Great Basin: precontact life ways, changes during contact, and colonialism - Essay Example

Great Basin: Precontact life ways, changes during contact, and colonialism Introduction The Great basin region is a vast region that is predominantly a desert land. The region was first inhabited in the early 10,000BC (Pritzker, 221). The Tribes of the Great Basin region had to adapt to this environment in order to survive. The tribes that comprised of the Shoshoni, the Ute, Paiute, Bannock, and the Gosiute shared common traditions. They even intermarried as was the case among the Shoshoni and the Bannock. Most of these groups were hunters and gatherers, hunting game meat and gathering seeds, berries and greens from plants (Great Basin National Heritage Area, p3). But some took it a step further and incorporated agriculture as was the case among the Paiute. However, there was a transition in their social, economic and political organization from the pre-colonization era, to the colonialism era. Geographical conditions of the Great Basin region The Great Basin region is an area that encompasses the regions between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. This whole area is a high desert region. It stretches up to the North in Colombia Plateau and down to the South in Colorado Plateau. The zones included in this territory are Idaho, Oregon, Western Wyoming, Eastern California, Nevada, Utah and Southern Oregon. The area is predominantly a low rainfall and intense temperature area and its rivers do not flow into the ocean; rather they vanish in the sand. It is an area that to the average eye seems inhospitable to human existence. This is because it has sparse vegetation and extreme weather variation. The summers of this region are extremely hot while the winters are extremely cold. In spite of these harsh conditions, the Indians have lived in the region for centuries. For the Indians to survive in this region, they had to have a good knowledge of this vast region which had varying ecologies. They had to have a vast wealth of environmental knowledge for them to survive (Macllwraith, pg 263). Social Organization The Indians of this Great Basin region spoke languages that had a similar origin. This was with the exception of the Washo community. They spoke languages that originated from the Numic subclass of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family. The numic people divided into the western, central and southern subgroups around 2000 years ago. Then around 1000 years ago, they spread to the North and East. Archeological and linguistic data suggests that the numic people spread from the Southeastern California into the great basin. The communities of the Great Basin region were mainly organized into nuclear families that composed of a father, mother and children (Gibson, pg7). Often times there would also be another member of the extended family such as a grandparent, a younger sibling or a widowed relative. Past this nuclear family the people of the Great Basin were linked by kinship, marriage, friendship and adoption. These numerous connections were very critical to the nuclear family as they provided a safety net especially in times of drought and food scarcity. The Great Basin region was culturally characterized by sexual egalitarianism. Youngsters were allowed to engage in experimental sex with the intention of marriage. Trial marriages were allowed and were the norm. Knowledge on contraception and abortion was readily available to the youngsters. Furthermore, divorce was a simple process and only involved the process of one of the parties moving back to their paternal home. In some of the tribes like the Shoshone and the Paiute, the woman could marry more than one man. Often they were brothers and the practice was aptly named fraternal polyandry. This was a contingency measure borne out of need. There seems to have been a scarcity in eligible mates and this was a remedy to that shortage. In other instances, the woman would marry two unrelated men or cousins. However, the woman rarely married more than two men. Due to the extreme harshness of the Great Basin region the Indian communities tended to be organized in small numbers of about 30 people and about 100 in other regions. These settlements were often established along water channels and sources as water was important for sustenance. Membership to this units was fluid and while members were related to each other they could leave one commune and move to another at any given time without and hindrance from the community. The ethnic groups that comprised the greater Great Basin region comprised of the Shoshone, Paiute, Bannock, Ute and the Gosiute. The Shoshone were further divided into various subgroups The Northern, southern, eastern and Western Shoshone. The Northern Shoshone were further divided into 5 subgroups; the Lemhi Shoshone who mainly depended on salmon for sustenance but hunted buffalo in Western Montana, the Fort Hall Shoshone, the Bruneau Shoshone who relied heavily on salmon and camas for survival, the Boise Shoshone who also hunted buffalo but depended on salmon and camas and the Mountain Shoshone. Their naming system for the subgroups originated from the kind of foods they ate. There were the Tukudika who predominantly ate sheep; the Agaidika who ate salmon; the Kamuduka who ate rabbit, the Tubaduka who ate pine-nuts, and the kukundika