More than 14,000 years ago the ancestors of the Plains Indians migrated from Asia to North America, where many of them settled in the upper Mississippi River and Great Lakes areas. Displaced from their land by Europeans who came to settle in the east, they moved to the central plains.
Most of the Plains Indians were nomadic, which means that they were not farmers who stayed in one place and raised crops on the land but hunter-gatherers who moved about, getting their food by killing buffalo from the large herds that grazed the prairies and by trading goods with other tribes.
In the mid-1880s, as immigrants and settlers began to come from the east, traveling westward in covered wagons and claiming some of the Plains Indians territory for themselves, the U.S. Army began to build forts in these areas. Relations between the Plains Indians and the white settlers grew increasingly tense, and a series of misunderstandings eventually led to the massacre of an Indian village. This marked the beginning of more than thirty years of war between the Plains Indians and the U.S. Army. Within five years of the Sioux and Cheyenne victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, the old-time nomadic, buffalo-hunting culture was gone.
The central plains of North America, to the east of the Rocky Mountains, provided the homeland for the Plains Indians;
here the hunting grounds of the twelve 'typical' tribes coincided with the grazing range of the largest of the buffalo herds. These tribes all shared the common features of extensive use of the tipi, buffalo and horse; the division of warriors into societies; and the religious ceremony called the Sun Dance.
Cultural characteristics naturally varied from tribe to tribe, most obviously between the least associated tribes such as the Blackfoot to the north and the southerly Comanche. The Plains tribes inevitably had links with their neighbouring tribes on the borders of the Plains. To the west were the Plateau tribes, such as the Nez Perce; and the south-west desert tribes, such as the Apaches, had originally been among the earliest inhabitants of the Plains. They, like the village farming tribes on the borders of the eastern woodlands, because of their close proximity to the Plains Indians shared with them a number of cultural traits, and in fact occasionally ventured out on to the open grasslands themselves.
The Plains Indians established themselves during a period which is referred to as 'dog-days', because the dog provided their only beast of burden. Most tribes initially ventured west from the eastern woodlands, across the prairies and on to the Plains. However, these pedestrian Indians were unable fully to exploit this hostile environment until after the introduction of the horse, which, by allowing the successful hunting of the buffalo and the adoption of a fully nomadic life, encouraged many tribes to abandon border areas for the central Plains. The adoption of a horse culture heralded the golden age of the Plains Indians—an age abruptly ended by the intervention of the white man, who forced them from their vast homelands into reservations in the second half of the 19th century.
The transitional period of movement on to the open Plains occurred in most cases during the 17th century, although the previously mentioned tribal variations make exact dating impossible. Similarly, while certain characteristics can be considered typical of the Plains Indians as a whole, it is important to note that there were usually variations, both from tribe to tribe and between individuals. Indeed, their society was highly individualistic, partly because they were a very spiritual people. Their life was not centered on physical survival, but on spiritual renewal, and much of it focused on maintaining harrnony with the Sacred Powers. The word "medicine has come to describe the supernatural or spiritual power which the Indians personally received from their deities, and which guided them in hunting, war, healing, and all the other concerns of everyday life.
As a nomadic people their borders were vague, and—in contrast to the men who forced them from it—the Plains Indians had no conception of actually owning the sacred Mother Earth.
Given the special and integrated nature of Indian life and attitudes, it is inevitable that this short study of their culture departs somewhat from the normal Men-at-Arms format. The Plains Indians had no specifically military organization in the European sense. The greater part of Plains Indian history must be seen against a background of constant small-scale warfare between tribes and smaller groups. Their confrontations with the blue-coated soldiers who finally destroyed their inde¬pendent existence occupied only a few decades, and were not typical of the Indian experience. Those final years demonstrated vividly the enormous gulf which lay between Indian and white attitudes to warfare; and there is a danger of slipping into misleading generalizations if we attempt to analyze the Indian experience through the distorting perspective of the white man's military culture and assumptions. |
