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For Kids

Native Americans used games to teach their children safety, strength, agility, and sportsmanship. The games were fun but they had purpose. The game of Sep, the Toe Toss game, the Hand Game, the Snow Snake game and other games listed below are real Native American games that you can play at home or at school. They were very popular games in olden times and are still fun and challenging today. Good luck!

The Hand Game (Nez Perce)

Butterfly Hide and Seek (Ojibwa)
Moccasin Game (Ojibwa) Lacrosse (Ojibwa) Snow Snake Game (Iroquois) Toe Toss Stick (Apache)
BEAR RACE (Northwest Coastal) No equipment needed. Northwest Coast Play. Outside, hallway, or classroom if room allows: "Players line up behind starting line. At a signal they begin to run imitating a bear's shuffling gait - place left hand and right foot forward at the same time, then right hand and left foot forward. The first over the finish line wins; or the one with the best imitation of a bear may win. Older Children can return to the starting line to make the race longer and more challenging. Lesson: Observe ways of nature around you (in this care, the bear's movements). It also teaches that speed is not always as important as correct play." MORE: A list of other Native American games you can play in your classroom, with instructions, make your own game setup or have your kid do it

These are fun and interactive Native American games you can play online. Flash games have been removed.

Hoop and Darts game, interactive

Dr. Dirt's Time Travel Machine - Life Long Ago - Flintnappers, interactive

World of the Caddo, interactive

Solve an Ancient Mystery, Plains Native Americans, interactive
Adventures into the Past, interactive Guess the Word before the Turtle Hides in His Shell, Interactive Match the Dwellings to the First American Group, interactive
Weave a Virtual Wampum Belt, interactive

Whose Feature Is It? interactive

Native American Stories

Native American Stories - Child of Water and Little Blue Rock, Wise Owl, Clever Coyote, The Invisible Warrior, How Raven Stole Crow's Potlatch, and more

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Native Americans in Olden Times for Kids

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Real Native American Games you can play at home or at school, and Interactive Native American games to play online - Native Americans in Olden Times for Kids

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Native Americans used games to teach their children safety, strength, agility, and sportsmanship. The games were fun but they had purpose. The game of Sep, the Toe Toss game, the Hand Game, the Snow Snake game and other games listed below are real Native American games that you can play at home or at school.

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Duration:

7 minutes, 27 seconds

In Lakota culture, history is passed down to new generations through the spoken word. There are many different versions of the Emergence Story, varying from band to band and family to family. This version comes from the Cheyenne Creek community on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation of the Oglala Lakota tribe. The story was told by Wilmer Mesteth -- a tribal historian and spiritual leader -- to Sina Bear Eagle, who retells it in the following passage. The story can be read below or a recitation of the story can be watched. A physical copy of the story is also available in the Visitor Center.

Herd of buffalo grazing on the prairie
NPS Photo

In Lakota culture, history is passed down to new generations through the spoken word. There are many different versions of the Emergence Story, varying from band to band and family to family.

Natural entrance of Wind Cave
NPS Photo

This story begins at a time when the plants and the animals were still being brought into existence, but there were no people or bison living on the earth. People at that time lived underground in the Tunkan Tipi - the spirit lodge - and were waiting as the earth was prepared for them to live upon it.

To get to the spirit lodge, one must take a passageway through what the ancestors referred to as Oniya Oshoka, where the earth "breathes inside." This place is known today as Wind Cave, referred to in modern Lakota as Maka Oniye or "breathing earth." Somewhere, hidden deep inside this passageway, is a portal to the spirit lodge and the spirit world.

There were two spirits who lived on the surface of the earth: Iktomi and Anog-Ite. Iktomi, the spider, was the trickster spirit. Before he was Iktomi, his name was Woksape - "Wisdom" - but lost his name and position when he helped the evil spirit Gnaskinyan play a trick on all the other spirits. Anog-Ite, the double face woman, had two faces on her head. On one side, she had a lovely face, rivaling the beauty of any other woman who existed. On the other, she had a horrible face, which was twisted and gnarled. To see this face would put chills down any person's spine.

Anog-Ite was once Ite, the human wife of the wind spirit, Tate. She longed to be a spirit herself, so when the evil Gnaskinyan told her dressing up as the moon spirit, Hanwi, would grant her wish, she followed without question. Gnaskinyan used both Ite and Woksape as pawns in his trick on the other spirits. The Creator, Takuskanskan, decided not to punish Gnaskinyan for this trick, because evil does what's in its nature. Woksape and Ite were both punished because they let their pride determine their actions and allowed themselves to be guided by evil, when both should have known better. Takuskanskan transformed the two into Iktomi and Anog-Ite, allowing Iktomi to play tricks forever and Anog Ite to be the spirit she desired to be. Both were banished to the surface of the earth.

Iktomi and Anog-Ite had only each other for company. Iktomi spent his time playing tricks on Anog-Ite, torturing her and never allowing her to live in peace, but this pastime soon bored him. He wanted new people to play tricks on, so he set his sights on the humans. He knew he needed help for this trick; he asked Anog-Ite, promising he'd never torment her again. She agreed to these terms and began loading a leather pack.

Anog-Ite filled this pack with buckskin clothing intricately decorated withporcupine quills, different types of berries, and dried meat. She then loaded the pack onto the back of her wolf companion, Sungmanitu Tanka. When the wolf was ready, Iktomi led him to a hole in the ground and sent the wolf inside Oniya Oshoka to find the humans. The wolf followed the passageways until it met the humans.

Anog-Ite was once Ite, the human wife of the wind spirit, Tate. She longed to be a spirit herself, so when the evil Gnaskinyan told her dressing up as the moon spirit, Hanwi, would grant her wish, she followed without question. Gnaskinyan used both Ite and Woksape as pawns in his trick on the other spirits. The Creator, Takuskanskan, decided not to punish Gnaskinyan for this trick, because evil does what's in its nature. Woksape and Ite were both punished because they let their pride determine their actions and allowed themselves to be guided by evil, when both should have known better. Takuskanskan transformed the two into Iktomi and Anog-Ite, allowing Iktomi to play tricks forever and Anog Ite to be the spirit she desired to be. Both were banished to the surface of the earth.

Iktomi and Anog-Ite had only each other for company. Iktomi spent his time playing tricks on Anog-Ite, torturing her and never allowing her to live in peace, but this pastime soon bored him. He wanted new people to play tricks on, so he set his sights on the humans. He knew he needed help for this trick; he asked Anog-Ite, promising he'd never torment her again. She agreed to these terms and began loading a leather pack.

Anog-Ite filled this pack with buckskin clothing intricately decorated withporcupine quills, different types of berries, and dried meat. She then loaded the pack onto the back of her wolf companion, Sungmanitu Tanka. When the wolf was ready, Iktomi led him to a hole in the ground and sent the wolf inside Oniya Oshoka to find the humans. The wolf followed the passageways until it met the humans.

A lone wolf standing
NPS Photo // Glacier National Park

Once there, he told the people about the wonders of the Earth's surface, and showed them the pack on hisback. One man took out the buck skin clothing and felt the soft leather. His wife tried on a dress and, when he looked at her, he thought the dress accentuated her beauty. Next they took out the meat, tasted it, and passed it around amongst some of the people. The meat intrigued them. They'd never hunted before, and had never tasted anything like meat. They wanted more.

The wolf told them if they followed him to the surface of the Earth, he'd show them where to find meat and all the other gifts he brought. The leader of the humans was a man named Tokahe - "The First One" - and he refused to go with the wolf. He objected, saying the Creator had instructed them to stay underground, and that's what he'd do. Most of the people stayed with Tokahe, but all those who tried the meat followed the wolf to the surface.

