1. Treating Mind and Body--Before European contact, many native peoples--especially the Iroquois--kept those who had fallen ill among them, rather than isolating them in a sick room or something approaching a hospital. In this way, those who had fallen ill or were injured were made to feel that they were still an integral part of the community, which undoubtedly helped to foster recovery from the kinds of illnesses native peoples suffered from in the years before European contact. With the introduction of European communicable diseases, however, this became a recipe for disaster; keeping people ill with smallpox, for instance, among those not already infected by the disease ensured wider infection of the populace.
2. Medical Practice--natives relied upon "natural" remedies--meaning those not dreamed up by European medical professionals, like bleeding, using purgatives, emetics, and blistering agents as antidotes for a variety of diseases, as well as medicines like tincture of mercury, which slowly poisoned the body (and by using on a long-term basis, could cause dementia--hence the term, "mad as a hatter").
3. Visions and Health--Again, in the readings in Jesuit Relations regarding health and medicine, we are reminded of the importance native peoples placed upon visions or things imagined while in a state of altered consciousness. Our Jesuit correspondents again emphasize their incredulity at the importance natives placed placed upon the visions that occurred to them--and at the lengths they would go to to make the dreams come true--particularly those that pertained to the erotic. Nonetheless, for the Huron (and other Iroquois people) these dreams and visions were very important--"more real the reality."
a. Alcohol and the Altered Conscious--most native peoples sought to achieve a state of altered consciousness, from which they would have visions that would tell them what their life's purpose would be. Often, native peoples ingested a variety of herbs and fungi (peyote, psilocybin mushrooms). When you read any account of native peoples and alcohol during this time period, you inevitably see descriptions of people being falling down drunk. Over the years, historians have attempted a variety of explanations for this behavior--a genetic intolerance for alcohol, depression over the changes to their lives, the massive loss of kin, etc. I argue, however, that the damage done to native communities by alcohol was largely the result of their need to seek these altered states of consciousness. Acts committed while drunk--even when severe--were largely forgiven by native communities, who recognized that a person who committed such a crime while drunk was not able to control themselves, and therefore not completely accountable for their actions.
II. Diplomacy and War
A. Native diplomacy--Diplomacy was facilitated by trade. Diplomacy was not always the favored tactic of native peoples, of course, who often resorted to war when trade negotiations broke down. While many people were killed during these disputes, they tended to be about territorial disputes--not, significantly, over "ownership" of a particular piece of land, and who held the rite to cell it.
B. Native Wars--Native wars tended to usually be low-grade conflicts. Men usually fought until they either overcame, or were themselves overcome by, their opponents. These men then would be marched back to the village, where they would slowly be tortured to death--or, on rare occasions, pardoned and given to a family who had recently lost a member. Families would be given this replacement as a way of renewing that family--and, by extension, renewing the tribe, anyway.
1. Pequot War--disputes between groups of Puritans and an Indian people called the Pequot broke out in 1637-1638. The Pequot in the early months of the dispute had run of the battlefield, won numerous victories over the groups of Puritans. The tide turned, however, when the Puritans began burning down Pequot villages, including all the buildings and the villages granary, where the Pequot stored their seed corn. The culmination of the fighting happened at Fort Mystic, which the Puritans burned to the ground and murdered everyone (noncombatants, among them women and children. This action the Mohawk observed from a safe distance, and began talks with the other Iroquois peoples to use those kinds of tactics against the Huron, who controlled a substantial amount of land with lots of beavers.
2. Mohawk leadership--the native people we know as the Mohawks were able to observe this conflict from a safe distance (from the far side of the Hudson Valley), and began to advocate for a change in tactics in order to cut off the Huron from any action on the turn trade.
3. The Destruction of the Huron--On March 16 of 1649, a small contingent of an Iroquois force in excess of 1,000 warriors attacked St. Ignace, killed many of he men attempted to save the settlement--including Fr. Brebeuf, who the Iroquois slowly tortured to death--used the woman and children as pack animals, and escaped south. Several other Huron settlements were likewise attacked during this period. These attacks were extraordinary for several reasons--the level of coordination among the various Iroquois nations and the logistics of moving that many men on foot. Just as significant, however, was the timing of the attack, in mid-March, when food supplies were at there lowest level. By destroying what they couldn't carry away, the Iroquois also prevented the Huron from planting food in the spring, and ensured they would have to leave what they considered their homeland in order to survive.
