Vickipedia

INDIANS, AMERICAN. The name American Indians, applying, as it does, to all the tribes which inhabited the New World when it first became known to Europe, and to their descendants since that date, originated in a geographical misconception that this New World was but the projection or extension of India or the east of Asia, and that consequently the natives were sto-graphically connected with the people of the East Indies. The islands between North and South America were, accordingly, the ‘West Indies.’ The western hemisphere has not been lucky in the naming either of the country itself, or its aborigines.

The origin of the American race or races is still a much-vexed and unsettled question. The theory, having hitherto, perhaps, had the balance of repute in its favor, derives them from Asia. ferrying them across Behring Strait. In the Swedish Polar expedition (1878-79), Prof. Nordkensjold traced in the Tchuktchis, on the north-east coast of Siberia, an ‘ unmistakable stamp of the Mongols of Asia, and the Eskimo and Indians of America.’ Lieutenant Palander of the same expedition, however, assimilates those Tchuktchis to the Greenland Eskimo, while Peschel groups them with the native tribes of Kamtchatka. The Samoyedes and other Arctic races of Asia, it is further pointed out, are of Mongoloid stock, and distinctly round-headed; while the Eskimo, next to the Kai Colos of Fiji, are the longest-headed race on the globe.

The derivation of the American races in whole or in part from Chinese, Japanese, or other Asiatic arrivals on the western seaboard, is attended with at least equal difficulties; for where are any affinities between such emigrants and the American races in language, customs, arts, modes of life? The latter, at the time of their discovery, had neither rice, wheat, barley, oats, or rye; nor iron; nor horse, sheep, camel, or poultry; all which, since then, propagate and flourish in the New World. The natives were found cultivating only maize, squashes, plantains, cassava, potato, tobacco. They had but one poor beast of burden, the llama, confined to the uplands of South Cordilleras, and one species of dog unrepresented in the Old World. Their knowledge of metals was limited to copper, bronze, lead, gold, and silver.

The language of the red men, furthermore, is generically different from all Asiatic languages; from the Indo-Chinese monosyllabic character, from the agglutinating Ural-Altaic, from the inflexional Semitic and Aryan; it is, in fact, a product purely and wholly of America, without any Old World affinities or analogies whatsoever describable as polysynthetic or hugely agglomerative, expressing a whole sentence sometimes in a seventeen-syllabled word. This character applies to all their 760 inextricably intermixed languages. Then their physical, and for the most part their mental traits also are, as an ensemble, all their own. Their hair is universally black, straight, glossy, and long, never wavy, persistent to old age, properties characterizing also the hair of the mummies of the Ancon necropolis, and other places of Peru; the beard very scanty, generally wholly, sometimes only partially, rooted out; the eyes small, deep-set, always horizontal, soft, partially closed and languid when not roused by passion, and overset by narrow and high-arched eyebrows; the brow itself, broad and low, receding in a very remarkable degree towards the flat crown; the cheek-bones broad and prominent; the nose also prominent and sensitive, often very long and aquiline; the hands delicate and long-fingered, soft and smooth like the silken skin of the whole body; the whole lire supple, elastic, shapely, and agile. The features are generally regular, and often handsome. The Crows, in particular, six feet high, with exceedingly long hair reaching to the ground, and in some cases measuring 10 feet (all of a piece), are described as decidedly handsome, or even noble. The women, with their soft luscious figures, dark soft eyes, delicate hands, and altogether feminine characteristics, are said to be not without their sensuous attractions. In complexion they are mostly of a copper, cinnamon brown, or olive-yellow hue, though there are also many varieties, merging on one side into the deep, almost negro tint of the Guaicuri and Pericui of Lower California, and the Charruas of Uruguay; and on the other side into the almost brilliant blonde of the Mandans and Hydas (Queen Charlotte islanders). The body lithe, swift, and supple, is yet not so strong generally as that of the European or Negro type, nor capable of so much hardship, fatigue, or enduring strain. In stature, the races range from the dwarfish Eskimo and the Peruvian, with a mean height of 4 feet 9 inches, to the 6-foot Crow and the gigantic Patagonian. Physically, the North American in his native state is peculiarly haughty, serious, habitually taciturn and grave, yet on occasion eloquent and naively imaginative; full of simple childlike wonderment and trustfulness till suspicion has been aroused; with plenty of slumbering passion, which excited becomes overmastering; in warfare stealthy, soft-paced, cunning, treacherous, with unslakable fury of revenge when the enemy is in his clutch; yet remarkably cold and stoical in outward manner, suffering with proud nonchalance the utmost extremity of fate. Altogether, he is somewhat of a sad, soft, serious, passionate, pathetic personage.

