Woodland Indian Ingenuity

Indigenous Ethno-technology - The ways in which various cultures have modified or altered their environment by a diverse collection of processes and knowledge that people used to extend human abilities and to satisfy those human needs and wants

Stereotypes would lead you to believe that Native Indians, whether they are Mississippian or Plains Bison hunters were "primitive" at best and "just made ends meet, perhaps living on the edge of failure" most of the time. The Native Woodland People simply had very little "technological advances" such as we have today. Perhaps those low-level operations or procedures from which higher-level, more complex objects and operations were later constructed are still beyond the scope of what most people think of when they use or hear the word, "primitive," in connection to ancient indigenous cultures.

Is that true? Well, in a way. They did have their own technologies that served them rather well. Even if they didn't have the type of technological advances we have today, why should anyone care? Well, technology is relative. Technology changes and takes on new forms and new meanings throughout history and so it goes today. A computer from 1988 doesn't look anything like the communication technological advances of 2008. What is more important, the internet, the speed of communication with Iphones, Ipods and high speed computers make life very different from the world we lived in just 20 years later. So, with that said, the technologies on the horizon will inevitably make what we have today seem antiquated and obsolete sooner than you think. More to the point--can we learn anything about ourselves as humans from all of this?

I believe we can -- so the answer is -- Yes! I know "those people" lived in the stone age and they had to kill to eat and used crude devices to cut, carve, process and chop. They never got beyond the stone age. How could we possibly consider them anything but "primitive" and again I ask, " Just what could we possibly ascertain from studying such ancient people? Ancient - primitive -- these may just be the earliest ways in which people modified their natural world to meet their needs. Now, that doesn't sound so bad, does it?

If you use any of the instruments of technology today that I mentioned above, you might want to read on. If you really consider the following passage, you will know and understand that we are still in the stone age. The "silicon" chip is the "brain" for every computerized instrument that we use in the early 21st century. What is silicon? I pulled this from Flickr. The full text of the description reads: "How does silicon dioxide (beach sand - small pebbles ) become an integrated circuit, one of man's most intricate and finely crafted devices?

Growing silicon crystals from a single seed crystal is the most important part of the process. This takes place in a furnace which is heated to about 1,500 degrees Celcius (2,732 degrees Fahrenheit). In the furnace is a container filled with molten silicon and a secondary element such as phosphorous or boron. The seed crystal is dipped into the molten material; it is then withdrawn with a rotating motion, similar to making candles by dipping them in hot wax. Solidifying on the seed, the molten material takes on the same atomic structure as the seed.

This molecular symmetry distinguished a single crystal from unsructured or non-symmetrical material. Each finished crystal cylinder is approximately six inches in diameter and about four feet long. Using a high speed diamond edged saw, the cooled glass-like cylinder is then sliced into wafers. All silicon wafers are not exactly the same, each manufacturer's wafer varies in thickness and surface finish due to their unique specifications. It takes about 50 complex steps to convert wafers into integrated circuits. The final step is cutting the wafer into hundreds of tiny circuit chips.

So, are we really still plugged into the stone age? There doesn't seem to be anyway at the moment of getting around it. We are. Although we may not use sillicon or even flint for our modern everyday cutting and serious construction tools, flint has a couple of advantages that steel does not. Since flint is made of microscopic crystals of silica which is an extremely hard mineral. When it forms in these small crystals it has a unique character when struck - it breaks with a 'conchoidal' fracture. The edges of the fractured flint are razor sharp and can easily cut plants, twine, sinew and meat. Flint takes much longer to blunt than steel and it doesn't rust or decay even after centuries of lying around in a field or under it.

The formation of flint is quite complicated. Basically the silica comes from the hard parts of sea creatures such as sponges. When sponges die, they leave behind tiny silica fragments which become ingrained in the chalk. Over time and through complex chemical processes, the silica fragments dissolve, are transported, and then are deposited to form flint nodules.

We may believe we have mastered technology but we haven't mastered the art of cutting the cord to the ancient core at the heart of all ancient worlds.

What do we see the most in the archaeological record, of course are the hardy stone tools, pieces of pottery, bone, copper and charred remains of a fire pit. The occasional burial, house, wall, storage pit or other feature adds to our knowledge of the people that occupied the site.

What most Americans fail to see is the complexities involved in each of these cultures and that they are right here in our own backyard. "That's partly wrapped up in the subtle racism that still exists against American Indians. People typically don't think that American Indians could have built a civilization given the biases that were developed during the westward expansion." Tim Pauketat is an associate professor of archeology at the University of Illinois and a leading expert on Cahokia.