C. Unintended Consequences--while destroying most of the Huron, and therefore opening up the Huron lands for their own exploitation. The Iroquois had also hoped to eliminate the French from the area, since they sided with their enemies, the Hurons, in the struggle. The result of losing their allies among the Huron was that the French sent more trained military troops, and more French settlers, determined to maintain their presence in "New France." This development, along with the surrender of control by the Dutch to the English of New Amsterdam (which the English began calling "New York"), changed the trading relationships the Iroquois had developed, as well. The result of this is perhaps best exemplified by a woman on here way to becoming the newest saint in the Roman Catholic Church--Kateri Tekakwitha, a woman who grew up among the Mohawks, but chose to live her short life as virgin devoted to venerating Jesus Christ through the mortification of her own flesh.
Most of this week's lectures have attempted to deal with the relationship between mythology and history. Are these two traditions complimentary, or contradictory? Why? Can you use one methodology to understand the other? What do you thing the pitfalls of this would be.
This assignment should fill at least two full, machine-produced pages, and it is due at the beginning of class on Thursday, February 2.
A. Meaning--the word "shawnee" (or the close approximation thereof) means "southern" in many other native languages--although how far south the Shawnee originated no one is really sure, because the Shawnee were an extremely mobile people.
B. Native Peoples in the Ohio Valley
1. Adena People--existed in the early Woodland Era, from about 1000 to 200BC. The Adena were probably were not a single "tribe," but a group of people probably loosely related who shared a burial complex and ceremonial system.They were the first people in this region to settle down in small villages, cultivate crops, use pottery vessels, acquire exotic raw materials, such as copper and marine shell, to make and bury their honored dead in conical burial mounds. TheAdena grew a variety of plants in their gardens, including squash, sunflower, sumpweed, goosefoot, knotweed, and maygrass. This set of native plants often is referred to as the Eastern Agricultural Complex. The Ohio and Mississippi valleys were one of only seven regions in the world where people turned local plants into the basis for a food-producing economy. The consequences of this change in how people made a living would be far-reaching. The Adena lived in small villages near their gardens, but they likely moved frequently as they continued to follow a hunting and gathering way of life, which they supplemented with the harvest from their gardens. Adena pottery consisted of large, thick-walled vessels that likely were used to cook the ground-up seeds of the Eastern Agricultural Complex into a gruel something like oatmeal.
2. The Hopewell Tradition--succeeded the Adena era, having its greatest prominence from about to about 500ACE. It is characterized by gigantic mounds and earthen enclosures in a variety of shapes, magnificent works of art crafted from raw materials brought to Ohio from great distances, and particular styles of stone tools and pottery unique to this time and region.
The Hopewell culture developed from the preceding Adena culture, but the Hopewell culture built much larger earthworks and greatly expanded the area from which it obtained exotic raw materials, such as shells from the Gulf of Mexico, copper from the Great Lakes region, mica from the Carolinas, and obsidian from the Rocky Mountains. The archaeologist N'omi Greber refers to the rise of the Hopewell culture as an "explosion" of art, ritual, and ceremonial architecture.
The earliest evidence for the Hopewell culture is in Illinois, but the most spectacular earthworks are in southern Ohio and Indiana north of the Ohio River, especially in the valleys of the Great and Little Miami, Scioto, and Muskingum rivers. The Newark Earthworks, Ohio's official prehistoric monument, is the largest set of geometric earthworks built by the Hopewell culture. The Fort Ancient Earthworks, in Warren County, is the largest example of a hilltop enclosure. The largest set of Hopewell burial mounds is at the Mound City Group in Chillicothe. All three of these sites are National Historic Landmarks and all are being considered for nomination as World Heritage sites. These large earthwork sites were not cities. They were places of ceremony, including rituals related to the burial of the honored dead.
