The Buffalo and the Indian

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An Editorial

The ceremony called Hako, from the Pawnee Hakkopirus, was a rite of fertility and adoption. For the Pawnees and the other Native Americans an interpersonal relation outside kinship could not exist. Whoever wanted to trade either goods or rituals had to estblish kinship relations, a category which ordered chaos, enlightening right relations and reciprocal obligations. Outside kinship one could find only slaves and enemies. Adoption was stressed by a ceremony in which the "fathers" (the guests come to trade) gave two ritually decorated pipes to the "children" (the hosts). Hakkowpirus comes from akkow = mouth, where the h suggests breath and the median k represents the word wood, therefore hakkow could be freely translated voice breathing from the woods. Pirus means beat or hit and metaphorically points to the drum.

Tobacco smoke represents the breath of the sacred the visual image of life breath, therefore it is the most precious offering to the spirits. In fact it is the substance of the gift the gods themselves had given to the human beings to be used in a sacred covenant between humans and gods or among human beings.

Tobacco is spread throughout the Americas and its cultivation anticipates and accompanies that of maize, the Indian "flesh".The hallucinogenic smoke of tobacco and other plants such as red willow, sumac and dogwood, together with the fathers' fasting throughout the ceremony, continuous and obsessive drumming, ceremonial repetition of gestures and songs, provoked altered states of consciousness which secured that the Sacred was there, witnessing the human covenant.

The Hako ritual represents the tool to establish a middle ground, a bridge beyond the borderline permitting communication. This is the reason why we have chosen the name of the Sacred Pipe ritual as a means to communicate with and to give voice to Indian magic-visionary cultures. A means to give the possibility to the European culture to overcome its limits, since it has always considered American Indian cultures as either positive or negative metaphors, but never as human cultures on the same level of dignity.

Even if ideology can find room in this magazine, since it is of immense importance both to European and modern Indian culture itself, we are ambitious enough to try to give body to Indian civilizations. Indians, even if they do have a non-historical culture, are not without history. They are made of flesh and blood, politics and economics, religion and sex.

Swaying, we offer our pipe.

The American Bison

  A short story of the American bison and its two varieties, Bison bison bison and Bison bison athabascae. The latter was the first to face extinction. The great herds wandered without a precise pattern and this caused the Indian nomads on foot to follow them and face alternative periods of great abundance and starvation. Therefore many tribes adopted a mixed economy of hunting and agriculture to overcame food crisis. The herds were usually divided in groups of cows and calves led by an old cow and smaller herds of bulls or solitary males. These units usually gathered together for the summer rut season, then they divided again into female herds spending winter in the open plains and males preferring more covered valleys and woods. Good hunting seasons for the Indians were winter and summer, but bull meat was too bad to be eaten and bulls were looked for especially for their hides to make bull's boats and humps to make shields.

Surrounded Conservatives

  In 1867 almost all the Teton Sioux were interestd in barting their heaps of buffalo hides for guns, blankets and other goods. Perhaps Red Cloud was the only Lakota chief to realize that bargaining the peace from a strong stand was worthwhile, but the Sioux were very happy to sign the Laramie Treaty of 1868. As a result they were confined in a reservation: the story of the places of the Sioux Agencies of Rosebud and Pine Ridge is interesting, because it showed that even great chiefs such as Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, more political than Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, were ideologically bound to the Sioux only economic resource: the buffalo. They had forgotten their agricultural past and tried to consolidate the territory grabbed from the Missouri and Platte agricultural tribes and to secure the Crow land they were invading. The reason why they chose the place of their Agencies stubbornly was the buffalo and the nearness of the Nebraska and Wyoming trading posts. They never realized that the buffalo days were almost gone; in fact, they were the leading members, together with Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, of the warrior caste that had founded its growing power during the last days of the Fur Wars on the Great Lakes. In those days it developed a new ideology based on the idea that "the land cannot be sold" and the hunters and warriors overcame the power of the traditional civil and feminine chiefs, based on horticulture. These new leaders boycotted any attempt to transform the tribes' recent hunting economy based on the horse, even if their monopoly was challenged by many non Indian and Mиtis hunters. The opening of the Oregon Trail was the beginning of the mass invasion of the Great Plains. On June 26, 1876 general Custer died at Little Big Horn but, on the other side of the Black Hills, on June 8, the first newspaper had already been printed in Deadwood. While Crazy Horse was assassinated at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, not very far from the Black Hills, in Deadwood 50 lawyers were admitted to profession. Not all the Indians were stubborn opposers of change: the Ponca tried to raise cattle, even if most of it was destroyed by Sioux hostile to compromise. The reservations were divided between the "progressives", who used white butchers and the "traditionalists", who preferred to stage the hunting of the cattle in order to support a way of life perfectly void of economic value, but symbolically meaningful.

