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The culture of the Indians of pre-Columbian America. Peoples of North America: culture and traditions

The culture of the Indians of pre-Columbian America. Peoples of North America: culture and traditions

18.06.2019

How and when did the diverse historical and cultural regions of North America appear? Archaeologists have undertaken to answer this question. On the territory of North America, the centers of the emergence of anthropoid apes were not found. Therefore, the indigenous population of the North American continent must have been newcomers. But where did the "first Americans" come from - the Paleo-Indians, that is, the Stone Age Indians, mammoth hunters?

Most researchers are inclined to believe that man first appeared on the American continent 25-29 thousand years ago. According to anthropologists - scientists who study the origin of man - America was inhabited by representatives of one racial type - the Mongoloid. From their distant Asian ancestors, the American Indians retained blood groups, among which there are no blood types currently existing on the Eurasian continent. They are distinguished by typical for Mongoloid spatulate teeth - incisors, men rarely go bald in old age, and women almost do not turn gray. The people who settled the American continent were strong, hardy and energetic.

Culture and life of the ancient population of North America.

Approximately 15-10 thousand years ago, during the Ice Age, life was in full swing around the hearths. Here, archaeologists find tools made of stone and bone, as well as the bones of animals that these people ate. The "first Americans" were hunters of large, now fossil, animals: first the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, then the deer, the bison. Collecting edible plants supplemented their diet.

They had throwing weapons - darts and spears, bow and arrows. They knew how to use fire, build round temporary dwellings covered with skins. They hunted mammoths, musk oxen, elks, bears, bison and elephants. To create tools, like their counterparts in Western Europe, they widely used bone. It was from bone that they made straighteners for arrow shafts, throwing tips, and needles. With such needles they sewed fur. From fur, they sewed practical and comfortable fur overalls, as well as costumes consisting of several items: pants, parka boots with a rounded bottom edge - a “tail”. It is this detail of the cut of the parka - a long cape, or "tail" - that testifies to the connection of ancient Americans with the population of ancient Eurasia, in particular, the population of the Siberian taiga - the Tungus.

In the town of Folsom in southwestern North America, archaeologists have found the bones of 23 fossil bison and stone laurel throwing points. These items belonged to people who lived in North America about 15 thousand years ago. Traces of hunters on large fossil mammals - bison, horses, sloths - have been found throughout what is now the United States.

About 4 thousand years ago, the first farmers appeared in the southwestern United States - Cochisi. By this time, the first experiments in the cultivation of corn, beans and squash belong. At the same time, the man of the American archaic used fish resources and edible aquatic plants. Baskets for collecting edible plants, grain graters, knives, drills, and scrapers are known among household items of Cochisi.

About 2,000 years ago, the Cochisi farmers were replaced by the Hohokam and the Mogollon from Mexico. The creators of these cultures were not only industrious farmers, but also makers of magnificent ceramics, of various shapes and skillfully decorated with geometric decoration.

The dishes that were used in everyday life were very simple. These are bowls and vessels with a flat bottom, differing in size and shape. The painting is located on the outside along the walls of such vessels. But many ceramic vessels were made for cult purposes. For example, bowls in which sacrificial food made from cornmeal and other gifts were offered to deities were often decorated on the inside with complex geometric designs. These bowls and vessels were placed in the graves along with the dead.

Ornamental compositions on ceramic vessels consisted of complex geometrized images of sacred animals and birds. Scientists have suggested that these birds and animals were revered as totems. The compositions on the inner parts of the vessels often fit into a circle or triangle and, as a rule, were placed in the central part at the bottom of the vessel. The drawings were applied mainly in black and red colors, which, perhaps, symbolized the idea of life and death.

Representatives of these cultures built irrigation facilities in their fields, erected places of worship on earthen platforms, and lived in houses buried in the ground, the walls of which were lined with bricks of unbaked clay, and the floors were made of wooden boards.

Around the year 200, basket makers replaced the Hohokam and Mogollon cultures in the southwestern United States. They were called so because they made watertight baskets that were pot-shaped. Basketmakers cooked food in such vessels on hot stones. Basketmakers lived in caves.

In the canyons of Arizona, in the valleys of the Mencos and Rio Grande del Norte rivers, in the Colorado Canyon famous for its archaeological monuments, people lived who were called cliff-dwellers (translated from English. Inhabitants of cliffs, rocks). Like their basket-maker predecessors, the cliff-dwellers lived in rock crevices, under rock sheds, and in caves. But there they built entire cities. Their mud brick houses were created not only by people, but also by nature itself, they squeezed into rocky depressions, grew in breadth and depth, piled on top of each other. In fact, it was one big house in which a community lived, consisting of several large families - clans. Each family had its own sanctuary, which was a round building and resembled a well. The Indians called such ancestral shrines Kiva.

In the period 300 BC. e. - 800 AD e. in the valleys of the Ohio and Illinois rivers lived people who learned to find native copper and process it in a cold way. They created a culture that scientists call the Aden and Hopewell cultures. In the middle reaches of the Mississippi, pre-state associations and a pre-urban culture arose. A feature of this culture was temple architecture in the form of pyramids, highly artistic metal and ceramic products.

Aden culture and hopewell ceased to exist. The archaeological finds of these cultures extracted from the earth are stored in the most famous museums in the world, one of which is the Museum of Natural History in New York. But as a reminder of the former greatness of these cultural traditions of ancient America, numerous mounds-temples have been preserved. They are very different in appearance and structure. Archaeologists have created a typology of adena-hopewell mounds-temples.

Mounds - mounds used to be called mounds with coffins. This is a kind of burial grounds, in which numerous burials were excavated. The height of such mounds does not exceed 10 meters. They are most numerous in the northern part of the Mississippi River basin. Archaeologists consider them the most ancient form of funerary structures of the Aden-hopewell cultural tradition.

Pyramidal mounds are structures on earthen platforms of geometric outlines. It is obvious that the idea of erecting such burial structures was born in the neighborhood, in Mexico. Inside such pyramidal architectural structures, the deceased were rarely buried. The burials were located on the territory of special cemeteries next to them.

Garbage mounds are a special kind of "shell piles" known in the Bronze Age culture of Europe as places of accumulation of food waste and household waste. In Chaco Canyon, such rubbish mounds are found near settlements and mark the start of a road southeast of Pueblo Bonito. They consist of stones, shards, ceramics and other inorganic waste. At the same time they are burial grounds. They are rectangular in shape and look like platforms.

Mounds in the form of animals and birds are the most mysterious and interesting form of religious architecture in North America. Such mounds began to be erected after 700 by the creators of the hopewell culture. They survived in the states of Wisconsin and Ohio. Some have the outlines of a snake (405 m long), an eagle, a bear (17 m), a fox, an elk, a bison, a jaguar, a toad (46 m), inside these structures, archaeologists have found secondary burials with poor inventory. It is possible that the symbolic figures of the mounds were considered as images of totemic ancestors, in the wombs of which the deceased were placed with the aim of their subsequent resurrection.

The dead were buried in barrows, accompanied by tools and weapons. Funerary wooden masks with deer horns were placed on the faces of the deceased. The clothes of the dead were literally strewn with river pearls and decorated with metal plates and figurines of animals and birds.

Unlike the burial mounds of the Aden culture, the hopewell burial complexes were built in two stages. Earthen fences were erected around the mounds, which had a round, rectangular or octagonal shape. Such fences could reach 500 m in diameter. Two or more such burial complexes could be connected by paths. Enclosing structures of a rectangular shape contained dozens of mounds. Like all monuments of this type, these were not just burial grounds, but also special tribal sanctuaries that had a cult and ritual significance.

The Hopewells (the creators of the Hopewell culture) had several types of funeral rites, among which the most common was cremation - the burning of corpses. But for people who had a particularly high social status, there was a different burial custom. For them, special burial houses were built in specially selected places. They were buried in shallow graves or log tombs. The floor of such a burial was rammed and an adobe platform was built. A rectangular bed was erected on a clay platform, on which the body of the deceased was placed. Nearby were objects that were subject to a special procedure of "killing" or destruction. These items were supposed to follow the deceased to the next world. Among these items were objects made of obsidian - volcanic glass, which was brought by merchants from the far west; obsidian served as an ideal material for making ritual knives. There were also jewelry made of copper, river pearls, which literally showered the bodies of the deceased. Smoking pipes were placed in the graves. The tube itself was made in the form of a flat platform, on which the image of the animal was located.

The distant descendants of the "first Americans" eventually became the ancestors of three large groups of the indigenous population of North America - Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts.

Aleuts.

Aleuts - the island people of the Pacific North - hunters of marine mammals, fishermen, gatherers. Their life is inseparable from the sea.

Hunting.

The sea near the islands of the Aleutian archipelago does not freeze. The Aleuts hunted sea otters and seals, northern fur seals and sea lions, large and small whales, dolphins, sea urchins, as well as foxes, cormorants, ducks, and geese. In addition, they caught fish - cod, halibut, salmon.

As a rule, hunters united by 15-20 people. The Aleuts went out to sea each in their own kayak. Its frame consisted of an elastic wooden frame - a lattice. Parts of the lattice were fastened together with a whalebone. Such a frame did not bend or break under the impact of ocean waves. Outside, the kayak was covered with the skin of sea lions. High-speed kayaks could reach speeds of up to 10 kilometers per hour, while the kayak moved silently through the water. The carrying capacity of the kayak is up to 300 kg.

The hunter who went fishing was carefully equipped. His body was kept from the cold by a parka made of bird skins. A waterproof kamley from the intestines of seals was poured onto the park, into the seams of which miniature bunches of red bird feathers were sewn - amulets that protected the hunter from the forces of evil during fishing and attracted prey. For hunting marine mammals, the Aleuts used harpoons with throwing boards, spears, which were called "beaver arrows".

Dwellings.

Fleeing from bad weather, the Aleuts built dwellings buried deep in the ground. The traditional housing of the Aleuts is a dugout with an entrance through a smoke hole. Inside the dwelling they descended along a log with notches.

Before the arrival of the Russians, such structures were built from the bones of a whale, and later fins were also used as a building material. 10-40 families lived inside such a dugout. In ancient times, the Aleuts settled in large houses that could accommodate even more people.

Crafts.

Stone, bone, driftwood (a tree washed ashore by the sea), grass served as the material for the manufacture of fishing tools, weapons and utensils. Men used stone, later iron daggers, women used wide, short horizontal, slightly curved slate knives ("pekulka" or "ulu").

With the help of needles made from bird bones, Aleut craftswomen sewed clothes, kayak covers, made leather purses for sale, waterproof clothes from the intestines of marine mammals.

The Aleuts were very skilled at weaving mats and baskets. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, Aleutian women made baskets from grass and willow twigs, made using the technique of ring weaving. In ancient times, such baskets were used as bags along with bags made from the skins of marine mammals. They were woven from multi-colored grass fibers, mostly yellowish and brownish shades. Using a variety of colors of grass fibers, craftswomen created a geometric ornament based on symbolic figures: a rhombus, a rectangle, a triangle, a zigzag.

Clothing.

The Aleuts - both men and women - wore long deaf clothes with sleeves without a hood. Men's parkas were sewn from the skins of birds, women's - from the skins of sea beavers and cats, with wool inside. On their feet, the Aleuts wore boots made of the skin of marine animals. The clothes were perfectly adapted to life in the conditions of the oceanic tundra - the Aleutian Islands.

Since ancient times, the Aleuts have been sewing unique clothes from bird skins - puffin parkas. 300 - 400 skins were used to make the parka. The skins were removed with a stocking from the bodies of puffins, dressed and sewn together with tendon threads. Birdskin parkas were sewn double-sided. They could be worn outside both with feathers (in the rainy season) and dressed with leather (the feathers pleasantly cooled the body in the summer). The skins were laid out in tiers and neatly sewn together. Between the horizontal rows of skins, strips of leather dyed with red paint were laid. Embroidery was done over strips of leather. They embroidered clothes with deer hair. Now this technology has been lost, but earlier the craftswomen worked with bone needles so skillfully that there were no traces of embroidery on the inside of the leather strip. White long deer hair, taken out from under the deer's neck earring, was considered sacred and was considered as a talisman.

One of the main elements of the hunting costume of the Aleuts were wooden visors, decorated with sea lion whiskers, and conical headdresses, also made of wood, worn by representatives of the tribal elite.

