what did 1600s native americans wear to stay warm
Introduction
The American Indians of the Northwest Coast traditionally lived on a narrow chugalug of Pacific coastland and offshore islands. The Northwest Coast culture area stretches from what is now the southern border of Alaska to northwestern California. The Pacific Ocean is the western boundary. To the east are the mountains of the Declension Range and the Cascades. In many places the littoral hills or mountains autumn steeply to a embankment or riverbank. Abundant rains support dense, towering forests that are rich in animal life. This surroundings provided a wealth of resource for the Indians.
Traditional Civilization
Peoples and Languages
The Northwest Coast was densely populated when Europeans first made landfall in the 1700s. It was dwelling to peoples speaking Athabaskan, Tshimshianic, Salishan, and other languages. Well-known tribes included the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Bella Coola, Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), Declension Salish, and Chinook.
Food
Northwest Coast tribes had no pressing food problems. They could get plenty of fish, shellfish, and fifty-fifty whales, seals, and porpoises from the sea and local rivers. The men built weirs (underwater enclosures) and traps to catch huge hauls of salmon and candlefish as they swam upstream to spawn. The women preserved a year's supply of salmon by drying the fish over a smoky fire and pressed the oil from candlefish. The Indians used big amounts of this oil, dipping stale foods into it at meals. Other important fish were herring, smelt, cod, and halibut. People also dug clams along the beach and smoked them just as they did salmon.
Northwest Coast peoples varied their fish-based diet through hunting and gathering. Families traveled to the mountains, where the men hunted deer, elk, mountain goat, and carry. The women nerveless bulbs, roots, berries, and seeds.
Settlements and Housing
Most groups congenital villages almost waterways or the coast. Normally home sites and settlements were limited to narrow beaches or terraces because the country fell so steeply to the shore or riverbank.
Like other hunting and gathering peoples, Northwest Coast Indians had seasonal settlements. Summer was the time for communicable and gathering food and processing it for winter storage. In this flavor a house usually had several bases of operation. The members divided themselves into minor groups that moved between skillful line-fishing and berry-picking sites. In the winter about people lived in their kin group's principal edifice, which was unremarkably in a village on the coast. Most villages had several such buildings, each one the home base of a large extended family group. There was also at least i very large structure in which the highest-ranking group lived and where the hamlet could agree a large potlatch, or celebration.
Northwest Coast Indians made their houses with wood from the forests, usually red cedar. The buildings were rectangular and upwardly to 100 feet (30.5 meters) long. The Indians congenital a framework of cedar posts and fastened planks to form the walls and roof. The planks could be taken down, loaded onto canoes, and moved from one site to another. Most homes had a key fire pit.
In northwestern California, at the southernmost limit of the civilisation area, people congenital smaller houses for single-family use. These peoples also built a combined clubhouse and sweat order, which was the focus of male person activity. These structures were common in the California civilization expanse to the s.
Clothing
Dress was fairly unproblematic among Northwest Coast peoples. Although ceremonial garments and some hats could exist highly decorated, near article of clothing was worn for protection from the surroundings rather than for evidence. Throughout the region women wore skirts or gowns of buckskin, soft leather, or woven wool or institute fibers. Men's dress varied from tribe to tribe but was in general quite minimal—most men wore nothing but ornaments on warm days. For protection from the pelting, they had cedar-bark raincoats and a brimmed chapeau. Winter garb included a robe or a blanket. People of loftier status wore robes made of or edged with strips of sea otter fur and yarn made of the wool of mount goats. Salish groups nearly the Georgia Strait wove robes of mountain goat wool and also of wool from a special breed of shaggy canis familiaris. The blankets were fabricated of cedar-bark cobweb, mountain-goat wool, dogs' hair, and feathers.
Both women and men customarily wore some combination of necklaces, earrings, nose rings, bracelets, and anklets. These were fabricated of various materials, more often than not shells, copper, wood, and fur. Some people rubbed grease and ochre (an bawdy fe ore) onto their skin to produce a cherry color, often absolute with black. Tattooing was too practiced.
Technology and Arts
Woodworking was the outstanding skill of the Northwest Declension. Traditional carving tools included adzes, mauls, wedges, chisels, drills, and curved knives, all made of stone. Sharkskin was used for sanding or polishing wooden items. Boatbuilders hollowed logs with fire to make the canoes they paddled in the streams as well as big seagoing whaling canoes. Other woodworkers steamed and aptitude planks to brand boxes, tying the edges together with bandbox roots. Some of these boxes were built to hold the huge winter stores of dried food. Others were used for cooking, which was done by adding hot rocks to the food in the boxes. Other everyday items fabricated of woods included spoons and ladles, canoe bailers, trinket boxes, chamber pots, fishhooks, and even the triggers of animal traps.