The journey to the surface was long and perilous. When they reached the hole, the first thing the people saw was a giant blue sky above them. The surface of the earth was bright, and it was summertime, so all the plants were in bloom. The people looked around and thought the earth's surface was the most gorgeous place they'd ever been before.
The wolf led the people to the lodge of Anog-Ite, who was in disguise; she had her sina - "shawl" - wrapped over her head, hiding her horrible face and revealing only her beautiful face. Anog-Ite invited the people inside, and they asked her about the clothes and the food. She promised to teach the people how to obtain those things, and soon she taught the people how to hunt and how to work and tan an animal hide.

This work was difficult, however. The people had never struggled like this in the spirit lodge. They grew tired easily and worked slowly. Time passed, and summer turned to fall, then to winter. The people knew nothing about the Earth's seasons and had worked so slowly that, by the time the first snow came, they didn't have enough clothes or food for everyone. They began to freeze and starve.

They returned to the lodge of Anog- Ite to beg for help, but it was then that she revealed her true intentions. She ripped the shawl from her head, revealing her horrible face, and with both faces - beautiful and horrible - laughed at the people.

A bison bull covered in frost
NPS Photo

The people recoiled in terror and ran away, so she sent her wolf after them to chase and snap at their heels. They ran back to the site of the hole from which they'd emerged, only to find that it had been covered, leaving them trapped on the surface.

The people didn't know what to do nor where to go, so they simply sat down on the ground and cried. At this time the Creator heard them, and asked why they were there. They explained the story of the wolf and Anog-Ite, but the Creator was upset.

The Creator said, "You should not have disobeyed me; now I have to punish you." The way the Creator did that was by transforming them - turning them from people into these great, wild beasts. This was the first bison herd.
Time passed, and the earth was finally ready for people to live upon it. The Creator instructed Tokahe to lead the people through the passageway in the cave and onto the surface. On the way, they stopped to pray four times, stopping last at the entrance.

On the surface, the people saw the hoof prints of a bison. The Creator instructed them to follow that bison. From the bison, they could get food, tools, clothes, and shelter. The bison would lead them to water. Everything they needed to survive on the earth could come from the bison.

When they left the cave, the Creator shrunk the hole from the size of a man to the size it is now, too small for most people to enter, to serve as a reminder so the people would never forget from where they'd come.

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The Lakota Emergence Story - Wind Cave National Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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Duration: 7 minutes, 27 seconds In Lakota culture, history is passed down to new generations through the spoken word. There are many different versions of the Emergence Story, varying from band to band and family to family. This version comes from the Cheyenne Creek community on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation of the Oglala Lakota tribe.

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Paiute Photo Ferron 2012 at Mossy Cave.
Photographed by Arch Deac Design LLP.

Paiute Indians occupied the area around what is now Bryce Canyon starting around 1200 A.D. The Paunsaugunt Plateau was used for seasonal hunting and gathering activities, but there is no evidence of permanent settlements.

The legend of Bryce Canyon was explained to a park naturalist in 1936 by Indian Dick, a Paiute elder who then lived on the Kaibab Reservation:

"Before there were humans, the Legend People, To-when-an-ung-wa, lived in that place. There were many of them. They were of many kinds - birds, animals, lizards and such things, but they looked like people. They were not people. They had power to make themselves look that way. For some reason the Legend People in that place were bad; they did something that was not good, perhaps a fight, perhaps some stole something....the tale is not clear at this point. Because they were bad, Coyote turned them all into rocks. You can see them in that place now all turned into rocks; some standing in rows, some sitting down, some holding onto others. You can see their faces, with paint on them just as they were before they became rocks. The name of that place is Angka-ku-wass-a-wits (red painted faces). This is the story the people tell."

Fremont and Anasazi people occupied the portion of the Colorado Plateau near Bryce Canyon from around 200 A.D. until 1200. The Fremont were more to the north and west, with the Anasazi more to the south and east. There is recently discovered evidence of the mixing of these two cultures on the Kaiparowits Plateau.

Native Americans first occupied the Colorado Plateau 12,000 years ago, but no evidence of their activities has yet been found on the Paunsaugunt Plateau.

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American Indian History - Bryce Canyon National Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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Paiute Indians occupied the area around what is now Bryce Canyon starting around 1200 A.D. The Paunsaugunt Plateau was used for seasonal hunting and gathering activities, but there is no evidence of permanent settlements.

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Sitting Bull Tatanka-iyotanka

Little Bighorn Battlefield Archives/Library

There are many stories about the first people who lived on the North American continent. One tells of the Great Spirit who collected dust from the four winds to create the Comanche people. The Hopi people tell of two brothers who slashed open great swaths into the ground and sowed powerful stalks of cane so the ancient people living beneath the earth could climb above ground.

Archaeologists research migrations of peoples from north central Asia across a land bridge that stretched across the Bering Strait between modern-day Siberia and Alaska during the Pleistocene Ice Age-some 13,000 years ago. Read more "

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Indigenous Heritage - Telling All Americans' Stories (U.S. National Park Service)

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There are many stories about the first people who lived on the North American continent. One tells of the Great Spirit who collected dust from the four winds to create the Comanche people. The Hopi people tell of two brothers who slashed open great swaths into the ground and sowed powerful stalks of cane so the ancient people living beneath the earth could climb above ground.

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Tribal Tourism and Native Voices in Parks (U.S. National Park Service)

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In recent years, a number of collaborations between tribes and the NPS have focused on amplifying native voices within park visitor experiences and supporting the development of tribal tourism. Through these collaborations, tourism can help Indian Country link its historical interpretations and cultural vitality to modern landscapes, showcasing tribal stories and perspectives that are intertwined in the fabric of American history.

