Plains Indians

The culture area was an organising device of North American anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the Plains is its best known example. It grouped nations by environment and economy: the Lakota and Dakota, the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Blackfoot, Crow, Pawnee, Kiowa and others, speaking languages of at least five unrelated families and frequently at war with each other. The traits the label names are mostly recent.

The horse arrived in North America with the Spanish, spread north through trade and raiding during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and made the mounted bison hunt possible; several of the nations most associated with the Plains had been farmers further east within living memory of the ethnographers who described them. So the grouping records a way of life that existed, in the form described, for about two centuries, and it presents it as timeless. It persists because museums organised their collections by it, because the Bureau of Indian Affairs and its equivalents administered by it, and because it supplied the imagery that stands for indigenous North America in the popular mind, to the exclusion of everyone else. The nations themselves have their own names and their own accounts of who they are, and those are what the atlas uses on the individual entries. This page exists so that a reader who meets the collective label can find out where it came from.

Two religious matters attach to this grouping and both are live. The Sun Dance, in its various forms among the different nations, was banned in the United States and Canada from the 1880s, enforced through the withholding of rations and through criminal prosecution, and was practised in secret for decades. In the United States the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 was the formal end of the policy. The dance is held today, and how it should be described, who may attend and what may be photographed are decisions belonging to the nations and the individuals who hold it.

The 1993 Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality, adopted at Lakota Summit V, states one such position plainly and is catalogued in this atlas. The Ghost Dance is the second. It spread across the Plains from the teaching of the Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka in 1889, and the response to it ended at Wounded Knee Creek on 29 December 1890 in the killing of some three hundred Lakota, mostly Miniconjou and Hunkpapa, by the Seventh Cavalry. The atlas writes that history in full and does not reconstruct the ceremony. Both cases show the same pattern, in which a religion was first suppressed by law and then, once it was safely historical, taken up as material by people with no connection to it. The nations concerned have been explicit about the second as well as the first.

Sources The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890James Mooney with Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota SpiritualityLakota Summit V