what modern american ceremony would come closest in intent to a native american potlatch
Many thousands of years earlier Christopher Columbus' ships landed in the Bahamas, a unlike group of people discovered America: the nomadic ancestors of modern Native Americans who hiked over a "land span" from Asia to what is at present Alaska more than 12,000 years ago.
In fact, by the time European adventurers arrived in the 15th century A.D., scholars estimate that more than than 50 meg people were already living in the Americas. Of these, some 10 million lived in the expanse that would become the U.s.. Equally time passed, these migrants and their descendants pushed s and east, adapting as they went.
In order to keep runway of these diverse groups, anthropologists and geographers have divided them into "culture areas," or rough groupings of contiguous peoples who shared similar habitats and characteristics. Most scholars break North America—excluding present-solar day Mexico—into x carve up culture areas: the Arctic, the Subarctic, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Plains, the Southwest, the Great Bowl, California, the Northwest Coast and the Plateau.
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The Arctic
The Arctic culture area, a cold, flat, treeless region (actually a frozen desert) virtually the Arctic Circle in present-day Alaska, Canada and Greenland, was abode to the Inuit and the Aleut. Both groups spoke, and continue to speak, dialects descended from what scholars call the Eskimo-Aleut language family.
Considering it is such an inhospitable mural, the Arctic's population was insufficiently pocket-sized and scattered. Some of its peoples, particularly the Inuit in the northern part of the region, were nomads, following seals, polar bears and other game as they migrated across the tundra. In the southern part of the region, the Aleut were a bit more than settled, living in minor angling villages along the shore.
The Inuit and Aleut had a great deal in mutual. Many lived in dome-shaped houses fabricated of sod or timber (or, in the North, ice blocks). They used seal and otter skins to make warm, weatherproof clothing, aerodynamic dogsleds and long, open line-fishing boats (kayaks in Inuit; baidarkas in Aleut).
By the time the United states purchased Alaska in 1867, decades of oppression and exposure to European diseases had taken their cost: The native population had dropped to simply 2,500; the descendants of these survivors however make their home in the surface area today.
READ More than: Native American History Timeline
The Subarctic
The Subarctic culture expanse, by and large composed of swampy, piney forests (taiga) and waterlogged tundra, stretched across much of inland Alaska and Canada. Scholars have divided the region's people into 2 language groups: the Athabaskan speakers at its western finish, among them the Tsattine (Beaver), Gwich'in (or Kuchin) and the Deg Xinag (formerly—and pejoratively—known equally the Ingalik), and the Algonquian speakers at its eastern stop, including the Cree, the Ojibwa and the Naskapi.
In the Subarctic, travel was difficult—toboggans, snowshoes and lightweight canoes were the primary ways of transportation—and population was sparse. In general, the peoples of the Subarctic did non form big permanent settlements; instead, small-scale family groups stuck together equally they traipsed later on herds of caribou. They lived in pocket-size, easy-to-move tents and lean-tos, and when it grew likewise cold to hunt they hunkered into underground dugouts.
The growth of the fur trade in the 17th and 18th centuries disrupted the Subarctic way of life—at present, instead of hunting and gathering for subsistence, the Indians focused on supplying pelts to the European traders—and eventually led to the displacement and extermination of many of the region's native communities.
The Northeast
The Northeast civilisation area, 1 of the first to have sustained contact with Europeans, stretched from nowadays-day Canada's Atlantic declension to North Carolina and inland to the Mississippi River valley. Its inhabitants were members of 2 main groups: Iroquoian speakers (these included the Cayuga, Oneida, Erie, Onondaga, Seneca and Tuscarora), most of whom lived along inland rivers and lakes in fortified, politically stable villages, and the more than numerous Algonquian speakers (these included the Pequot, Flim-flam, Shawnee, Wampanoag, Delaware and Menominee) who lived in minor farming and fishing villages along the ocean. There, they grew crops like corn, beans and vegetables.
