Native Americans of North America

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Traditional Way of Life

Long before the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans in North America developed rich and varied cultures, as diverse as the cultures of Europe or any other continent. Each group adopted a way of life suited to the resources and demands of its environment. For example, groups devised unique tools and weapons needed to hunt local game and to gather and process plant foods effectively. They built homes and shelters out of materials available in their area. Each culture had its own language, style of art, oral traditions, spiritual beliefs, and system of social organization.

With such rich diversity, it is problematic to generalize about traditional Native American ways of life and beliefs; there is no single Native American culture. Nevertheless, Native American cultures share certain traits that are common to many indigenous peoples around the world. These include spirituality as the foundation of tribal and personal life, strong ties to the land on which they live, a sense of kinship with the natural world, a conception of the natural and supernatural worlds as interrelated and whole, an intimate relationship between health and spirituality, creative expression as an integral part of daily life, and the oral transmission of traditions and histories. Yet each Indian culture has its own distinct tribal identity; many are related but no two are exactly alike.

The following sections explore the traditional ways of life of Native American peoples. The discussion covers food and subsistence, housing, clothing and adornment, social and political organization, marriage and family life, recreation and games, transportation, trade, warfare and weaponry, language and communication, spirituality and religious practices, music and dance, and arts and crafts. Because these sections primarily describe ways of life as they existed before European contact, the past tense is generally used; traditions that continue to the present are noted where appropriate. For a discussion of contemporary Native American cultures, see the Native Americans Today section of this article. For a discussion of traditional Native American cultures arranged by geography rather than thematically, see the Culture Areas section of this article.

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Food and Subsistence

The foods Native Americans ate, and the methods they used to acquire them, depended on where they lived. The land and its resources determined whether Indians foraged, fished, hunted, or farmed. But no group ever relied on only one type of food. Even those who practiced agriculture still relied on game and wild plants to supplement their harvests.

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The ease or difficulty with which North American Indians could obtain food directly influenced how they lived. The more time that was required to hunt, gather, or fish, the less time there was for other cultural activities. In the barren environment of the Great Basin, for example, Indians adopted a nomadic lifestyle because they constantly needed to search for food. But on the Northwest Coast, where rivers and oceans teemed with life, there was enough food for people to live a settled village lifestyle.

This section provides a general discussion of Native American foods and subsistence methods. To learn more about the foods and subsistence methods of Native Americans in a specific geographical area, see the Culture Areas section of this article.

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Foraging

Native Americans gathered a wide range of plant foods, including many varieties of edible wild nuts, berries, seeds, and grasses. Almost all Native Americans relied on some wild plant foods. Wild rice—a type of seed-bearing grass that grows naturally along the muddy shores of marshes and streams—was such a staple for the Menominee people of present-day Wisconsin that they derived their tribal name from the Ojibwa word for wild rice: manomin. The people of the arid Southwest harvested agaves, cactus, acorns, piñon nuts, and juniper berries, which ripened at different times of year and at different elevations.

For most California Indians, the acorn was the most important single food source. Gathered in the autumn, acorns were stored for year-round use through a time-consuming process. Women had to dry, hull, and pulverize acorns into meal, then leach the meal in hot water to remove the tannin, a bitter-tasting substance that causes indigestion. After boiling the acorn meal into mush, they molded and baked it into cakes for their families. In the southern California desert, the Cahuilla made the seed pods of the mesquite tree into food. By pulverizing the ripened pods in an upright wooden mortar with a pestle, they were able to obtain the juice as a beverage. Once the pod meal dried, it was made into cakes, providing a nutritious food for traveling.

In some areas of the Northwest Coast, more than 40 kinds of berries and fruits were available. Women in this region also gathered ferns with edible roots, lilies with edible bulbs, such as riceroot and camas, and starchy tubers. Camas and edible roots such as bitterroot, yampa, and sego were key food sources for the Plateau Indians. Among peoples like the Iroquois, for whom farming was the main source of food, wild plant foods served as an important dietary supplement, especially if crops failed.

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Fishing

Native Americans who lived along rivers or in coastal areas depended on fishing for a major portion of their diets. They caught fish using spears, hooks and lines, lures, harpoons, barbed arrows, nets, traps, and even poisons.

