The Native people of North America comprise an immense diversity of societies adapted to the full variety of terrestrial environments. From the tundra and coniferous forests of the far north to the swamplands and deserts of the south these societies have in many cases sustained a distinctive lifestyle and identity despite the fact that their lands fall within the boundaries of Canada and the United States, both powerful nation-states with advanced industrial economies. Indeed, the deprivation and degradation experienced by most Native American (or Indian) societies during centuries of contact with the larger Euro-American society has in recent years been put into reverse, with greater respect now being afforded both to their political rights and to the value of their particular cultures. For example, in Canada, Indian societies are now termed ‘First Nations’. Even so, the loss of population and land will never fully be recovered, and it seems likely that many decades will pass before the North American Indians enjoy the full economic, political and cultural entitlements due them as citizens of the countries into which they have been absorbed.
The first effective European contact with the Native North American societies ranged from the early sixteenth century in the south and east to the early twentieth century in parts of the Arctic. The records of explorers, missionaries and traders reveal peoples of extraordinary economic and cultural ingenuity. Large political nations and fabulous monumental architecture,both famous from parts of Central and South America, are not reported. Yet North American Indians had achieved complex social organizations and sophisticated aesthetic cultures, normally on the basis of relatively simple, in technological terms, hunter-gatherer, fishing, or farming economies. For example, on the basis of hunting, plant collecting and fishing the Calusa of Florida developed a monarchical social structure reminiscent of Ancient Egypt (Marquardt 1988), the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island evolved spectacular ceremonials of economic distribution (the potlatch), and in the Arctic the Eskimo (Inuit) accomplished a viable mode of living well beyond the latitude where trees cease to grow (Riches 1982).
The widely varying social organizations and cultures of the North American Indians have stimulated the development of compelling academic studies of inestimable importance to the discipline of anthropology. Thus the work of Morgan, Boas, “Benedict, “Eggan and many others reads as a catalogue for the history of anthropological theory over the past century and more.
Morgan and the Iroquois
Lewis Henry Morgan, best known in anthropology for his evolutionism, is more properly remembered for developing an understanding of human social institutions as components of a broader social structure. His theoretical insights rest principally on the comparative study of North American Indians, and most especially on his work on the Iroquois, the tribal confederacy in the northeastern United States among whom he conducted both field and archival research. Morgan’s studies, principally published between 1851 and 1877, provide landmark accounts of systems of kinship and marriage in general, and in particular the shape of “matrilineal descent structures. Thus the Iroquois matrilineal system, though not “matriarchal, was revealed by Morgan as permitting women to exercise exceptionally high levels of political influence (Morgan 1851). The men who sat on Iroquois tribal and confederacy councils were nominated by the women from their respective “lineages. Correspondingly, women enjoyed enormous influence in the household, connected with the fact that”uxorilocal postmarital residence meant that the main domestic unit consisted of a stable core of women whose husbands, drawn from different lineages, enjoyed no solidarity. Also to be noted is that the distinctive manner by which Iroquois classify their relatives — for example, using the same terms to label siblings and certain (but not all) cousins — has entered general anthropological parlance as the ‘Iroquois’ relationship terminology. This was first reported in 1724 by “Joseph-Frangois Lafitau, the French Jesuit missionary, and was famously developed by Morgan in his discussions of “classificatory kinship (Morgan 1870).
Twentieth-century studies of social organization
The landmark publication, Social Anthropology of .North American Tribes, edited by Fred Eggan (1937), developed Morgan’s approach to the study of North American Indians, though it eliminated its evolutionary dimension. Influenced by the British structural-functionalist, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, the contributors attend mainly to the social and political organization of a large variety of societies, especially the various Plains Indian societies of the north-central United States (e.g. Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho). The focus is principally on kinship organization, although other types of relationship, such as the joking relationship famous among many North American Indian peoples, are considered as well. Another strand in this topic, representing an important dimension in the anthropology of Native North America, discusses social change, particularly the religious revivalism which may be associated with the appalling relations with Euro-Americans during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus the Plains Indians’ ghost dance, a mil-lenarian religion foretelling a general catastrophe which only the Indian will survive, may be understood as a reaction to defeat and confinement to reservations experienced by people who until that time had steadily developed a successful buffalo hunting culture based around horses and firearms secured from European immigrants by trade (Mooney 1896). Further south, among the Navajo of Utah and Arizona, the peyote religion, focused on the ceremonial use of hallucinogens, served similar functions (Aberle 1966).
Inspired by Morgan, Eggan and others, the social organization of the North American Indians has continued to fascinate anthropologists. In particular, the matrilineal societies, though not numerically preponderant, have received considerable attention. As well as the Iroquois, examples range from the Tlingit and Haida, hunters and fishermen of coastal and island southeast Alaska, through to the Hopi, pueblo dwellers of Arizona, and also the Navajo, a people noted for having taken up livestock herding in place of hunting and agriculture. In contemporary times all Native North American Indian societies have diversified their economies because of contact with the wider American society, taking in a range of new livelihoods including lumbering, construction work, fur trading, tourism, and many other types of wage labour. Such involvement with the broader commercial economy has had a fragmenting effect on social structure, and at least the partial demise of all the traditional forms of social organization is widespread.