The Hopewell people lived in small villages, or hamlets, scattered throughout the river valleys of southern Ohio where they grew a variety of crops, including sunflower, squash, goosefoot, maygrass, and other plants with oily or starchy seeds. They also gathered wild plants, hunted for deer and other large and small game, and fished. The earthworks also must have served as places for these dispersed groups to gather periodically to renew friendships and socialize.
The Hopewell culture had leaders, but they were not like powerful rulers who could command armies of slaves and soldiers. Many people from different villages worked together to build these large mounds and enclosures. The Hopewell "explosion" was brilliant, but brief. It was all over by AD 400. The reasons for the decline of the Hopewell culture are not well understood. The shift during the succeeding Late Woodland period to larger villages surrounded by walls or ditches hints that increasing conflict may have been one factor in the abandonment of the earthworks and the far-flung networks of exchange.
3. Cahokia Mounds--years after the decline of the Hopewell tradition, a new native culture developed a couple of hundred miles to the west, in the Mississippi River Valley, about 10 miles east of present-day St. Louis. The site known as Cahokia, at its height, was probably one of the largest "cities" in the world, with a population in 1250 greater than that of London.
According to archaeological finds, the city of Cahokia was inhabited from about A.D. 700 to 1400. At its peak, from A.D. 1050 to 1200, the city covered nearly six square miles and 10,000 to 20,000 people lived here. Over 120 mounds were built over time, and most of the mounds were enlarged several times. Houses were arranged in rows and around open plazas, and vast agricultural fields lay outside the city.
The site is named for the Cahokia subtribe of the Illiniwek (or Illinois tribe, a loose confederacy of related peoples), who moved into the area in the 1600s. They were living nearby when the French arrived about 1699. Sometime in the mid-1800s, local historians suggested the site be called "Cahokia" to honor these later arrivals
The fate of the prehistoric Cahokians and their city is unknown, but the decline seems to have been gradual, beginning around the 1200s. By A.D. 1400 the site had been abandoned. Exactly where the people went or what tribes they became is yet to be determined.
Depletion of resources probably contributed to the city's decline. Climate change after A.D. 1200 may have affected crop production and the plant and animal resources needed to sustain a large population. War, disease, social unrest, and declining political and economic power may have also taken their toll.
4. Fort Ancient Culture--developed about 1000ACE; like Cahokia, Fort Ancient Culture explodes with the introduction of the cultivation of maize.
The Fort Ancient culture thrived in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky. Villages were made up of a number of circular or rectangular houses surrounding an open plaza. The Fort Ancient people continued to build small burial mounds, but gradually shifted to burials in a cemetery area with no mounds.
Fort Ancient features 18,000 feet of earthen walls built 2,000 years ago by American Indians who used the shoulder blades of deer, split elk antler, clam shell hoes and digging sticks to dig the dirt. They then carried the soil in baskets holding 35 to 40 pounds. Portions of these walls were used in conjunction with the sun and moon to provide a calendar system for these peoples. There is evidence that the Fort Ancient culture built Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio. They also may have built the "Alligator" Mound of Licking County.
5. Early Shawnee Culture--Uncertainty surrounds the eventual fate of the Fort Ancient people. Most likely their society, like the Mississippian culture to the south, was severely disrupted by waves of epidemics from new infectious diseases carried by the very first Spanish explorers in the 16th century. After 1525 at the Madisonville-type site, the village's house size becomes smaller and fewer with evidence to be "a less horticulture-centered, sedentary way of life".There is a gap in the archaeological record between the most recent Fort Ancient sites and the oldest sites of the Shawnee, who occupied the area at the time of later European (French and English) explorers. It is generally accepted that similarities in material culture, art, mythology, and Shawnee oral history linking them to the Fort Ancients can be used to establish the shift of Fort Ancient society into historical Shawnee society.