Fishing provided the basis for the affluent way of life enjoyed by the Nootka and other Northwest Coast peoples. Although they ate many different kinds of fish, salmon was especially important because of its predictable and distinctive life cycle. The Nootka knew that salmon returned every spring and summer from the sea to their spawning grounds in freshwater streams. Fishermen erected latticework fences called weirs across the entire width of a river to prevent continued upstream swimming by the salmon. The current then swept many of the salmon back into traps while others were harpooned. Fishermen also used dip nets—bags of netting suspended from wooden frames—and boxlike or cylindrical traps. The salmon swam back in such densely packed schools that the Nootka could catch five months’ food supply in the course of several weeks. By supplementing smoked and dried salmon with berries, deer, and clams, as well as other types of fish, the Nootka had enough food to last them until late February, when the herring returned. The Nootka and some other Northwest Coast peoples also practiced whaling, which they considered the noblest of all occupations. Paddling dugout canoes, they ventured into open seas between March and August to hunt California gray whales with harpoons.

Fish and waterfowl were easy to catch in the Southeast, a region of meandering rivers and vast swamps of cypress and cane. In subtropical south Florida, the Calusa had such an abundant supply of fish and shellfish that they flourished without the need for agriculture. The Delaware (Lenni Lenape), Montauk, and Powhatan enjoyed the flat, fertile coastal plains of the East Coast, one of the world’s richest fishing areas. The clam beds of Long Island were an asset to those who lived there.

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Hunting

The earliest inhabitants of the North American continent, known as Paleo-Indians, survived by hunting big game and other wild animals. Until the end of the last ice age, around 10,000 years ago, many giant animals roamed the land. Paleo-Indians used spears to hunt mammoth, mastodon, a now-extinct form of bison, and smaller animals. They were skilled at making razor-sharp stone spearpoints—as well as knives, scrapers, and choppers—by chipping stone flakes away from a larger rock. They lashed these stone points to wooden shafts with strips of animal hide to create spears. There is also evidence that Paleo-Indians stampeded herds of bison to drive them over cliffs, killing or crippling large numbers with a minimum of effort. In addition to hunting, Paleo-Indians likely relied on wild plant foods to supplement their diet.

The development of a new tool, the atlatl (pronounced at-LAT-ul), revolutionized hunting. The atlatl was a spear launcher that greatly increased the force and speed with which a spear could be thrown, allowing a hunter to kill his prey from a safe distance away. The hunter lifted the device over his shoulder and sent the spear hurtling toward his target with a whiplike motion. By 8000 bc hunters in southwestern Europe and southwestern North America were using the atlatl, although no one knows where or when it was invented.

After the ice age ended, the mammoth, mastodon, American camel, saber-toothed cat, giant ground sloth, and many other large mammal species became extinct, possibly because of severe climate changes or disease. Some scholars believe overhunting by humans may have played a role in this extinction, but there is little archaeological evidence to support this theory. After the large mammals died out, the most important game animals in North America were grazing and foraging mammals such as caribou, moose, elk, bison, pronghorns, deer, and bighorn sheep; scavengers and carnivores such as bears, coyotes, wolves, foxes, and pumas (mountain lions); sea mammals such as seals, sea lions, and whales; and smaller game such as ducks, geese, turkeys, rabbits, beavers, raccoons, opossums, and squirrels.

Centuries before the arrival of Europeans, Plains hunters lived in nomadic bands that hunted the American bison, commonly called the buffalo, on foot. Living with the constant threat of starvation, these Plains Indians survived by driving bison herds over cliffs. Men dressed in bison skins positioned themselves at the head of the herd to lead the chief bull bison. Snorting and rolling in the dust, they lured the herd toward the edge of the cliff before disappearing into the brush. Other hunters then used fire to incite a stampede over the cliff. Another Plains hunting method used fire to encircle a herd of bison. Hunters stationed themselves at a single opening in the circle, where they killed the frightened animals with bows and lances. The arrival of the horse, widespread among Native Americans by the mid-1700s, completely changed the bison hunt. Instead of stampeding an entire bison herd over a cliff, hunters raced after bison on horseback and shot them with bows and arrows, and later, rifles.