American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Over the past two decades, a number of scholars, many of them Native Americans, have published works drawing attention to the significance of the American Indian in American history. They suggest, first, that Indians played a significant role in shaping what is today the United States by, second, contributing uniquely American components to the national experience. Anecdotal and narrative accounts of American Indians have appeared since Columbus’s first landfall. Western, or frontier, historians have talked about the ”Indian Barrier” to Anglo-American expansion. But rarely were Natives credited with playing a formative role in the making of the nation. As scattered residents of an “empty continent,” they could be ignored as irrelevant to the mainstream of American history. This essay endeavours to explore the evidence and interpretations which urge us to consider how Native Americans helped shape America. Many of this nation‘s finest thinkers have tried to understand and explain what it means to be an American. The quest for national identity and definition surfaced two centuries ago and still continues, revealing a certain restlessness, a rootlessness which seems to haunt the nation. In 1980, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder highlighted “one of the key problems in American society now” as “people’s lack of commitment to any given place.” Like foster children, periodically moving from place to place, living in houses but aching for a home, immigrant peoples have lived on and ranged about a continent without sinking roots. What is needed, Snyder asserts, is ”not even a rediscovery but a discovery of North America. . . . People live on it without knowing what it is or where they are. They live on it literally like invaders.” So they wonder where they fit, who they are.

Native Americans developed during prehistoric times a continent-wide system of trade between ethnic groups. Foodstuffs and highly valued perishable and imperishable commodities moved sometimes very long distances along major trade routes linking numerous ethnic groups. Europeans could establish trading relationships with Native Americans only because the latter already engaged in international trade on a significant scale and well understood the principles of commodity exchange. Within the aboriginal trading system certain “trading centers” stood out as major nodes of exchange on long-distance inter-ethnic trade routes. This paper outlines basic characteristics of trading centers, then identifies and briefly describes one that has not been recognized before. Some sedentary Peoples living in the Great Plains Culture Area never abandoned their riverine oasis settlements and horticultural habits to become transhumant mounted folk. Historically well-known among these cultural conservatives are the Mandan who lived on the middle Missouri River or its tributaries. The Mandan first came to colonial European attention, in fact, as active traders. At the time of the initial French visit during the winter of 1738-39, and certainly later, the Mandan villages (and later single village) constituted what John C. Ewers labeled a ’’trading center. ’’

Myths and legends world-wide, as well as ancient history, suggest that conflict, schism or factionalism existed universally in communities of all sizes. Edward Spicer (1962:492) wrote: “It seems very doubtful that what modern men know as ‘difference of opinion’ existed for more than very short periods in any communities of the Indians in northwestern New Spain before the coming of white men.” Persistent dissenters were banished. The tempting problem is to explain why the factionalism occurs in general and in any particular case. In her famous book, Patterns of Culture (1934:BO-88) Ruth Benedict developed a very attractive picture of Pueblo Indian culture producing a mild, non-aggressive, friendly and accommodating personality in Pueblo Indians, which she labelled “Apollonian” and contrasted the Pueblos with the aggressive Plains “Dionysians.” Finding considerable factionalism in Taos Pueblo has tempted Benedict and a number of other scholars to try to explain why it seemed to occur there more frequently than among other Apollonian communities practicing the Pueblo culture. I am motivated to write this paper because of my conviction that ethnohistorical research has brought to light important information which suggests that the previous explanations of Taos factionalism were incomplete. That Peyotism, a new and distinct religion based on use of a slightly intoxicating, spineless cactus found only in south Texas and Mexico, was accepted only at Taos seems to have prompted several students of Pueblo culture to attribute to Peyotism that Taos appeared more disturbed and split than the other Pueblo communities where Peyotism was not practiced.