All signs, then, would seem to favor the theory that the native Americans are as indigenous to the country as are its peculiar fauna and flora; or at all events, if they did originally issue from Asia, it must have been in a most remote pre-historic time.

When the country was discovered, the most civilized parts were those extending from New Mexico to Peru, the best specimens of architecture being found in the Maya region and in Peru. The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico had towns surrounded by high walls scaled by ladders. There was also in Mexico a system of picture-writing, and there they boasted of records to a remote date. The Peruvians used quipos or knotted cords as aids to memory. In this quarter was also a more or less constituted government by kings and hereditary chiefs. Outside this region, the only monuments are mounds, principally in the Ohio valley, of peculiar shape, apparently symbolical. All beyond, the native races in numberless, widely-scattered, small-clustered tribes and clans, roamed their primeval forests of oak and pine, of cotton-wood and pecan, and the immeasurable prairies; subsisting chiefly by the chase, hunting the droves of buffaloes, the elk, the antelope, trapping beavers, &c. They had attained to marvelous swiftness and precision of movement. From his horse at full gallop the Indian will shoot you 15 or 20 arrows a minute at flying buffaloes, all with sure aim and deadly effect. The Gauchos and other mixed races of South America, at the present day challenge the world in horsemanship. They will swing themselves under the belly of the horse, hang on there with toe and heel, while the horse is in full chase, then bound aloft on its back again at wire. The Indians are almost all hunters armed with bow and arrow, with spear and dart; in South America, with lassoes, and stoneballs attached to hide-ropes. In their wild state, they live in wigwams, of bark among the Iroquois, but generally of hides among the other tribes. They, especially the Crows, are highly skilled in dressing skins. Their own clothing consists of a robe and leg-covering for the men, and a short petticoat for the women, though in some warm places the clothing is very scanty. Some of the tribes dress richly and picturesquely. A chief is arrayed in a shirt or tunic made of two deerskins, and embroidered with porcupine quills and the hair of scalps. Over this is a robe of the skin of the young buffalo-bull, with the hair remaining on, liner or flesh side garnished with porcupine quills, and a rude portrayal of the battles or events of the wearer’s life. The legs are encased in deerskins, also ornamented, and the feet shod in moccasins of buckskin.

All the tribes are fond of painting and tattooing their bodies, figures being varied for grief or joy, for war or peace. The use of tobacco is almost universal, and a chief boasts a pipe four five feet long and two inches wide, wound with braid of porcupine quills, the bowl ingeniously carved by the chief himself. The calumet is the symbol of peace, and solemnizes all treaties and all great councils. The Indians believe in the Great or Good Spirit, but also in evil spirits particularly needing to be propitiated. The dead are solemnly buried with a supply of food and implements for the next world. One of the great features of Indian life is ‘ medicine’ (the word adopted from the French) or mystery. The ‘ medicine man’ is physician, magician, prophet, soothsayer, juggler, and high-priest. Every respectable Indian has a ‘ medicine bag,’ made of the skin of an animal, bird, or reptile, and elaborately ornamented, stuffed with grass or moss, and religiously closed or sealed. This bag is in the highest degree sacred; days, and even a week of fasting, and sacrifices of dogs and horses being devoted to it. At 14 to 15 a boy is ‘ forming his medicine ‘—that is, he wanders from his father’s house, absenting himself for two, three, sometimes even five days, during which time he lies on the ground crying to the Great Spirit, and fasting all the time. After he has fallen asleep from weariness, the animal he dreams of is his ‘ manitou,’ the protector assigned him by the Great Spirit for life. Having returned home and satiated his appetite, he sallies out with weapons to procure the animal or bird he dreamt of, which he then preserves entire about him through life for ‘good luck.’ In death it is buried with him. To lose it in war or otherwise is to lose one’s honor, which is retrievable only by conquest of the medicine-bag of a tribal enemy. All the Indian religions of North America seem to have arisen out of ancestor worship (see totem). In the science of medicine proper, the Indians have a pretty large empirical knowledge, having particular herbs and appliances for asthma, coughs, diarrhœa, diseases of the skin, &c.

Before acquaintance with Europeans, the Indian beverage was almost exclusively water. In Mexico, however, Pulque (q. v.), the fermented sap of the agave, was drunk, as also in South America a beverage made from fermented cashew and other fruits.