Winter Hunting on the Missouri

  C. Lйvi-Strauss remembers the Missouri tribes' winter hunt: the Indians were closed in their earth lodges, with their dogs and children kept perfectly quiet, with no fire or chopping wood in order not to frighten the buffalo entering the village, used as a trap. He shows the winter hunt as opposed to the summer one because the former was sedentary, symbolically connected to horticulture and it preferred to attract the animals inside the village; therefore it was an "endo-hunt". The latter, on the contrary, brought the Indians far from their earth lodges, in the plains where they were very likely to find the enemy. Therefore it was connected to war and can be considered an "eso-hunt".

G.C. Beltrami, an Italian traveller in the early 1820s and discoverer of the Western and Norther sources of the Mississippi, was one of the witnesses of the Chippewa and Santee Sioux buffalo hunt. He also shared the excitement of a summer hunt on horseback and witnessed a winter hunt in which a buffalo herd was trapped on the fragile ice cover of the Missouri, that cracked under their weight; all the animals were killed.

Save the Buffalo!

  In 1889 William Hornaby believed that only 85 buffaloes roamed free in the USA, together with 200 heads protected in the Yellowstone National Park, 550 near the Great Slave Lake in Canada and about 250 in zoos and private herds.

Among the various rescuers of the buffalo was the mentioned W. Hornaday, supported by President Theodore Roosevelt. Others were the Salish Indian (Flathead and Pend d'Oreille) ranchers Samuel Walking Coyote, Charles Allard and Michael Pablo, who constituted the core of the National Bison Range in the Salish reservation in Montana and later the Wood Buffalo Park near Banff, Alberta, Canada.

Charles Goodnight, trail discoverer and great rancher, created the herd in the Yellowstone National Park and Scotty Philip one herd in South Dakota. Now the buffalo is neither endangered nor threatened; in fact the "wonderful animal" can be raised as easily as cattle and such was the herd of the rancher who provided his buffaloes as extras for "Dancing with the Wolves".

From Bison to Cow

  The year 1883 was the last year of the buffalo: they say that the two last northern herds were destroyed one by Sitting Bull's Sioux and the other by white hunters. These killings seemed to fulfill the prophecies made by different men in the 1840s: merchant Denig, gesuit De Smet and army colonel Abert. But these were only the final stages of a history begun centuries before and it would be unfair accusing the Indians and even the last white hunters of the destruction of the buffalo.

The buffalo had enormously expanded its range during the 16th and 17th centuries and occupied the ecological niches left empty by epidemies, slave hunting and intertribal wars. When De Soto travelled trough the Southeast in the 16th century, he saw "cow" horns and hides, but never saw or mentioned one buffalo. It seemed that, notwithstanding serious demographic losses, the Indians were still able to keep the buffalo away from their fields. The expansion of the settlers' agriculture beyond the Appalachians meant doom for the buffalo east of the Mississippi River and in 1832 the herds had disappeared also in Iowa. The Eastern Woodlands had been transformed ecologically by the cutting of timber to open new fields, to get wood for the buildings and coal for the first factories, and by the expansion of the European weeds.

East of the Mississippi the weeds and grasses which were not eaten by European animals were destroyed and pastures made of imported bluegrass and clover expanded enormously, creating pastures for the settlers and ranchers even before they had reached the lands beyond the Appalachians.