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- [Instructor] In the first years of interaction between Native Americans and Europeans, there were a lot of aspects of each other's cultures that each group found, well, just plain weird. Europeans and Native Americans looked, dressed, and thought differently in fundamental ways that lead to misunderstandings and even violence between them. So let's take some time to compare some ways in which Native American cultural ideas differed from European cultural ideas. So how is it possible to make a direct comparison between Native American cultures and European cultures? One way is to choose a few categories of social interaction and belief and identify how each group conceived of them. Here, I've chosen ideas about land and property ownership, gender roles, and religion as areas to compare. Now before we start, I wanna put a big asterisk here and say that these are generalizations, just as the English, French, Spanish, Dutch didn't have all exactly the same religion or a concept of proper gender roles. The Algonquians, Iroquois, Pueblos, and Mississippians weren't identical either, but there were some similarities among European groups and among Native American groups that allow us to compare and contrast them more broadly. So let's start identifying these differences and exploring what effect they may have had on how the two groups perceived and interacted with each other. One major difference between Europeans and Native Americans was in their ideas about land ownership. To Europeans, land was owned by individuals and passed down through families. They had the right to fence off a plot of land and prevent trespassing. For Native Americans, land ownership was less defined and more temporary. One tribe might claim control of a hunting range or one family might farm a plot of land for a season but they didn't own it forever. Most land was free for everyone to use but not to own. So when Europeans arrived, Native Americans might agree to let them farm and hunt in their territories but they didn't expect that Europeans would then fence off that land and prevent others from using it. Likewise, Europeans were confused when Native Americans continued to use land that they thought they had purchased to own forever. Native Americans also tended to have a more communal approach to property and trade. To them, trading relationship were important and they require a lot of feasting and gift giving to cement ties between tribes. Europeans were frequently frustrated by the amount of pomp and circumstance Native Americans demanded to complete what they saw as a simple business transaction. Partly, this had to do with how Native Americans viewed property in general. While Europeans gained high status in society by owning a lot of things and therefore being rich, Native Americans achieved high status by giving a lot of things away, being a source of riches for others. So unlike in Europe where there were huge gaps between the rich and the poor, Native American societies were comparatively egalitarian. It was pretty rare for someone to go hungry if their neighbor had food to spare. Europeans couldn't tell if Native Americans were just naturally generous, kind people or if they maybe just didn't get how business worked and to Native Americans, Europeans seemed greedy and selfish, allowing others to starve and do without so that they could enrich themselves. Differences in gender roles also confused the groups. In European societies, men were the heads of household and they were in charge of outdoor labor. Women took care of the home but they also have relatively few rights. They couldn't participate politically, own property, or get divorced. In Native American societies, men hunted and fished and conducted warfare which often meant that they were away from home for weeks or months. Consequently, women did the farming since they were home to tend the crops. Native women also had a lot more freedom than European women. They could get divorced, they could give political advice to councils. Many Native American societies were matrilineal so children belonged to their mother's family rather than their father's and when a couple got married, the man moved in with his wife's family, not the other way around. To Europeans, gender roles in Native society almost seemed like they were flipped upside down and they took this as evidence that Native people were uncivilized. To Native Americans, it looked like Europeans could barely care for themselves. They had to be taught how to farm, how to fish, even how to hunt effectively in the new world. Finally, Native and European religious practices differ, at least, on the surface. Native Americans tended to believe that one great creator had made the world and that nature was imbued with spirits who would reward or punish them based on how well they took care of the land. In fact, this actually wasn't that much different from the Catholicism of Europeans who believed in a single god but also many helpful saints. But where they differed was in exclusivity. When Europeans introduced them to Jesus and Mary and the saints, many Native Americans were happy to include them in their pantheon of helpful spirits. But this angered Europeans who insisted on exclusive worship of the Christian god. All of this differences lead to fraught interactions between Europeans and Native Americans. But despite these differences, they also adopted many useful aspects of each other's culture over time especially in terms of trade. Native Americans were keen to get their hands on the metal implements for cooking and farming and hunting that Europeans possessed as well as guns and horses which were great for transportation and also for making war. Europeans were also willing to take part in the social rituals and trading rituals of Native Americans, sometimes even marrying into Native American families so they could get access to furs hunted by Native Americans and to Native Americans as allies in their wars against rival European powers and the Americas. So as we wrap up, I encourage you to take a closer look at this chart. Is there anything you find particularly surprising about these differences? Where do you think that Europeans and Native Americans were most likely to find common ground between them? And lastly, which of these cultural aspects do you think was the most significant difference between Europeans and Native Americans and why?

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Comparing European and Native American cultures (video) | Khan Academy

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Instructor] In the first years of interaction between Native Americans and Europeans, there were a lot of aspects of each other's cultures that each group found, well, just plain weird. Europeans and Native Americans looked, dressed, and thought differently in fundamental ways that lead to misunderstandings and even violence between them.

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Effects of the Homestead Act on Native Americans

The Homestead Act of 1862 granted land claims in thirty states. These areas were the traditional or treaty lands of many Native American tribes.

Many homesteaders believed that all native peoples were nomads and that only those who owned land would use it efficiently. Few tribes were truly nomadic. Most nomadic tribes had certain locations they would travel to throughout the year. Other tribes had permanent villages and raised crops.

Native Americans believed land belonged to the community, not to individuals. They didn't own land the ways homesteaders conceived of ownership. This conceptual difference raised conflicts between settlers and Native Americans.

The Homestead Act increased the number of people in the western United States. Most Native Americans watched the arrival of homesteaders with unease. As more settlers arrived, they found themselves pushed farther from their homelands or crowded onto reservations. Reactions were as complex and varied as the Native Americans themselves. Some looked for new opportunities. Many hoped to adapt. Other fought to hold onto their traditional ways of life. All recognized that changes would alter their lives forever.

With the increase in settlers, the land the Native Americans once knew changed:

buffalo numbers decreased

domesticated animals increased

fences were built

water was redirected

more non-native crops were planted

unsustainable farming methods increased

native plants diversity dwindled

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Native Americans and the Homestead Act - Homestead National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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The Homestead Act of 1862 granted land claims in thirty states. These areas were the traditional or treaty lands of many Native American tribes. Many homesteaders believed that all native peoples were nomads and that only those who owned land would use it efficiently. Few tribes were truly nomadic.

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Native American societies before contact (video) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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The original native American Indians are believed to be Asians who, twenty thousand years ago, hiked across the treeless plain that is now the Bering Strait in search of food on the hoof and eventually moved into the diverse environments of North America. Thus it is customary to divide the Indians of North American not into ethnic groups but rather into culture areas, each of which includes nations that, in response to the regional environment, adopted substantially the same ways of life.

Pre-European Cultures

When the European invaders began arriving in the sixteenth century, farming was the dominant activity on the eastern part of the continent in the culture areas of the northeast (from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes and from lower Canada to Illinois and North Carolina) and the southeast (from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River). Hunting predominated elsewhere, save for some coastal areas where fishing prevailed and parts of the dry Southwest where gathering was more important. Where farming was more intensive, settlement was more sedentary. Yet even in the farming areas, though men aided women in clearing the land, it was the women and children who did the agricultural laborcultivating, weeding, and harvesting corn, beans, and squash; hunting and picking wild berries, fruits, and nutswhile men (and sometimes younger women) were on the hunt in the spring, early summer, and fall. In the hunting regions, where the game was larger and journeys after it longer, the Indians remained nomadic. These native economies, seemingly primitive, supported a population of five to ten million in what is now the United States and Canada.

The Eastern Woodland Indians. The natives of the culture areas in North America first affected by the European presence, those of the northeast and southeast, are customarily referred to as the Eastern Woodland Indians. They spoke different languages, and their places of residence varied in size from several thousand inhabitants to a few score of souls. Politically, organization ranged from democratic and libertarian to hierarchical and authoritarian. But within all the Eastern Woodland tribes there were clans, each claiming a single ancestor. Most tribes were matrilineal, probably because women carried on the predominant economic activity of farming. And the tribes had similar ways of regarding and rearing children. The importance of the child, unborn and born, was evident. Male missionaries and traders who visited the Indians, though barred from witnessing the delivery of the newborn, gave testimony that prospective mothers enjoyed good health during pregnancy and a painless delivery, after which they quickly reentered normal life.

The newborn child was also immediately prepared for the world. Most Indians immersed children at birth, the water temperature notwithstanding; some circumcised the boys. Other customary rituals included ear piercing, hanging wampum or other ornaments around the baby's neck, and feeding the little one oil or grease. There was a 50 percent child mortality rate due to the rigors of Indian life and the

recurrent smallpox epidemics as a result of contact with Europeans. Children were born at approximately four-year intervals due to protracted breast feeding, prohibitions on sexual relations while nursing, abortions, and even infanticide. All these factors stabilized the size of the population. Families were small by European standards; three or four children appears to have been the average.

