151. Plains, Southwest, Northwest Areas
For instance, the Indians of the Plains between the Rocky mountains and the Mississippi river form a comparative unit. They are all warlike, the great aim in life of every man in these tribes being attainment of military glory. All the Plains tribes subsisted to a large extent on buffalo, lived in tipis—tents made of buffalo skins—and boiled their food with hot stones in buffalo rawhide. Nearly all of them performed a four days’ religious ceremony known as the Sun Dance, of which one of the outstanding acts was fasting and sometimes self-torture inflicted with skewers drawn through the skin and torn out. These customs were common to the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Blackfeet, Assiniboine, Omaha, Kiowa, Comanche, and other tribes.
As one passes from this region to the mountainous plateau which constitutes the present New Mexico and Arizona—the Southwest of the United States—one encounters a series of tribes often inhabiting stone houses, subsisting by agriculture, cooking in earthenware pots, little given to fighting, according authority to priests rather than warriors, erecting altars, and performing masked dances representing divinities. This Southwestern culture, its internal relations, and the tribes participating in it, have already been discussed in another connection (§ [87]).
If, however, on leaving the Plains one turns northwest to the shores of British Columbia and southern Alaska, a third distinctive type of native civilization appears. Among these Northwestern or North Pacific Coast tribes, such as the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Nutka, and Salish, the priest as well as the warrior bowed before the rich man, an elaborate set of rules and honors separating the wealthy high-born from the poor and lowly. Aristocracy, commoners, and slaves made up distinct strata of society in this region. Public rituals were occasions for the ostentation of wealth. Houses were carpentered of wood. Cooking was done in boxes. The prevalent food was fish.
The significant thing is that these are not three tribes, but three groups each consisting of a number of politically independent tribes spread over a considerable territory and evincing a fairly fundamental similarity of customs and institutions. We are confronting three kinds of culture, each super-tribal in range and attached to a certain area. These areas have sometimes been called “ethnographic provinces”; they are generally known as “culture-areas.” Of such areas ten are generally recognized on the North American continent. These are the Plains, Southwest, North Pacific Coast, Mackenzie-Yukon, Arctic, Plateau, California, Northeast, Southeast, and Mexico.[23]
Obviously we have here a classification comparable to that which the naturalist makes of animals. As the zoölogist divides the vertebrate animals into mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes, so the anthropologist divides the generic North American Indian culture into the cultures of these ten areas. The naturalist however cannot stop with a group as inclusive as the mammals, and goes on to subdivide them into orders, such as the rodents, carnivores, ungulates, and the like. Each of these again he goes on splitting into families, genera, and finally species. The species correspond to the smallest groups in human society, namely the tribes or nations. Parallel to the family or order which the naturalist finds between a particular species and the great class of mammals, one may therefore expect to discover groups intermediate between particular tribes and the large culture-areas. Such intermediate groups would consist of clusters of tribes constituting fractions of a culture-area: clearly pertaining to this area, but yet somewhat set off from other clusters within the same area—like the Pueblos and Navaho within the Southwest, as already described (§ [87]). We may call such clusters or fractions sub-culture-areas, and must concern ourselves with them if we desire to deepen our understanding of aboriginal American civilization.
For the sake of simplicity, it will be well to select a limited portion of North America, instead of wrestling with the intricacies of the continent as a whole, in an endeavor to see how its culture-areas and sub-culture-areas reveal themselves in detail and help to throw light on native history. California will serve as a type example.