who were buffalo eaters. The Shoshoni lived in conically shaped huts that were made from sosoni which was a type of grass that grew in the region. This is also how they got the name Shoshoni which is a derivative of the word sosoni and refers to them as “the grass house people”. The Shoshone’s main source of food was the salmon and even lead to them being referred to as the snake people, which is what the hand sign for salmon among the Indians depicted. The Bannock or the “water people”, on the other hand, hailed from the southern Oregon to the region where the Blackfoot and Portneuf joined the Snake River. They however intermarried with the Shoshone when they migrated into the Lemhi and Snake River valleys and the Bridger basin. The two tribes shared a similar cultural heritage and spoke closely linked languages, where the Bannock spoke western numic and the Shoshone spoke central numic. So, most of the people in these tribes were bilingual due to the prevalent cases of intermarriage among them. The Bannock, unlike the Shoshone were more aggressive as their culture promoted war unlike the Shoshone and it was their warriors who often proved most powerful in the intertribal communities. Social changes brought by the contact era and colonization The first outsiders to arrive in the region were the Spanish who came in the 18th century. The first settlement followed soon after and it comprised of the Mormon settlers who arrived in the region in 1848. Not long after that an Indian reservation was created in the region so as to assist in the assimilation of the native population and to turn them into Christians. In the reservation, was included a number of Indian schools for the children. The children were either kidnapped or forced into these schools that were created as boarding facilities and were brainwashed into abandoning their culture (Littlefield, pg 10). The native Indian culture was repressed at whatever cost. The reservations also came under threat as they were continuously curved out to create land for private use. This was in part due to the Dawes Act of 1886 that allowed for the survey and division of reservation land for private Indian ownership (Greenwald, pg3). Unlike other Indians, the Great Basin Indians were exposed to the European Americans much later. It is because of this delay in contact that the Indians of this region managed to maintain their culture and religion long after most Indians from other regions had been assimilated. They were therefore the first Indians to come up with the idea of a native renaissance. The Ghost dance was the result of these native renaissance efforts. It was the brainchild of two prophets of Paiute origin, Wovoka and Wodziwob, who felt that this mystical ceremony would help in reestablishing the pre-contact era. Other mystical ceremonies that emerged from this region were the Sun Dance and the Ute Bear Dance. The Peyote is another first from this region. It was a Native American church that was developed in the region in response to the poverty, loss of culture and the worsening conditions that were felt in the region in the post contact era. It integrated Christianity with universal Indian culture. It originated from prehistoric Mexico ( Pritzker, pg 223). Economic Organization The mountain Shoshone were famous for their compound bow that they made from the horns of mountain sheep, elk and buffalo. The bow making process was an intricate affair. The horns would be heated so as to make them malleable and then they would be straightened. They would then ensure that the tips of the bow were pointed piece that was from each of the two horns used. The tips were about 18 to 24 inches long. The bottom ends of these horns would be intricately joined together by placing a separate piece of horn over the joint and wrapping the joint tightly using a wet rawhide. In order to make the bow very strong, they would glue strips of animal sinew to the back. This bow making process normally took around two months and the result was a strong bow. It required great upper body strength as it had a pull strength of about 65 pounds. So strong was the bow that it could catapult an arrow through a bison. As a result of this great efficiency, the Shoshone bows were highly prized. If fact, they were said to be worth a horse and a gun. The Gosiute lived in the South and west of the Great Salt Lake. Their main source of subsistence was plants and they even used a vast number of plants for their seeds, berries, roots and even greens. The Paiute lived in south east Oregon, eastern California and western Nevada. Various sub tribes had various staple foods; rabbit meat, wild onions, ground squirrel, trout, pinion nuts were among these foods. The Ute on the other hand whose traditional homelands spanned from Utah, Colorado and parts of New Mexico often conducted trade. They trade buffalo and deer hides and meat with corn and other agricultural products with the pueblo. Like most ethnic groups in the Great Basin region, plant played an important part in food provision for the Paiute. The southern group had over 44 different types of grass from which they gathered seeds. Further among the Owens valley group, the seeds were owned communally and would be collected by the women. They would be sorted and dried with hot coals and ground to produce flour that was used to bake bread for the community. They also