It was common to name a child at birth, possibly from a supply of names available to the clan, or in response to an event or the appearance of the child, or after an animate or inanimate object (an eagle, the wind). Boys took on nicknames that captured their exploits (as did men), which probably put pressure on them for further achievements. Huron males apparently changed names as they moved through life stages, to combat illness, and in response to dreams. (Most Huron believed they had two souls, one of which remained with the body unless it was reborn as a child, explaining why some children resembled their dead ancestors.) Finally, the name of a recently deceased person would be passed on to another member of the tribe so the name was not lost. But it was impolite to call a person by his or her own name; instead one used a term that expressed the relationship of the speaker to the person addressed, my sister's son, for example. Even if there was no family affinity, terms such as brother or nephew could still be used.

European observers, hardened to infant mortality, were impressed by the fondness shown toward and good care taken of Indian children by their mothers. This quality was nowhere better demonstrated than in the feeding of the infant. Unlike European upper-class parents, Indians did not put their children out to be nursed. If the mother happened to die before the child was weaned the father might fill his mouth with water in which corn had been boiled and pass the liquid on to the infant. Nursing went on for several years. During this time the child stayed close to its mother, usually transported on a cradleboard tied to the mother's back. As the child grew and was allowed to crawl it was carried without a board, again on the back of the mother, who grasped it by one leg and the opposite arm. Weaned at approximately three years, the young Indian who had been so carefully attended was suddenly left to his or her own devices, unconfined and now learning from the example of elders. Still, young children must have remained under the watchful eyes of their parents and, probably, the entire village community.

Children were considered to be specially linked to the spiritual world, and in general were indulged rather than punished. Nothing shocked the Europeans more than the absence of physical punishment as a means to discipline Indian children. Sometimes they were chastised by having a little water thrown in their faces, and there were reports of Creek parents occasionally scratching disobedient children and, along with the Chickasaws, allowing young ones to be beaten by someone outside the household. Nevertheless, corporal punishment was very much the exception rather than the rule, although ridicule or fear of the supernatural might be used to produce obedience. Surely the example of parents, especially warrior-fathers, shunning corporal punishment must have contributed to children, especially sons, mimicking the restraint shown by their elders. Indeed, in a milieu which placed a premium on withstanding pain and suffering without flinching, corporal punishmenta blatant manifestation of feelinghad no place. The development of self-restraint and stoicism, initiated in childhood, was closely linked to the cultivation of autonomy, highly prized in adulthood.

The aim of these native American parents was to train male hunter-warriors, who would be required to act individualistically yet always conform to the demands of a communal, conservative, homogeneous society. Scantily clad in winter, boys hardened their bodies as they did their minds; their elders expected of them self-control and absence of "womanly" emotion. Females were instructed as planter-gatherers, who must possess wilderness survival skills as keen as those of the males. Children were expected to adopt the clearly defined gender roles assigned to them. Education of the young was primarily but not exclusively imparted by the example of elders. Religious and moral training came from the parents, seconded by the whole community. A related but different means of instruction was storytelling. This oral literature was entertaining but, more important, conveyed cultural beliefs and practices. Often the leading characters of legend and myth were children or youths, making it clear that the young were targets of these stories.

The test of childhood training would be in adulthood, and the transit from one stage of life to the other was well-defined. For girls there were sometimes rituals surrounding the onset of menstruation. For boys, whose passage through puberty was less biologically evident, there were more elaborate ceremonies: the huskinaw, a rigorous physical trial, and the vision quest, a spiritual journey. Both involved isolation as well as sensory deprivation and stimulation; their purpose was to begin life on a new course, though without forfeiting the training of childhood, and to locate through visions the spirits which dominated the young person's life. Sometimes the tribal adults gave the young man a new name, the meaning of which might shame, exalt, or even assign a personality to the recipient.

And so the line between childhood and adulthood was clearly drawn. Eastern Woodland Indians would draw upon the lessons instilled in the early years to govern the behavior of the later ones. Sex after puberty was considered normal. Marriage partners might be tentatively chosen by parents, and a young man could be expected to consult the parents of his intended. Yet there was no coercion: both young men and young women had a choice when it came to marrying and deciding whether to remain wed.

The Plains and Pueblo Indians. Tribal organization, intertribal relations, and child rearing among the Plains Indians resembled that of the Eastern Woodland Indians. However, most of the Plains tribes, being hunters rather than farmers, were on the move rather than settled. Fathers were frequently absent, leaving mothers with additional chores. Hence, grandparents ordinarily filled the void left by otherwise-occupied parents.

The experience of childhood among the sixteenth-century Pueblo Indians of southwestern North America, whose culture dated back centuries to the by-then-extinct Anasazi, was both similar to and different from that of their distant cousins on the Atlantic coast and the Plains. The Pueblo Indians led lives governed by ritual. The umbilical cord of the newborn was buried inside the house (female) or in a cornfield (male), making clear the sexual division of space and labor. The boy's penis was sprinkled with water, while the girl's vulva was covered with a seed-filled gourd, just as in the natural (adult) world clouds (men) poured their rain on seeds (women), causing them to germinate. On the fourth day the medicine man presented the infant to the rising sun, named it, gave it an ear of corn (representing the Corn Mothers who gave life) and, if it was a male, a flint arrowhead (to create thunder and lightning). A female remained attached to her place of birth, while a male changed houses, living with his mother as a boy and moving at adolescence into a kiva to learn male lore.

Gender was not the only social division among the Pueblo Indiansage also mattered. Children were considered to be indebted to their parents, who had to pay the religious elders for their birth rituals, and there continued a dyadic relationship between givers and receivers, seniors and juniors. None were more senior or more powerful than the kachina, or spirit forces. All adolescents were initiated into the kachina cult, and quickly learned what dire punishment awaited those who did not respect generational reciprocity. With menstruation girls entered womanhood through initiation into clan-based groups, while boys had to kill an enemy before induction into the warrior fellowship through a physical ordeal reminiscent of the Eastern Woodland huskinaw.

With the Spanish conquest and the imposition of Christianity in the seventeenth century, Pueblo Indian society was fundamentally altered. The Franciscan priests set about their goal of conversion by upsetting the age relationship, attempting to turn sons from their natural to their spiritual fathers, beginning with baptism. Parents were humiliated by casting adults in the roles of devils in religious dramas, fathers were emasculated by violating the gender division of labor, and children were courted with gifts, as the Franciscans played upon the Indian belief that favors must be reciprocated. Gifts of livestock and lessons in animal husbandry not only yielded baptisms and pious lives; they also under-mined the authority of the Indian hunt chiefs. The friars also offered Indian youth the nurturing benefits associated with mothers. Only those Indians who strongly resisted Christianity, among them the Hopi, remained matrilineal societies.

The Nineteenth Century and Beyond

In the mid-nineteenth century the western half of the United States was inhabited by almost a quarter million Indians: Eastern Woodland Indians (including Winnebago, Cherokee, and Chippewa) who had been forced to resettle; Plains Indians ( Sioux, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Crow, Arapaho, Pawnee, Kiowa, Apache, Comanche); Pueblo Indians of the southwest (Hopi, Zuni, Navajo), and the Indians of California and the Pacific Northwest. Advancing European-American settlement, including plans for a transcontinental railroad, and intermittent Indian-white warfare led to the creation of reservations in the late 1860s. Continuing conflict was resolved in the next decades through the United States government's policy of forced assimilation. Indian children were required to attend white schools, often far from home; by 1900 there were twenty-five off-reservation boarding schools, supplemented by reservation boarding schools and day schools, public schools (attended by both Indian and white students), and mission schools. In all cases the Indian child was expected to forsake his or her own culture for the European American.