Beliefs.

The Aleuts worshiped the spirits of nature in the form of animals. One such animal was the whale. In general, the whale played a special role in the life of the Aleuts. Ribs and skulls of whales are often found in ancient Aleutian burials. Often the skull of a dead hunter lay between two whale ribs.

The Aleuts made mummies from the bodies of the revered dead and buried them in caves. This method of burial was known to the Aleuts from ancient times.

American Eskimos.

Eskimos live in the American Arctic and subarctic. They inhabited a vast area from the Bering Strait to Greenland. A small group of Eskimos lives in the northeast of Asia.

The Eskimo languages are Yupik, Inupiaq, Inuktukut.

Hunting.

Whale hunting played a special place in the life support system. In hunting for marine mammals, the Eskimos used two types of boats - kayak and umiak.
The kayak is silent and fast. Its load capacity reaches 300 kg. The hunter, sitting down in it, tightly fastened the belt around his waist. If the boat capsized, colliding with an ice floe, the hunter could turn it back with a stroke of the oar without taking on water.

The main hunting tool of the Eskimos was a harpoon with a shooting tip.

Dwellings.

The Eskimos settled in small groups, between which weak ties were maintained. In summer, the dwellings of the Eskimos were cone-shaped buildings made of poles, covered with birch bark and bark. Winter dwellings are dugouts with one or two living quarters and a supply room at the entrance. Inside the dwelling there were special sleeping places.

During hunting expeditions to the center of the American Arctic region, the Eskimos built snow dwellings, which were called igloos. Inside the igloo, a canopy of skins was built, which served as a living chamber. In the event of a sudden blizzard, the Eskimos burrowed into the snow along with the dogs and waited out the bad weather.

Two families often lived in an igloo, the interior space was heated by zhirinkas - bowls made of soapstone with a wick floating in seal fat. They cooked food on the fats.

Clothing.

Eskimo clothing was well adapted to the cold climate of the Arctic. Summer clothes were sewn from fur in one layer, and always with fur to the body. Winter in two layers, with one layer facing the body with fur, the other with fur outward. Clothes were made from deer fur. The men wore a short kukhlyanka with a hood made of deer or seal skin, the fur facing the body.

Crafts.

In the craft, bone carving was a special branch of art, and only on a walrus tusk. They made the handles of labor tools from it, giving them the shape of animals and people, household and religious objects. Master carvers created very realistic sculptural compositions with the participation of people and animals, as well as images of spirits. Such figurines were called pelicans. Pelikens are the spirits of wealth and contentment; the Eskimos wore these figures as talismans.

North American Indians.

By the time the Europeans arrived, more than two thousand Indian tribes lived on the territory of the North American mainland. Let's talk about a few.

Athapaski.

Athapaski is the collective name of the Indians of this vast area, who belong to various tribes: the Kuchins, the Tanayna Koyukons, the Inaliks and many others. Athabaskans are hunters and fishermen. The fauna of the region is quite diverse. There were deer, caribou, elk, and many other animals, so hunting prevailed over fishing.

Dwellings and life.

The entrance to the house was usually facing the river, so the settlements usually stretched along the coast. Houses were cut from logs. The winter dwelling had a domed vault deepened into the ground, and was covered with animal skins. There was a hearth in the center of the house. The floor was covered with branches, and the entrance was through a short dug tunnel. The bunks were the main element of the interior decoration of the dwelling. They sat, slept, ate. The dishes were made of wood, horn, grass and birch bark.

Clothing.

The Athabaskans wore well-dressed suede, made from deerskin without fur. Suede shirts were decorated with suede fringes and reindeer hair embroidery. The cut of men's and women's shirts was the same. The hem most often had a pointed outline, the edge of the hem was decorated with a fringe, the edges of the clothes were ornamented, fur or fringe was left there, these were amulets. The costume was complemented by suede pants and special shoes - moccasins.

Prairie Indians

The territory occupied by the Indians of the Great Plains is located in the heart of North America. It stretches from the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan to Texas.

Teton-Dakota, Sioux, Comanche, Kiowa, Mandan - American traders and hunters were the first to meet representatives of these Indian tribes in the developed expanses of the Great Plains.

All tribes spoke different languages and did not understand each other. In order to communicate, they invented sign language and pictorial writing, the signs of which were understood by all Prairie Indians.

Hunting was mainly a male occupation. The men hunted down deer and elk, hiding in the bushes or in the undergrowth. Most often it was an individual hunt. Collective hunting for buffalo in the summer.

The camp of hunters consisted of several groups, the members of which were related to each other. Marriages were between members of more or less distant groups. The tribe united several camps. Their portable dwellings - tips - the inhabitants of such camps installed in a circle. Each family erected its own tipi at a certain place in this ring, which was determined by the degree of participation of the family in public life.

Power was exercised by the leaders of the lower and higher levels. Decision making was determined by agreement among the top leaders. Leaders and well-deserved wars formed communities that were called men's unions. The men's unions were accepted taking into account the military merits of the candidate. Military prowess and generosity were highly valued.

The Prairie Indians were excellent warriors. So, for example, the warlike disposition and possession of horses made the Dakota tribe an aggressive people. The warriors were armed with bows and arrows.

After the arrival of Europeans, the Prairie Indians quickly mastered horseback riding. The horse has become an integral part of military equipment. Mobility and the speed of movement associated with it were the most important features of their culture, as it was mobility that determined their opportunity in the vast expanses of the Great Plains.

The exploits of men were considered especially prestigious. The Indian could accumulate military >. It was considered prestigious to look boldly into the eyes, to pick up a rifle from an enemy who had fallen out of the saddle, to steal an enemy’s horse, quietly sneaking into his village, to scalp the head of a defeated enemy.

Tomahawk

A tomahawk made of deer horn throughout the history of the Indians served as a symbol of the valor of a male war. A tomahawk is a hatchet with a long handle. The design of the tomahawk has evolved. The most ancient form of this melee weapon was the caribou antler tomahawk. A flint point or a metal blade was inserted into a short cut off process of such a horn. The long tail served as a handle. The lower part of the handle was decorated with suede fringe. Later, the handle was made of wood, traditionally decorated with fringe, and a metal blade was inserted into the upper end. This is what the tomahawks of the steppe Indians looked like. Later, when the Indians of the Prairies met the Europeans, they began to present tomahawks, combined with a peace pipe, as a gift to the Indian leaders.

PEACE PIPE

The peace pipe is a sacred object adorned with eagle feathers, which symbolized prosperity and well-being.

The most ancient rituals in which the peace pipe was used were dedicated to the cult of fertility. The Indians gathered together and sat in a circle. The most revered person - a military leader, leader or elder - lit a sacred pipe, took a few puffs and passed it to a warrior sitting next to him. He took a few puffs and passed it to a neighbor. So the tube went around all the participants in the ceremony in a circle, uniting them. Smoke rose to the sky, symbolizing thunderclouds. The participants in the ceremony encouraged them to pour rain. Rain, prosperity and peace were closely related concepts. Therefore, when the Indians concluded peace agreements, stopped hostilities, they performed a ritual similar to the ritual of making rain: they sat in a circle and lit a peace pipe. The Europeans, who fought with the Indians and more than once observed the rituals during the truce ceremonies, called the sacred pipe of the Indians -\u003e.

Housing and life

The life of the Indians proceeded in practical small tips. A tipi is a single-family dwelling designed to be used all year round. In the center of the tipi is a hearth, the smoke from which came out through the smoke hole. This hole could be closed with a skin in case of bad weather. The lower edge of the tire was often piled with stones or pinned to the ground with bone or wooden pegs. In the summer it was raised to check the room. The tipi is cozy and warm in winter, sometimes a little stuffy from the smoke. Tipi - a conical structure made of poles, covered with 8-12 bison skins. The skins are skillfully dressed and sewn.

The outer side of the tipi cover was usually decorated with painting. It was a special form of mnemonic writing.
The drawings that covered the bottom edge of the tipi were painted by women. This form of fine art was passed down from mother to daughter and was very ancient. The archaic style of drawings itself testifies to the antiquity of the idea of drawing images on leather covers of hut-like dwellings. The drawings are planar, there is no perspective in the compositions, the most significant images were distinguished by larger sizes. The figures of riders with spears galloping on horseback, dressed in lush feather headdresses, images of foot warriors, animal dogs are drawn in such a generalized way that they resemble signs-symbols. These are indeed signs, similar to the letters of the alphabet. Tire painting itself was also a special form of pattern writing.

For example, the drawings could be read as follows: >. During the migrations, the stakes were piled on a V-shaped drag, which was dragged by a dog or horse.
Pottery was too heavy for the nomadic life of the Indians, so animal skins or stomachs were used for cooking. The skin was stretched on sticks, water was poured and red-hot stones were thrown inside. Pieces of fresh meat were placed in boiling water, which did not need to be boiled for a long time. Spoons were made from bison horn, which was previously steamed in water and then shaped accordingly. Such spoons were used exclusively for pouring food, as they ate with their fingers. Plates were made from growths on elm trunks.

Writing material

The Prairie Indians used the white surface of well-dressed bison skins as writing material. On the surface of the skin, they applied multi-figure compositions telling the military history of the tribe.

clothing

The art of dressing the skin of which clothes were made was inherited through the female line. The fresh skin of a bison was stretched on the ground with fur down. With the help of scrapers made of elk horn, with a blade made of iron or stone, women cleaned the surface of the mezra. If the skin was intended for making clothes, the fur was removed. The skin was then soaked in water or buried in damp earth. After that, it was softened with oil or the treated surface was smeared with the brain of a bison. Further, the remains of the mezdra were cleaned from the skin and hung over the smoke in order to smoke it. Smoked skins took on a brown hue.

The Indians knew how to make deliciously white skins that were used for ceremonial needs. Softer elk skins were used for sewing clothes. Some skins were used in their raw form. Rawhide was used to make some tools: for example, rawhide straps were used to fasten ax blades to shafts.

The male costume of the Indians consisted of a leather turban, sleeveless jacket, suede leggings, moccasins and a bison skin shirt. The men's costume was complemented by a breastplate made of falcon wing bones, fastened with pieces of bison skin. This breastplate was considered a ceremonial decoration.

Women wore straight cut shirts to the knee, leggings, moccasins. Shirts were sewn by folding two bison skins with their tails down. Therefore, a characteristic cape formed in the lower part of women's shirts. The lower part of such shirts and seams were decorated with suede fringe, which symbolized bison fur.

The leader could be recognized among the tribesmen. On his shoulders is thrown the skin of a bison with magnificent winter wool. The cape is decorated with owl feathers and noisy pendants. On the neck is an ornament of sixty grizzly bear claws.

The eagle feather was considered endowed with magical powers and was considered as a strong amulet. In the headdress of the leader, the length of the feathers of which reached 68 cm, there were several dozens of such feathers. The leader's hair was smoothed and covered with red paint, and cartridge cases from rifle cartridges were woven into them. The leader's face was painted red.
The clothes were decorated with embroidery with porcupine quills. Personal decorations made from bird feathers were widely used.

Prominent warriors and leaders wore high feather headdresses, which were often decorated with bison horns, a symbol of power.

Beliefs and Rites

The supernatural world of the Prairie Indians consisted of what they called >, that is, everything sacred.

Wakan is the Greatest Mystery that mankind can only know. The contact between the world of people and the world of the elements of creatures is carried out by professionals - shamans. Shamans have special knowledge that they can only convey through their own language, which is poorly understood by their fellow tribesmen.

Kamali is to perform a ceremony, that is, communication with their helper spirits, they dressed in a suit made of animal skins.

The beliefs of the Indians were embodied in rituals and ceremonies that were theatrical in nature.

The Indians of the Prairie led a free life on the expanses of the Great Plains.

Tlingtites

The northwestern coast of North America from the Yakutat in the north to the Columbia River in the south was inhabited by numerous Indian tribes who led the way of life of hunters and fishermen.

In addition to the Tlingit, the Chugach, Kwakiutl, Tsishman and other Indian tribes lived on the coast. Their villages were located along the shores of lagoons, on the banks of lakes or rivers. The houses faced the entrances to the water and lined up in one line.

The Tlingit were skilled fighters. They dressed in armor, put wooden helmets on their heads, which covered the lower part of the face.

