidemic diseases and death, booze that was maybe as devastating, and ultimately forced Native Americans onto cramped reservations.  Those reservations still exist.  We have traveled through a couple of them during our travels; those reservations are not pretty places...