Monks Mound was the centerpiece of the complex, rising 100 feet from its 14-acre base. Archeologists estimate that it took 22 million cubic feet of earth, all transported from nearby "borrow pits" by baskets carried on the backs of workers, to create the mound in several phases. A large building - 105-feet long, 48 feet wide and about 50 feet high - once stood atop the mound and is believed to have been the ceremonial home of the city's ruler or an elite clan.

Between the mounds were a series of plazas, the biggest of which - the Grand Plaza - covered almost 50 acres.

"These were places where you'd have feasts, processions or other public gatherings," Pauketat said.

Arrayed around the central city were many outlying villages, where Cahokians raised corn, squash and a variety of starchy seeds on farms and hunted to supply the inner-city residents with meat.

They also practiced craft specialization, with individual clans or villages producing artworks, tools and weapons.

Pauketat said these villagers were clearly second-class citizens.

"They didn't eat the good meat even though they were closer to the source at and may have had some social obligation to send it here," he said.

Pauketat said archeologists have barely scratched the surface of Cahokian culture.

One of the most significant discoveries to date is Mound 72, a ridge-top burial mound in which archeologists found the remains of an important ruler, a male in his 40s, lain on a bed of more than 20,000 marine shell disc beads. Nearby were caches of arrow tips from present-day states like Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin, apparently sent in tribute to the deceased.

Also buried nearby were the bodies of many men and women, the victims of a mass execution at the same time of the man's burial.

Though the reasons for the human sacrifices remain unclear, Pauketat said it appears the deaths were part of "a theatrical ritual, and the roles seem to be mythical," possibly a retelling of the story of creation.

Mythical creatures like the birdman, a human looking figure with a falcon beak, also figure prominently in Cahokian artworks.

While such tidbits give glimpses of the ancient Cahokians, many aspects of their lives are shrouded by the passage of time, including the name by which they knew their city.

The name Cahokia comes from a clan of the Illinois Indians - the Cahokia - that was living in the area when the first French explorers arrived in the early 1600s. But the city's original name was never recorded because the Cahokians had no form of writing. And strangely, no stories referring to the great city were ever recorded among the tribes that are believed to be their direct descendants - the Osage, Omaha, Ponca and the Quapaw, among others.

One theory, put forward by anthropologist Alice Kehoe, suggests that "Cahokia had some negative associations and when people left they were trying to get away from it and they intentionally forgot about it," said Pauketat. (The Indians) didn't talk about it, Euro-Americans came in, they didn't care about it. So this place is sort of the city that history forgot."
(This section quoted from MSNBC website from August 2004.)

Stone Tools, Arrow heads, Axes, Drill Points, Broken flint flakes and chips all tell a story -- true, but that is only part of it. The fabric of society - literally --the softer side of life is all but missing. Bits and pieces of textiles, ropes, bags, baskets, nets and mats were often discarded in early archaeological excavations because it was difficult to identify what the charred black mass was; it was even more difficult to tell what, if anything it contributed to the overall picture of the people. There were relatively few archaeologists that gave much credence to a darkened mass that nearly disintegrates when air hits it.

The "hard" evidence of life and technological advances came primarily from changes in stone tools, the bone and pottery that gave the scientist something to use a basis for their conclusions. Consequently, the skewed image of the Native Woodland Indian was based largely on the "lacking of evidence." There were no large quantities of bags, pouches, clothes, mats, baskets, ropes, nets or other soft items that survived the centuries in the ground. What did survive was so minute and lacked detail that it was not taken into serious consideration for decades when scientists wrote their reports and museums created dioramas for tourists. It showed the melodrama of the lone hunter with his leather loin cloth, and proverbial spear hunting down a bear for the family to subsist on for the winter. The women were assumed to have taken a modest role in processing the meat and stayed in the shelter nursing her child unprotected and alone.

The hard life of Native Women was given a boost when Europeans arrived and saw women carrying their children on their back and gardening with bone and stone tools or using a digging stick. The women were presumed to be the doers and the men the sayers.

Not! Probably one of the biggest myths or stereotypes about Native people is that women did all the work and men were lazy. Another myth conjectures that the women had no say in political affairs, warfare, social ideals or any major decisions. Again, NOT! Early contact with Europeans was a major catastrophe for the Native Eastern Woodland People. They suffered death and disease in the thousands before actual contact. Untold numbers of individuals, families and entire villages and even tribes were wiped out. The shift in the balance of nature due to over hunting by some ethnic groups to take advantage of European trade and commerce caused still others to become dislodged from their traditional homes, more loss of life due to warfare and more diseases and even starvation from over crowded conditions among refugee populations as in the case of the Algonquins in Wisconsin when driven from the Ohio Valley and southern Great Lakes by the Iroquois in the mid-18th century.