Hunting tools and weapons were made of stone, bone, shells. The Tlingit were known for cold working of metal - forging native copper. From copper they made mainly jewelry and daggers. They hunted with harpoons, arrows, spears.

Religious performances

Religious ideas were based on ideas about helper spirits. The Indians believed in the existence of spirits - patrons of various crafts, spirits - patrons of individual hunters, personal spirits - assistants of shamans. The Indians believed that after death the soul of the deceased moves into the body of an animal, which was revered as a totem.

Totem is an Indian concept that comes from the Ojibwe Indian word recorded by European missionaries >.

Crafts and art

The Indians masterfully mastered the technique of woodworking. They had drills, adzes, axes made of stone, woodworking and other tools. They knew how to saw boards, cut curly sculptures. They made houses, canoes, working tools, and totem poles from wood. The art of the Tlingit is distinguished by two more features: multi-figure - the mechanical connection of different images in one object, and poly-eiconic - the flow, sometimes encrypted, hidden by the master, a smooth transition from one image to another.

Living in the rainy and foggy climate of the sea coast, the Tlingit made special capes from grass fibers and cedar bast, which resembled a poncho. They served as a reliable shelter from the rain.

The works of monumental art included rock paintings, paintings on the walls of houses, totem poles.

The images on the pillars are created in a style called bilateral (two-sided). The Indians of North America used the so-called skeletal style to draw pictures on ritual objects, ceramics, and also to create rock art.

American Indian culture

1. The origins of Indian culture.

The high cultures of the native Americans and all their remarkable successes, both in the material and in the spiritual field, arose on the basis of original development.

The first culture already established in America (which existed about 15 thousand years BC) - the Folsom culture, so named after the place where its traces were found, does not differ too markedly in comparison with the late Paleolithic culture of the inhabitants of the Sandia cave. The center of the Folsom culture was the North American Southwest (New Mexico). However, traces of this culture have been found in almost the entire territory of the present United States. These are chiefly the flint spearheads with which the Folsom hunters used to kill buffalo.

The first agricultural crop in America was the Cochisi culture. At this time, three or three and a half thousand years ago, corn was first grown. It compensated the Indians of pre-Columbian America for the absence of all other grains that the Old World possessed. And at the same time, the inhabitants of another part of North America, the edge of the Great Lakes, for the first time, so far in a cold way, are trying to process metal. First, it is copper, which the Indians found in its pure form. Meanwhile, the Indian population of the subarctic regions of North America (present-day Canada and Alaska) still remains at the level of a primitive culture, the basis of which is exclusively hunting for large animals (now it is mainly caribou) and fishing.

Following the first North American agricultural culture, the Cochisi culture, on both coasts of North America, the culture of piles of shells, or rather kitchen piles, entered the history of this part of the New World. Indian fishermen who lived here many, many hundreds of years ago threw leftover food, bone needles, knives and other tools, often made from shells (hence the second name of the culture), into this dump. And now such heaps of shells for Americanists are rich, valuable evidence of the life of the then Indians.

Directly beyond Cochisi in southwestern North America, a new agricultural culture is emerging, also based on the cultivation of corn - the culture of basket makers - "basketmakers" (about 200 BC - 400 AD). It got its name from a special kind of watertight, pot-shaped baskets that "basketmakers" wove to boil porridge-like food in them. Basketmen still lived in caves. But inside these caves they were already building real houses. The main habitat of these Indians was Arizona. Here, especially in the Canyon of the Dead Man, numerous traces of them have been found in various caves. The basket-makers tree near Fall Creek in southern Colorado can be dated (with some variation) to 242, 268, 308, and 330 CE. e.

In an era when the culture of "basketmakers" was living out its days in the North American Southwest, a new culture is taking shape, the culture of the inhabitants of rock cities, who built their "cities" under the natural sheer walls of sandstone or tuff, or in the deep canyons of the rivers of the North American Southwest, or, finally, right in the rocks, Their houses, in the construction of which the caves created by nature itself were widely used, grew horizontally and vertically, squeezed into the recesses of the rocks and piled on top of each other. For the construction of walls, as a rule, adobes were used - bricks dried in the sun. We find such settlements in the North American southwest in the canyons of several large rivers. In these Indian cities, next to rectangular living quarters, we always find round buildings. These are the sanctuaries that the Indians called beer. They were also a kind of "men's clubs". Although they were built exclusively by women, they were forbidden to enter these temples.

The builders of these settlements in the rocks and in the deep Colorado canyons did not build a city, but one big house. Each room was molded close to the other, cell to cell, and all together they were a giant building, similar to a honeycomb and numbering several tens or even hundreds of living quarters and sanctuaries. For example, the home-city of Pueblo Bonito in Chaca Canyon had 650 dwellings and 20 shrines, or kiwis. This semi-circular house-city, within the walls of which all the inhabitants of a small Czech town could be accommodated, was the largest building in all of pre-Columbian North America.

The large number of sanctuaries (kiv) in each of these house-cities testifies to an important fact: the development of agriculture here went hand in hand with the development of religion. None of the rock cities has its own agora, some kind of collection point for solving public issues. However, in each of them there are dozens of temples.

A few centuries later, these people leave their amazing cities, carved into the rocks or sheltered under the cliffs of the southwestern canyons, and move - literally - closer to the sun. They build their new settlements (we now call them pueblos, as well as the house-towns in the canyons of the rivers) on flat, steep hills called mesas (mesa - Spanish for "table"). The new pueblos are also growing like honeycombs. The inhabitants of such pueblos, regardless of their linguistic affiliation, we usually refer to by the common name Pueblo Indians. This is the last, highest stage in the development of the pre-Columbian cultures of North America. The Pueblo Indians are the indirect heirs of the inhabitants of the rock cities, as well as representatives of much less well-known agricultural cultures - the Hohokam and the Mogollon.

However, the level of development of agriculture among the Pueblo Indians is immeasurably higher than that of their predecessors. They built extensive irrigation systems, which in this rather arid area were of great importance. The main agricultural crop was still the same corn (they grew more than ten varieties of it), in addition, pumpkin, red capsicum, lettuce, beans, and tobacco were also grown. The fields were cultivated with a wooden hoe. Along with this, the Pueblo Indians tamed dogs and bred turtles. Hunting became for them only an additional source of food. They hunted deer, and more often animals that are now completely extinct, a bit reminiscent of the South American llama. Hunting was one of the male occupations. The men also weaved and made weapons. The women cultivated the fields. The construction of dwellings was also an exclusively female affair. The Pueblo Indians were excellent potters, although, like all other groups of the Indian population of America, before the arrival of the first Europeans, they were not familiar with the potter's wheel. Ceramics were produced by men and women together.

In the pueblo, women played a significant role. In the era of the appearance of the first Spaniards, matriarchy completely prevailed in almost all Indian tribes. Cultivated land was in common use and distributed equally among women - heads of families. After the wedding, the husband moved to his wife's house, but only as a guest. "Divorce" was carried out without any difficulty. After the rupture of marital ties, the husband had to leave the house. The children stayed with their mother.

The inhabitants of each pueblo were divided into a number of tribal groups. They were usually named after some animal or plant. And this totem was considered by all members of the family as their ancient ancestor. Several tribal groups made up a phratry - a clan association, which also bore the name of an animal or plant. Gathering in phratries, the inhabitants of the pueblos performed religious rites, during which the entire life cycle of one or another totem animal, such as an antelope, was usually depicted. In the life of the Pueblo Indians, religion occupied an exceptional place. Religious ideas were inextricably linked with agricultural skills. When a mother had a child, the first thing she did was smear the mouth of the newborn with gruel made from cornmeal. The father painted sacred signs on all the walls of the dwelling with the same gruel. In the same way, all the other major events of life in the mind of the Pueblo Indian were associated with corn. The main deities were the sun and mother earth. A significant role was played by religious rites performed together - ritual dances. The most important of these was the so-called snake dance - a ritual act of worship of snakes - the legendary ancestors of the Indians. The priests danced with a rattlesnake in their teeth. At the end of the ceremony, women sprinkled rattlesnakes with corn grains.

Of particular importance to the Pueblo Indians was and still is the so-called kachina. This is something like a dance drama, which was performed in ritual masks depicting certain deities. Miniature reproductions of these deities are "children's kachinas" - dolls. Receiving such dolls as a gift, Indian children had to learn in advance to recognize the characters of ritual dances.

All religious rites were performed either in the pueblo square or in the kiva. Inside the sanctuary there was a kind of altar with images of totem animals of one or another phratry. For example, in the "snake kiva" the main decoration was a veil with hollow bodies of snakes sewn to it, made of cloth. During the ceremony, the priest, who was behind the veil, put his hand into the body of such a snake, causing it to move.

Until the middle of the 19th century, the inhabitants of the Pueblos of the North American Southwest did not come into close contact with whites and thus retained without significant changes the characteristic features of their culture, which during the last six to eight centuries did not undergo any qualitative transformations.

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At different stages of the development of the North American continent, it was inhabited by representatives of different peoples, in the 1st century AD even the Vikings sailed here, founded their settlement, but it did not take root. After Columbus "discovered America", the period of European colonization of these lands began, a stream of immigrants poured in from all over the Old World, these were the Spaniards, and the Portuguese, and the British and French, and representatives of the Scandinavian countries.

After seizing the lands of the displacement from their territory of the indigenous population of North America - the Indians, who at the beginning of European expansion did not even own firearms and were forced to give up their lands under the threat of complete annihilation, the settlers became sovereign masters of the vast areas of the New World, which have enormous natural potential.

Indigenous peoples of North America

The indigenous peoples of North America include the inhabitants of Alaska and the Arctic part of the continent of the Eskimos and Aleuts (northern regions of the USA and Canada), the Indian population, mainly concentrated in the central and southern parts of the mainland (USA, Mexico), and also the Hawaiian people living on the island of Hawaii in Pacific Ocean.

It is believed that the Eskimos moved to the territory of North America from Asia and the distant expanses of Siberia at a time when Alaska and the mainland of Eurasia were not separated from each other by the Bering Strait. Moving along the southeastern coast of Alaska, the ancient tribes moved deep into the North American continent, so about 5 thousand years ago, the Eskimo tribes settled the Arctic coast of North America.

The Eskimos who lived in Alaska were mainly engaged in hunting and fishing, if weather conditions allowed - gathering. They hunted seals, walruses, polar bears and other representatives of the Arctic fauna, such as whales, and all the prey was used practically without disposal, everything was used - skins, bones, and entrails. In the summer, they lived in chums and yarangas (dwellings made of animal skins), in winter they lived in igloos (also a dwelling made of skins, but additionally insulated with blocks of snow or ice), and were engaged in reindeer husbandry. They lived in small groups, consisting of several kindred families, worshiped evil and good spirits, shamanism was developed.

The Aleut tribes, who lived on the Aleutian Islands in the Barents Sea, have long been engaged in hunting, fishing and whale hunting. The traditional dwelling of the Aleuts is ulegam, a large semi-dugout designed for a large number of people (from 20 to 40 families). It was underground, inside there were bunk beds, separated by curtains, in the middle there was a huge stove, they went down there along a log in which steps were cut.

By the time the European conquerors appeared in the Americas, there were about 400 Indian tribes who had a separate language and knew writing. For the first time, Columbus encountered the indigenous inhabitants of these lands on the island of Cuba and, thinking that he was in India, called them "Los indios", since then they have become so called - Indians.

(North Indian)

The upper part of Canada was inhabited by North Indians, Algonquin and Athabas tribes who hunted caribou and fished. In the north-west of the continent lived the tribes of Haida, Salish, Wakashi, Tlingit, they were engaged in fishing and sea hunting, led a nomadic lifestyle, lived in small groups of several families in tents. On the California coast, in mild climatic conditions, Indian tribes lived, who were engaged in hunting, fishing and gathering, collecting acorns, berries, and various herbs. They lived in semi-dugouts. The eastern part of America was inhabited by the Woodland Indians, these are tribes such as the Creeks, Algonquins, Iroquois (considered very warlike and bloodthirsty). They were engaged in settled agriculture.

In the steppe regions of the North American continent (prairies, pampas), hunting tribes of Indians lived, who hunted bison and led a nomadic lifestyle. These are the Apache, Osage, Crow, Arikara, Kiowa, etc. tribes. They were very warlike and constantly clashed with neighboring tribes, lived in wigwams and tips, traditional Indian dwellings.

