American Indian life — Edition Insights

ild in stone, to grow and weave cotton, to irrigate, to obey priests, and in some rude measure to organize the year into a calendar. None of these culture elements traveled farther. But the maize-beans-squash agriculture, pottery making, the organization of cult societies, the division of the community into clans, reckoning descent from one parent only, some tendency toward town life and the confederation of towns, all of which the Southwest had also acquired from Mexico, it passed on to its neighbors, notably to those of the Gulf States between Louisiana and Georgia. Here, these institutions were once more worked over and, in the main, reduced, and then some of them passed on northward, first to the Mound-builders of the Ohio valley, and then to the Iroquois of New York. From the Iroquois, in turn, some of their Algonkian neighbors and foes were just beginning to be ready to learn certain betterments, when the white man came and swept their cultures into memory.

We have thus, a series of culture centers—Mexico, Southwest, Southeast, Iroquois, Atlantic Algonkins—of descending order of advancement, and subsequent to one another in time. They constitute a ladder of culture development, and, although undated, represent a real sequence of history.

One area was but haltingly and sparsely infiltrated from the Southwest: the North Pacific Coast, centering in British Colombia. In this mild and rich environment a native culture grew up that, in the main, went its own way. It did not attain to the heights of Mexico, scarcely even equaled the Southwest. Pottery and agriculture failed to reach it. But out of its own resources, it developed, independently, a number of the arts and institutions which the remainder of North America drew from Mexico: clan organization and cult societies, for instance, the beginnings of a calendar and cloth weaving. And it added features, all its own: plank houses, totem poles, a remarkable style of decorative art, a society based on wealth. Here then we have a minor, but mainly independent culture center of the greatest interest.

In a still smaller way, and without as great a freedom from southern influences, the tribes of the treeless Plains, in the heart of the continent, developed a little civilization of their own. This was founded on what they had originally got from the Southwest and Southeast, was remodeled on the basis of an almost exclusive dependence on the buffalo, and underwent a brief and stirring efflorescence from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, after the Plains tribes had got horses from the Spaniards. Here, then, grew up customs and appliances like the tepee, the travois, the camp circle, warfare as a game with “coups” as counters.

Similarly in the far north, along the shores of the Arctic, where the Eskimo spread themselves. Here, almost nothing penetrated from Mexico, but stern necessity forced a special inventiveness on the mechanical side and the way was near for the entrance of influences from Asia, some few of which may have diffused beyond the Eskimo to the North Pacific Coast tribes.

Such, then, are the outlines of the history of the native, American race and civilization. It is a long and complexly rich story, only partly unraveled. Those who wish it in greater fullness will find it in Wissler’s _The American Indian_. Only enough has been sketched here to show that modern anthropology is an inductive science with a minimum of speculation; that it aims at truly historical reconstructions and is beginning to achieve them; and that it lies in the nature of its tasks to distinguish and analyze the several native culture areas or local types of Indians before proceeding to conclusions based on combinations.

Therefore it is, that many small items of ethnic knowledge acquire considerable importance. From the average man’s point of view, it is of little moment that the Zuñi farm and the Yurok and Nootka do not, or that the former refuse to marry their dead wives’ sisters and the latter insist on it. At best, such bits of facts have for the layman only the interest of idle curiosities, of antiquarian fragments. To the specialist, however, they become dependable means to a useful end, much as intimate knowledge of the position of arteries and nerves serves the surgeon.