With all that said, the Europeans did record some of their early encounters giving us some descriptions of what conditions existed and even some visual descriptions of the Native individuals themselves. That along with new archaeological evidence has changed the view that we have of Native people to a large degree. They were not always living on the edge of starvation and deprivation. They often had not burdened the women with all the work and the men were not always lazy.

If one facet of their technology was the telling factor, it was TEXTILE MANUFACTURING! Yes, that's right. American Indians as with many other ethnic populations around the world were extremely skilled at the soft arts as well as stone tool production. The idea that most Native people wore leather is another indication of ignorance of some basic information.

Textiles are produced from native plants, usually harvested in the fall. Some of those plants included Dogbane (Indian Hemp); Stinging Nettle; and Milkweed. The woody - pithy stems were cut at the base of the plant sometime after the leaves turn and then were collected in vast quantities, laid out to dry or sometimes soaked briefly to 'ret' them and then carried to a lodge or shade shelter where the artisan could break open the stems, break out the harden pith from the surrounding silky fibers. Those were collected and rolled into twine, rope and cordage.

The cordage could be used as is for tying their dwelling frames together, making fishing nets, bow strings, or made into bags, leg ties, arm bands, slave ties, burden straps, belts, sashes, skirts, footwear, mantles, baskets, mats and other needed items by twining the cordage together.

All of this labor, once the harvest was complete could be done inside or under a protective shelter. Even children could be set to doing any number of the tasks listed above. Colors were added to the items through the collection of additional plants, processing them accordingly and dipping the cordage into each color vat of dye. The stratified societies of probably Late Woodland and certainly Mississippian cultures around a 1,000 years ago produced such an excess of textile materials that a large chunk of their economy could be based on the surplus traded to outlying societies for goods such as Great Lakes Copper, Western Obsidian or Atlantic seacoast shells.

How do we know this if this "soft" part of the culture disintegrated in the ground? In a word, "pottery." Pottery shards are among the best evidence we have of what the textile patterns looked like, what type of weave or twining technique was chosen and just the fact that it was used on the pottery tells us that there was an excess. Stone and clay pipes and figurines also are another clue at the elaborate clothing for rituals and ceremonies along with more recent findings of textiles that have survived because they were either in a dry soil or a completely moist environment or because they were resting on copper. Copper seems to preserve these fragile pieces of the past. These pieces then are taken to labs and closely studied for content, dyes, techniques, etc. Wickcliffe Site, a Mississippian Site in Kentucky has yielded a number of pieces of textiles from which many conclusions have been drawn.

Another factor that should play into the importance of the use of textiles is the difficulty and complexities of "hide tanning."

1. Most Native Woodland Indians wore leather clothing. True. or False
2. Most Clothing Worn by Woodland Indians was leather. True or False
3. Indian Women chewed the hides to soften it. True or False
4. It didn't take many brains to tan a hide. True or False
5. Every animal has enough brain to tan its own hide. True or False
6. Tanning was a one day job. True or False
7. Bucking a hide is breaking it down. True or False
8. If you want to make a skirt, leave the hair on. True or False
9. Eggs, Liver and Urine make good brain substitutes. True or False

Now -- This is just a brief excursion into hide tanning. The real blood and guts of this should be covered in a book rather than a short blog.

Once a butchering camp has been established, the participants must cut the hide carefully from the animal so as not to cut holes in the hide. They also must try to leave no meat, little fat and tendons and bone.

The hide needs to be processed almost immediately. The larger the hide, the more difficult it is to preserve it for working later. Every animal has enough brain to tan its own hide. True.

There are preferred techniques for scraping off the fat and membrane (scarf skin) which include spreading it out on the ground, over a beaming board or hung up in a frame. Whichever method is chosen, the real work begins. The membrane must be completely removed leaving no scars behind or holes.
This membrane sometimes is like peeling skin; once you get a corner started, put your tool down and pull. There are bone and stone tools called fleshers that are just for the purpose of taking off the outer flesh.

Next, if you are going to make a skirt, moccasins or leggings, then flip the hide over-- hair side up with the grain facing up toward you so that you are pushing down against the grain to remove the hair. If you choose to soak the hide at this point in ashes and water, this will stimulate the removal of the hair. After an all night soak hopefully, the hair will just slip off.

The task ahead then becomes fleshing the grain side. Getting the grain off is essential. Scraping over a beaming board allows you to move the hide around at waist level. The hide that is tied into a rack or frame tends to loosen as it is worked and you will need to stop occasionally and tighten the cordage holding the hide into the frame. It is far easier to work on the hide if it is stiff and doesn't bow in every time you push in on it.

Once the hair and the grain is removed, you basically have rawhide.