(Navajo Indians)

In the southern regions of the North American continent lived the Navajo, Pueblo and Pima tribes. They were considered one of the most developed, led a sedentary lifestyle, were engaged in agriculture, and using the methods of artificial irrigation (they built canals and other irrigation facilities), bred cattle.

(Hawaiians, even going on a boat, do not forget to decorate themselves and even their dog with national wreaths.)

Hawaiians - the indigenous population of the Hawaiian Islands belong to the Polynesian ethnic group, it is believed that the first Polynesians sailed to the Hawaiian Islands from the Marquesas Islands in 300, and from the island of Tahiti a little later (in 1300 AD). Basically, the Hawaiian settlements were located near the sea, where they built their dwellings with a roof of palm branches and were engaged in fishing by canoeing. By the time the Hawaiian Islands were discovered by the English explorer James Cook, the population of the islands numbered about 300 thousand people. They lived in large family communities - ohans, in which there was a division into leaders (alii) and community members (makaainan). Today, Hawaii is part of the United States, being the 50th state in a row.

Traditions and customs of indigenous peoples

North America is a huge continent that has become home to representatives of a large number of different nationalities, each of which is original and unique in its own way, has its own traditions and customs.

(Eskimo demonstrating national dance)

The Eskimos live in small family communities, adhere to the principles of matriarchy (the headship of a woman). The husband enters the wife's family, if she dies, the husband returns to the parents' house, the children do not leave with him. Kinship is considered on the mother's side, marriages are concluded at an early age by prior arrangement. The custom of a temporary exchange of wives is often practiced as a friendly gesture or as a sign of special favor. Shamanism is developed in the religion, shamans are the leaders of the cult. Difficult natural conditions, the constant threat of hunger and death in case of failure to hunt, a feeling of complete powerlessness in the face of the power of harsh Arctic nature, all this forced the Eskimos to seek solace and salvation in rituals and rituals. Enchanted amulets, amulets, the use of various magic spells were very popular.

The Aleuts worshiped the spirits of dead animals, they especially revered the whale, when a male hunter died in the village, they buried him in a cave, placing him between two whale ribs.

The Indian tribes of North America believed in the supernatural origin of the world, which, in their opinion, was created by mysterious forces, among the Sioux they were called wakans, the Iroquois said - orenda, the Algonquians - manitou, and Kitchi Manitou was the same supreme spirit to which everything obeyed. The son of Manitou Wa-sa-ka fashioned a tribe of people from red clay, taught them how to hunt and hunt, taught them to dance ritual dances. Hence the special reverence by the Indians for red, they rubbed their body and face with red paint on especially solemn occasions, such as girls in the tribes of California and North Dakota at a wedding ceremony.

Also, the Indians, having passed the path of development of many peoples of the world, deified nature and its forces, worshiped the deities of the Sun, Sky, Fire or Sky. They also revered spirits, patrons of tribes (various plants and animals), which were called totem. Every Indian could have such a patron spirit, seeing him in a dream, a person immediately towered in the eyes of his fellow tribesmen, he could decorate himself with feathers and shells. By the way, the headdress made of eagle feathers was worn by leaders and outstanding warriors only on very solemn occasions, it was believed that it had great spiritual and healing power. Also, a special ax with a long handle made of caribou deer antler - tomahawk was considered a symbol of the valor of any male warrior.

(The ancient revered ritual of the Indians - the peace pipe)

One of the well-known Indian traditions is the ancient ritual of lighting the pipe of peace, when the Indians sat in a large circle and betrayed each other a kind of symbol of peace, prosperity and prosperity - the pipe of peace. The ritual was started by the most respected person in the tribe - the leader or elder, he lit a pipe, took a couple of puffs and betrayed it further in a circle, and all participants in the ceremony had to do the same. Usually this ritual was carried out at the conclusion of peace treaties between the tribes.

The famous Hawaiian traditions and customs are the presentation of flower garlands (lei), which are handed along with a kiss on the cheek to all visitors by beautiful Hawaiian girls. Stunningly beautiful lei can be made from roses, orchids and other exotic tropical flowers, and according to legend, you can only remove a garland in the presence of the person who gave it. The traditional Hawaiian aloha means not only words of greeting or goodbye, it reflects the whole gamut of feelings and experiences, they can express sympathy, kindness, joy, and tenderness. The indigenous inhabitants of the islands themselves are sure that aloha is not just a word, but the basis of all the life values of the people.

The culture of the island of Hawaii is rich in superstitions and signs that people still believe in, for example, it is believed that the appearance of a rainbow or rain is a sign of the special disposition of the gods, especially when the wedding takes place in the rain. And the island is also famous for its mesmerizing hula dance: rhythmic hip movements, graceful hand passes and unique costumes (a puffy skirt made from raffia palm fibers, wreaths of bright exotic flowers) to rhythmic music on drums and other percussion instruments. In ancient times, it was a ritual dance performed exclusively by men.

Modern life of the peoples of North America

(Modern streets of the USA on the site of the former native places of the Indians, the indigenous peoples of America)

Today, the total population of North America is about 400 million people. The bulk are the descendants of European settlers, the descendants of the British and French colonialists mainly live in Canada and the USA, the descendants of the Spaniards inhabit the southern coast and the countries of Central America. Also, more than 20 million representatives of the Negroid race live in North America, the descendants of Negro slaves, once brought from the African continent by European colonialists to work on sugar and cotton plantations.

(Indian traditions were absorbed by the urban culture of grown cities)

The Indian population, which has retained its population of about 15 million people (a significant decrease in the population due to diseases, various kinds of infringements, as well as complete displacement from indigenous lands of habitat in the reservation), is located in the United States (5 million people - 1.6% of the total population countries) and Mexico, speak their own languages and dialects, honor and preserve the customs and culture of their people. According to various sources, up to 18 million Indians lived in North America in the pre-Columbian period.

The Aleuts, as before, live on the islands of the Aleutian Archipelago, are considered a disappearing nation, today their population is about 4 thousand people, and in the 18th century it reached up to 15 thousand.

INTRODUCTION

Indians - the general name of the indigenous population of America (with the exception of the Eskimos and Aleuts). The name arose from the erroneous idea of the first European navigators, who considered the transatlantic lands they discovered to be India.

Scientists began to be interested in Indians as soon as they first came into contact with Europeans. Around the middle of the 19th century, a new scientific discipline was born - American studies - the science of history, as well as the material and spiritual culture of the Indians.

The object of this work is the American Indians, the subject is their culture.

The purpose of this work is to study the culture of the American Indians. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to solve a number of tasks:

Explore the origins of Indian culture;

To study such a phenomenon of Indian culture as mounds;

Explore the culture of the Prairie Indians;

To study the peculiarities of the culture of Indian groups from Alaska to Florida;

Explore the languages of the North American Indians, as well as show what role they played in the development of modern languages.

While working on the topic, I encountered the problem of literature on this topic. There is very little material in Russian. Of course, most of the material has not been translated from English. This indicates that domestic culturology has little interest in the culture of the US Indians (there is much more literature on modern US culture). The greatest help in preparing this work was provided to me by the historical and ethnographic reference book "Peoples of the World" edited by Yu.V. Bromley, as well as the book of the researcher of Indian culture Miroslav Stingl "Indians without tomahawks".

Origins of Indian culture.

The high cultures of the native Americans and all their remarkable successes, both in the material and in the spiritual field, arose on the basis of original development.

Indian culture. The contribution of the indigenous population of America to world culture::: I.A. Zolotarevskaya

The United States of America is a multinational country, its population has a peculiar ethnic past. As you know, in addition to the Americans - the dominant nation, there live such peoples and ethnic groups as blacks, Mexicans of the southwestern United States, immigrants from Asian countries, as well as descendants of the indigenous population of North America - Indians and Eskimos. The American nation, which arose on the basis of the English, absorbed the most diverse ethnic elements in terms of language and culture. Settlers from Holland, France, Spain, the Scandinavian countries and the German states participated in its creation. The so-called late immigration attracted residents of eastern and southeastern Europe, as well as immigrants from Asia and Latin America. All of them contributed to modern American culture, invested in its development their work, knowledge, traditions, the richness of their languages, folklore, treasures of spiritual culture.

And now in all areas of the life of the American people, in their industrial and cultural activities, one can see evidence of the peculiar origin of the modern US population. Let's take a map of the country. It is full of names of cities, rivers, mountains, sounding in all languages of the world. Various national influences are easy to detect in many areas of the life of the American people. Ukrainian immigrants in the XIX century. they brought with them high-yielding varieties of wheat, hitherto unknown in America; immigrants from southern Europe developed viticulture in the United States, the Swiss - first-class cheese production. In American cuisine, the tastes of many peoples are also represented.

In the spiritual culture of the people - in literature, art, folklore, various national traditions are also intertwined.

The same diversity is found in the architecture of the United States. In Florida, and especially in the southwest of the country, Spanish influence is noticeable. In the southwest, where Spanish is spoken along with English and where a large number of inhabitants are Mexicans, the cities and rural towns differ little from the cities and villages of Mexico. In Louisiana, the houses of plantation owners are often designed in the style of French buildings of the past. New Orleans also retained some traces of French architecture.

The largest cities in the United States are characterized by national quarters - Italian, Chinese, Russian Hill in San Francisco, etc.

Forced to live in segregation, the poor of Italian, Slavic origin, Puerto Ricans, Chinese and others retain their native language, many of the customs of their homeland, and this is also reflected in the appearance of American cities. In the "Russian" quarter of New York Harlem, there are signboards in Russian, Orthodox churches have been built; the Chinatown of New York impresses with an abundance of advertisements in Chinese, Chinese bazaars, shops, restaurants; in San Francisco, where the largest number of people of Chinese descent live, many people in Chinatown wear traditional Chinese clothing. Chinatown in this city has its own telephone exchange with Chinese telephone operators. The emergence of special quarters for immigrant groups, belonging to the so-called undesirable, is caused by a system of national and racial discrimination, which has a political and economic basis. The division of the working population of multinational America along national and racial lines incites national hatred, intensifies competition in the labor market and weakens the class positions of the American proletariat, which is motley in origin.

The wealth of the country has been formed from the national achievements of the most diverse peoples. But these peoples were far from being in an equal position. The system of national oppression, the division of workers along racial and national lines with the help of unequal wages for equal work, the infringement of civil rights, the introduction of segregation for national groups and domestic discrimination hinders the natural development of the American nation, hinders social progress, and prevents the complete merging of ethnic groups that make up the American nation. The existence of national quarters in large cities and ethnically isolated areas in remote areas of the country is explained not only by the youth of the American nation, the American state, but above all precisely by this policy of dividing the people according to skin color and national origin. The spiritual isolation of certain ethnic groups in the American nation itself as a result of such a policy causes enormous damage to the political and cultural development of the peoples of America.

In this regard, the position of the indigenous population of North America, the Indians and the Eskimos, is very indicative. These peoples made a great contribution to the creation of the North American states, to the development of the culture of the USA and Canada. But to this day they are among the most disenfranchised and oppressed sections of the population of these countries. The American lawyer Felix Cohen spoke very figuratively about this: “Just as a canary in a mine indicates by its behavior the poisoning of the air with poisonous gas, so the Indian by his position reflects a change in our political atmosphere. Our treatment of the Indians, more than other national minorities, reflects the rise and fall of our democracy."

From the moment they appeared on American soil, the conquerors and settlers clashed with the locals - the Indians. The European colonists had a conflicting relationship with them.

True, the indigenous population of North America has never been particularly numerous and settled mainly on the coasts of rivers and lakes - places most favorable for hunting, fishing and farming - their main sectors of the economy. The European colonizers of North America rushed first of all to these lands, already developed and inhabited by Indians. The economy of the Indians and the hunting and slash-and-burn extensive agriculture that prevailed among the tribes of North America required large areas of land. Unwilling to reckon with this, the colonial authorities demanded more and more concessions from the Indians, forcing the Indian tribes to sell "surplus" land for next to nothing. The Europeans encroached not on free, as many bourgeois historians claim, lands, but on lands that were vitally necessary for the local population.

