The percentage of cephalic indices above 84 (on the heads of living individuals) among certain Indian tribes (Boas) is as follows: Apache, 87.6; Arapaho, 5.0; Arikara, 24.6; Blackfeet, 6.2; Caddo, 47.2; Cherokee, 20.0; Cheyenne, 10.4; Chickasaw, 14.4; Comanche, 65.3; Cree, 4.9; Creek, 25.0; Crow, 12.0; Delaware 12.0; Eskimo, (Alaska), 10.6; Harrison Lake, B.C., 88.8; Iroquois, 15.4; Kiowa, 25.0; Kootenay, 19.1; Mandan, 4.5; Micmac and Abnaki, 7.0; Mohave, 86.5: Montagnais, 21.7; Moqui, 54.3; Navaho, 49.4; Ojibwa (eastern), 26.6; Ojibwa (western), 10.2; Omaha, 23.0; Oregon (south), 50.9; Osage, 79.1; Ottawa and Menominee, 24.7; Pawnee, 4.8; Pima, 9.6; Round Valley, Cal., 4.8; Sahaptin, 57.4; Shuswap, 59.9; Sioux, 9.6; Taos, 6.0; Ute, 8.9; Wichita, 96.0; Winnebago, 66.8; Zuñi, 41.4.
The Apache, Mohave, Navaho, Osage, Sahaptin, Wichita and Winnebago practised skull-deformation, which accounts in part for their high figures. The brachycephalic tendency of the Caddo, Moqui, Shuswap and Zuñi is marked; the Comanche, with an average cephalic index of 84.6 and the Harrison Lake people with one of 88.8, are noteworthy in this respect. As in the case of stature, so in the case of head-form, there seems to have been much mingling of types, especially in the Huron-Algonkian region, the Great Plains and the North Pacific coast.
The North American Indian may be described in general as brown-skinned (of various shades, with reddish tinge, sometimes dark and chocolate or almost black in colour) with black hair and eyes varying from hazel brown to dark brown. Under good conditions of food, &c., the Indian tends to be tall and mesocephalic as to head-form, and well-proportioned and symmetrical in body. The ideal Indian type can be met with among the youth of several different tribes (Plains Indians, Algonkians, Iroquoians, Muskogians and some of the tribes of the south-western United States). Beauty among the aborigines of America north of Mexico has been the subject of brief studies by Dr R. W. Shufeldt and Dr A. Hrdlička (Boas Anniv. Vol., New York, 1906, pp. 38-42).
The extent to which the red and white races have mixed their blood in various parts of North America is greater than is generally thought. The Eskimo of Greenland have intermarried with the Danes, and their kinsmen Race mixture. of Labrador with the English settlers and “summerers.” The eastern Algonkian Indians in New England and Acadia have now considerable French, English and Scottish blood. Many of the Canadian Iroquois are more than half French, many of the Iroquois of New York half English. The Cherokee, an Iroquoian people of the Carolinas, have some admixture of Scottish and German blood, to which Mooney would attribute some, at least, of their remarkable progress. In the state of Oklahoma, which has absorbed the old “Indian Territory,” the results of race-amalgamation are apparent in the large number of mixed bloods of all shades. In spite of the romance of Pocahontas, the intermarriages of the two races in the Virginian region seem not to have been very common or very important. Nor does there appear to have been much intermarriage between Spaniards and Indians in the south Atlantic region, though in Texas, &c., there was a good deal. In New France, in spite of the efforts of some recent Canadian-French writers to minimize the fact, intermixture between whites, and Indians began early and continued to be extensive. In parts of New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, some of the northern American states and regions of the Canadian north-west, there are Indian villages and white settlements where hardly a single individual of absolutely pure blood can now be found. In the veins of some of the “Iroquois” of Caughnawaga and New York state to-day flows blood of the best colonial stock (Rice, Hill, Williams, Stacey, &c., captives adopted and married within the tribe). In the great Canadian north-west, and to a large extent also in the tier of American states to the south, the blood of the Indian, through the mingling of French, Scottish and English traders, trappers, employees of the great fur companies, pioneer settlers, &c., has entered largely and significantly into the life of the nation, the half-breed element playing a most important rôle in social, commercial and industrial development.
In 1879, besides those whose mixed blood had not been remembered and those who wished to forget it, there were, according to Dr Havard (Rep. Smiths. Inst., 1879), at least 22,000 métis in the United States and 18,000 in Canada (i.e. in the north-west in each case). When the province of Manitoba entered the Canadian Confederation it numbered within the borders some 10,000 mixed-bloods, one of whom, John Norquay, afterwards became its premier. In the Columbia river region and British Columbia some intermixture has taken place, originating in the conditions due to the establishment of trading-posts, the circumstances of the early settlement of the country, &c.—this has been both French and English and Scottish. Farther north in Alaska the Russian occupation led to not a little intermixture, both with the Aleuts, &c., and the coast Indians. In some parts of the far north intermixture of the whites with the Athabaskans is just beginning. In Canada no prohibition of marriage between whites and Indians exists, but such unions are forbidden by law in the states of Arizona, Oregon, North Carolina and South Carolina.