The buffalo also met the competition of European cattle, bred or wild,in the woods of Eastern USA and the prairies of Texas, even if it did not flourished as much as in South America. We may say that ranching east of the Mississippi was delayed by the settlers' buffalo hunting, copied from the Indian cycle of hunting and agriculture. But the Bison b. athabascae and the mountain herds of Bison b. bison had already been depleted by overhunting: buffalo meat supported the golden years of the fur trade and there was even a Pemmican War between the British Northwest and Hudson's Bay Companies, while the Americans preferred to buy fresh meat from the Indians.

The Companies bought not only meat, but also hides and by 1840 the buffalo had disappeared from the Oregon and Wyoming Plateau. In 1860 they were scarse also in Montana. Many say that the "wonderful animal" had retired in the Great Plains, but the sad truth is that the Plains were the only place left in the USA and Canada where the buffalo still lived. In fact the traders, through the debt system and alcohol, forced the Indians to overhunt buffalo cows in winter, when they were mostly pregnant.

The opening of the overland trails spelt disaster for the Plains herds; meanwhile the Texas longhorns began to travel along those trails bound for the miners' towns, bringing with them the infamous Texas fever. It is likely that the fever infected not only the Missouri and Kansas cattle, but also the bison. Moreover,the longhorns were competitors because could eat buffalo grass, while the settlers' horses, mules and oxen spread their manure full of clover and forage seeds on the prairie leaving large, green patches along the trails. After the Mormons and the Mexicans demonstrated it was possible for their cattle to survive tha harsh Plains winters, the European cows began substituting the buffalo, until 1882 was named the Beef Bonanza. The building of forts and trading posts made flourish the trade of forage, which had a further diffusion from the horses given to the reservations and/or raided by the Indians. In addition the Indians' hunting technique of setting the prairie on fire for miles helped the growing not only of native weeds, but also of the more aggressive European weeds. The railway contributed to the massacre in two ways: through the white hunters such as Buffalo Bill, who provided meat for the workers, and by giving 40 miles on both sides of the tracks open to colonization. Even if the best lands went to Big Business speculators, the Homestead Act of 1862 pushed forward the agricultural frontier and the settlers exterminated the buffalo, an old enemy of the farmer. The early mechanization of agriculture only worsened an already serious situation.

The adoption of the German buffalo hide tanning process and the appearance of faster, better rifles meant death for the last herds: between 1872 and 1874 about 3 million heads were killed. Only a very small percentage was killed for political reasons, that is starving the Indians; in fact in 1870 the "hostile" factions were a minority in many tribes and also among the warlike Plains tribes there were important peace factions, even if the "friendly" were busy in intertribal wars.

The gloomy truth is that the farmers exploited thoughtlessly their fields planting wheat, corn and cotton until they became barren, then they moved away, so the Americans exploited the buffalo to exhaustion, then substituted them with cattle for meat, hides and leather (this later was substituted by rubber). Ironically the great season of the longhorns and the cattle kingdoms lasted only a few years and declined almost for the same reasons: ignorance of the harsh biosystem in the Plains, overgrazing, obsolescence of open range ranching and introduction of the barbed wire. While 1883 was the buffalo's last year,the winter of 1886-87, when 90% of the animals froze and starved to death, was the longhorn's last season.

   

The Wonderful Resource

  The Indian, the Buffalo and the Horse: this is the essence of life in the American Plains in the 18th and 19th centuries, but in the picture one element is European, the horse. Before the diffusion of the horse after the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, Indian life was very different and the buffalo was exploited in a limited way as raw material. West of the 98th meridian, in fact, it rained only 12.5 cm. a year, the grass rooted deeply in the ground to absorb humidity and exposed only a short blade in the open, enough for the buffalo to browse. The low grass lands were not suitable for agriculture and the small groups of nomads on foot that entered this American Desert to hunt buffalo had constantly to face death and hunger. East of the 98th meridian more abundant rains reached 25 cm. a year; it was the land of the tall grass, excellent not only for Indian horticulture but also, later, for the settlers'plows. In both areas there were good riverine timber lands that sheltered a host of small and large game.