The Shawnee traditionally considered the Lenape (or Delaware) their "grandfathers". The Algonquian nations of present-day Canada regarded the Shawnee as their southernmost branch. Along the East Coast, the Algonquian-speaking tribes were mostly located in coastal areas, from Quebec to the Carolinas. Algonquian languages have words similar to the archaic shawano (now: shaawanwa) meaning "south". However, the stem shaawa- does not mean "south" in Shawnee, but "moderate, warm (of weather)". In one Shawnee tale, Shaawaki is the deity of the south.
Before contact with Europeans, the Shawnee tribe consisted of a loose confederacy of five divisions which shared a common language and culture. The division names have been spelled in a variety of ways. The divisions are:
In addition to the five divisions, the Shawnee can be divided into six clans or subdivisons. Each name group is common among each for the five divisions and each Shawnee belongs to a group.The six group names are:
Pellewomhsoomi (Turkey name group)—represents bird life,
Kkahkileewomhsoomi (Turtle name group)—represents aquatic life,
Petekoθiteewomhsoomi (Rounded-feet name group)—represents carnivorous animals like the dog, wolf, or whose paws are ball-shaped or "rounded,"
Mseewiwomhsoomi (Horse name group)—represents herbivorous animals as the horse and deer,
θepatiiwomhsoomi (Raccoon name group)—represents animals having paws which can rip and tear like those of a raccoon and bear.
Petakineeθiiwomhsoomi (Rabbit name group)—represents a gentle and peaceful nature.
Membership in a division was inherited from the father, unlike the matrilineal descent often associated with other tribes. Each division had a primary village where the chief of the division lived. This village was usually named after the division. By tradition, each Shawnee division had certain roles it performed on behalf of the entire tribe. By the time they were recorded in writing by European-Americans, these strong social traditions were fading. They remain poorly understood. Because of the scattering of the Shawnee people from the 17th century through the 19th century, the roles of the divisions changed.
1. Aataentic (Sky Woman)--Lived above the earth until one day she fell (or was pushed by her husband) through a hole in the sky. She clawed at the sky's earth, but that just left her with handfuls of grasses and seeds as she fell.
2. Aquatic Animals of the Earth--Aataentsic's fall did not go unnoticed; the aquatic animals saw her, and quickly called a conference. The decided that turtle would let her live on his back. Aataentsic prevailed on the other aquatic animals to provide her with soil to plant seeds; for this they had to dive deep underwater, and only the muskrat was successful.
3. Birth of Aataentsic's Daughter--After accomplishing this, Aataentsic gave birth to a daughter. When the daughter matured, she became pregnant under mysterious circumstances (impregnated by the turtle), and eventually gave birth to twin boys. The good twin (Tharonhiawagon, Upholder of the Heavens, Sky Grasper) was born the conventional route, while the evil twin (Tawiskanon) was born through his mother's side, thus killing her. When Aataentsic asked the twins who was responsible for their mother's death, each twin blamed the other; the evil twin was more persuasive, however, and he became his grandmother's favorite. The Good Twin she threw out of her house, assuming he would die. Instead, the Good Twin, with the assistance of the turtle, his father, created man, and also many things that greatly assisted man. This made Aataentsic and the Evil Twin angry, and they went about undoing everything the Good Twin did to help man; the two were not powerful enough, however, to completely undo all of the Good Twin's work.
4. The Battle Between Good and Evil--finally, the two brothers fought, and the Good Twin prevailed. He could not re-do everything that his brother and grandmother undid, however. He was able to teach man to plant corn to support themselves, and to keep harm at bay through the use of a variety of rituals. To keep the ceremonies, the Good Twin assigned roles to each of the 5 clans that he named after various animals: the Wolf, the Bear, the Turtle, etc. These clans correspond to the Five Nations that made up the Iroquois Confederacy: Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca (from east to west).
B. Hurons--shared some common mythologies and cultural practices (which suggests a closer connection to the Iroquois).
1. Aataentsic--the Hurons also claimed descent from Aataentsic. Huron mythology diverged from the Five Nations, however, in claiming that Aataentsic's daughter died while giving birth to a single son, who they called Yoscaha, who filled the same role as the Good Twin did for the Five Nations. Aataentsic, perhaps driven mad buy her grief over her daughter's death, although this isn't clear in the myth, attempts to undo all of Yoscaha's good work for human kind.