“During the entire period of colonization,” William Foster wrote in the preface to G. Apteker’s work on the history of the American people, “the indigenous people of America - the Indians - were subjected to cruel robbery and extermination by white invaders of different nationalities. Various governors and generals believed that the Indians had no reason to claim the lands of their homeland and that the whites had no reason to feel remorse, committing wild robberies and the most brutal murders of the natives. But the Indians resisted exceptionally skillfully and selflessly. One of the most significant moments in our national history was the struggle of the Indian people in defense of their homeland - a heroic but hopeless struggle. The Indians waged this selfless struggle until the second half of the 19th century, putting forward many outstanding fighters. The resistance of the Indians was all the more remarkable because they fought despite the fact that they were small in number, were at a lower stage of social development, and had only relatively primitive weapons. The conquest and colonization of the North American continent brought physical death to many Indian tribes. At the same time, the domination of the Europeans had a negative impact on the state of the original culture of that part of the Indians who survived in an unequal struggle with the colonialists. And although very little of the traditional culture of the Indian population of the United States is currently left, we must not forget how much of what they created even before the appearance of Europeans in America was subsequently accepted by the colonists and firmly entered the culture and life of the peoples not only of America, but and other parts of the world.

First of all, at first it was difficult for the settlers to master the land of the American continent without the help of the Indians. Hence the need for business and cultural exchange with the Indian peoples. And although the Indians in the XVI-XVII centuries. stood at a much lower stage of development than the European settlers, the spiritual and especially material values created by the indigenous population of North America rendered a great service to the colonists and subsequently to the Americans.

Recently, a voice has been raised in the ethnographic literature of the United States in defense of Indian culture. Several works appeared that were directly devoted to those cultural achievements of the Indian peoples, which were perceived by European settlers and entered modern American culture.

“Communication with the Indians,” wrote the American ethnographer Irving Hallowell, “influenced our speech, our economic life, clothing, sports and entertainment, some local religious cults, methods of treating diseases, folk and concert music, the novel, the short story , poetry, drama, and even some aspects of our psychology, as well as one of the social sciences - ethnography.

The Indians, as the same Hallowell rightly noted, left a certain imprint on the American nation. At the origins of its origin, in the colonial period, the knowledge of the Indians in various areas of life was readily accepted by European settlers, since without many of them they simply could not stay on American soil. “From the Indians, the colonial powers received not only their lands and wealth,” says the well-known American historian G. Apteker, “but also skill and technology, without which the colonial enterprise should have ended in failure.” “Most of the Indian contributions were made through voluntary acts of relief,” he continues. Let us turn to the well-known example of such voluntary assistance, which G. Apteker speaks about. It is known that Thanksgiving Day - one of the national holidays in the United States - is associated with the first corn harvest received by the Puritans of the New Plymouth colony. The wheat that the colonists brought with them was not accepted. The settlers were threatened with imminent starvation if the local Indians had not taught them how to cultivate corn and showed them how to care for the crops.

They not only taught the colonists how to grow corn, but also pointed out the most suitable fertilizer for local conditions from fish heads. As you know, corn has forever taken a strong place in American agriculture and in their diet. The wide use of corn is evidenced by the many dishes that American housewives know how to cook from it.

Being a very productive crop, corn played an important role in raising the welfare of the country. Approximately 92% of corn grown in the United States is fed to livestock. Corn is sown by 2/3 of the country's farms. The so-called maize belt - the area most favorable for growing corn (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and parts of Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Missouri adjacent to these states), is at the same time the main area for pig breeding, as well as fattening cattle.

The European colonists, and after them the Americans, owe the Indians of North America their acquaintance with melons, cucumbers, sunflowers, legumes and other useful plants. And now, bean dishes: canned beans with meat, canned bean soups and others are considered the original American cuisine.

Here it is worth mentioning maple juice and maple sugar. The colonists also learned how to extract maple sap from the Indians. Maple sap harvesting in parts of the United States and eastern Canada has been a rural holiday since colonial times, at which the entire county gathers to feast on maple sugar candies in the same way as the Indians of the northeastern part of America do now. For both Canadian farmers and Indians, this custom is a welcome tribute to the past. Maple sugar production in eastern Canada is now in full swing, with local farmers meeting a significant portion of their sugar needs with maple sugar.

In the adaptation of European settlers to the new conditions of the American continent, the labor skills developed by the local population played a primary role. This applies to hunting, fishing, methods of preparation and conservation of food stocks. As you know, the tribes of the northwest coast created a high fishing culture, which put them forward in one of the first places in terms of development among other North American tribes. Their experience, as well as labor, are used by fishing companies in the USA and Canada. Indians are hired with their boats and sent to the most dangerous and hopeless places. It is believed that "an Indian will get fish where no one will get it." This proverb has a completely real basis.

The colonists adopted from the Indians an ingenious way of preserving meat and berries for future use in the form of pemmican. The Indians of the northern forests and prairies have long prepared pemmican for long expeditions or for the winter. Meat and berries were dried, ground into powder, mixed with fat. This highly nutritious blend has a long shelf life and is convenient on the go. In the canning industry in the United States and Canada, pemmican occupies an important place.

Perceiving from the Indians, first of all, the most necessary things, the European settlers could not help but turn to the clothes of the Indians. The inhabitants of the border, who were in approximately the same conditions as the Indians, as a rule, preferred the European comfortable and more affordable clothing of forest tribes made of suede and skins, leggings and moccasins. True, the colonists made their own amendments to the cut of clothing, and under their influence, the Indians themselves appeared caftans with open sleeves made of the same suede. Moccasins lasted the longest. Later, somewhat modified moccasins became an indispensable accessory for American lumberjacks. The Spanish colonists from the southwestern colonies valued the art of the Pueblo and Navajo weavers. Capes and fabrics of their production with a wonderful ornament were famous both among the local Indians and in the Spanish colonies. Skilled weavers were kidnapped, extracting a considerable income from their work.

At first, the colonists also used Indian pottery. Not so long ago, American archaeologists found that the inhabitants of the colony of Virginia (XVII century) exchanged pottery with the Indians, and they adapted to the tastes of buyers and sculpted it according to the European model. The inhabitants of the western Spanish colonies have long used dishes made by the Pueblo Indians. These products were works of art in terms of the perfection of form and the beauty of the ornament.

I must say that the labor of the Indians in the Spanish colonies of North America was used much more widely than in the eastern colonies of the British and French. The Spaniards dealt with the more developed peoples of the ancient agricultural culture, who had long been sedentary. They made extensive use of the labor of these Indians in agriculture, in silver and lead mines, and in the construction of forts, missions, and residential buildings.

The Spanish settlers adopted some of the silver mining techniques from the Indians of the area. But most of all, they benefited from the experience of local tribes in agriculture in the arid climate of southwestern North America. Native American influences also showed up in the area's colonial architecture. Experts find that the buildings erected by the hands of Indian craftsmen ennobled the lush and heavy architecture of the Spanish colonial period, giving the missions and other buildings of the early colonial period a strict outline.

At present, architects in the United States are eagerly turning to Indian forms, creating official and residential buildings in the style of the Pueblo Indians.

The role of Indian medicine, which provided an invaluable service to the colonists, deserves special mention. It is easy to imagine that, having found themselves in new conditions, without medicines, medical care, the poor of England, Ireland, the German states, which were just freeing themselves from the fetters of medieval superstitions, could not help but be captivated by the magical techniques of Indian healers. But, of course, not these techniques, but the positive knowledge accumulated by folk medicine, from the very first years of European colonization, contributed to the well-deserved respect that Indian healers and the Indian pharmacopoeia enjoyed. The state of medicine in the colonies for a long time left much to be desired. According to Governor Berkeley of Virginia (70s of the 17th century), in the first year of his reign, one in five died of malaria. After the Peruvian balsam, which became known in Spain from the Indians in the middle of the 17th century, was brought to the colony, the mortality from this disease in Virginia completely ceased.

In 1738, a certain John Tennet was rewarded by the Virginian authorities for treating pleurisy according to a prescription he had taken from the Seneca Indians. Even in the 19th century Indian healers, as well as doctors who treated herbs according to Indian recipes, enjoyed great confidence in patients.

In 1836, the Pharmacopoeia of the Indian Physician was published in Cincinnati. Other books were published at that time, introducing the methods of treatment and means used by the Indians (“Indian health guide”, “North American Indian doctor and the essence of the method of treatment and prevention of diseases according to the ideas of the Indians”, etc.). The indisputable achievements of Indian folk medicine have entered the world of science and medical practice (see the article by A. I. Drobmnsky in this collection),

In American literature, there has always been an "Indian" theme in one form or another. It can be said without exaggeration that without the "Indian" novels of Fenimore Cooper, Mine Reed and others, she would have been much poorer. At the same time, through literature, images of Indian mythology, folklore, and everyday life penetrated into life, into the ideas of Americans and other peoples.

American literature reflected two main tendencies in relation to the Indians. One of them, the dominant one, sanctified the colonialist policy of the ruling circles of the country and had a pronounced racist character. The other, democratic, reflected a sympathetic attitude towards the indigenous population. She was either romantic, which is typical of earlier authors who admired or touched the high moral qualities of the persecuted people, or tried to show the Indian peoples in a more realistic way.

It is hardly necessary here to dwell on reactionary literature, which did not bring anything positive into the life of America, but only deepened racial prejudices, misanthropic sentiments and disrespect for the peoples of this culture.

As for the works of a romantic nature that played a positive role in awakening a sympathetic interest in the Indians, they include, for example, the poems of Philippe Frenot (1752-1832), a participant in the French Revolution and the War of Independence. Freno gives the image of a majestic Indian, alien to the bustle of European civilization, living in a great past.

Close in this regard to Freno and the poet of a later time, famous for his poem "The Song of Hiawatha" by Henry Longfellow (1807-1882). His "Song of Hiawatha" was translated into the languages of many peoples and for the first time introduced readers to the poetic world of Indian mythology. Through "Hayawata" world literature took these images, expanding the range of ideas of mankind about the Indians, their spiritual world, some customs, before that little known. But an even more earthly image of the native inhabitant of the American forests was given by the wonderful American writer Fenimore Cooper. His Indians are not so majestic, not so elevated heroic, they are already people of flesh and blood, and not symbols of Freno and Longfellow.

Cooper's novels appeared in years when interest in the Indians was extremely great. Suffice it to say that only in the decade 1824-1834. in the United States, about 40 novels on an Indian theme and about 30 plays were published, some of which were adaptations of Cooper's novels. Some of the Indians were attracted by the extraordinary will to win and proud courage, others were amazed and frightened by their fearlessness. Regardless of what feelings they evoked in different sections of American society, for all the Indians were equally interesting. In the same years, reflecting the point of view of the ruling classes, various kinds of literature appeared, pouring mud on the Indian peoples, depicting the Indians as some kind of monsters, who, for the sake of general peace, must be ruthlessly destroyed.

Cooper's novels, as a rule, go against this muddy stream of slander, designed to justify the exterminating Indian policy of those years. Not being free from a biased attitude to the events of colonial times, Fenimore Cooper endowed the best qualities of those Indians who got along with the "whites", more precisely, with the British (but not with the French). Cooper's Indians are not only warlike, but also generous, they are wise, full of a stoic attitude to life, the Indian is always an excellent hunter, he is skilled in his crafts, he knows how to be loyal and sacrifice himself. For the first time it was Fenimore Cooper who spoke about the inhabitants of the border. They adopted the way of life of the Indians, because they found it reasonable, convenient and more humane than life in the so-called civilized society. It is known that the Indians willingly accepted into the tribe those who wished to settle with them. The Seminoles became so close to the blacks who fled the plantations of the South that they entered into a long war with the Americans, protecting their new tribesmen. All eastern tribes had a large number of mestizos in their midst - the result of mixed marriages in the early colonial period, when there were still few European women in the colonies, as well as "adoption" by the tribes of European traders, residents of the colonies and later Americans from the eastern states, for whatever reason seeking shelter from the Indians.