practiced ditch irrigation in order to increase the yield from these wild plants. They would build dams to divert water into these long ditches that had the potential to water many acres of land. The southern grouped also engaged in agriculture and the Northern groups grew pumpkin, melon sunflower, beans and amaranth (Ojibwa, p12). Economic Changes after the Contact era and colonization When contact begun, the Indians traded with the Spanish, but the Spanish did not form a colony in this region due to its isolated nature and the harshness of its environment. The Euro-Americans soon followed, settling in the region and the Indians that the Spanish explorers in the late 18th century found were already influenced by Euro-Americans. When the Euro-American came they quickly destroyed the already fragile ecology of the Great Basin region. They allowed their cattle to overgraze destroying the seed grasses. The Indians adopted the horse culture while escaping from captivity. Perhaps they bought horses from the region north of the river Colorado, so that by mid eighteenth century most Shoshone groups had adopted the horse culture like their Great Plains counterparts. Some of the Indians adopted raiding as a means of surviving during the colonization as land was subdivided and their food sources began to diminish. This was further fuelled by the seizure of resource rich land for farming by the settlers, prohibition of Indians from using the grasslands by burning them down and also cutting down of pinon groves that were used as firewood. Game animals also gradually disappeared due to crowding out and soon the Indian population was starving and drastically dying out (Pritzker pg 222). Political organization Leadership of each settlement was democratic in nature and member could pursue independent agendas without fear of condemnation from the leaders. Among the Shoshone the leader was given the title “Daigwahni” or the talker. The primary responsibility of the daigwahni was to collect information on the ripening of food in all regions so as to inform the people. This person was usually a talented orator who could use the power of persuasion during community meetings in order to get mutually convenient agreement from the members. Among the Paiute people the leader was referred to as the Niave. He lead by example and helped the community to come to an agreement. He was not seen as a decision maker but as an authority to give suggestions and advice to the community during council meetings. Among the Ute, the communities or bands as they were known often had two chiefs. One was a civil chief while the other was a spokesman. In times of war there was also a chief in charge of war. The communities dwelled in clearly demarcated territories, other bands could still use the land. This is because among the Ute, land was communal resource shared among them as a gift from creation and not private property. Political Changes after the Contact era and colonization Following the contact era and the subsequent colonization, political organization among the Indians began to change. Community leaders began to be increasingly referred to as chiefs instead of the traditional titles like daigwahni and Niave. Indians began to organize themselves on larger communities due to the creation of reservations. They began to utilize tribal councils for representation especially when advocating for their rights. The status of the native Indians shifted from privileged owners of a vast territory to disenfranchised citizens whose political rights were suppressed by the very people they had welcomed into their territory. Their land was subdivided without their consent and they were confined to reservations. Conclusion The vast Great Basin region that is predominantly desert terrain was first inhabited in the early 10,000 BC. The Tribes of the Great Basin region had to adapt to this environment in order to survive, adopting hunting and gathering practices and a bit of agriculture in areas close to rivers. The contact period changed their economic situation as they began to trade in different commodities with the Spanish. However colonization did the greatest amount of damage to the socio-economic and political situation of this region. Not only did their culture deteriorate but their economic ability diminished as their ecology was destroyed and their land was taken from them. Further their political status became pitiable, becoming disenfranchised citizens of a country they once controlled and roamed free in. Works Cited Pritzker, Barry A. Native American “Encyclopedia”: History, Culture and Peoples. New York, Oxford University Press, 2000. Ojibwa. Indians 101: The Great Basin Tribes. 20 March 2012, 01 May 2013 Great Basin National Heritage Area. HISTORY TIMELINE of Great Basin National Heritage Area. 01 May 2013 < http://www.greatbasinheritage.org/great-basin-history.html> Gibson Bush, Karen. The Great Basin Indians: Daily life in the 1700s. Minnesota. Capstone Press. 2006. Greenwald, Emily. Reconfiguring the Reservations: The Nez Perces, Jircarilla Apaches and the Dawes Act. 1st Edition. UNM Press. Littlefield, Holly. Children Of the Indian Boarding Schools: Picture the American Past Series. New York. Lerner Publications . Macllwraith, Forsyth, Thomas, Muller Edward. North America: the Historical Geography of a changing continent. Rowman & Littlefield. 2001. Read More