Life in the Northeast culture expanse was already fraught with conflict—the Iroquoian groups tended to be rather aggressive and warlike, and bands and villages outside of their allied confederacies were never condom from their raids—and it grew more complicated when European colonizers arrived. Colonial wars repeatedly forced the region'south Indigenous people to take sides, pitting the Iroquois groups against their Algonquian neighbors. Meanwhile, as white settlement pressed westward, it eventually displaced both sets of Indigenous people from their lands.
The Southeast
The Southeast culture area, north of the Gulf of United mexican states and southward of the Northeast, was a humid, fertile agronomical region. Many of its natives were expert farmers—they grew staple crops like maize, beans, squash, tobacco and sunflower—who organized their lives effectually small formalism and market villages known every bit hamlets. Mayhap the most familiar of the Southeastern Indigenous peoples are the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole, sometimes called the V Civilized Tribes, some of whom spoke a variant of the Muskogean language.
Past the time the U.S. had won its independence from Uk, the Southeast culture expanse had already lost many of its native people to disease and displacement. In 1830, the federal Indian Removal Act compelled the relocation of what remained of the V Civilized Tribes so that white settlers could accept their land. Between 1830 and 1838, federal officials forced nearly 100,000 Indigenous people out of the southern states and into "Indian Territory" (later Oklahoma) westward of the Mississippi. The Cherokee called this frequently deadly trek the Trail of Tears.
READ More: How Native Americans Struggled to Survive on the Trail of Tears
Coil to Proceed
The Plains
The Plains culture area comprises the vast prairie region betwixt the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, from present-day Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Before the arrival of European traders and explorers, its inhabitants—speakers of Siouan, Algonquian, Caddoan, Uto-Aztecan and Athabaskan languages—were relatively settled hunters and farmers. After European contact, and especially subsequently Spanish colonists brought horses to the region in the 18th century, the peoples of the Great Plains became much more nomadic.
Groups like the Crow, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Comanche and Arapaho used horses to pursue smashing herds of buffalo across the prairie. The most mutual abode for these hunters was the cone-shaped teepee, a bison-pare tent that could exist folded up and carried anywhere. Plains Indians are also known for their elaborately feathered war bonnets.
As white traders and settlers moved west across the Plains region, they brought many damaging things with them: commercial goods, like knives and kettles, which Ethnic people came to depend on; guns; and disease. By the end of the 19th century, white sport hunters had nearly exterminated the area'south buffalo herds. With settlers encroaching on their lands and no way to make money, the Plains natives were forced onto government reservations.
READ MORE: How Horses Transformed Life for Plains Indians
The Southwest
The peoples of the Southwest culture area, a huge desert region in present-day Arizona and New Mexico (forth with parts of Colorado, Utah, Texas and Mexico) developed two distinct ways of life.
Sedentary farmers such as the Hopi, the Zuni, the Yaqui and the Yuma grew crops like corn, beans and squash. Many lived in permanent settlements, known as pueblos, built of rock and adobe. These pueblos featured groovy multistory dwellings that resembled apartment houses. At their centers, many of these villages also had large ceremonial pit houses, or kivas.
Other Southwestern peoples, such as the Navajo and the Apache, were more nomadic. They survived by hunting, gathering and raiding their more established neighbors for their crops. Because these groups were e'er on the motility, their homes were much less permanent than the pueblos. For instance, the Navajo fashioned their iconic eastward-facing round houses, known equally hogans, out of materials similar mud and bark.
By the fourth dimension the southwestern territories became a office of the United States later on the Mexican War, many of the region's native people had already been killed. (Castilian colonists and missionaries had enslaved many of the Pueblo Indians, for case, working them to death on vast Spanish ranches known as encomiendas.) During the second half of the 19th century, the federal regime resettled virtually of the region's remaining natives onto reservations.
The Peachy Bowl
The Great Basin culture area, an expansive bowl formed past the Rocky Mountains to the east, the Sierra Nevadas to the west, the Columbia Plateau to the n, and the Colorado Plateau to the south, was a arid wasteland of deserts, salt flats and brackish lakes. Its people, most of whom spoke Shoshonean or Uto-Aztecan dialects (the Bannock, Paiute and Ute, for instance), foraged for roots, seeds and nuts and hunted snakes, lizards and small-scale mammals. Because they were always on the move, they lived in compact, easy-to-build wikiups made of willow poles or saplings, leaves and brush. Their settlements and social groups were impermanent, and communal leadership (what little at that place was) was informal.