In the 19th century Indian tribes resettled on reservations across the Mississippi made Indian Territory a political and cultural center for all local Indians and the small white population that lived on the reservations (agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, traders, cattle breeders who settled on Indian land, and others). A major role in this was played by the appearance among some tribes of writing in their native language. In itself, the need for writing may indicate the degree of cultural development of some Indian peoples. And the fact that this was precisely the need is evidenced by the fact that the first creator of the syllabic alphabet, which most corresponded to the grammatical structure of the Indian languages, was the Teal Sequoia mestizo. He served for some time in the American army, had the opportunity to see the benefits of literacy and, although he himself could neither read nor write in English, he set out to create an alphabet for his people in his native language. For several years he worked on compiling the alphabet and, finally, presented his invention to the tribal council - syllabic signs carved from birch bark. His young daughter helped her father by reading and composing words from birch bark in front of the council of elders. The council encouraged the efforts of the Sequoias and the whole tribe - old and young, men and women - enthusiastically began to learn to read and write. Very soon, the Cherokees became completely literate, after them other eastern tribes - the Creeks, Choctaws, Chicasawas, Seminoles, who have since received the nickname of civilized ones, have mastered the letter.

Thanks to their efforts, the Indian Territory, which was until the middle of the 19th century. the extreme frontier of American possessions in North America (remember that Texas was annexed by the United States only in 1845, and Arizona, New Mexico and other southwestern territories were wrested from Mexico in 1848), did not lag behind in many respects other regions of the country. And in this a big role was played by newspapers and magazines published by the Creeks, the Cherokees, and then by other Indians. The newspapers, published in one of the Indian and English languages, reported not only local news, prices for grain, livestock, but also covered the international situation. Moreover, all of them contained a literary page introducing literary novelties and cultural life outside of Indian Territory.

For America of that time, especially for its frontier territories, such a loving attitude towards the press, which was shown by the Indians, who had only recently mastered writing, was an unprecedented thing.

With the division of common lands in Indian Territory and the events that followed, Indian newspapers ceased to exist. The intensified forced assimilation of the Indians, carried out until the 1930s, contributed to the fact that the Indians of the "Five Civilized Tribes" almost completely switched to English. Very few people of the older generation can now read or write one of the languages of the Five Tribes, although in everyday life spoken language in their native language continues to be maintained even among Indians living in cities. In eastern Oklahoma, where the largest number of Cherokees live, an 1896 issue of the Cherokee Lawyer is sold to tourists as a souvenir.

Native American themes have appeared in the work of American artists since colonial times. Sketches of travelers and colonists who became interested in the life of a people unfamiliar to them appeared in Europe as early as the 16th century. Lemoine and Shallo, the colonists of the Huguenot colony of Carolina, left to humanity the most valuable everyday drawings with text - now almost the only material reminder of the disappeared Timukva tribes.

George Catlin. "Three Famous Warriors"

In 1735, the artist Gustavus Hesselius created a series of portraits of the leaders of the Delaware tribe. In the first half of the XIX century. another, more extensive series of portraits of famous Indian leaders was conceived and made. They came to Washington to pose for artists. Reproductions of 120 portraits were included in McKenny and Hall's three-volume edition of American Indian Tribal History. In the 19th century artists often traveled to the West in search of material, and many of them - Muller, Kurtz, Kathleen, Bodmer and others - left valuable ethnographic sketches and documentary paintings. The most famous at this time were the works of Catlin, subsequently published in his book on the American Indians, translated into many European languages. Kathleen was not only an artist, but also an educator. He sought to acquaint the widest possible circle of people with the life of the tribes that he happened to see. The artist arranged an exhibition of his paintings and traveled with her to the eastern cities of the United States. The exhibition, which he called "Indian Gallery", was a kind of traveling museum.

Henry Cross."Sitting Bull" - a portrait of the leader and medicine man of the Khank-Papa tribe

In addition to paintings, there were also various ethnographic exhibits - clothes, smoking pipes, feather headdresses, beaded jewelry and other items. There was even a life-sized Crow Indian tent and mannequins depicting Indians of different tribes. Demonstrating the exhibits, the artist talked about the life of the Indians, about their customs. Europe soon became acquainted with the Indian Gallery.

Another artist, Henry Cross, visited the tribes of the Far West and Southwest of the United States in 1860, making over 100 portraits. They are held by the Wisconsin Historical Society. Reproductions of these portraits, provided with scientific commentary, were published by the Society in 1948.

It is impossible not to mention the work of another artist - Wright, who painted a series of paintings reflecting the defeat of the Sioux Indians in the 90s of the XIX century. The uprising of the Sioux Dakotas, held under the slogan of returning to the old life, waiting for the Indian messiah, who should save the Indians from oppression perpetrated by the whites, ended in a terrible beating of the Dakotas. Punishers spared neither men, nor women, nor children. The bloodless tribe was driven to the reservations at gunpoint. The massacre of the Sioux Indians caused indignation among the advanced sections of American society. The artist Wright depicted the "Dance of the Spirit" - a rite associated with the messianic movement of the Indians, scenes of executions. The ethnographer and historian James Mooney placed these truthful drawings in his long book on the Sioux Indian Rebellion, thus expressing his protest against the "Indian" policy of the US government.

All of these works are of great educational value. Reflecting the attentive, respectful attitude of the best part of the American intelligentsia to the Indians and their culture, they were an excellent response to the slander of the yellow press, detective literature, pseudo-historical novels, malicious and stupid cartoons that poisoned the consciousness of Americans with racial prejudices.

Indians, their history and culture have been a constant subject of scientific interest in the United States. Ethnography, anthropology and archeology arise here primarily as sciences dealing with the past and present of the indigenous population of America and, first of all, the indigenous population of the United States. The US government needed systematic knowledge about the Indians, their settlement, customs, legal norms, religious beliefs for the further implementation of the "Indian" policy.

To do this, in 1879, the Bureau of American Ethnology was created in 1879 at the Smithsonian Institution - almost the only scientific institution that depended directly on the US government, and not on private individuals. It was headed by Major John Powell, who previously headed the Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region. In his former position, Major Powell, a geologist by training, did a great job of systematizing Indian languages and created their first substantiated classification. Under his leadership, a series of publications on the archeology and ethnography of North America came out, laying the foundation for further research. Gradually, other scientific centers also appear in the USA, also initially focusing on the study of the indigenous population of America. American Studies is being created as a complex science.

For applied American ethnography, modern Indian society is a kind of laboratory. In this “laboratory”, a part of ethnographers and sociologists, working on a specific social order, studies the processes of the so-called acculturation and assimilation, the mechanics of the forced transfer of society from the state of the primitive communal system to the conditions of the capitalist system. The conclusions obtained on the Indian material can be used in the study of societies that are in the sphere of US interests.

But the Indians are not only an object of study or some kind of guinea pig in this kind of scientific laboratory, which are reservations. They understand perfectly well what goals they come to them with, who is talking to them - a friend or a cold observer. It is not for nothing that ethnographic literature often complains about the secrecy of the Indians, their unwillingness to let strangers into their inner world. Ethnographers who have managed to actually show sympathy for the Indians, to help them in some way, or simply respect their customs, moods, and needs, always meet with full understanding and effective help in field practice.

Part of American ethnographers, united by sympathy for the oppressed peoples and, above all, for the most disadvantaged peoples of their country, calls themselves supporters of active ethnography and contrasts their work with applied ethnography. Active ethnographers strive to combine the study of the Indians with real help to the people with whom they have to work. This assistance is expressed in various forms - in the establishment of medical care, schooling, in the creation of craft organizations, in explaining the advantages of advanced agricultural methods, etc. A very important side in the activities of ethnographers is their work to establish the former borders of Indian tribes. This work is connected with the Indians filing lawsuits against the US government, demanding payment of money under old contracts. The Indian Claims Commission, set up in 1946, is overwhelmed with such cases, since most of the tribes have not yet received the amounts due to them for the land sold to the US government. The fact that Indian tribes, through their lawyers, invite ethnographers to help them in restoring justice, means undoubted trust in those selfless scientists who give their work and knowledge to the benefit of the oppressed. And all these efforts are not in vain. Many American ethnographers write with respect and gratitude about the Indians, who willingly restore, together with the researcher, a picture of the past of their tribe.

A historical example of the collaboration of Indian intellectuals with a progressive researcher is the work of Henry Morgan on the Tonawanda reservation (Seneca Indians). The CUTA Indians may justly be proud that the reconstruction of Iroquois society has brought Mr. JI. Morgan to the world-historical discovery of the universality of the tribal system. It is known that Morgan began studying the Iroquois under the influence of his friend General Eli Parker, an Iroquois by nationality. The Iroquois of the Seneca tribe, to which Parker also belonged, not only helped the great scientist, but, appreciating his friendly deep interest in Indian culture, accepted Morgan into the tribe (1847). And in the future, the Iroquois themselves continued to participate in the restoration of the social history of their people: a descendant of Eli Parker Arthur Parker is engaged in ethnography and the history of the tribe (he wrote an interesting book about the life of Eli Parker, a man of brilliant mind and great knowledge, an associate of General Grant):

Quite a few other names of ethnographers and archaeologists of Indian origin who have devoted themselves to the study of the indigenous population of America can be named, including E. Dozier, a specialist in Indians of the southwest; founder of the National Congress of American Indians, an officer of the Indian Bureau, and author of books and articles on the present condition of the American Indians, Darcy McNickle (a flathead tribe from the Selish language family); expert on the Indians of Oklahoma, historian and ethnographer Muriel Wright, who traces her origins to the Choctaw tribe, and many others. In the 1930s, the now-deceased ethnographer A. Finney, a Sahaptin Indian by birth, was trained as a postgraduate student at Leningrad University.

The history of the colonization of North America was the history of the seizure by Europeans of lands belonging to the indigenous population of the continent. Nevertheless, throughout the history of the colonization of North America, the Indians many times showed generosity towards the colonists who needed their help.

We can safely say that the colonial wars were fought to a large extent by the forces of Indian tribes. The colonialists fomented discord between the tribes, forcing them to fight for the interests of others, sought the support of the strongest tribal unions to destroy their rivals in the colonization of North America. The role of the Iroquois League in the Anglo-French wars is known. "If we lose the Iroquois, we are lost," the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Colony wrote to England in 1702, when word got around that the League of the Iroquois wished to side with the French.

And later in the Revolutionary War, the British tried with all their might to use the Indians in the fight against the young American nation. In turn, the Americans tried to enlist the support of local tribes, or at least achieve their neutrality. Even in the war between the North and the South, the Indian tribes continued to play, albeit to a more limited extent, the same role of allies of the various contending parties.

From the Indians, the settlers borrowed a new way of waging wars, loose formation. During the years of the War of Independence, he was destined to play a huge role in the independence of the colonies. The loose system was also used by the revolutionary people of France during the Great French Revolution.

An invaluable service was rendered to the United States by the eastern "civilized" tribes, with the help of which the territory beyond the Mississippi was mastered and some tribes of the prairies were "pacified". The participation of a number of tribes in the war between the North and the South on the side of the northerners is another example of the undoubted contribution of the Indians to the creation of a modern state. And the very state structure of the United States to some extent owes its origin to the Indians. The idea of federal states was borrowed by Benjamin Franklin from the structure of the Iroquois Union.

The attitude towards the Indians, towards their culture is changing as the US state grows, as the productive forces develop, as American capitalism develops. At the beginning of colonization, in terms of their ability to master the natural resources of the continent, settlers from Europe did not differ so sharply from the indigenous population of America, in any case, at first they simply adopted many of the cultural achievements of the Indians in finished form. Later, with the development of American capitalism, the achievements of Indian culture are lost among new forms of material life, undoubtedly more highly developed, and the Indian origins of many of these new forms are forgotten.

The less the Indians were considered in the economic and political spheres, the more disdainful the official attitude towards the Indian and his spiritual culture became. Slander on the Indians, on their mental abilities and ability to work, treating them as inferior creatures, whose culture does not need to be reckoned with, was required to justify the segregation policy that the United States began to pursue in the 19th century. towards Indian peoples. From about the 30s of the XIX century. Indians began to be resettled on reservations on lands that, for whatever reason, were not in the field of vision of capitalist entrepreneurs. First, the most advanced tribes from the eastern states of the country were subjected to this fate, which were gradually resettled beyond the Mississippi, then, after the war between the North and the South, after a long resistance, the tribes of the prairies and the Far West were imprisoned in the reservation. Until the 1930s, Indians did not have the right to leave the reservations without the permission of the authorities, no matter how difficult the living conditions were there. As a rule, the lands of the remote regions of the country, which were the least convenient for agriculture, were allocated for reservations.