Boas and the Northwest Coast Indians
The work of Franz Boas and his students provides another major theoretical perspective in anthropology developed through the ethnographic study of North American Indians. Field research on the Eskimo (Inuit) of Baffin Island in 1883, and, from 1886 onwards, on the Indians of coastal northwest Canada, particularly the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island, convinced Boas that the hypothetical stages which Morgan and others believed depicted the course of societal evolution everywhere were misguided and unconvincing. In the case of the Baffin Island work, Boas’s studies put in train discussion of the relation between ecology and social organization which has dominated Inuit studies to the present day (e.g. Riches 1982). It also set the standard for the subsequent field research on the Inuit and other Eskimo-speaking peoples in the Arctic, especially that emanating from the Fifth Thule Expedition of the 1920s, which is particularly noted for its classical descriptions of the shamanistic religion (e.g. Rasmussen 1929). It is only in recent years that anthropologists have begun systematically to propose that it may be factors other than the natural environment, such as deep-rooted cultural ideas, which shape the form of Inuit social organization and customary practices (e.g. Fienup-Riordan 1990). As to Boas’s studies on the ‘Northwest Coast Indians’, these are a monumental achievement, yet the systematic description of their social organizations, which Morgan’s methods would have helped provide, eluded him. Satisfying accounts, using structuralist methods, were indeed forthcoming only in the 1970s (e.g. Rosman and Rubel 1971).
The category ‘Northwest Coast Indians’ refers to a remarkable series of ‘societies’, with broad cultural similarities and coastal adaptations, stretching from southeast Alaska (including the Tlingit and Haida) through to northern California (for example, the Yurok). These societies have in common that their economies are based on hunting, fishing and collecting (for example, of wild plants, nuts, acorns, seeds), and that their social organizations include developed systems of social ranking, the exchange of food and wealth objects (shells, coppers, bark blankets), and (in the case of most of the societies) the potlatch ceremonial. Yet these features apart, they exhibit enormous diversity, notably in language, mythology, kinship organization and art (which in the northern societies includes the totem pole). Boas addressed the complexity of Northwest Coast societies by attending in great detail to historical connections and geographical distributions concerning elements of culture within local regional areas, a perspective which subsequently came to be labelled ‘historical particularism’. Whatever the theoretical shortcomings of this perspective, thanks to Boas the wealth of data now available on the Northwest Coast Indians is unparalleled, and many later theoretical approaches in anthropology have drawn on this material as their testing ground.
As well as his fine-grained approach in tracing particular cultural elements, Boas also developed the concept of a people’s culture as an integrated whole. Among famous developments of this notion, again drawing on North American Indian material, was Ruth Benedict’s idea, published in 1934, that cultures thus construed manifest distinct ‘patterns’ or ‘configurations’ which could compellingly be described through psychological idioms. Thus Benedict contrasts the Northwest Coast Indians with the various Pueblo Indian societies, peoples whose historical achievements in stone architecture and urban organization (including cliff dwelling) rank them as among the best known Native North Americans. With regard to the characters of the Northwest Coast Indian and the Pueblo Indian cultures, Benedict particularly attended to their developed ceremonial and cultic lives and to their “secret societies and, drawing on Nietzsche, labelled them as respectively ‘Dionysian’ (Northwest Coast Indians) and ‘Apollonian’ (Pueblo Indians). These labels depict differing orientations of members of society to personal ambition and the constraint of tradition. The Dionysian is individualistic and passionate: thus among the Northwest Coast Indians, ecstasy is the aim in religious ceremonial; and in political life, in the context of social ranking, there is arrogant competition for “status, mainly through accumulation and gifting (in the ceremonial potlatch) of economic wealth such as coppers and blankets. In turn, the Apollonian is committed to tradition and decries individualism: among the Pueblo Indians, for example, there is a cultural emphasis on emotional restraint and the ideal is placidly to submit oneself to the interests of the group. Benedict’s writings, though reducing these various societies to crude stereotypes, certainly brought the North American Indians to the attention of a very wide readership.
To the future
In the late twentieth century, Native Americans have achieved a measure of political redress relating to the original appropriation of their lands by Euro-American immigrants. Of particular significance for archaeologists and museum anthropologists is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which has altered their practice significantly, while also indicating increased public recognition of Native American history (Fine-Dare 2002). Since the 1980s, Native American tribal groupings have established legal casinos, creating new revenue streams and sparking new political struggles within Indian communities and with US state authorities (Perry 2006). Both NAGPRA and casino gambling have marked significant shifts in how Native Americans conceive of and publicly present their cultural identities (Lawlor 2006). North American Indians have also won increasing admiration from wider American society for their cultural achievements. In particular, the environmental and ‘New Age’ movements laud Native Americans for their spiritual and harmonious attunement with the ecological environment, and for the prophecies associated with some Indian societies relating to an impending utopian age. The empirical veracity of New Age representations of the Indian way of life may not be fully accurate; but for the Native Americans themselves, the fact that their cultures command respect can only assist them in their continuing political struggles with the American mainstream.