The trained hauteur and stoicism of the Indians is remarkable. One day, during King Philip’s war in New England, a chief ran unawares into the hands of the English. A young official of twenty-two questioning him, the chief refused conversation with him : ‘ You much child, no understand matters of war.’ When sentenced to death, ‘ he liked it well, he would die before his heart was soft, or had spoken anything unworthy of himself.’ Hatuay, a powerful chief of Hispaniola, urged to embrace Christianity before he was burned, and thus go to heaven, refused to ‘go where he would meet any of the accursed Spanish race.’ In a re-union of the most intimate relations and friends, the Indians maintain the coldest reserve, and yet at death the lamentation of the survivors is extreme. In the Far West, and among the Rocky Mountains, where the Indians are yet intact from the whites, they live simply, cleanly, and hospitably. Mr. George Catlin, who lived eight years exclusively among the different tribes of North America—himself evidently of an artless, childlike, silvan nature—looks upon the Indians ‘ as the most honest and honorable race of people I ever lived amongst in my life.’ During all those eight years, he everywhere met the most cordial hospitality, and the kindest offices at their hands, while he ‘ never lost the value of a shilling among them.’

‘ Civilization,’ however, has proved the ruin of the Indian morally and physically. Thirst of revenge, unquenchable hate, loss of self-respect, and whisky, have been the constant heritage (especially in the United States) entailed on the reds by the approach of the whites. The policy of the first English settlers and the United States has all along- been to thrust the Indians ever farther into the west, till now there are no wild tribes east of the Mississippi. The Cherokees and Creeks were bodily removed from Georgia to the Indian Territory in 1838. Virginia had three Indian wars or massacres, 1622, 1629, and again 1676; New England two—the Pequot war, 1637, and King Philip’s war, 1675. The United States policy with the Indians has not been satisfactory or successful, and difficulties and small wars have been frequent. Missions have been largely prosecuted amongst them by individuals and societies. The French and the Spaniards, had missions; and of Protestant missionaries the names of Mayhew, John Eliot, and the Brainerds are conspicuous. The five civilized tribes of the Indian Territory (q. v.) raised (1880) over 3,000,000 bushels of grain, and had 100 schools, and 8500 pupils—industries being taught there and on the other reservations. Nevertheless, as a rule, the Indians recognize their inevitable doom, and all spirit dies out of them. ‘ They are migrating to their fathers and the setting sun.’ In Canada, where there is more room, the Indians still live at peace with the colonists as they did with the French, to the degree even of intermarrying with them. Three towns of Canada are exclusively Indian. The great mass of Spanish Americans are of Indian origin.

In the United States there were in 1880 over 303,000 Indians (and from the census it appeared that the tribal Indians included in that total are on the increase). In Canada there were in 1881 close on 104,000. In North America altogether the Indians are calculated at considerably less than four millions; and in South America, including pure and mixed, about seven millions.

The following is from A. H. Keane’s General Scheme of American Races and Languages:

1. Sub-Arctic Races—Eskimos Aleuts, Thlinkeets.

2. Athabascan or Tinney Family.

3. Algonquin family, from Canada to South Carolina, and from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains. To the northern branch belonged or belong the Chippewas or Ojibways, Ottawas, and Crees; to the eastern, the Abenakis, Penobscots, Mohicans or Mohegans; to the southern, Powhattans, Rappahannocks, Shawnees; and to the western, Illinois, Miamis, Cheyennes, and Blackfeet.

4. Wyandot-Iroquois family, from Upper Canada to West Virginia, surrounded by Algonquins. To them belong Wyandots or Hurons, Iroquois or ‘ Six Nations ‘ (including Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, Cayugas, Tuscaroras), and Monocans.

5. Dakota or Sioux family, including Assiniboines, Winnebagoes, Omahas, Iowas, Kansas, Crows.

6. Appalachian Races—Muscogee group, Cherokees, Catawbas, Natchez, &c.

7. Columbian Races.

8. Californian Races.

9. Shoshone and Pawnee families, from Idaho to New Mexico, including Utes, &c.

10. New Mexican and Arizona Races.—Pueblos nations, &c.

11. Mexican Races—Aztec-Sonora group, Miztec, Zapotec, Zacatec, &c.

12. Central American Races.

13. Orinoco Races—Carib family, Barre family, &c:

14. Amazon Races.

15. Peruvian and Bolivian Races.

16. Brazilian Races—Guarani family, Botocudos, &c.

17. Patagono-Chilian Races—Araucanians, Puelches, Tehuelches, Fuegians.