The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures

Pekka Hämäläinen writes in his essay “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures” of the change brought about by the introduction of the domesticated horse to Plains Indians all over the continental United States from the mid-16th to the mid-19th centuries.  Noting briefly the iconic status of the horse in the mythos of the romanticized history of Indians, Hämäläinen’s essay is focused on the deleterious effects of this species’ introduction, which “disrupted subsistence economies, wrecked grassland and bison ecologies, created new social inequalities, unhinged gender relations, undermined traditional political hierarchies, and intensified competition and warfare,” concluding that the introduction of the horse was a “mixed blessing.”

For Southern Plains Indian groups, Hämäläinen describes the adoption of the horse in the context of Apache Plains groups that had traditionally operated as nomadic hunters, “[who had fashioned] a blend of part-time agriculture with seasonal mounted bison hunting.” By the mid-17th century Comanche groups had migrated to the South, nearly annihilating the Apache by leveraging the horse’s speed, transforming their economies and causing a shift in the nomadic bison hunting and agricultural subsistence practices to pastoralism.  Horses required grazing lands, causing the Comanche to modify their movement patterns, an effect seen in the change in women’s duties, which came to be centered around winter foraging, and for the middle-class women, more time herding animals and less time planting crops or preparing hunted buffalo. By the mid-19th century, “with up to eighty horses per family,”63 the southern Plains tribes had become “bona-fide pastoralists.”

On the northern Plains, “the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 unleashed large-scale diffusion”63 causing horses to quickly spread across the landscape, where “long, cold winters…kept most [Indian people] chronically horse-poor” causing a wealth imbalance previously unknown among these groups.  In addition, “Euro-American-driven fur trade and capitalist penetration” caused an increase in gun sales to north Plains people, “[undermining their traditional] egalitarian ethos…where the rich could gain status, secure support in councils, and monopolize leadership positions,” resulting in a “relatively rigid rank society [that] benefited a selected few at the expense of the vast majority.” The Blackfeet, for example, saw the incorporation  of ‘slave-wives’ that were put to service as labor in support of large herds, and became entangled in wars with neighboring tribes that ultimately “made Euro-American military takeover virtually effortless.” By the mid-19th century tribes such as the Crow depended so much on trade and large herds that when Lakota invaders arrived, also rich with horses and guns, their society began to collapse, ultimately “[driven by the U.S. army] onto ever-smaller reservations.”

Eastern Plains tribes such as the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras initially retained traditional agricultural practices while engaging in the livestock trade with settlers in the late 18th century.  But “more southern villagers – Pawnees, Omahas, Poncas, Otoe-Missourias, Kansas, Osages, and Wichitas - …acquired large horse herds, [putting] more emphasis on hunting, [and became] increasingly nomadic.” This nomadism resulting in “overlapping claims over hunting ranges, turning the eastern Plains into a viciously contested war zone,” creating strife among tribes across the region.   Nevertheless, for most eastern Plains tribes, especially in the north where they remained villagers, by and large, although they found themselves in contention with Lakotas, they ultimately forged alliances and “[became] participants in the only true success story of Plains Indian equestrianism.” Lakotas and allied groups had “[found] a functional equilibrium among horse numbers, ecological constraints, and economic, cultural, and military imperatives.”

The Lakota leveraged the horse to create a hegemony, mastering hunting and developing a superior military, becoming “the dominant power of the northern Plains.” Their position along the right climactic zone allowed them to keep their herds small, paradoxically maintaining “riverine ecosystems and bison herds,” given them a comparative advantage to other Plains tribes after the introduction of the horse.  By the late 19th century, besides becoming the archetypal Plains Indian group dominating romanticized U.S. history, the Lakota had “escaped the adaptive complications of the eastern Plains, the overabundance and ecological instability of the southern Plains, and the destructive divisiveness and social and military volatility of the northern Plains.” Hämäläinen notes that this imagery and anomalous success “creates distorting historical shortsightedness” that ultimately masks the real challenges that the introduction of the horse presented to the vast majority of Plains Indian groups across the continental United States.

The Indians' New World

James H. Merrell, in his essay “The Indians’ New World:  The Catawba Experience,” examines the theme of a ‘New World’ through the eyes of Indian people that represented “demanding basic changes in ways of life…[and an] experience of natives [that] was more closely akin to that of immigrants and slaves.” As Roger Nichols notes in his introduction to Merrell’s essay, this experience included agitation by expanding colonialism, European diseases, changed kinship systems, disappearing languages, and shifting political leadership. In the southern piedmont, extending from South Carolina to Virginia, the Catawba Nation lived during the late 17th-mid-18th century in “a cluster of villages along the border between the Carolinas,” and the effects of these changes are apparent in the history of the Nation, affected dramatically by this ‘New World’.

“Bacteria brought the most profound disturbances to upcountry villages,” notes Merrell, where swampy country incubated disease with alarming frequency among the Catawba Indians.  “Major epidemics struck the region at least once every generation – in 1698, 1718, 1738, and 1759,” erasing “deep pools” of traditional knowledge and lifeways.  Knowledge including the most advantageous traditional hunting spots and “choices sites for gathering” disappeared.  The result was “splintered remnants of the old [Nation, creating…] a kaleidoscopic array of migrations…and mergers.” Relationships and kinship systems were adversely affected by this splintering, a traditional localism was disturbed, and “people from different backgrounds had to forge a common culture and a common future.”