Some Indian groups arrived in the latter area about in A.D.1000 and began to experiment agriculture especially along the Missouri, but their primary resource was small game and only rarely the buffalo. In the 13th century the Caddoans, very advanced in corn planting, together with squashes beans, tobacco, etc., reached the fertile riverine lands again, founding their way of life primarily on corn and on game hunting, but only secondarily on the buffalo. But the harsh ecological system of the Prairies brought in cycles of droughts, that caused the development of the winter and summer buffalo hunts to overcame starvation in case of shortenings in the crop provisions. The winter hunt was "passive" and "feminine" and the taboos were very similar to those of the well-to-do girls at puberty, while the summer hunts were "masculine" and "solar", excluding children, old people and single women. During the summer hunt the weather factor was very important, because a shower could spoil the meat exposed to dry on the racks. Since summer was a time of tribal unity, after winter dispersion, both for the buffalo (summer rut) and the Indians (gathering of families) there were rites stressing this similarity. Then the horticultural tribes came back to their fields.

But the new cycle of droughts and the arrival of the horse in the 18th and 19th centuries, besides the invasion of the Eastern tribes (Sioux Cheyennes and so on) pushed westward by the Fur Wars, transformed Indian hunting economy. The buffalo overcame any other resource until it became the Plains Indians' only resource. The animal was exploited to make every profane and cerimonial article, peace and war tools and became the sacred symbol of Indian life, even if until very early 19th century the Indians preferred the meat of other game, more tender and less rough. The Plains nomads, such as the Athapaskans, the Utes and the Comanches, traded briskly with the Pueblos, according to Spanish sources, and payed enormous prices for their corn.

The arrival of the Spaniards on the Indian market earthquaked the exchange rates. Before, the goods exchanged by the Pueblos were mostly luxury items such as stone or shell beads, turquoise, feathers and pottery and most villages were economically self-sufficient. Later, the arrival of the Spaniards and the Athapaskas broke the balance: the Spaniards sometimes confiscated, sometimes payed Pueblo corn and cloth with daggers, hatchets, wool, wheat and other goods; the nomads sometimes exchanged their game meat, sometimes raided the Pueblos. The Pueblos adapted themselves to the new situation, becaming middlemen of European goods and Indian meat, accumulating wealth to support their rich ceremonial life and surviving culturally to the Franciscans. The nomads, depending on one resource, were socially stiff and scarcely apt to answer external stimuli.

In fact they soon learned to barter buffalo meat and hides for Spanish (later French, British and American) goods, but the transformation of their "wonderful resource" from use value to exchange value did not give birth to any kind of vigorous primitive accumulation, only to a thoughtless exploitation of the animal, that at first seemed the more inextinguishable the more it concentrated in front of the settlers'advance. During the tragic history of the "buffalo-commodity" nothing is more surprising than the blindness to waste of the tribes that in time competed for the hunting grounds, their inability to transform their rich resource into a source of independence. The evolution of the nomad tribes followed the pattern of the single-crop system, that is they became the more dependent on their only commodity the more it became obsolete or unsalable.

The pre-horse Blakfoot family, for example, was monogamic but, when faced by the hide boom the warriors began to marry more wives and to raid women in order to have more tanners for the hide market. The wealth they got was considerable, since a Blackfoot hunter with four wives as an average earned about $1500-2000 a year, which he invested in firearms, alcohol, blankets, tools and trinkets, while in the same period - 1830-49 - a white hunter earned $400 a year and in the East the average worker's salary was $397 a year and a woman working in the model factories in Lawrence, Massachusetts earned only $130 a year.

   

Buffalo Robes

  It deals with an important item of the Plains Indians' apparel. It could be painted or quilled and the subject and style was different for men and women. Women's robes were usually abstract, geometric,, depicting the so called "box and border" motif, showing a stylized exposition of the buffalo cow's internal organs. Men's robes usually were painted (until 1850) with the famous "Black warbonnet" motif, especially among the Northern tribes, while the Southern Indians preferred the "hourglass" motif. The "war record robe" showed the owner's war deeds in the masculine pictorial style. There were specialized robe painters and the way of wearing one'robe was a dictionary of non-verbal messages. The Sioux had the saying "drop his robe", that meant "to die with his boots on".