Many items fabricated by the woodworkers were artistic also as functional. Dishes, for example, were sometimes in the grade of animals or monsters. Faces of animals, birds, and people were carved on boxes, house fronts, house posts, boats, and grave posts. Woodworkers made wooden helmets and masks for formalism dances and dramatic performances. Nigh spectacular of the artworks was the totem or memorial pole.
Northwest craftsmen likewise had some native copper to work with. They made some of their arrowheads from it, as well as copper knives for weapons of war. They engraved designs on a plaque, called a "copper," that served in the place of a valuable bank note. One famous copper was valued at 7,500 blankets.
Another swell skill of the Northwest Indians was weaving. The women wove long, ribbonlike strands of inner cedar bark into mats and beautiful baskets. Storage containers, receptacles for valuables large and small, and rain hats were also woven.
Society
The social system of the Northwest Coast Indians was unusual among hunting and gathering cultures. Almost such peoples formed just pocket-size bands in which anybody was considered to be social equals. This arrangement helped them to meet the food needs of the group as a whole. On the Northwest Declension, however, food was plentiful. Less work was required to run into the needs of the population, and there were food surpluses. These circumstances were similar to those of some farming societies, such as those of the Southeast culture area. As in the Southeast, the Northwest Coast peoples developed a arrangement of ranked social classes. Their class system of ruling elites, commoners, and slaves was unique among nonagricultural societies.
Tribes often organized themselves into groups called "houses." These were made up of a few dozen to 100 or more people who considered themselves to be related, though sometimes only distantly. They lived together for at least function of the year and shared the rights to particular resources, such as sites for angling, berry picking, and hunting. House groups too held a variety of other privileges, including the exclusive utilise of particular names, songs, dances, and, particularly in the north, totemic representations or crests.
Within a house group, each member had a social rank that was determined co-ordinate to the individual's degree of relatedness to a founding ancestor. The highest in rank held a special title that in each linguistic communication was translated into English as "master." Commonly a human or the widow of a past chief, this leader determined many of the patterns of daily life—when to move to the salmon-angling site, when to build weirs and traps, when to brand the kickoff grab, which other groups should be invited to feasts, and so on.
In theory, people of high rank had vast powers. However, because a house group's property was held in common, all adults other than slaves could phonation their opinions on group affairs. Nigh leaders avoided abusing other members of the house and community—not but were they kin, but the principal also needed their cooperation to accomplish even the most basic tasks. For example, many strong arms and sturdy backs were needed to acquire, assemble, and position the heavy materials required to build or repair a house.
Slaves, however, had few or no rights of participation in house grouping decisions. They usually had been captured in babyhood and taken or traded so far from their original homes that they had niggling promise of finding their mode back. They were property and could be traded abroad, married, killed, or freed at their possessor'south whim. A typical business firm group owned at least 1 slave but rarely more than a dozen.
The social status of each member of a business firm group was hereditary but was not automatically causeless at birth. Such things had to be formally and publicly announced at a potlatch, an event sponsored by each group due north of the Columbia River. The term comes from the trade jargon used throughout the region and means "to give." A potlatch always involved the invitation of another house (or houses), whose members were received with cracking formality every bit guests and witnesses of the event. Potlatches were used to mark a broad variety of occasions, including marriages, the edifice of a house, and the funerals of chiefs.
Having witnessed the proceedings, the guests were given gifts and served a banquet. The social statuses of the hosts and guests were affirmed through the potlatch. Such events were very expensive to sponsor, which reflected the rank of the hosts. Gifts were distributed according to the status of each guest, with the more than splendid gifts given to the guests of highest status. Whether hosting or acting equally guests at a potlatch, all members of a business firm ordinarily participated in the proceedings. This served to strengthen anybody'due south identification with his or her grouping.
An interesting aspect of Northwest Coast culture was the emphasis on teaching children etiquette, moral standards, and other social traditions. Every gild has processes by which children are taught the behavior proper to their future roles, only often such pedagogy is not a formal process. On the Northwest Coast, still, children were instructed formally. This instruction began at an age when children were nonetheless in their cradles or toddling, and all elder relatives, particularly grandparents, participated in it. Children born to loftier status were given formal didactics throughout babyhood and adolescence. They had to larn not only routine etiquette merely besides the lengthy traditions that went along with their rank, including special rituals, songs, and prayers.
Religion
The religions of the Northwest Coast had several concepts in mutual. 1 was that salmon were supernatural beings who voluntarily took the form of fish each year in order to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of humankind. On beingness caught, these spirit-beings returned to their domicile beneath the sea. There they were reincarnated if their bones or innards were returned to the water. If offended, however, they would reject to render to the river. Thus the Indians prohibited acts that were believed to offend the spirit-beings and held a number of ceremonies to gain their goodwill. Principal among them was the first-salmon ceremony. This rite involved honoring the outset salmon of the angling season by sprinkling them with eagle downwardly, ruby ochre, or some other sacred substance and welcoming them in a formal speech communication. And so the Indians cooked the salmon and distributed their flesh, or morsels of it, to all the members of the grouping and any guests.
