As popular as comic strip and movie characters as they are ill-known in reality, the natives of North America amply deserve the kind of attention that normally is given to the more spectacular civilizations of Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. For such a subject, there could be no better introduction than the bitter yet dignified words of Ohiyesa, a Dakota Indian writer better known by his American name, Charles Eastman: "The first American mingled with his pride a singular humility.Spiritual arrogance was foreign to his nature and teaching. He never claimed that the power of articulate speech was proof of superiority over the dumb creation; on the other hand, it is to him a perilous gift...He believes profoundly in silence - the sign of a perfect equalibrium. Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind, and spirit. The man who preserves his selfhood, ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence - not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree; not a ripple upon the surface of shining pool - his, in the mind of the unlettered sage, is the ideal attitude and conduct of life. If you ask him: 'What is silence?' he will answer: 'It is the Great Mystery!' 'The holy silence is His voice!' If you ask: 'What are the fruits of silence?' he will say: 'They are self-control, true courage or endurance, patience, dignity and reverence. Silence is the cornerstone of character.' ...Alas, into the silent life of the North American Indians we have sown the seeds of noise, of haste, at the same time as we introduced books, gunpowder and a thousand strange follies. In the words of Sun Chief, a Hopi born in the previous century, 'I have now learnt that a person thinks with their head instead of their heart.' "
The remarkable survival of indigenous American cultures in spite of persecution, genocide and brutal deportation bears witness to the intellectual and moral vitality of these people whose ancestors created superb works of art that are virtually unknown to the general public.I hope that these words will inspire due respect for these "unlettered" peoples who se harvesting of the "fruits of silence" we have cut short.
It is now generally accepted that the peoples who came to be known as "Indians" for the simple reason that, on reaching America, Columbus believed he had found the Western route to India (an idea he held onto until his death), came over to the continent in successive waves, crossing what is now known as the Bering Strait between glacial periods. In other words, the Indians came over from Siberia. The pioneers reached Alaska over 30,000 years ago. There is now an archeological site in Texas with evidence of human presence on the continent dating back to 37,000 years ago. It took these early pioneers just a few millenia to work their way down to South America. The last to arrive were the Inuits, who have remained in the far north of the New Continent to the present day.
Equipped with tools and weapons made of wood, bone, flint or other hardstones, these nomadic hunters and gatherers of wild berries lived much as the ancestors of modern Europeans did, progressing from chipped stone to polished stone.
The "cultural revolution" that occurred in the Near East when nomads became sedentary and learned how to cultivate wild plants was paralleled in America. At around 5000 BC, Western Europeans and these future "Indians" were at comparable levels of development. But just as the Vikings never built a Parthenon or a Sistine Chapel, so the inhabitants of the deserts, plains and forests north of the Rio Grande never built any temples like those of the Maya, decorated with impressive sculptures. Nor did they develop a script to record the discoveries of their wise men. However, they did create goods and religious objects that clearly express their aesthetic concerns.
The first great hunters of the plains and forests had no bows and arrows. Instead they used flint tips on the end of short spears which they later balanced by fixing a sculpted object in a suitable position.
These early tribes consisted of only a small number of individuals, sometimes as many as several hundred of them divided up into autonomous groups. In those days the Great Plains were covered in thick forest. The country was inhabited by animals which are now extinct: giant bears and bison, horses (which would later be reintroduced by the White Man), camels, four-horned antelopes, mastadons and mammoths. Many of these species did not survive the end of the Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago. Others were most certainly extinguished by man. The result was that there were no animals capable of pulling a cart or carrying a rider. Thus, there could be no intensive plowing.
Dwindling game made these North Americans highly receptive to lessons from Mexico, where they were trying to domesticate a wild plant that yielded an ear about as thick as a finger - corn. This crop was cultivated and improved by hybridization, as were squashes, to varying degrees of intensiveness, but only in the central and eastern areas. Otherwise the Pacific seaboard remained home, in California, to eaters of shellfish, berries, and to the north, in Canada and Alaska, to sedentary fishermen.