It was especially hard for the hunting tribes, evicted in areas devoid of game. Lacking agricultural skills, many tribes could exist only on meager rations issued to them by the state on account of the debt for the land acquired from the Indians. The Indians were under triple supervision - soldiers, employees of the Indian Bureau and missionaries of various church persuasions. Employees (agents) of the Indian Bureau and missionaries were supposed not only to keep the Indians in obedience, but, in accordance with the new course in the US Indian policy, to contribute to their speedy assimilation. The assimilation of the Indians, the destruction of their original culture and, first of all, communal land use, was needed when the main funds of the so-called free lands in the country were exhausted, while the Indians still had quite significant possessions; in addition, on the lands transferred to the Indian tribes, "while the rivers flow and the grass grows," as they said® in the treaties, minerals began to be found, so that they represented a doubly tempting booty. “The Whites set as their goal not only the complete conquest and economic enslavement of the Indians, but in many countries also the complete destruction of their culture and their physical extermination. In the United States and Canada, this struggle for the destruction of the Indians and their entire social order was carried out by insidious methods, by the methods of the complete elimination of Indian social institutions and the forcible assimilation of the surviving Indian population ... This principle was put by the US government in the basis of the law of 1887 on Indian reservations " , - this is how William Foster characterized the US policy towards the Indians, analyzing the events of the late 19th century.

The law of 1887, which W. Foster speaks of, was passed when, according to a prominent US official, "the belief prevailed that as a result of assimilation and extinction, the Indians would disappear and their lands should be transferred to the whites." Indeed, at the end of the XIX century. in the United States, the Indian population barely exceeded 200 thousand - the result of extermination wars, hunger strikes on reservations and epidemic diseases. And now, about fifty years after the Indians were forcibly isolated from American society, concluding them in reservations, they begin, again against the desire of the Indians, who somehow adapted to the new conditions, to “open” these reservations for Americans to settle in them. This measure is supposedly carried out to save the Indians and their culture from complete destruction.

The mass "opening" of reservations affected primarily the agricultural tribes of the Indian Territory. These were peoples who received the nickname civilized, since they had a written language in their native language. They were promised American citizenship. However, obtaining citizenship rights was associated with a number of conditions. On the way to achieving equality, which the Indians talked about a lot in those years, there was an indispensable condition for the abolition of communal land use, the division of communal lands into small plots, which were transferred first to temporary (for 25 years), and then to full private ownership of the heads of families. The surpluses that formed after such a division, and which, as a rule, represented the most convenient lands, went to the state fund, and were put on sale. As a result, the local Indians turned out to be divided - their plots interspersed with the possessions of American farmers, oil fields, railway sections, etc. At the same time, tribal administration was abolished in the Indian Territory, which further contributed to the destruction of ethnic communities. Very few of the Indians of the former Indian Territory became farmers. Even if they had sufficient skills for this, the Indians did not have the means to manage the economy at the level that would help them withstand capitalist competition. And very soon, most of the owners, despite the ban on selling land for 25 years, parted with their land, which passed to oil and railway companies, into the hands of sales agents, etc.

The same fate befell many Indian groups throughout the country, especially in the Midwest and other areas of intensive industrial and agricultural development.

The dispossession of Indians throughout America proceeded with such speed that by 1930 the entire Indian population faced the prospect of complete impoverishment. In just over 40 years, 21 million acres of fertile or mineral-rich land were taken from the Indians by an act of 1887. The division of land by 1934 was made in 118 reservations. The Indians, once again robbed, went to work in local factories, worked as laborers, were hired under a contract for seasonal harvesting, in a word, led the same lifestyle as the poorest sections of the American population. The only difference was that, with even greater poverty, they were even more disenfranchised, often did not know English, and their ambiguous position as wards of the US government put them under the complete control of the Indian Bureau.

Simultaneously with the economic attack on the Indians, with the destruction of the Indian community and the tribe that helped the Indians to stick together, there was an attack on the original culture of the Indian peoples.

The native language, customs, and religious beliefs of the Indians were declared banned. Missionaries actively eradicated "pagan" mores. The government has adopted a special school curriculum. Children were torn away from their families, sent to special boarding schools located far from the reservation. Everything that connected the little Indians with their people was banned - songs, dances, national clothes, religion. Teaching in Indian schools was conducted exclusively in English, so that the children forgot their native language. Children from different tribes were collected in boarding schools, so that they could not communicate with each other in any Indian language and involuntarily resorted to English. Indian youth received knowledge that was difficult to find application on the reservation to which they returned. A small stratum of Indian intelligentsia emerged, alien to both Indians and whites. Many never found their place in life, which naturally aroused in the Indians a feeling of protest against such methods of assimilation, which brought confusion and demoralization to their environment. But some of the intelligentsia that arose in these years from the Indian environment later faithfully served their people in the role in which the Indians were allowed to act (teachers, employees of the Indian Bureau, preachers, etc.).

In general, all the efforts of the US ruling circles in the field of Indian policy in the XIX - early XX centuries. were aimed at destroying Indian culture, separating the Indians, demoralizing them and, consequently, minimizing their ability to resist. The Indians responded to this with uprisings, as well as protests of a different nature, expressed in various religious movements, in the emergence of teachings about the rejection of European culture, the secret confession of old or renewed cults forbidden by the church (the messianic movement of 1812-1814 and the uprising of Tecumseh, Dance of the Spirit in 1890 and the uprising of the Sioux Indians, etc.). The Indians continued to live their spiritual life. And this, to some extent, helped the Indian peoples to resist absorption by the dominant nation.

By the beginning of the XX century. at least the external manifestations of any serious resistance of the Indians were eliminated. Large tribes were settled on separate, remote from each other reservations (Iroquois, Sioux, etc.) and placed with Indians of other language groups. The system of measures for forced assimilation, which included the intensified work of many religious missions, boarding schools, strict bans on traditional activities, customs, entertainment in the native language, etc., operated steadily for several decades and literally threw the Indians out of the primitive communal system into the modern capitalist society, where they found themselves among the most disadvantaged part of the population.

The US government, under public pressure, was eventually forced to take action to save them from extinction. Under President Franklin Roosevelt, the Indian Bureau was headed by John Collier. Together with other progressive public figures, he tried to renew the composition of the Bureau with ethnographers, doctors, lawyers, educators, including those from the Indian intelligentsia, and with their help overcome the traditional US policy aimed at oppression, robbery and spiritual enslavement. indigenous people of the country. Public organizations such as the Association for American Indian Affairs and others ardently supported the line adopted by Collier and his associates, and actively participated in the preparation of reforms to improve the condition of Indians and Eskimos. In 1934-1936. several laws were passed, known as the Indian Reorganization Act, which provided for the introduction of self-government in Indian societies, the creation of production and marketing cooperatives, changes in the school system, and the protection of Indian property. However, these reforms were of a dual nature. On the one hand, they contributed to the partial restoration of the economic basis for the existence of the Indians: the government forbade further looting” of reservation lands; the organization of production and marketing cooperatives helped them to partly get rid of buyers - sovereign owners on the reservation; a special department under the Bureau of Indian Affairs was supposed to be engaged in the revival of Indian crafts and thereby open up a new source of income for the Indians.

Reforms in the education system reflected changes in Indian government policy. From boarding schools, the Indian Bureau moved on to establishing schools on reservations. The curriculum itself is changing, the emphasis is on teaching subjects that are necessary for a resident of an Indian reservation, industrial training is being introduced (lessons in home economics, weaving for girls, agricultural technology, studying a tractor and other agricultural machines - for boys, etc.). The Indians, who literally disappeared from poverty and unemployment, were also provided with some material support. Under the Civil Conservation Corps, which was in charge of public works (draining swamps, improving soils, building roads, etc.), special units were created from among the Indians, who got the opportunity to earn some money.

These reforms, no matter how insignificant they were, to some extent helped the Indian tribes during the years of terrible crisis and depression that reigned in the country. But they also had another side, reflecting a somewhat different view of the country's indigenous population compared to the past. Weakened, scattered groups of Indians, at various stages of assimilation, have long ceased to pose a threat to the well-being of the US ruling classes. Now one could think of their "exotic" culture. At this stage, it is no longer an object of persecution, but to some extent conservation and development of its individual forms. Laws 1934-1936 essentially artificially restored the tribal organization where it was no longer connected with the social structure of the new Indian society. The forms of primitive communal relations were either completely destroyed, as among the Indians of Oklahoma (or the Pima Indians in Arizona), or gradually died out, as among the western Indian peoples living in isolated areas of the country (the Navajos, the Pueblo Indians, the Seminols of Florida, etc.). The artificial organization of society was once again imposed on the Indians, returning them back, encouraging the revival of old customs, cultivating national narrow-mindedness and preventing the Indian working masses from uniting with the working people of all America. It is on this side of the laws of 1934-1936. and was the main focus of the Indian Bureau. Inviting the Indians, who had long lost their forms of primitive communal relations and lived in the same way as the surrounding rural poor of Oklahoma and other areas, to re-create tribes, the government placed the Indians under double control. Now, to the control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs was added the supervision of the "leaders", the "tribal council". This new administrative elite was dependent on the Bureau and had to act on its orders, receiving in return all the benefits from the laws of the 1930s (irrigated land, advantageous places in cooperation, etc.).

At present, there are 600,000 people in the United States who identify themselves as Indians and Eskimos, that is, almost as many as there were Indians and Eskimos in what is now the United States at the time of European colonization.

It is believed that by the time of European colonization, approximately 800,000 Indians and Eskimos lived in what is now the United States. By the end of the XIX century. as a result of wars of extermination, famines and diseases, the number of Indians in the country fell to 200 thousand. The relatively large increase in the Indian population with the constant "erosion" of Indian communities due to the assimilation of part of the Indians and their departure from the "Indian" way of life is primarily due to the cessation of the physical extermination of the Indians which lasted until the end of the 19th century. In addition, some improvement in living conditions for a part of the Indians who have received qualifications associated with cooperatives plays a role; the creation of normal hygienic conditions in some reservations, the struggle of the medical community against infectious and social diseases.

Most of the Indians continue to live on reservations, to which many are primarily tied by land that is not taxed in accordance with US "Indian" legislation. Often, being Americans both by occupation and by the whole way of life, the Indians do not leave the reservation, so as not to lose their piece of land - a refuge in case of loss of work. That is why among the inhabitants of the reservations one can find groups of the most varied degree of "assimilation" - from the Americanized way of life of the Iroquois of the State of New York to the very original and retaining many forms of the material and spiritual culture of the past, the Florida Seminoles. Both of them live on reservations, but the former refer to the reservation as a home to which they return from work, for example, in the construction of skyscrapers in large cities of the USA and even Europe, and the Seminoles really still remain more isolated and adhere to old customs that sharply differ them from other Americans.

A significant number of Indians live in small communities among the rest of the country's population. These are the Indians of Oklahoma. And although they live in cities or on farms interspersed with other residents of the state, they have developed some special kind of autonomy in which, being completely American by occupation, they retain "tribal" government, have their own medical and educational institutions and public organizations.

All the listed groups of Indians associated with a particular tribe, reservation, with land on the reservation, or leading the way of life of ordinary American farmers or city workers, are united by a common historical fate and present situation. And although the Indians in the past were ethnically diverse and were at different stages of the primitive communal system, the conditions of economic and national oppression in which they have to live now force them to hold on to each other, no matter how different the situation of individual Indian groups may be. And violent measures of assimilation, carried out through the most diverse channels, naturally evoke a desire to preserve their customs, their world, where neither a missionary, nor an Indian Bureau official, nor an idle tourist can invade. That is why it is necessary to distinguish between those forms of culture that the Indians retain for themselves as a symbol of their existence as a special ethnic group, and ostentatious, created specifically for the needs of commercial demand.

Interest in the culture of the Indians, which is now being shown in the USA, is directed primarily to the past, to remnants that have become obsolete or have been preserved due to the uneven development of individual regions of the country. In the show, the popularization of the culture of the Indians, there is always an element of attraction. And without this element, it was hardly possible to attract money for organizing all the various exhibitions, fairs, and handicraft workshops. Commercial interest lies in many undertakings related to the "revival" of Indian traditions in art and crafts.

For many Indians today, not only tribal organization, but most of the customs are about as alien as they are to "white" Americans. For reasons of a financial nature, these Indians are forced to reproduce what they have no organic connection with. Among peoples who have preserved their original culture more than others, the reproduction of holidays and rituals for the amusement of a bored public hurts a sense of pride, belittles their human dignity.