Some other religious concept on the Northwest Coast was the accomplishment of personal ability by seeking contact with a spirit-being. Such contact commonly came through a supernatural experience called a vision quest, which typically involved isolation and fasting. Among Declension Salish all success in life—whether in hunting, woodworking, accumulating wealth, war machine ventures, or magic—was granted by spirit-beings encountered in the vision quest. From these spirits each person caused special symbols, songs, and dances. Taken together, the dances constituted the major ceremonies of the Northwest Coast peoples. Known every bit the spirit dances, they were performed during the winter months.
Shamans used supernatural power to heal the sick and to recover souls that strayed from their bodies. It was usually believed that some shamans had the power to crusade illnesses equally well as to cure them. Witchcraft was used to kill others or to brand them ill and was believed to exist carried out by malicious persons with noesis of secret rituals.
European Contact and Cultural Change
The Tlingit were the first Northwest Coast Indians to encounter Europeans, when Russian traders arrived in Tlingit territory in 1741. The Russians did not institute a mail in the region until 1799 and so only afterwards heated resistance. Espana sent parties to the Haida in 1774, Britain to the Nuu-chah-nulth in 1778, and the United States to various groups in most 1800.
The colonizers sought sea otter pelts, which were peculiarly dense and highly prized in Mainland china. Although the Russians forced Aleut men to hunt sea otters for them, they traded with Northwest Declension peoples for furs and nutrient. In commutation they brought manufactured goods, such equally steel blades, to the tribes. Some native peoples profited greatly from this trade. The Tlingit sold huge quantities of fish, game, and potatoes to the trading posts. The Tsimshian and others gained command of major trade routes, demanding fees for passage and vessel rental. Still other groups hired out their slaves every bit prostitutes or laborers.
Beginning in the 1840s the Northwest Coast tribes faced a flood of settlers from the eastern United States and Canada. In the U.s. this occupation was accompanied by the removal of the tribes to small reservations in what are now Washington and Oregon. Missionaries taught the Indians not only Christianity just also etiquette, punctuality, and other aspects of the ascendant culture. Traditional ceremonies, such every bit the potlatch and spirit dancing, were banned in Canada for decades. In add-on, the formal schooling of native children was in the hands of missionaries on much of the declension for many decades.
From the tardily 1700s through the 1800s the nigh disruptive events for Northwest Coast peoples were epidemics of diseases such every bit smallpox and measles. Having no immunity to these illnesses, the Indians suffered very high expiry rates. Information technology is estimated that between 1780 and 1900 the native population in the region declined by as much as fourscore percentage.
In the late 1800s the fur trade collapsed, and Northwest Coast peoples struggled economically. Having lost most of their lands and increasingly dependent upon manufactured goods, they needed to develop new sources of income. Some people began working for wages, something that about other Native American peoples refused to exercise. At starting time jobs were mostly express to guiding prospectors, backpacking cargo over mountain passes, cutting wood for coastal steamers, and working as farm and domestic labor. Yet when the canned salmon industry adult, wage labor boomed. With their extensive knowledge of the region's salmon, native men and women had a clear advantage in the fishing industry. Some Indians, often of loftier social status, established their own businesses; they typically employed, fed, or otherwise aided the lower-status members of their house group. Fishing continues to be a mainstay of the region's economic system.
Having retained a loftier level of economic independence compared to other Native American groups, Northwest Coast peoples were able to organize relatively finer against government interference. Beginning in 1912 the Tlingit, Haida, and other tribes in southeastern Alaska created political groups called Native Brotherhoods and, afterwards, Native Sisterhoods to human action on behalf of the people in legal and other proceedings. Similar groups were subsequently formed in littoral British Columbia. These organizations pursued a diverseness of legal strategies to ensure equal treatment under the police. An early success was the 1915 passage of an act granting territorial citizenship to Native Alaskans who met certain requirements.
Later in the 20th century these groups filed a number of successful antidiscrimination lawsuits and country claims. In the United States the country claims led to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. This act turned over some 44 million acres (17.eight million hectares) of state and almost 1 billion dollars to Native Alaskans. The Canadian organizations brought about the repeal, in 1951, of laws prohibiting potlatches and the filing of land claims. After many years of discussion, the provincial government of British Columbia agreed in 1990 to negotiate tribal land claims through a body known every bit the British Columbia Treaty Committee. However, the negotiation process was painstaking, and progress was tiresome.
Source: https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Northwest-Coast-Indians/480466
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