The Hopi managed to remain remote from European-American culture into the mid-twentieth century. The cradleboard remained, as did long-term nursing on demand. Mainstream medicine was rejected (and infant mortality was high); punishment (when administered, by the maternal uncle) was notably absent while rewards persisted; children grew up always in the presence of others. Girls were taught domestic chores by mothers, and boys, taught by fathers, learned farming; some games remained that were reminiscent of the warrior past. Initiation rites continued as a way of introducing youth to the Hopi world. Children were forced to go to school, but they did not internalize what they were taught, since their elders had conditioned them to believe in basic Hopi values. Thus, the Hopi maintained a strong cultural link with the past.

Usually, however, the contact between native American Indians and European Americans had a much greater impact on the former; a traditional group usually could not survive in the face of a more aggressive, more powerful, and far more intolerant society. The Delawares, for example, an Eastern Woodland tribe, went through a cultural decline from the early sixteenth into the mid-twentieth century, by which time they had lost their original identity, lost their lands east of the Mississippi, and moved into Indian Territory in Oklahoma. There they lived in frame houses, wore European clothes, accepted dependence on the federal government, sent their children to missionary (later government) schools, changed the basis of their kinship system, and became hardly distinguishable from poor rural whites.

The Winnebagos, also an Eastern Woodland tribe, were less dramatically affected. Forced to cede land to the government, they were able to remain in Wisconsin and, although they sent their children to missionary schools, the youngsters did not leave their parents' homes. But by the third decade of the twentieth century babies were being born in hospitals, and many methods of child rearing changed to a less indulgent regime, including even corporal punishment. Brothers and sisters quarreled, in adolescence the sexes mixed, and masculine tasks disappeared (as males were more affected by cultural change than females). English was taught in the home, and the dress, housing, and transportation of the dominant culture was appropriated. In the mid-twentieth century psychoanalyst Erik Erikson visited the Dakota Sioux, a Plains Indian tribe, where he found that children received traditional training at home but faced the demands of European-American society in school. Yet they neither rebelled openly nor showed signs of inner conflict. Rather, students were apathetic or passively resistant, and they viewed the world as dangerous and hostile.

World War II proved disruptive to Native Americans: men joined the armed services and women as well as men took defense jobs. City living was nontraditional, as was some of the work done by rural women in the absence of manpower. But disruption also heightened cultural awareness and even inspired a return to practices long abandoned, such as war chants and prayers for victory, as well as traditional dances. After the war the government began implementing its so-called termination policy: doing away with tribal governments and the trust protection for Indian territories while granting land to individual Indians who would now pay taxes and obey the laws of the states they inhabited. As a corollary to termination, Indians were encouraged to relocate in cities, and by 1958 about one hundred thousand had done so, most without federal assistance.

Relocation was a failed attempt at assimilation; it resulted in continuing ghettoization and poverty. The deplorable living conditions of native Americans described by anthropologist Lewis Merriam in 1928, though they may have been temporarily improved due to rising incomes during World War II, were reconfirmed by reports from California in 1966 and University of Michigan anthropologist Joseph G. Jorgenson in 1971, and again by the census of 1990. Perhaps the most serious problem of all, alcohol, was confronted when the Indian Health Service (IHS) was created in 1954. Though underfunded, IHS has addressed itself to the endemic (and epidemic) matter of fetal alcohol syndrome. Why Indians have been particularly vulnerable to alcohol abuse is unclear, but they died of it at five times the rate of other Americans in the 1990s.

Alcoholism and suicide, poverty and unemployment: these realities more closely describe the life context of Native Americans than of any other group in the United States today. Although the federal government has been paying more attention to the needs of Indian children, as evidenced by such legislation as the Indian Education Act (1972), the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975), the Indian Health Care Improvement Act (1976), the Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act (1978), and the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978)and there is no denying the impact of this attentionnevertheless the situation for Indian children today is often grim.

See also: American Indian Schools; Canada.

bibliography

Axtell, James, ed. 1981. The Indian Peoples of Eastern America. A Documentary History of the Sexes. New York: Oxford University Press.

Boyer, Bryce L. 1979. Childhood and Folklore: A Psychoanalytic Study of Apache Personality. New York: Library of Psychological Anthropology.

California State Advisory Commission on Indian Affairs. 1966. Indians in Rural and Reservation Areas. Sacramento.

DeMallie, Raymond J., and Alfonso Ortiz, eds. 1994. North American Indian Anthropology: Essays on Society and Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Dennis, Wayne. 1940. The Hopi Child. New York: Appleton-Century.

Eggan, Dorothy. 1970. "Institution and Affect in Hopi Cultural Continuity." In From Child to Adult, ed. John Middleton. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press.

Erikson, Erik H. 1950. Childhood and Society. New York: Norton.

Ferrero, Pat. 1983. Hopi: Songs of the Fourth World. San Francisco: Ferrero Films.

Gutierrez, Ramon A. 1991. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 15001846. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hilger, M. Inez. 1951. Chippewa Child Life and Its Cultural Background. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Illick, Joseph E. 2002. American Childhoods. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jorgenson, Joseph G. "Indians and the Metropolis." In The American Indian in Urban Society, ed. Jack O. Waddell and O. Michael Watson. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

Mann, Henrietta. 1997. Cheyenne-Arapaho Education, 18711982. Niwot: University Press of Colorado.

Mannes, Marc. 1996. "Factors and Events Leading to the Passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act." In A History of Child Welfare, ed. Eve P. Smith and Lisa A. Merkel-Holguin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Mead, Margaret. 1932. The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press.

Meriam, Lewis, et al. 1928. The Problem of Indian Administration. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Newcomb, William W. 1956. The Culture and Acculturation of the Delaware Indians. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Newcomb, William W. 1974. North American Indians: An Anthropological Perspective. Pacific Palasades, CA: Goodyear.

Pettitt, George A. 1946. Primitive Education in North America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rawls, James J. 1996. Chief Red Fox Is Dead: A History of Native American Indians since 1945. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Rountree, Helen C. 1989. The Powhattan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture. Norman: Oklahoma University Press.

Sorkin, Alan L. 1978. The Urban American Indian. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Swanton, John R. 1946. The Indians of the Southeastern United States. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Szasz, Margaret. 1974. Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination, 19281973. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Tooker, Elizabeth. 1964. An Ethnography of the Huron Indians, 16151649. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Trigger, Bruce. 1969. The Huron Farmers of the North. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Joseph E. Illick

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native american children
the original native american indians are believed to be asians who

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hiked across the treeless plain that is now the bering strait in search of food on the hoof and eventually moved into the diverse environments of north america.

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Native American Children The original native American Indians are believed to be Asians who, twenty thousand years ago, hiked across the treeless plain that is now the Bering Strait in search of food on the hoof and eventually moved into the diverse environments of North America.

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Native American life was a lot different than working a 9 - 5 job, running to the nearest restaurant and ending the day watching television on the couch. Life as a Native American changed for men, women and children.

To get a clear picture of the daily life of Native Americans, we need to look at it from three perspectives:

A Day in The Life of Native Men

The men began their lives with the name of an elder or ancestor. Later in life, their name would change that described a heroic act in their lives. Boys were focused on fighting and horsemanship, so they had little time for girls.

Being tough and brave was essential for men.

Men may join battles, which would consume their lives. The guardian spirit caused men to leave their tribe at the age of 17 in search of the spirit. Upon returning home, he would be ready for battle or would be sent out to hunt for his tribe and family.

Days or weeks would be spent on trying to find herds.

Men would report back to the tribe and then have to go and kill the buffalo if asked. Animals were sacred, and only the number of animals needed to eat were killed.