2. The Five Nations of Huronia--the Hurons are divided into five nations, as well:
a. Arendaronnon (Rock) tribe lived at the northwest tip of Lake Simcoe
b. Attingneenongnahac (Barking Dog) tribe lived west of the Arendaronnons
c. Ataronchronnon (Tribe Beyond the Great Silted Lake) lived along the southern most portion of the Georgian Bay.
d. Tahontaenrat (Deer) Tribe lived south of the Ataronchronnon
e. Attignaoutan (Bear) Tribe, the largest of the tribes of Huronia, lived in the westernmost and northernmost vicinities.
C. Regulating Iroquois Conflict--Iroquois oral tradition claims that before the Confederacy was formed (about the year 1400, many scholars believe), the Iroquois fought almost constantly among themselves--driven in part by the tradition of replacing clan and family members with outsider adoptees.
1. Hiawatha--a member of the Onondaga tribe, Hiawatha is credited with developing the idea of the Iroquois Confederacy. He sought to bring like-minded tribal leaders to find was that the Iroquois could leave peacefully with one another. He was opposed by a member of his tribe called Atotarho, who used magic and poison to kill each of Hiawathas's daughter. Driven mad with grief, Hiawatha became a recluse, and only ventured out to hunt humans to cook and eat.
2. Deganawidah--a member of the Hurons. About the same time Hiawatha was going mad, Deganawidah emerged also seeking peace among the various Iroquois people. According to Huron beliefs, Deganawidah sprang from the union of a young virgin and a supernatural being. Before his birth, his grandmother dreamed that he would set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the destruction of the Huron people--so his grandmother and mother tried to kill him. After each attempt, however, they found him sleeping in their lodge, unharmed, so the two women decided that the fate of the Huron could not be avoided.
a. The First Condolence Ceremony--after hearing that Hiawatha had been driven mad by is grief, Deganawidah decided perform a condolence ceremony for Hiawatha, to bring him back to his "right" mind. These kinds of ceremonies became very important in Iroquois life, particularly since the proper functioning of their society was largely dependent upon moral suasion.
b. Ononharoia and the Festival of Fools--Father Brebeuf describes the practice of the Ononharoia as something completely foreign to him, but the French has long practiced something similar in their own culture--the Festival of Fools, when the rich and mighty could openly be made fun of. This was also the case at Christmas; people went "a wassailing" to drink the expansive wine of the lord of the manor. Fr. Brebeuf also failed to notice the similarity between the story of Deganawidah and Jesus Christ.
c. Tree of the Great Peace--according to Deganawidah, he had a vision of a great tree, with white roots extending in all directions. He interpreted this dream to mean that all Iroquois speakers should be brought into share in this great peace. This led to Five Nations into conflict with other Iroquois peoples, who wished to avoid allying with the Five Nations. The Great Peace ended conflict within the confederacy, but not for those who refused to join.
The BlackRobe, although a work of fiction, is based upon events that actually happened—as chronicled in the Jesuit Relations. After reading the sections assigned in the first two weeks, as well as the introduction to Colin Calloway's The Shawnees and the War for America, your assignment is to compare and contrast the belief systems between Native Americans and their European counterparts--in what ways were they similar, and in what ways were they different?
Alternatively (or, in addition), you may wish to compare the events depicted in The Black Robe with what you have read in Jesuit Relations. How do these two works compare? In one more true than another? If so, then why is it closer to the truth? Keep in mind that one is a work of fiction based on fact, while the other purports to be a true depiction of events. Does this effect why one form is considered more truthful than the other? Which one do you think is a more accurate depiction of the past—and why?
Your answer should fill at least 2 machine produced pages, using a conventional font, twelve-point type, and one-inch margins all around the paper. This should be handed in at the beginning of class on Thursday, January 26.
This title of this class is Great Americans, so I think it would be a good idea to define our terms. What do we mean by "great," and how do we measure it?
