Excerpt

The Plains and the People

Luther Standing Bear wrote: “The feathered and blanketed figure of the American Indian has come to symbolize the American continent. He is the man who through centuries has been molded and sculpted by the same hand that shaped its mountains, forests, and plains, and marked the course of its rivers... He once grew as naturally as the wild sunflowers; he belongs just as the buffalo belonged. With a physique that fitted, the man developed fitting skills - crafts which today are called American. And the body had a soul, also formed and molded by the same master hand of harmony. Out of the Indian approach to existence there came a great freedom - an intense and absorbing love for nature; a respect for life; enriching faith in a Supreme Power; and principles of truth, honesty, generosity, equity, and brotherhood as a guide to mundane relations.”1

The image of the horseback-riding tipi-dwelling bison-hunter of the Plains is iconic, branded into the European-American consciousness. The charging brave with feathers in his hair on the galloping steed is a symbol of America's untamed live-free-or-die spirit. And the exhausted warrior slouched over his mount is a tragic symbol of a proud race who refused to get with the program of progress, and therefore sadly had to be removed so that young America could live up to its so-called manifest destiny. But to say that the Indian was some wild animal like the wolf or bear that had to be removed because he couldn't adapt is an example of blaming the victim. Just the fact that he learned to ride a European horse is evidence enough of Native adaptability.

The legendary Lakota of the Plains had not always lived in tipis and hunted bison. Like most pre-Columbian Native American cultures, they had been a settled farming people. Living near the Great Lakes, their lifeway may have resembled the Iroquois. Then in the mid 1700s, French traders armed the neighboring Chippewa, and the Lakota were driven westward.2 As uprooted refugees they staggered into the vast and menacing prairie.

Richard Erdoes writes that the Plains “covered an immense region spreading westward from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains and down from the Canadian border to the arid highlands of Arizona and New Mexico... The main feature of the Plains was the treeless prairie, the famous Sea of Grass, the feeding ground of millions of buffaloes. It stretched as far as the eye could see, wave after wave of rolling hills disappearing into purple infinity. Its surface was forever agitated by the rippling winds, and the undulating mass of swaying, rustling grass gave many early travelers the feeling of being surrounded by a special kind of dry ocean... The Plains was a country of immense sunsets, intense colors, and violent contrasts – a country of scorching heat and bone-chilling cold, of summer hail storms and winter blizzards, of long dry spells and sudden flash floods.”3

The dramatic nature of this land inspired vibrant lifeways and beliefs. The Lakota developed a relationship with the bison, who would provide them with food and shelter. When the food supply is on the hoof, a society needs to be mobile, so a new kind of house was devised: a conical bison-leather tent. A whole tipi village could be rolled up in three hours one morning, hauled ten miles and then rebuilt in three hours before nightfall. In some ways, this new nomadic life protected people: living in small villages with lots of open space made outbreaks of disease and territorial violence less likely.4 Being a migratory culture put a limit on the amount of material wealth one could amass, so a community was not powerfully divided between rich and poor (and as we'll see, religious rituals required the redistribution of surplus wealth). Surviving by the hunt also kept people physically fit, and riding a horse half-naked into a bison stampede without stirrups or reins was good training for battle. There's a reason Hollywood loves the Plains Indians: they were incredibly fierce.

Standing Bear wrote that “the hand that fashioned the continent also fashioned the man for his surroundings.” The mysterious Creator is sometimes likened to a grandfather, and the maternal land itself can be compared to a grandmother or mother, although Vine Deloria cautions that “too often this dimension is twisted when non-Indians make it a sentimental truism and the Indian philosophy appears shallow and without insight. But the true meaning of the motherhood of the land is that, like a mother, it shapes and teaches our species and, according to the peculiarity of the area, produces certain basic forms of personality and social identity which could not be produced in any other way.”5 Lame deer observed that this process of formation is lifelong: “We are a part of the nature around us, and the older we get the more we come to look like it. In the end we become part of the landscape with a face like the badlands.”6

Humans are shaped and instructed by the landscape, but the landscape also receives some of its matter and spirit from humans. A Crow chief told Europan invaders, “The soil you see is not ordinary soil, it is the dust of the blood, the flesh and bones of our ancestors.  We fought and bled and died to keep other Indians from taking it...  You will have to dig down through the surface before you can find nature's earth, as the upper portion is Crow. The land, as it is, is my blood, and my dead, it is consecrated.”7 Humans have baptized the land with their blood, sweat, tears, etc., and have sanctified it with their prayers, songs and laughter. What an outsider might consider “dirt” is powerfully imbued with spiritual energy.

Anthropologist Joseph Epes Brown wrote: “To survive, people had to discern the behavior and power of natural forces and animals; they had to know such things as which roots cured illness, which bird songs foretold the coming of a storm, and which plants indicated the proximity of underground springs. Through this close interaction between people and the natural world around them, the phenomena of the world were translated into a spiritual language and a metaphysical science.”8 As Standing Bear put it, “Life for the Indian is one of harmony with nature and the things which surround him. The Indian tried to fit in with nature and to understand, not to conquer or rule. Life was a glorious thing, for great contentment comes with the feeling of friendship and kinship with the living things around you.”9

1Standing Bear (1933)

2St. Pierre (1995) p. 39

3Erdoes (1972) p. 1-2, 7

4It should be noted here that the initial arrival of the Lakota refugees caused great disruption in the Plains, which were already inhabited by other Native peoples, and there was ongoing friction between the tribes. But this rarely escalated to the level of genocidal warfare. For further exploration, there is a chapter about Native American tribal “warfare” in j. Snodgrass's Natives Discover America (2018)

5Deloria (1999) p. 131

6Lame Deer (1994) Caption for second illustration.

7Curley (Crow, 1912)

8Brown (2001) p. 87

9Standing Bear (Lakota) in Goble (2005) p. 5