If you choose to work on several hides at once, this is the time in the process to store this one in a flat, cool, dry place. Did I say dry! Once moisture attacks it, then it is lost.

The next step is not chewing, but soaking in water - a creek, a bucket or trough of water that is cool to room temperature. Monitor it so the hide soaks up the water just enough that it can now be stretched. Too much soaking and your hide will rot and fall apart. Take it out of the water, wringing it over a stick, twisting it liberally in two directions at once. This can be done over a post, over a rope, over the bark of a tree or by two people pulling it and twisting it in the wind. Stretch it to open up the pores in the skin so that it will absorb the liquid brain matter that you are about to stir up.

Take the brains, raw and mash them into the hide or mash the brains and simmer them with water for an hour. Then pour the liquid brain into a trough and be careful not to boil the brains or use them steaming hot. The hide needs to be thoroughly soaked and saturated in the brain matter.

A test to see when this has happened is done by squeezing the hide and watching to see if the brain matter oozes through the pores of the skin to the other side. It is not enough if this does not happen!

Once the brains have penetrated the entire hide, you can rinse the excess matter from the hide. Wring out the hide once again using one or more of the methods from above. Now, carefully, punch tiny holes around the edges about 2" apart. That is subjective and again there are variations in this method. You need to use cordage to string up the hide so that it is very tight in the frame. The frame or trees need to be several feet wider than the hide is so that when it stretches, and it will, the hide will still have room to be worked on well inside the frame.

Staking the hide out is a term that comes from the Plains when they literally had to drive stakes in the ground around the hide and tie it to them to work on it due to the lack of trees.

Some people choose the post method rather than or in addition to staking it out in the rack. That means you have a post, no smaller than 4" wide at the top and probably 6-8" wide -beveled if possible waist high so that you can stretch and work the hide one small part of it at a time. You push and pull each section of the hide until you feel the fibers separating and softening. You are stretching it, literally breaking the fibers down, separating them and trying to open the hide, working the brain into it all at the same time.

The effect: a white coloration; softness and texture like suede and edges that will be stiffer than the body of the hide.

Once you feel that it has achieved the peak of softness or feel that working it more with a staking tool or over the post will endanger the hide --meaning that it may punch holes or stretch tiny holes already in the hide beyond repair, then stop.

Prepare to have a very soft hide. Smoking it over a very intense smokey fire will ensure the hide will shed water and this will add longevity to the hide. Often, the hides were additionally dyed in a vat of crushed walnut hull dye with iron filings or in the 18th and 19th centuries in an iron pot. The combination of the dye and the iron tend to stiffen the leather for bags, pouches, moccasins, etc. and act as an additional preservative. To this was added quillwork, some edge beads, occasionally tin or silver cones, dyed deer tail hair fringe, silk ribbons and in the 19th century beadwork. Painting was also an option for embellishments. Rich colors could be obtained from additional plants and items obtained in the fur trade.

No chewing now.

THIS HAS BEEN A BRAIN TANNING BRIEF

The hide tanning processes, no matter which ones you choose to use in getting from a green hide to a tanned one are a.)physically demanding, b.) frustrating; c.) time consuming; d.) not for anyone who has a bad back or is lazy or doesn't have a clue about what they are doing.

There are ways to teach a brief 10 step process to kids in the classroom. I have done it for decades. It is possible to teach the public a similar method with a little more real time involved. Or you can really set out to learn this complex and difficult task and reap the rewards of a job well done.

The Natives may not have had to punch a time clock or commute to work but the complexities and strenuous physical activity, the tools, the hours of back breaking labor -- not to mention time spent hunting the creature (s) and butchering and processing the meats, sinews, bones, organs, hooves, tail, and other parts was not a job for a single woman. It went to several members of the same family or friends who took on different tasks to accomplish the end result. I believe that just from this brief dissertation of what goes into "hide tanning" that you will agree that certainly, one of the major factors that went into the importance of the use of plant fiber textiles in society was the sheer labor intensive - all encompassing work of just processing one hide. It took several hides to accomplish the task of making clothing for one person and if you and others in your clan or family were responsible for making clothing for others, you had your work cut out for you.

This was a material that may have faired only slightly better in the archaeological record but it is clear that the task continued well into the historic period from the material culture collectively in museums around the world. The physical evidence comes in the form of bags, pouches, moccasins, coats, leggings, knife sheaths and few other items such as early 19th century cultural revival items such as complete "buckskin outfits" attributed to the Ottawa who were following Shawnee Prophet, Tenskwatawa in his ideal to return to the "old ways."

I report you decide for yourself.

Oh yes, the answers:

1. True
2. False
3. False
4. False
5. True
6. False
7. False
8. False
9. False (Not Urine for tanning - but great for a mordant for dying)