A considerable number of the chiefs and able men of the various Indian tribes of certain regions in recent times have had more or less white blood—Iroquois, Algonkian, Siouan, &c.—who have sometimes worked with and sometimes against the whites. In the case of some tribes there have been “pure blood” and “mixed blood” factions. Some tribes have frowned upon miscegenation; even the Pueblos (except Laguna, which is Keresan) have never intermarried with the whites. Both in Canada and the United States strains of Indian blood run in the veins of prominent families. Some of the “first families of Virginia” are proud to descend from Pocahontas, the Algonkian “Princess,” who married the Englishman Rolfe. In Maine may still be discovered perhaps those whose line of life goes back to the Baron de St Casteins and his Abnaki bride, while in Ontario and New York are to be met those who trace their ancestry back to the famous Iroquois Joseph Brant and his half-English wife. In the early history of Pennsylvania and Ohio were noted the Montours, descendants of a French nobleman who about 1665 had a son and two daughters by a Huron woman in Canada. In 1817 Captain John S. Pierce, U.S.A., brother of President Franklin Pierce, married the fair Josette la Framboise, who had at least a quarter Indian (Ottawa) blood. In the latter part of the 18th century a young Irish gentleman married Neengai, daughter of the Michigan Ojibwa chief Waubojeeg, and of the daughters born to them one married a Canadian Frenchman of reputation in the early development of the province of Ontario, another the Rev. Mr McMurray, afterwards Episcopal archdeacon of Niagara, and a third Henry R. Schoolcraft, the ethnologist.
Several Indians, some full-blood, others with more or less white blood in their veins, have rendered signal service to ethnological science. These deserve special mention: Francis la Flesche, an Omaha, a graduate of the National University Law School. D.C., holding a position in the Office of Indian Affairs; Dr William Jones, a Sac and Fox, in the service of the Field Museum, Chicago, a graduate of Harvard and of Columbia (Ph.D.); and J. N. B. Hewitt, a Tuscarora, ethnologist in the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, D.C. In some regions considerable intermixture between negroes and Indians (Science, New York, vol. xvii., 1891, pp. 85-90) has occurred, e.g. among the Mashpee and Gay Head Indians of Massachusetts, the remnants of the Pequots in Connecticut, the Shinnecocks and the Montauks, &c., of Long Island; the Pamunkeys, Mattaponies and some other small Virginian and Carolinian tribes. In earlier times some admixture of negro blood took place among the Seminoles, although now the remnants of that people still in Florida are much averse to miscegenation. Of the tribes of the Muskogian stock who kept large numbers of negro slaves the Creeks are said to have about one-third of their number of mixed Indian-negro blood. Sporadic intermixture of this sort is reported from the Shawnee, the Minnesota Chippewa, the Canadian Tuscarora, the Caddo, &c., in the case of the last the admixture may be considerable. It is also thought probable that many of the negroes of the whole lower Atlantic coast and Gulf region may have strains of Indian blood. The mythology and folk-lore of the negroes of this region may have borrowed not a little from the Indian, for as Mooney notes (19th Rep. Bur. Amer. Ethnol., 1900, pp. 232-234), “in all the southern colonies Indian slaves were bought and sold and kept in servitude and worked in the fields side by side with negroes up to the time of the Revolution.” When Dr John R. Swanton visited the Haida recently the richest man among the Skidegate tribe was a negro. Some of the Plains tribes and some Indians of the far west, however, have taken a dislike to the negro.
The leader in the “Boston Massacre” of March 5, 1770, was Crispus Attucks, of Framingham, Mass., the son of a negro father and a Natick Indian mother. The physical anthropology of the white-Indian half-blood has been studied by Dr Franz Boas (Pop. Sci. Monthly, New York, 1894).
The culture, arts and industries of the American aborigines exhibit marked correspondence to and dependence upon environment, varying with the natural conditions of land and water, wealth or poverty of the soil, abundance Culture, arts, industries, &c. or scarcity of plant and animal life subsidiary to human existence, &c. Professor O. T. Mason (Handb. of Amer. Inds. N. of Mexico, 1907, pt. i. pp. 427-430; also Rep. Smiths. Inst., 1895, and Pop. Sci. Monthly, 1902) recognizes north of Mexico twelve “ethnic environments,” in each of which there is “an ensemble of qualities that impressed themselves on their inhabitants and differentiated them.”
These twelve “ethnic environments” are:—