The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (28 page)

The Hopi of Third Mesa tended gardens of corn, beans, squash, gourds, and melons, always trying to produce a surplus; the ideal was to have a year’s supply stored to ward off drought. They relied on underground seepage of water and, because of the slope of the mesa, were able to capture most available rain runoff. Once the harvest of carbohydrate sources was in, a hunt leader added protein to the diet by organizing a rabbit drive.

Another post-harvest activity was raiding. The Hopi people’s official position was that they fought only in self-defense. In days of old, however, after praying to ancestral warriors for help, they set off enthusiastically with bows and arrows, tomahawks, spears, and throwing sticks. Oraibi’s traditional enemies included the Apache and Ute, whose scalps would once have been brought back, displayed on poles, and ritually “fed.” These scalps were treated as “sons” of the
nina,
or slayer, who had taken them. They would be buried with him when he died, just as scalps had been left with burials in dry caves 1,500 years earlier. Among the Hopi, the scalp taker had to seclude himself in a kiva for four days and nights, fasting and undergoing rituals of purification so that the spirits of his victims could not take revenge.

Inequality and Conflict

Let us look now at the sources of inequality at Old Oraibi. They lay principally in the field of ritual leadership and were based on the alleged sequence of the arrival of various clans. Because the culture hero Matcito had reached Oraibi first, his Bear clan was preeminent in ritual. At the time of Titiev’s stay, the Pikyas clan was second only to the Bears.

Ritual authority, however, did not necessarily translate into secular authority. The head of the village, always drawn from the Bear clan, could urge proper behavior. The heads of the 21 clans, who served as his advisers, could agree. The war leader could threaten the disobedient with punishment. But in the final analysis there was no monopoly of force, no power to carry out commands. Since the highest authorities were ritual leaders, the ultimate punishment for wrongdoing would be supernatural.

Even within a phratry, the ties between clans were so weak that bickering was endemic. In 1934, for example, the Pikyas and Patki clans (both part of Phratry VIII) began quarreling. The Patki argued that the ceremonies they owned entitled them to be ritually superior to the Pikyas. In fact, they claimed that the ancestors of the Pikyas were late arrivals, Tewa speakers from the village of Hano, and therefore not “true Hopi.” This quarrel confirmed an ancient prophecy that warned the Pikyas to beware of the Patki.

The most famous Oraibi conflict took place in 1906 and is still the subject of heated debates. It involved the Bear and Spider clans, both part of Phratry II. According to Titiev, the Spiders argued that they were equal to the Bears in ritual authority but were never allowed to provide Oraibi with its headman. The Bears sought justification for their ritual preeminence in the legend of Matcito. The Kokop clan of Phratry VI sided with the Spiders. More and more clans began to choose sides in the dispute, and eventually half of Oraibi’s population picked up and moved to nearby Hotevilla.

The Bear-Spider conflict had been simmering for decades before Oraibi split, and many scholars believe that the dispute had multiple underlying causes. Anthropologist Jerrold Levy has examined many potential causes, which include the destabilizing effects of population growth, drought, the erosion of farmland, and interference in Hopi life by everyone from Anglo-American ranchers and missionaries to the U.S. Cavalry.

We have no doubt that one can find multiple causes for every social upheaval, but we would like to focus on a few widespread principles. Achievement-based societies fissioned, or gave rise to daughter communities, all the time. The archaeological record is full of periods when a handful of villages appeared in a region, grew, split, and sent junior segments off to found new villages, while senior segments remained at the parent community.

Although certain clans were treated as the ritual leaders of the village, that did not give them the secular power to prevent fissioning. A hierarchy of ritual authority was little more than a hierarchy of virtue, and the larger an achievement-based society became, the harder it was for such a hierarchy to hold it together—especially if a sizable group considered its position in the hierarchy unfairly subordinate.

THE ORIGINS OF ACHIEVEMENT-BASED VILLAGE SOCIETY ON THE PLAINS OF NORTH AMERICA

Corn, as we have seen, reached the U.S. Southwest from Mexico. In the Southwest the major obstacle to its success was drought, which Native Americans overcame with irrigation. The story was different along the Missouri River, from North Dakota to St. Louis. In this case the major obstacle to corn’s success was the threat of frost.

The first types of corn to enter the Midwest and the Plains were Mexican varieties that needed 180 to 220 days to mature. They succeeded in the warm Southwest but were too cold-sensitive for the shorter growing season of the central United States. Corn reached the Midwest at least 2,000 years ago but did not grow well enough at first to become a staple.

What probably opened up the Plains and the Midwest was a new type of corn called Northern Flint, which matures in only 160 days. Archaeologist David Brose suggests that this newly evolved corn was given one of its first serious tryouts by the Indians of northern Ohio and western Ontario, a region whose climate is ameliorated by the waters of Lake Erie. The lake was surrounded by humid soil and provided Native people with the fish needed to sustain life while they experimented with the growing of 160-day corn. Once Flint corn, with its eight to 12 rows of kernels, had established itself, 1,000 to 900 years ago, virtually all Native American groups in the Midwest made a greater commitment to corn agriculture.

For millennia the Plains, the land of the bison or American buffalo, had been home to hunters and gatherers. Now the Missouri River became a corridor leading horticulturalists north to the Dakotas. A prehistoric society known as the Middle Missouri tradition, using hoes made from bison shoulder blades, began cultivating the floodplain of the Missouri and its major tributaries. They planted gardens of corn, beans, squash, gourds, sunflowers, and tobacco, fished and collected mussels from the river, and hunted buffalo on the prairies beyond the river.