   

Buffalo Dance

  Catlin describes the Buffalo Dance of the Mandans, a ceremony taking place when every tactics to find the buffalo had failed. It was a dance that could not fail, because the Mandans went on dancing until the buffalo appeared. But what happened when the buffalo were disguised Sioux raiders?

   

Woman as Prey

  One of the oldest and most recurring symbols painted by hunter priests on the walls of Paleolithic caves, hidden in the womb of the Earth, is the vulva. The goal is to associate the "wounded", bleeding vulva, during menstruation, childbirth or deflowering (moments of women's fertility) and the wound made by and bleeding because of the penetration of a lance or an arrow. Lenticular images can be seen also in caves of Iowa and in the birchbark rolls of the Great Lakes Midи society. The priests not only want to influence the game's fertility, but also a hunter's luck, who repeats a penetration, even if its aim has been overturned. In fact, it is not a coitus aimed to procreation, but a deadly tool to kill the prey.

This is the reason why a hunter - and a warrior - cannot have any sexual intercourse before the hunt (the warpath) in order not to "offend" the prey informing it of the incoming penetretion. Because of it he uses a secret language avoiding every sexual word or allusion speaking on his trail. Very often he avoids sex also after the hunt for some days, because he wants to interrupt the two activities, to prevent any magic association between a deadly penetration and a coitus, whose aim is life. The cut must be so clear that traditionally he does not even attend the carcass; in many cases he does not carry the it into the village and leaves to the woman the task of transforming the prey from corpse into butchered meat, that is a body magically disjointed, into food, shelter, apparel and tool. Men's weapons had to be protected from the danger of being magically "discharged" of their deadly power, which would cause the owner's death. Men's weapons could nor be touched by unauthorized women neither they could touch the ground, symbol of cosmic feminine power , in order not to be influenced negatively. Women in their menses were particularly dangerous, because their temporary hemorrhage looked too much like the wound, because of the laws of sympathic magic, and during that period women were too full of terrestrial and ctonian forces and could destroy the power of men's weapons, whose origin is heavenly. Indian theological thought stressed the primacy of life over death.

The point, besides being a symbolic penis, was made of stone and especially flintstone, was thought as condensated lightening, which hit the earth and caused to rain in a cosmic coitus (metal has the same masculine nature). If women and weapons were put together in an unproper way, not ritually, the result was disastrous, because this would cause the game to run away from the country, the hunter' misfortune and famine, because of the "offensive", allusive feminine smell impregnating them. A very tight symbolic bond between the point and the penis as tool of penetration on one hand and the animal, the vulva and in general the woman as penetrated on the other hand. As a countercheck let's consider the mass rape in the prairie of a woman made by the members of the offended husband's warrior society. It was a late custom that showed the collapse of the women's social position. In this case in the open prairie, like a buffalo cow, a woman was killed through the men's penises and not their weapons, overturning the symbolic connection.

The visual representation of the metaphorical and metonimical link between the woman and the prey is shown in the feminine apparel. The terrestrial nature of the Buffalo is made clear when the Oglala Short Buffalo states that the animal was given to the Indians by the Spirit of the Earth or rather the Spirit of the Earth and the Buffalo are the same thing. There is the same relation between the buffalo's and the woman's terrestrial nature. In Lakota the buffalo is ritually called pte, that is buffalo cow, while tatanka is the specific masculine noun. The reason is not only that cows were eaten, but also that the Lakota considered their source of life of feminine nature. In their system of sacred directions the buffalo came from the north, the red feminine direction and seat of one aspect of the soul, ni, breath. Linguistically sa, red, and san, vagina, are related.

While improper use of sympathic magic was dangerous,the proper use of feminine magic was absolutely necessary to the hunter to make the buffalo come near the village. Almost all the Plains tribes had women's societies to influence the buffalo. The Blackfoot had the Ma'toki, Buffalo Cows, that danced during the Sundance that opened the summer hunt. Mandan and Hidatsa women's societies held special ceremonies to attract the bison both in summer and in winter. Their White Buffalo Cow Society celebrated the rites of the Snow Owl and the Little Buzzard.