A Day in The Life of Native Women

Women held a very important role in their society. Women would pitch tipis, move tipis if the tribe was relocating, and they were in charge of tanning hides, too. Skinning buffalo and pray was the job of the women, and they cooked, too.

Gathering was the job of women. The women in a tribe would collect berries, nuts and other consumables while the men were hunting.

When the women weren't working, they would engage in a game of " shinny," which is a lot like field hockey.

Women were so vital to the tribe that without them, the tribe would cease to exist.

A Day in The Life of Native Children

Children had different roles, depending on the tribe they were part of at birth. Children that were part of the Plains Native tribes were cared for by their parents, and they were never beaten. Strength was vital to the tribe, and crying was not acceptable.

Babies may even have been moved to another location if they cried and wouldn't stop.

The issue with this practice is that opposing tribes may hear the cries and locate the baby and their respective tribe. Children would eventually be taught in the ways of their tribe and their beliefs.

Rituals would be taught to children, too.

Children copied their parents often to learn how to live and perform daily activities. Boys would be seen on toy horses. Girls would be seen making tipis and played with dolls made out of the skin of deer.

Boys would go out to find their spirit animals between the age of 14 - 17. Much of a boy's younger years were spent training for hunts and battle.

Rituals and religion were also a major part of life, with tribes honoring their ancestors often and holding big ceremonies when the entire tribe was able to gather together.

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A Day in The Life of Native Indian Americans - The People's Paths Resource

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Native American life was a lot different than working a 9 - 5 job, running to the nearest restaurant and ending the day watching television on the couch. Life as a Native American changed for men, women and children. To get a clear picture of the daily life of Native Americans, we need to look [...]

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Traditional Life as a Native American Child

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Kids learn about what life was like as a Native American Child before the europeans arrived including early childhood, punishment, growing up, school, and fun facts.

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Native American foods: History, culture, and influence on modern diets - ScienceDirect

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Approximately 12,000-15,000 years ago people from northeast Asia crossed the Bering Land Bridge to enter and inhabit North America beginning in Alaska but rapidly spreading throughout North and South American and the Caribbean islands. These people rapidly adapted to the available food sources and soon developed new foods.

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Native people pass down information-including food traditions-from one generation to the next through stories, histories, legends and myths. Native elders teach younger generations how to prepare wild game and fish, how to find wild plants, which plants are edible, their names, their uses for food and medicine, and how to grow, prepare and store them.

As European settlers spread throughout America and displaced Native American tribes, Native food customs were upended and completely disrupted. The evolution of Native American cuisine can be broken down into four distinct periods, described below.

The variety of cultivated and wild foods eaten before contact with Europeans was as vast and variable as the regions where indigenous people lived.

Seeds, nuts and corn were ground into flour using grinding stones and made into breads, mush and other uses. Many Native cultures harvested corn, beans, chile, squash, wild fruits and herbs, wild greens, nuts and meats. Those foods that could be dried were stored for later use throughout the year.

As much as 90 percent of the Southwestern Pueblo diet consisted of calories consumed from agricultural products, with wild fruits, greens, nuts and small game making up the balance. Because large game was scarce in some areas, textiles and corn were traded with the Plains people for bison meat. There is evidence that ancient Native cultures even incorporated cacao-the bean used to make chocolate-into their diets, as a 2009 excavation in New Mexico's Chaco Canyon revealed.

Corn, beans and squash, called the Three Sisters by many tribes, serve as key pillars in the Native American diet and is considered a sacred gift from the Great Spirit. Together, the plants provide complete nutrition, while offering an important lesson in environmental cooperation. Corn draws nitrogen from the soil, while beans replenish it. Corn stalks provide climbing poles for the bean tendrils, and the broad leaves of squashes grow low to the ground, shading the soil, keeping it moist, and deterring the growth of weeds.

As European settlers began arriving in the Americas, beginning with Christopher Columbus in the 15th century, they brought with them their own food customs. Some of the foods that came with the Europeans included sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, the horse, peaches, apricots, plums, cherries, melons, watermelon, apples, grapes and wheat.

Spanish sheep changed the lifeways of the Navajo (Diné) dramatically. From the time the Diné first acquired sheep, their flocks became central to their culture and lives. Newborn lambs are brought into the house when it is cold and fed by hand. Sheep are still a sign of wealth in some communities and can be given as a bridal gift to a woman's family from her prospective husband.

Just as Native communities adopted new foods and livestock into their cuisine, newcomers also wove ingredients from Native American communities into their cuisines. The Italian tomato, the Irish potato, Asian chiles, Britain's chips served with their fish, were all introduced by Native people of the Americas after initial contact in the 15 th century and beyond.

3. Government-Issued Foods and Forced Relocation

The opening of the western frontier, triggered by the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, encouraged many settlers to move west into what was traditionally Indian country. Congress initiated the Federal Indian Removal Act of 1830, which evicted more than 100,000 Native Americans east of the Mississippi River to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, completely disrupting traditional Native foodways-and all of their traditional food sources.

In the Southwest, in 1864, the Diné (Navajo) were also forced to leave their homelands in Arizona when all of their crops were burned and animals killed, leaving them with no food. They were forced to walk to Fort Sumner, New Mexico on the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, where many perished.

Four years later, on the Long Walk of the Navajo, they were consolidated onto a reservation. In what became known as The Trail of Tears, the people of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations were forced out of their homes and made to walk to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) to make their homelands available to settlers. All nomadic tribes north of the new border with Mexico were settled onto reservations.

During these forced relocations, new foods were distributed to tribes in the form of government-issued rations. The rations, distributed twice a month, originally included lard, flour, coffee and sugar and canned meat, generically known as "spam," which has been linked to an increased risk of diabetes among Native people. This food distribution program led to one of the most dramatic dietary changes in Native American history.

The original intention of the U.S. government was to supply rations as an interim solution until relocated Native people were raising enough food of their own. Instead, many Indigenous people became dependent on the rations. Some tribes initially abandoned their traditional food-procurement practices but found that there was never enough of the government-issued food to feed all their tribal members.

The Indian taco, one of today's best-known Native American dishes, was developed as a creative combination of government-issued rations with traditional Indigenous foods that the ancestors used for survival. Wheat flour, baking powder, lard and, later in the distribution process, yellow processed cheese, were all commodity foods issued to families on reservations (and still being issued today). Beans, wild game meat, if available, green chiles and tomatoes, already familiar and in some cases being produced by many families at the time, made a natural accompaniment to the new commodity foods.

Although a relative newcomer to the Native table, the Indian taco, and the fry bread on which it is served, are now considered indispensable at national fairs, powwows, and community events, both on reservations and in urban areas.

4. New Native American Cuisine

For the first time in U.S. history, Native chefs, Native cooks, restaurateurs and Native community members can decide for themselves what foods they want to include on their menus and on their plates.

The new Native American cuisine combines contemporary elements, which might include culinary techniques, presentation and flavors, with elements from the ancestral foods of the past. By weaving together the past and present, new Native American cuisine helps restore and disseminate pre-colonial food-and the Indigenous knowledge that accompanies it-for future generations.

Sources

"How to Eat Smarter," by Christine Gorman, Time, October 20, 2003.

U.S. Dietary Guidelines Unfit for Native Americans, by Neal D. Barnard, M.D., and Derek M. Brown,July 4, 2010.

American Indian Food, by Linda Murray Berzok,Greenwood Press, 2005.

America's First Cuisines, by Sophie D. Coe,University of Texas Press, 1994.