The earliest Middle Missouri villages, occupied perhaps 1,000 years ago, were at the mercy of marauding foragers who came off the Plains to raid their food supplies. In response the villagers surrounded themselves with defensive ditches and palisades. Villages typically had anywhere from 15 to 100 rectangular houses, each big enough for an extended family. The houses had fireplaces and storage pits, and the doors were kept narrow for defense. The ritual buildings in these villages, called ceremonial lodges, were framed with cedar posts and covered with an insulating layer of prairie sod.

In spite of the distances involved, the villagers of the Middle Missouri tradition carried out active exchanges of valuables with other regions. They acquired native copper from Lake Superior, conch shells from the Gulf Coast, dentalium from the Pacific, and a stone called catlinite from which tobacco pipes could be carved.

In 1541 Spanish explorers under Francisco Vásquez de Coronado reached what is now Kansas. Over the next century, many of the Spaniards’ horses escaped into the Plains and changed the lifeways of Native American groups. Some tribes abandoned horticulture and escalated their hunting of buffalo by making use of captured horses. Other tribes chose to continue farming the floodplain of the Missouri. It is the latter societies that we examine in this chapter.

During the late 1700s fur traders, following the Missouri River into what is now North Dakota, encountered two Native American societies called the Mandan and Hidatsa. In 1804 the Lewis and Clark expedition met the same two groups. Some 29 years later, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, a German explorer, reached Fort Clarke on the upper Missouri. He was fascinated by the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Crow, three allied tribes who spoke languages of the Siouan family. While the Mandan and Hidatsa lived in horticultural villages on the Missouri, the Crow had become equestrian buffalo hunters. Despite their different lifestyles, all three societies were allies, defending themselves against mobile horsemen such as the Cheyenne, Blackfoot, and Lakota.

Our first detailed look at the Mandan and Hidatsa comes from a French trapper named Charbonneau, who had lived among the Hidatsa for 37 years when Prince Maximilian interviewed him. By 1907 anthropologists such as Robert H. Lowie had begun to visit the societies of the upper Missouri, combining their personal observations with the historic accounts of Maximilian and Charbonneau.

Based on these pioneering descriptions, the precolonial Mandan and Hidatsa seem to have been typical achievement-based societies. They were composed of clans who reckoned descent in the mother’s line. Leadership was based on achieving respected elder status, for which raiding and ritual sponsorship were alternative routes.

Life in these Siouan-speaking villages was an endless search for
xo’pini,
a supernatural essence or life force that lay at the heart of success and renown. Some anthropologists have translated xo’pini as “power,” but it reminds us more of the magical, electric life force that the ancient Polynesians called
mana.
Xo’pini could be acquired either from a supernatural being or from a person of renown.

According to the age-old principle of reciprocity, one could not acquire xo’pini without paying a price. Often the price was self-inflicted suffering, such as the cutting off of the final joint of one’s own finger or the suspension of oneself by skewers through the flesh. Suffering could lead to visions in which a spirit or sacred animal revealed one’s destiny.

The man or woman who received a vision put together a sacred bundle, a tightly wrapped collection of objects associated with the supernatural encounter. Some bundles remained personal; a warrior, for example, might take his bundle along on a raid in hopes that its xo’pini would protect him. A bundle kept around so long that its origins were lost, however, became a clan or tribal bundle, one whose life force was all the greater because it went back to mythical time. The clan created a story about its origins, sang songs to it, and performed rituals over it. Some bundles were curated by clan elders for generations, making them the Plains equivalent of the fetishes curated by the Hopi.

Sacred bundles were by no means small. One Mandan bundle is reported to have contained the following items: two rings and a crescent made from native copper; one gourd rattle; six magpie tail feathers; 12 owl tail feathers; the scalp of a Cheyenne warrior killed by a respected Mandan ancestor; the skull and left foreleg of a grizzly bear; one tuft of chin whiskers from a buffalo; one skull and one horn from a buffalo; the hide from the head of a buffalo calf; and a stuffed jackrabbit of the type used to bait eagle traps.

In comparison, one well-known Hidatsa bundle contained two human skulls, one buffalo skull, a tobacco pipe used in ritual, a turtle shell, and a fan made from the wing of an eagle. The two human skulls were said to be from enormous eagles that had assumed human form.

The Hidatsa bundle just described had an interesting history. It was originally in the possession of a man named Small Ankle, a member of the Water Buster clan. When Small Ankle died suddenly, his son Wolf Chief was persuaded to sell the bundle to Christian missionaries. In 1907 it made it to the Heye Foundation’s Museum of the American Indian in New York.

The Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s convinced many members of the Water Buster clan that they were being supernaturally punished for selling the bundle. A delegation asked President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to intercede on their behalf, and in 1938 the Heye Foundation returned the bundle to the Hidatsa in exchange for a buffalo medicine horn. Lo and behold, the drought ended with the return of the bundle to Fort Berthold (
Figure 23
).

FIGURE 23.
   The sacred bundles of Mandan and Hidatsa clans contained
xo’pini,
a powerful life force. In 1938 the Water Buster clan of the Hidatsa recovered a sacred bundle that had been lost to them for more than 30 years. Among other items, this bundle contained two human skulls which, according to legend, came from enormous eagles that had assumed human form. In this drawing, inspired by a 70-year-old photo, clan elders Foolish Bear and Drags Wolf have partially unwrapped the bundle to reveal the skulls.

While personal sacred bundles were sometimes buried with their owners, others could be “purchased” in the context of a ritual. A father, for example, might host a ceremony at which his son was allowed to purchase his bundle. This would only happen, however, if his son had already had a vision of himself making the purchase.

Once his vision had been reported, the son might need a year to accumulate sufficient resources for the purchase. He borrowed from his relatives and the members of his age cohort, much as New Guinea tribesmen borrowed from their relatives to pull off an important act of moka. The seller of the bundle was then expected to distribute to others all the property he had received. Accumulating wealth was frowned on in Plains society.