Based on Westerns and children's books and comics, our image of the "Plains Indians" (occupying the area between the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes on one side and the Rocky Mountains on the other) has them galloping around on horseback and hunting the buffalo. Before Columbus and colonization, the story was very different indeed: a tale of modest villages and farming people. This all changed when these semi-sedentary peoples captured and started breeding the horses that escaped from Spanish horse farms. They now became superb riders, rediscovering the ways of their nomadic ancestors.
Culturally speaking, the Plains indians were not exactly advanced. They were influenced by the people of the Woodlands, a huge forest area east of the Mississippi River whose several periods of development, begining with the Archaic phase (reaching its apogee between 3000 and 1000 BC), developed traditions that would endure until the modern age - for example, the making of stone pipes, the forerunners of the well-known peace pipes.
In the past, the presence of numerous mounds gave rise to a belief in the development of a single civilization of moundbuilders. However, we now know that there were several different cultural centers after the Archaic period. Among these were the Adena and Hopewell cultures, around the first century AD, whose development remains somewhat ill defined. Hopewellian artifacts, for example, have been found in New York state. During this period the pipe bowls became miniature sculptural masterpieces, depicting figures and animals, the oldest examples being set into a kind of curved base. (In addition to having medicinal qualities, tobacco no doubt had its own special rituals.)
Finally, this period also saw the development of pottery with decorations in relief. Hammered copper religious objects, made from native materials, perpetuated an ancient tradition originating in the Great Lakes region. And it is because some of these objects found their way into tombs, where their salts preserved the fabrics from rotting, that we are aware of a highly refined textiles tradition. Copper plate was still being produced a thousand years later. Apart from their "stone masks", the most remarkable objects produced by the Hopewell culture were hands and bird talons cut from sheets of mica, which were also placed in tombs.
Around 700 BC, after an inactive period, the Woodlands experienced a cultural revival which, it was thought, was stimulated by contact with Mexican traders. This was towards the end of the period when the civilization centered on the city of Teotihuacan dominated an extensive area that included present-day Guatemala, then occuppied by the Maya. The new civilization that grew up during the next two or three centuries takes its name from one of its great rivers.
The Mexican influence is manifest in the squared mounds on which wooden temples were built. Sometimes, as at Cahokia in Illinois, such mounds could be up to 98 feet high. The base of the biggest mound at Cahokia forms a rectangle measuring 656 feet by 984 feet, making it bigger than the largest Egyptian pyramid.
In addition to such religious edifices, funeral mounds continued to be built and the death of high-status figures always meant the sacrifice of dozens of their servants and concubines, who were expected to follow them into the afterlife. They thus extended the principle underlying the customs of the Hopewell culture, in which the rich took all their wealth with them when they died (this was confirmed by the discovery of a tomb containing huge quantities of obsidian, which was extremely rare in the Woodlands).
If Cahokia was typical of the North Mississippi era, then Moundville, in Alabama, is its southern counterpart. The remarkable polished stone objects found here include one-piece axes with sculpted handles, bowls and animal effigy pipes. The East Woodlands are known for their large production of pottery and, above all, for the stone statues whose size, as much as 20 inches high, is very much the exception in North America, where there was a marked preference for small, refined objects.
The advent of the so-called "Southern Cult" around 1000 AD was accompanied by some fine terracotta works of art such as vases representing trophy heads or sitting or squating figures. Shell ornaments were common as well as some discs, most likely worn as breastplates, had engraved decorations such as a depiction of a warrior or a preist, running, perhaps holding a severed head in his right hand and a in his left hand a knife or scepter of the kind found in certain Mississippian tombs. This theme, which was linked to the magic practice of headhunting, belongs to the Mexican repertoire. In Florida, superb wooden sculptures have fortunately survived the humid climate.
To the west of the Mississippi River, a civilization influenced by that of the Woodlands was created by the speakers of the Caddoan language (the Sioux family). The ancestors of the Pawnee and Wichita Indians were also participants in this tradition. At the time they were a sedentary farming people. One of their finest sites was the famous Spiro Mound, which has yielded such remarkable treasures as a human facesurmounted by two antelope's horns and a stone pipe forming a highly realistic representation of a man beheading a victim.