"Evidence of cacao use in the Prehispanic American Southwest," by Patricia L. Crown and W. Jeffrey Hurst, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, February 17, 2009.

Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province; Exploring Ancient and Enduring Uses, by William W. Dunmore and Gail D. Tierney,Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Senses of Place by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso Eds,School of American Research Press, 1996.

"Inter-Indian Exchange in the Southwest," by Richard I. Ford, in Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 10. Southwest, Smithsonian Institution, 1983.

"Seeds of Health: The Hunger for Ancestral Foodways," Lois Ellen Frank with Melissa D. Nelson, presented at the NAISA Conference in Tucson, Arizona, 2010.

American Terrior: Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields, by Rowan Jacobson,New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.

"Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and the Performance of Identity," by Susan Kalcik, in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Gathering the Desert, by Gary Paul Nabhan, University of Arizona Press, 1985.

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, by Gary Paul Nabhan, Norton, 2002.

Why Some Like it Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity, by Gary Paul Nabhan, Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2004.

Heritage Farming in the Southwest, byGary Paul Nabhan, Western National Parks Association, 2010.

American Indian Food and Lore, by Carolyn Neithammer, Collier Books, 1974.

Eating in America: A History by Wavery Root and Richard De Rochemon, Ecco Press, 1995.

"Ritual Aspects of Corn Utterances amongst a Navajo Family from Pinon, Arizona," by Walter Whitewater, Unpublished Paper, Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, 2002.

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How Native American Diets Shifted After European Colonization | HISTORY

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For centuries, Indigenous people's diets were totally based on what could be harvested locally. Then white settlers arrived from Europe.

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It's no secret that the rich, highly processed, and refined foods of our Western diet are wreaking havoc on the general population. Obesity rates are growing, and nearly half of American adults are dealing with diet-related chronic illnesses such as heart disease, high blood pressure, or type 2 diabetes.

A diet loaded with saturated fats, refined sugars, sodium, and less than healthy substances is having devastating effects on our bodies, but it wasn't always this way.

Our ancestors - including the Native Americans of the western hemisphere - relied on wild foods, domesticated crops, fresh game, and fiber-packed legumes and fruits for a truly diverse (and utterly healthy) diet. For communities living in the desert, these foods would have included chia, nopales, and - a Cappadona Ranch favorite - mesquite.

Many of these foods are high in vitamins and mineral content, making them wonderfully beneficial for the people of those days.

Eating Like Our Ancestors

The hunter-gatherer people were likely to be a very healthy bunch. Depending on all-natural sources of food meant they had a solid supply of nutrition.

When the Native Americans began inhabiting the Americas, they found a land with abundant game like deer, buffalo, wild sheep and goats, elk, caribou, bears, beavers, rabbits, squirrels, turtles, alligators, snakes, wild birds, insects, as well as fish and shellfish.

Then there were the domesticated crops and wild foods. While there were many nomadic tribes that thrived on hunting and gathering, many others became advanced farmers, developing special techniques like irrigation, terracing, and crop rotation to have enough food to survive through winter. Farming in unison with gathering - from simple berry picking to more complicated processes like tapping trees for maple syrup - provided these indigenous people with a variety of healthy sources of food.

Important crops and wild foods included pumpkins, wild rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggs, honey, a variety of nuts, cranberries, strawberries, wild plums, roots, greens, and a huge variety of other fruits and vegetables.

Several things are worth noting here including the fact that because of the size of the New World (and America), every distinct tribe had its own unique diet, customs, and language. Because of this, it is difficult to pinpoint a specific "Native American Diet". However, since there were plenty of trade routes throughout North America, many types of foods could be found in all corners of the New World. This includes the staple foods known as the three sisters: corn (maize), beans, and squash.

Another interesting point is that the foods that were first developed in the New World through hybridization and selection have become the cornerstone of many diets throughout the world. It's estimated that now nearly 60% of all foods consumed worldwide came from the New World.

Desert Foods & Mesquite in the Life of Native People

The diversity of landscapes in the New World meant that each tribe had unique variations in their diet. For the people of the southwest, this included a variety of plants and foods that could only be found in their environment.

These desert foods offered many health benefits that helped to prevent many of the diseases that now run rampant in the native community. These foods included: acorns from the Emory Oak, grains such as amaranth, tepary beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, lima beans, lentil beans, cacti pads, tuna, chiles, chia, plantago, and - Cappadona Ranch's beloved - mesquite beans.

Of all these various desert foods, mesquite became a major resource for the people living in the American Southwest. The mesquite tree came to be such an essential tool that many tribes, such as the Pima, eventually came to identify it as the "Tree of Life".

Not only was the mesquite tree and bean a valuable commodity that was eaten and even mixed with water to produce a refreshing drink, the trunks and limbs of the tree were used to make shelters and fencing; the leaves were turned into lotions and medicines for toothaches, sores, burns, and chapped skin; the gum was used for treating upset stomach, aiding in digestion, and used as a glue; the sap helped wounds; the bark was used as cloth; the roots and woods became valuable sources of fuel; and it was even used for sports.

These foods provided the sustenance, vitamins, protein, and calories these ancient people needed to remain healthy and strong.

Sadly, things would soon change.

A European Way of Life Emerges & the Western Diet

The arrival of Europeans meant a drastic change in the way of life for the native people of the New World. While the Native Americans were initially able to adapt to the tremendous changes that were occurring - including the arrival of new plants and animals - many were eventually forced to change their traditional lifestyles.

From traditional big game being over-hunted to waterways being dammed shut and forests being cleared, it became harder for natives to eat and thrive as they once had. Many tumultuous wars left the native population relegated to reservations, where their diets of hunting, fishing, gathering, and farming were replaced by government-supplied commodity foods.

These changes in lifestyles and foods have come to play a major role in the present-day epidemic of obesity and diabetes among Native American populations.

But this way of living and eating hasn't just affected these native peoples - it has affected us all.

While this may not come across as the most positive of facts, it certainly is true. More than two-thirds of adults, and nearly one-third of children and youth, are overweight or obese, according to data drawn from the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans report. This change has a number of factors including the development of poor eating habits, increased access to highly processed foods, less physical activity, environmental changes, and less sleep.

Our diet plays an especially beneficial - or in this case harmful - role in our overall health. The type of foods we consume can have a huge effect on our intestinal flora, which is the 100 trillion different types of bacteria that call our gut home, and can also greatly affect our immune system.

These modern changes in diet and lifestyle have led to drastic changes in our health, but changing the way we eat and how much physical activity we get can help to prevent these issues, especially as we get older.

A New Hope

The epidemic of diabetes and obesity that has affected the Native American population has drawn plenty of attention from concerned medical professionals, nutritionists, scientists, government agencies, and community organizations.

And many people are fighting back. For several decades now, various agencies, universities, community partners, and community leaders have urged native people to return to the traditional diets of their ancestors. From tribes in Arizona who evolved metabolically to the feast-and-famine cycles experienced by their forefathers, to the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest who would have had a diet based largely on fish, these first Americans are returning to their roots to avoid the health-related pitfalls of their modern diet.

Studies from as far back as the early 1990's indicate that " a change in the Indian diet back to the beans, corns, grains, greens and other low-fat, high-fiber plant foods that their ancestors depended upon can normalize blood sugar, suppress between-meal hunger and probably also foster weight loss. "

While researchers continue to investigate the link between traditional desert foods and diabetes prevention, American Indians are forging ahead by returning to a diet that offers them a new hope, and they're getting help from many places.