Later European contact, some Great Bowl groups got horses and formed equestrian hunting and raiding bands that were similar to the ones we acquaintance with the Keen Plains natives. Subsequently white prospectors discovered gold and argent in the region in the mid-19th century, most of the Great Basin's people lost their state and, frequently, their lives.
California
Earlier European contact, the temperate California area had more than people than any other North American landscape at the time, approximately 300,000 people in the mid-16th century. It'south estimated that 100 different tribes and groups spoke more than than 200 dialects. These languages were derived from the Penutian (the Maidu, Miwok and Yokuts), the Hokan (the Chumash, Pomo, Salinas and Shasta), the Uto-Aztecan (the Tubabulabal, Serrano and Kinatemuk) and the Athapaskan (the Hupa, amongst others). Many of the "Mission Indians" who were driven out of the Southwest by Spanish colonization also spoke Uto-Aztecan dialects.
Despite this great diversity, many native Californians lived very similar lives. They did not practice much agriculture. Instead, they organized themselves into small, family unit-based bands of hunter-gatherers known equally tribelets. Inter-tribelet relationships, based on well-established systems of merchandise and common rights, were generally peaceful.
Spanish explorers infiltrated the California region in the middle of the 16th century. In 1769, the cleric Junipero Serra established a mission at San Diego, inaugurating a specially fell flow in which forced labor, disease and assimilation most exterminated the culture area's native population.
READ More: California's Piffling-Known Genocide
The Northwest Coast
The Northwest Declension culture area, along the Pacific declension from British Columbia to the tiptop of Northern California, has a mild climate and an abundance of natural resource. In particular, the bounding main and the region's rivers provided about everything its people needed—salmon, especially, but too whales, sea otters, seals and fish and shellfish of all kinds. Equally a effect, different many other hunter-gatherers who struggled to eke out a living and were forced to follow animal herds from place to identify, the Indians of the Pacific Northwest were secure plenty to build permanent villages that housed hundreds of people apiece.
Those villages operated according to a rigidly stratified social structure, more sophisticated than any outside of United mexican states and Central America. A person's status was adamant by his closeness to the village's chief and reinforced by the number of possessions—blankets, shells and skins, canoes and even slaves—he had at his disposal. (Goods similar these played an important office in the potlatch, an elaborate gift-giving ceremony designed to affirm these class divisions.)
Prominent groups in the region included the Athapaskan Haida and Tlingit; the Penutian Chinook, Tsimshian and Coos; the Wakashan Kwakiutl and Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka); and the Salishan Coast Salish.
The Plateau
The Plateau civilization surface area sat in the Columbia and Fraser river basins at the intersection of the Subarctic, the Plains, the Smashing Basin, the California and the Northwest Coast (present-day Idaho, Montana and eastern Oregon and Washington). Most of its people lived in small, peaceful villages along stream and riverbanks and survived by line-fishing for salmon and trout, hunting and gathering wild berries, roots and basics.
In the southern Plateau region, the great bulk spoke languages derived from the Penutian (the Klamath, Klikitat, Modoc, Nez Perce, Walla Walla and Yakima or Yakama). North of the Columbia River, most (the Skitswish (Coeur d'Alene), Salish (Flathead), Spokane and Columbia) spoke Salishan dialects.
In the 18th century, other native groups brought horses to the Plateau. The region's inhabitants quickly integrated the animals into their economic system, expanding the radius of their hunts and acting every bit traders and emissaries between the Northwest and the Plains.
In 1805, the explorers Lewis and Clark passed through the surface area, followed by increasing numbers of white settlers. By the end of the 19th century, most of the remaining members of Plateau tribes had been cleared from their lands and resettled in government reservations.
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Source: https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/native-american-cultures
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