Mississippian civilization was created by groups with widely different origins and languages. Among them, we could mention the ancestors of the Cherokee (related to the Iroquois of New York State) and the predecessors of the Creeks, whom Hernando de Soto encountered during his travels in 1540 and whose idiom belongs to the Muskogian family. However, this civilization made little mark in the plains which, at the time, were covered in high grass that D. Snow has described as "merely" a marginal extension of the Eastern Woodlands. The plains villages were protected by palisades and the houses were heavy wood constructions built to withstand the freezing winter. In the southern Great Plains, such as in Texas, the dwellings were lighter. Social organization was tribal and there were no kingdoms like those of the Natchez. Nomads continued to live alongside the farming villages, and it was they who began buying horses from the tribes of the western desert, who themselves had dealings with Spaniards starting in the early 17th century. In a few decades they required a reputation as superb horsemen and fearless warriors. This would soon be challenged by the exploits of the Crow, whose sedentary way of life was transformed by the acquisition of horses. In contrast, the tribes of the Missouri River valley continued to live in their villages and practice farming.
Around 10,000 BC, the region between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada (beyond which lies California) started to become increasingly arid. Its inhabitants had to adapt or perish. Thus the "desert culture" that existed in around 8,000 BC was one of berry-gatherers and hunters of small animals. These people had already mastered basketry but had yet to attain the refinement that came in around 2,000 BC with the technique of superimposing pieces of wicker that were themselves bound with fine strips of fiber. The best known site of this desert culture is Danger Cave in the Great Basin, whose small wooden figures anticipate the amulets made in later millennia. It is thought that the desert culture was the cradle of the different civilizations of the Southwest, as inflected through contact with Mexico and the resulting introduction of corn and other plants, such as squashes.
Between northern Utah and the Mexican border the landscape varies considerably, from the winter cool of the conifer-clad mountains to the scorching heat of the desert lowlands with their cacti and rattlesnakes. The Southwest is the only region of the United States where stone-based agriculture developed. As for ceramics, the oldest example found here, at Vakki, near the confluence of the Colorado River and the Gila River, dates from 300 BC, which indicates that the area was a thousand years behind the Mexican Altiplano.
Much less well known than those that followed it, this prolongation of the desert culture occupied a huge swathe of land from the Pacific coast (at the southern extremity of California) and the center of Arizona. Contemporaries of the Mogollon, Hohokam and Anasazi, the Hakataya were farmers who tried to surmount the harsh conditions of their sweeping desert homeland, but without quite managing to create the irrigation channels perfected by the Hohokam. This culture was probably a continuation of the Amargosa culture, which saw the development of the first pottery.
The first Mogollon villages appeared around 200 BC, between southwestern Arizona and southern New Mexico. They were small and their circular houses were half-underground. Given their mountainous, forest-covered land, the Mogollon at first used agriculture occassionally as a way of supplementing their diet of berries. They never produced as much corn as their neighbors. Serious food shortages around 500 AD were followed two centuries later by a period of expansion. Simple pottery designs were imbellished. Villages retained their defensive character until around the end of the first millennium. Also up to this time, they built kiva, those famous underground rooms for religious and community needs. The kiva built around the turn of the second millennium were much bigger and copied from the Anasazi, the Mogollons' northern neighbors. Also around this time a traditionof beige ceramics with black decoration developed in southern New Mexico. This famous local culture took its name from the Mimbres, the small river running through the center of the valley.
Established to the west of the Mogollon, in the desert around modern-day Phoenix, Arizona, the Hohokam were the ancestors of the Pima and the Papago Indians. They spoke Azteco-Tanoan languages. Their origins go back several centuries before the Common Era, which is when they began building villages. This sedentary people produced pottery whose simple decoration gradually became more sophisticated as a result, especially, of mixing with Mogollon and Anasazi immigrants. This is exemplified by the "Salado culture" of around 1300 AD. They wove cotton, as was done throughout the Southwest, and eventually began building large rectangular houses with walls of adobe (a mixture of earth and straw). The Salado, who were relatives of the Hohokam, built great places with several stories, like the one at Casa Grande, south of Phoenix (not to be confused with the Mogollon Casa Grande in Mexico).