Take, for instance, the White Earth Land Recovery Project, which is working to preserve and restore the traditional practices of sound land stewardship, language fluency, and community development. One of their goals is also to preserve traditional American Indian foods and cooking methods. Then there's the Native Seeds/SEARCH organization, which is working hard to preserve native plants from the Southwest and Northwestern Mexico.

Scholars and universities are also getting involved in the movement. There was the Decolonizing Diet Project initiated by Marty Reinhardt at Northern Michigan University. This year-long challenge was designed to challenge participants to eat only foods that were available in the Great Lakes region before 1602. While this specific study ended several years ago, it sparked a resurgence in research into indigenous diets. The nonprofit First Nations Development Institute noted an increase in agriculture-related grant request several years ago.

Even entrepreneuring Native Americans are making a push to bring traditional foods into the mainstream. Chef Sean Sherman (a.k.a. Sioux Chef), who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation, operates the Tatanka Truck in Minneapolis which specializes in the traditional foods of the Great Plains.

The echoes of America's past are finally coming through, hopefully in time to save us all.

Tips for Improving Your Diet and Health

Research continues to show that eating healthier and an active lifestyle can greatly improve our health, and it doesn't have to be super complicated or unpleasant.

The following tips and changes to your diet can go a long way in helping you improve your health in the long-term:

Eat more high-fiber plant foods like vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds.

Watch out for all of that salt and sugar! Plenty of refined foods will have these two in bulk.

Don't forget those prebiotic foods like onions, garlic, asparagus, beets, cabbage, beans, oats, bananas, and more.

Healthy fats can be great for you including fats found in foods like salmon and oils like olive oil and peanut oil.

Let go of those bad habits like smoking and overindulging in alcoholic beverages.

Remember to aim for at least 30 minutes of physical activity every day.

At Cappadona Ranch, we are doing our part to provide delicious, healthy treats for you and your family. Our goal is to provide natural foods that satisfy and stories that touch the soul. Find out more about our products here.
Sources:

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Forgotten in Time: The Native American Diet and How It Has Returned to Heal the First People

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It's no secret that the rich, highly processed, and refined foods of our Western diet are wreaking havoc on the general population. Obesity rates are growing, and nearly half of American adults are dealing with diet-related chronic illnesses such as heart disease, high blood pressure, or type 2 diabetes.

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The first part of this article talks about a wide range of foods. Look and think what would grow in the area of your people.

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Healthy eating in the modern world is not always easy. Fast food and prepackaged foods offer inexpensive and easy alternatives to healthier foods or cooking from scratch. Even in remote locations, you can find snacks like burgers, chips, candies and sodas. However, these kinds of foods can be harmful to our health in the long run.

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Mapping

We strive to map Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages across the world in a way that goes beyond colonial ways of thinking in order to better represent how Indigenous people want to see themselves.

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Native Land is a resource to learn more about Indigenous territories, languages, lands, and ways of life. We welcome you to our site.

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Territory Acknowledgement Teacher's Guide Mobile Apps API Territories List Languages List Treaties List

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When European explorers arrived in America, Native Americans did not communicate through writing as we know it. Instead, they told stories (oral histories) and created pictures and symbols. This type of communication is not unique to Native Americans, as long before writing was developed, people around the world recorded events, ideas, plans, maps, and feelings by drawing pictures and symbols on rocks, hides, and other surfaces.

Historic pictorial symbols for a word or a phrase have been found dating to before 3000 BC. These symbols, called pictographs, are created by painting on rock surfaces with natural pigments. These natural pigments included iron oxides found in hematite or limonite, white or yellow clays, and soft rock, charcoal, and copper minerals. These natural pigments were mixed to produce a palette of yellow, white, red, green, black, and blue. Historic pictographs are usually found under protective ledges or in caves where they have been protected from the weather.

Another similar form of communication, called petroglyphs, were carved, pecked, or abraded into stone surfaces. This carving could produce a visible indentation in the rock or it could cut deeply enough to reveal unweathered material of a different color below.

Native American symbols were like words and often had one or more definitions and/or contained different connotations. Varying from tribe to tribe, it can sometimes be difficult to know their meanings, while other symbols are very clear. With the multiple languages spoken by Native American tribes, symbols or "picture writing" was often used to convey words and ideas. Symbols were also used to decorate homes, were painted on buffalo hides, and recorded important events of the tribe.

These images are a valuable record of cultural expression and hold profound spiritual significance for contemporary Native Americans and for the descendants of the early Spanish settlers.

The arrival of Spanish people to the Southwest in 1540 had a dramatic impact on the lifestyle of the pueblo people. In 1680 the Pueblo tribes rose up in revolt of Spanish rule, and drove the settlers out of the area and back to El Paso, Texas. In 1692 the Spanish resettled in the Albuquerque, New Mexico area. As a result of their return, there was a renewed influence of the Catholic religion, which discouraged participation by the Puebloans in many of their traditional ceremonial practices. As a consequence, many of these practices went underground, and much of the image making by the Puebloans decreased.

There were many reasons for creating the Petroglyphs, most of which are not well understood by modern society. Petroglyphs are more than just "rock art," picture writing, or an imitation of the natural world. They should not be confused with hieroglyphics, which are symbols used to represent words, nor thought of as ancient Indian graffiti. Petroglyphs are powerful cultural symbols that reflect the complex societies and religions of the surrounding tribes.

The context of each image is extremely important and integral to its meaning. Today's native people have stated that the placement of each petroglyph image was not a casual or random decision. Some petroglyphs have meanings that are only known to the individuals who made them. Others represent tribal, clan, kiva or societal markers. Some are religious entities and others show who came to the area and where they went. Petroglyphs still have contemporary meaning, while the meaning of others is no longer known, but are respected for belonging to "those who came before."

Throughout the United States, there are thousands of pictographs and petroglyphs with the greatest concentration in the American Southwest. The site that has the most is the Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico. At the monument, archaeologists have estimated there may be over 25,000 petroglyph images along the 17 miles of escarpment. A small percentage of the petroglyphs found within the park pre-date the Puebloan time period, perhaps reaching as far back as 2000 B.C. Other images date from historic periods starting in the 1700s, with petroglyphs carved by early Spanish settlers. It is estimated 90% of the monument's petroglyphs were created by the ancestors of today's Pueblo people. Puebloans have lived in the Rio Grande Valley since before 500 A.D., but a population increase around 1300 A.D. resulted in numerous new settlements. It is believed that the majority of the petroglyphs were carved from about 1300 through the late 1680s.

Compiled, designed and edited by Kathy Weiser/ Legends of America, updated September 2019.
Also See: Blythe Intaglios - Nazca Lines in California Healing Crystals and Stones Indian Proverbs & Wisdom Medicine Bags or Bundles Native American Totem Animals & Their Meanings Geology.com National Park Service Native American Roots

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Native American Symbols, Pictographs & Petroglyphs

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When European explorers arrived in America, Native Americans did not communicate through writing as we know it. Instead, they told stories (oral histories) and created pictures and symbols. This type of communication is not unique to Native Americans, as long before writing was developed, people around the world recorded events, ideas, plans, maps, and feelings by drawing pictures and symbols on rocks, hides, and other surfaces.

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How did Native American tribes communicate with the Europeans and other tribes?

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By : Ashley Machado & Atiana Quenga Did Native American tribes use signals to communicate with the Europeans and other tribes? Before Christopher Columbus the Native Americans already spoke a language, but tribes had different ones. https://westernreservepublicmedia.org/onestate/herronna.ht…