Over time, the headmen of these indigenous groups lost their power and influence over these newly-disparate peoples, and “[e]ventually entire peoples followed their language and their leaders into oblivion.” Colonialist sentiment was influential by the early 19th century among Catawba peoples, creating a sort of “collective conscious” among the Indians, and trade goods slowly emerged as “less obvious agents of change.” Liquor and alcohol created new paradigms for social and economic activities within the tribe, and eventually “[Catawba peoples] found themselves caught up in an international economic network.” Colonists traded in primarily slaves and deer-skins, creating an insidious trade network that had never existed, where “competition replaced comity.”

By the early 1750’s colonial authorities had become prime movers in the lives of the Catawba Indians, who saw to it that colonies engaged in infighting, causing “headmen to [loosen] provincial purse strings,” and become victims of white planters and the settlerist mentality, which, in part, advocated for trading and sometimes outright theft from the Indians in order to gain lands for agriculture.  Along with alcohol, “[b]ridges, buildings, fences, roads, crops and other ‘improvements’ made the area comfortable and familiar to colonists but uncomfortable and unfamiliar to Indians.”  The fierce independence of both settlers and Indians put them “constantly at odds” and resulted in a “shift in the balance of physical and cultural power” that saw Catawbas modify survival strategies significantly in the late 1750’s.

During this intense period of colonialism Catawba’s shifted their resistance efforts to nation building efforts, acquiring reservation lands from local governors, engaging in enhanced trade with settlers, and “ultimately [began relying] on a more general conformity with the surrounding society.” Merrell laments that the Catawba learned these new lifeways only after paying a very high price, and that “natives throughout North America had their world stolen and another put in place.” And so, like the Puritans and settlers that followed, “localism, self-sufficiency, and the power of old ways,” crumbled in the face of this ‘New World’.

The Delaware Prophet Neolin

The Delaware Prophet Neolin is the subject and title of the article “A Reappraisal” by Alfred A. Cave, building on the themes of change, adaptation, and assimilation prevalent in Chapter 4 of The American Indian:  Past and Present by Roger L. Nichols.  Living in the mid-18th century changed landscape of a newly-settled European colony in the traditional Lenape homelands in the Delaware Valley of New Jersey, Neolin one of a group of “prophets [that] were the product of a century of upheaval.” “The syncretic religious movements led by postcontact revitalization prophets, [a group including Neolin], blended traditional and borrowed concepts and were neither purely indigenous nor ‘basically European’ in origin.”

The effects of settlerism, including the introduction of alcohol, splintering kinship systems, new trade patterns and economies, and the devastation of European diseases had, by this time, convinced Indians like the Delaware (traditionally known as the Lenape) to approximate a more assimilationist stance to Europeans encroaching on their homelands, and both “call for [a] peaceful resistance…and the revival of the ‘ancient Customs & Manners’[sic] of Native Americans.” In an effort to bridge the spiritual divide that emerged between Christian colonizers and the natural philosophy that had defined Indian spirituality since time immemorial, Neolin deftly “[interweaved]…traditional and [Christian monotheistic] syncretic elements.”

For example, Neolin incorporated the “new concepts of a supreme, omnipotent, and judgmental creator deity” into a traditional spirituality which held that “sacred power was most often sought through the intercession of lesser spirit beings.” These spirit beings – four in all – were known as Manetuwak, “located at each of the cardinal directions,” that were received in spiritual visions by Indians in their youth.  “Communal well-being depended on the favor of [these] spirits.” The Manetuwak played a vital role in traditional ceremonies including the Green Corn Ceremony and the Big House Ceremony, activities Neolin downplayed to his people in an effort to deflect criticism that Indians were practicing witchcraft.  In a well-documented ‘spirit journey’ upon which Neolin is said to have embarked, he encountered the “Master of Life,” closely associated with the Christian monotheistic God who “denounced [Indians’] addiction to the white man’s alcohol, and deplored Indian polygamy, sexual promiscuity...and their gravest offense, [the] toleration of European intruders.” Intrinsic to the newly developed spirituality was resistance, which proved an effective model for later resistance movements including that of “[t]he Ottawa war leader Pontiac”.

Neolin’s journey reflected the “lore” of Indian spirituality, but included previously unknown concepts including the concept of a hell, and a trickster God, “the Mahtanu…who spoiled the creator’s perfect work.” This ‘evil-one’ had no corollary in traditional Lenape spiritual lore.  Neolin used these Christian elements in his admonishments to tribal people to “[shore] up the discipline their beleaguered and divided communities needed if they were to resist further incursions.” And so the resistance elements were buttressed as well by the addition of these categorical figures into the traditional lore.  “[Neolin’s updated religious proclamation] was grounded in a new belief that all Indians were God’s chosen people, that whites were children of an evil spirit, and that the road to salvation lay in Indian unity and in the reclamation of Indian ways.” He recast the Christian God as ‘the Great Spirit’. 

Besides offering a philosophical mooring for future resistance movements, Neolin’s new spirituality, transformed for beleaguered Indian Nations in 18th century colonial America, served as a tool for helping Indians accommodate European activities.  These “cultural changes [were] deemed vital to their survival and, at the same time, reminded whites of their obligations to respect treaty rights,” creating in Neolin’s spiritual transformation a renewed hope for the disaffected, and for those Lenape afraid that their traditional political leaders had failed them.

References

Nichols, Roger L. The American Indian: Past and Present. 6th ed. Norman, Oklahoma. University of Oklahoma Press. 2008.