The Anasazi culture is rooted in ancient traditions. In 700 BC the south of Utah and Colorado was occupied by the "Basket Makers," a branch of the desert culture. Up to the middle of the first millennium, they made no pottery and hunted using spears, instead of the bows and arrows of their neighbors, the Mogollon. They lived mainly in natural rock shelters and at first their huts were very crude. However, the Modified Basket Maker period, beginning around 400 AD, saw the advent of pottery and pit houses. There was also large-scale agriculture, without reliance on irrigation systems.
In the 8th century, the pit houses disappeared. Villages began to take form but they continued to dig out underground chambers as religious meeting places. These large kivas can still be seen today next to the walls of houses in such Anasazi sites as the Cliff Place at Mesa Verde in Colorado. Chaco Canyon has the ruins of several settlements that could be described as towns. Pueblo Bonito assembles over 800 houses on a four-acre site. Built before the Mogollon took them up, the large kivas here measured up to 65 feet across and their earth roofs were supported by wooden beams could weigh as much as a hundred tons when the ground was waterlogged. There was only one kiva per town, but each clan had their own small kiva. All these dark chambers were used for practices still performed to this day, including among the Hopi. Hopi pottery comes out of a long-standing tradition including the fine Sikyatki jars of the 15th and 16th centuries.
The Indians of the Northwest coast are, stylistically, the best-known of the North American cultural areas. Famous for totem poles which regularly appear in cartoons to denote the "generic" religious art of US Indians, whether in the plains or in the eastern forests. In fact, these areas never produced any monumental art, or even anything more than six inches tall. Characteristic of the Northwest coast (nowadays shared between Alaska and Canada), this particularstyle would appear to go back many centuries. This is proven by the stone objects found on the banks of the Fraser River, which marks the southern limit of the expansion of the Athapaskan-speaking peoples, the ancestors of the well-known Tlingit, Haida and the Tsimshian tribes.
The symbols (most often animal forms) that are such a rich presence in the art of the Northwest coast have a heraldic, totemic value. For example, when an important man died his family would commission commemorative sculptures depicting the legendary animals emblematic of his clan either in full, by a detail or by allusions and abstract motifs intelligible only to the initiated. Look at the fine blankets made by the Chilkat, a sub-tribe of the Tlingit. An incredible quantity of masks was also produced right into the 20th century, until Western civilization began to pollute the Pacific coast that previously had been encroached on solely by fur buyers and gold prospectors, or a few ethnographers and collectors.Often, these masks did not entirely cover the face but were worn on the forehead. That is why they are called frontlets. They were part of the equipment of the shamans, priests who, like their counterparts in Siberia, mastered the art of ecstacy. Indeed, there are many similarities between the shamanistic rites of certain Athapaskan tribes to those of their distant Siberian cousins. There is a certain kind of ceremonial dish that is used only by the Gilyak in Russia and the Tlingit in Alaska.
The Northwest coast was also the scene of a surprising tribal ritual, potlatch, a custom involving the organizing of ruinously extravagant feasts and offering guests splendid gifts. Potlatch feasts were held with some regularity in these rich coastal societies. Hosts would even destroy valuable objects in order to enhance their prestige, and to force their guests to hold an even more ruinous feast. This system ultimately served as a kind of economic regulator, preventing certain clans from becoming too wealthy.
From the mid-19th century, white settlers' interest inlocal sculpture led to commercial mass production. The availability of sophisticated metal tools inspired native artists to experiment with rarely used materials such as stone. Reduced scale totem poles were made in a fairly soft, black material, argillite. The oldest examples are still of high quality as they were made by traditional sculptors. Production of masks and other ritual objects also increased in the same proportions.
The revival being witnessed today as a result of some remarkable Indian artists has taken this productive frenzy to new heights, and stylistic traditions have inevitably suffered somewhat as a result. However gladdening in itself, this renaissance should therefore not be allowed to overshadow the antique totem poles, superb textiles, masks and paintings from old religious buildings to be seen in the museums of America, or any of the countless objects that have made the Northwest coast one of the magical cradles of human creativity, home for many centuries to the most original forms of genius.
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