In some cases, all these unpleasant features of the commercial approach to the old culture of the Indians are tried to be overcome by making "fairs" and festivities as scientific and educational as possible. Ethnographers play an important role in this.

In Oklahoma, in the town of Anadarko - in the center of one of the most "Indian" states of the country - an open-air museum has been created. It presents life-size dwellings of various tribes of central North America. The construction and decoration of dwellings were carried out with the help of ethnographers and Indians from the respective tribes. Every year in August, the museum management organizes fairs where the Indians show their rituals, dances, demonstrate national clothes and jewelry. Here, artisans introduce those who wish to their crafts, and connoisseurs tell children Indian legends and tales.

In the state of New Mexico, the site of the same fair is the city of Gallup. Also in August, Indians from the western regions of the country and tourists come here. For the latter, hotels, restaurants are open, special bulletins are published informing about the order of the festival, as well as about some customs of the local Indians. Magnificent parades, rodeos, dances, reproductions of historical scenes follow each other for four days. These spectacles are of different properties.

Smaller festivities - the "Buffalo Dance" of the Prairie Indians, the "Snake Dance" of the Hopi, the Nighthawk Rite of the Eastern Cherokee, and many other festivities of a commercial nature, like the fairs described above, give a very far from the truth about the old customs of different tribes, but all of them have entered the everyday life of Americans in the same way as the "French" and "Italian" carnivals in New Orleans, the Mexican festivities in San Antonio, the song festivals of Norwegian-Americans, the New Year's processions in the Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco etc.

There is a point of view that in the United States, a part of the Indian population is developing a "pan-Indian" culture, which combines the cultural elements of different tribes. Indeed, over the past decades, one can observe a certain blurring of the lines between the tribes. Joint settlement in one reservation of multilingual tribes, frequent mixed marriages lead to constant cultural exchange.

In modern conditions (highways and railways, etc.), the Indians easily communicate with each other, attend the festivities of their friends and participate in the rituals and dances of tribes of a different culture and language. Therefore, festivities, dances, songs, costumes lose their ethnic address.

The activity of the American Native Church, which includes Indians of different tribes and whose cult is not associated with any particular tribe, also contributes to the strengthening of intertribal ties.

Some American ethnographers, noting the erasure of tribal boundaries, see this not so much as the preservation of old Indian customs, but as a stage in the process of assimilation of the Indians by the Americans. This is a perfectly acceptable assumption, since where the Indian population is especially diverse in its ethnic composition, tribal differences are erased rather quickly, but at the same time, external differences between the Indian and non-Indian population are gradually lost. The rapprochement of Indians from different tribes occurs with the help of the English language, since the vast majority of Indians either completely forgot their native language or are bilingual. In addition, basically all Indians, to one degree or another, accepted modern American culture and, above all, its material forms. However, almost everywhere the Indians retain their national identity. The need to defend their economic interests in the face of the US government, the struggle for equality binds American Indian citizens in much stronger bonds than belonging to the Native American Church or common festivities.

Nevertheless, the modern Indian population of the United States is increasingly participating in the social and cultural life of the country. Moreover, a number of areas of culture and art in the current United States are experiencing a certain influence on the part of the Indians, who enrich American culture, introducing into it some of their traditions, their talent, their creative work. “The United States is one of those countries in the Western Hemisphere in which there are very few Indians, and yet what a huge gap would exist in the culture of the United States if there were no Indian element in it!” William Foster wrote in his work “An Outline of the Political History of America » . And if a few decades ago, in all its policy, the United States proceeded from the fact that the Indians are “an endangered race and an endangered culture”, now the growth of the Indian population, and at the same time the growth of its activity in the social, political and cultural life of the country cannot be denied even by the most ardent supporters of the forced assimilation of the Indians.

If earlier, during the years of colonization of America and in the early days of the existence of the United States, this influence was direct and manifested itself mainly in the production of material goods, then with the increasing development of capitalist relations, Indian influence penetrates American culture through such channels as science, art , literature and even entertainment. In modern life, this indirect influence is of a very peculiar character. Continuing to influence the culture of the dominant nation, the original culture of the Indian groups encounters all sorts of obstacles to its own development. The ruling classes in the USA are striving to give the still preserved forms of the national culture of the Indian peoples a one-sided character advantageous from the point of view of capitalist entrepreneurship. The fight against this trend is of paramount importance for the Indians and is associated with an attempt to defend the right to their own culture. Here, the desire of the Indians to create national cultural values at a new stage, the persistent need to defend their right to independence in creativity and the stubborn struggle for the opportunity to develop their crafts and use the natural resources available in reservations for the benefit of their people are intertwined.

Let's look from this point of view at some still preserved forms of the original culture of the American Indian peoples. These primarily include painting, which has achieved certain successes and undoubted recognition.

R.Henry. Indian girl from Santa Clara

Without taking on the task of characterizing the ancient art of the Indian tribes, we will only say that it developed in several directions. The Indians of the northwest coast covered wooden utensils and ceremonial carved objects with paints, the Prairie Indians painted the covers of their dwellings - tents (tipi), raincoats, shields with pictographic signs that reported the exploits of their owners. The southwestern tribes had interesting "bulk" drawings of colored sand, which were created by nip and healer rites and immediately destroyed as soon as the rite ended. The drawings were symbolic and very complex. Many tribes knew the art of artistic modeling (smoking pipes, animal images, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic vessels were molded from clay), as well as stone carving. The tribes of the northwestern coast of North America created a very sophisticated art of carving wood, bone, horn, jade. Ritual and household items were decorated by Indian craftsmen with the same care and great skill.

G.Stuart. Tayendangea Indian Chief

But many of these forms did not receive further development. They are used very speculatively by contemporary American artists, who seek support and justification for modernist trends in painting in them. Experiencing a crisis of ideas, the dominant bourgeois culture turns to archaic forms, distorts them, distorting the original meaning, artificially tearing them away from the environment that once nourished them. The complex ornamentation of the Indians of the Northwest is interpreted as an ancient rationale for modern abstractionism and other formalist movements in painting and sculpture. Interest in the artistic traditions of the Indian peoples is not aimed at developing these traditions in relation to the needs of the Indians of today, but at serving the aesthetic culture.

The movement for the restoration of Indian culture, which began in the 1920s, was marked by the opening of a number of art schools for gifted Indians. Talented young men from the Kiowa tribe already in 1928 received high praise for their work at an international exhibition in Prague. Since then, paintings by Indian artists, murals, wall paintings have been decorating museums, residential buildings, and US government agencies. But the creativity of the masters of Indian origin is artificially directed along the channel that pleases the ruling classes. First of all, it is far from modernity in terms of subject matter, and in terms of the manner of execution, it is conditional. Canonized forms dominate, attracting with their exoticism. Often these forms are even loosely connected with Indian traditions. So, in an art school in Santa Fe, created specifically for the Indians, they developed techniques and style taken from the Persian miniature.

Very often, the creations of Indian masters are beautiful, despite the forms canonized by commercial demand. But they have two significant drawbacks - the limited means and the narrowness of the topic. The Indian artist sometimes creates strong paintings full of tragedy or bucolic charm. But they are usually turned into the past, show the exotic side of the life of the Indians, are conditional, as is the manner in which they are created.

How can an Indian live by making art? asked Allan Hauser, an Apache Indian school instructor in Brigham City, Utah. And he himself answers this question. “Practical experience and broader education stimulate the artist to create a creative work. But the facts discourage him. He learns that well-paid commercial art is a competitor for creative art, which often brings nothing but starvation.

And yet, many experts believe that the creations of Indian artists - this is the only thing that is now of value in modern painting in the United States. Talent, even entangled in the conventions of form and impoverished by themes, is able to create significant things. But all the more necessary for the Indians is freedom of creativity, which alone can help create art that is original and at the same time organically connected with contemporary reality.

Lloyd Kiva, a Teal by birth, at a conference on Indian arts and crafts, said: "The future of Indian art lies in the future, not in the past - let's stop looking back for standards for Indian art products." The words of Lloyd Keeve perfectly reflect the situation in which the art of the Indian peoples of the United States found itself, and testify to the urgent need to get rid of stylization and find a basis for the development of realistic forms of fine art.

In the development of handicrafts on Indian reservations, perhaps, the most successful combination of ancient traditions and new demands and tastes of craftsmen. Here, less than in any other area, representatives of the bourgeois American culture could look for material for themselves. And intervention in the arts and crafts of the Indians is limited mainly by the demand and tastes of the market. This is also difficult, but such interference did not succeed in spoiling the natural path of development of this interesting and promising branch of activity of the American Indian population.

It is interesting to note that American ethnographers who are directly connected with the Indians in their research work take a great part in the revival and development of art crafts.

Let's dwell on this in more detail. In 1935, under the Indian Bureau, in accordance with the laws of 1934-4936. The Department of Indian Arts and Crafts was created. Many ethnographers and archaeologists have worked and are now working at the Indian Bureau, traveling around the reservations, finding out the possibilities of creating or restoring art crafts that were prohibited during the years of forced assimilation. At the same time, through public organizations, progressive ethnographers make the work of the Bureau public and thereby force it to carry out measures useful to the Indians. Largely due to such work of the scientific community in many parts of the country where Indians live, as well as in museums, the production of original objects of Indian crafts and art is organized.

The circle of Indian artisans is quite wide, many Indian reservations or villages, where a certain number of people of Indian origin live, have workshops of a cooperative nature. The Cherokee in North Carolina have achieved a high art of woodcarving. It's been here since the 1980s. there is a craft school in which more than 20 years ago classes of art crafts were created, first weaving, then the production of pottery. Then the talented self-taught Going Baek Chilosky led the wood sculpture class. This art is taught not only by children, but also by adults. The Indians brought in Chilosky's former student, Amanda Crow, who was studying art history in Chicago, as an educator. The Penobscots also continue old traditions in crafts: they produce canoes for sale. On the Navajo reservation, carpets are woven for sale, for which this people was famous even in colonial times. The Pueblo Indians are famous for their pottery. At one time this art fell into decay. Now women from the tribes of the Pueblo Indians are again engaged in the production of pottery, which is of high quality and beauty of the ornament.

The fate of jewelry among the Pueblo Indians and Navajos, who are rightfully considered the best craftsmen in this area, is interesting.

The Indians adopted this art from the Spanish settlers and very soon surpassed their teachers, becoming the main suppliers of silver jewelry in the Spanish colonies of southwestern North America. Silver things - buckles, pendants, necklaces, they trimmed with turquoise. Now the production of jewelry occupies one of the first places among Indian crafts in terms of production.

But still, success in the revival and development of crafts is reduced to a minimum due to difficulties in marketing the products of artisans.

More than once, progressive American ethnographers have raised their voices against the dominance of shopkeepers-buyers who profit at the expense of Indian artisans. The creation of trading cooperatives helps to some extent to combat these predators that flood the reservations, but it is difficult to completely get rid of them.

It is equally important to find a market for Indian handicrafts. At the Tucson Indian Arts and Crafts Conference (1959), ethnographers convincingly argued how the narrowness of the market and the low wages of artisans hindered the further development of the newly revived crafts. “Navakh carpets became of much better quality and sold well. But the wages of weavers are so low that they will soon stop weaving ... Weaving, obviously, cannot take a place in non-Indian culture.

Pottery is also in decline. As you know, there is no wide market for well-ornamented ceramics, but it is open for cheap and flashy ashtrays...”. Concluding this sad review of the state of affairs, Royel Hessrick, head of Western American art at the Denver Museum of Art, stated: "The real pitfalls for Native American craft products are: poor management, sporadic production, weak advertising, or inability to understand changes in public whims." Dependence on the skuszczyk, on private benefactors, and, finally, on the taste of the public, which has been spoiled for many years by commercial advertising, are sufficient obstacles for economically weak handicrafts. In order for the American buyer to want to buy rather expensive handicrafts, rather than prefer cheap mass-produced fakes, it is necessary that he not only has the means to do this, but also understands their value. In this regard, the role of museums, popular science literature, and scientifically staged advertising is very important. Explanatory work is carried out by the progressive ethnographic community through museums and exhibitions, although, as the Americans themselves note, this is far from enough. And yet, the products of Indian handicrafts penetrate the life of Americans, certainly enriching it, although they occupy a small place in it.

As for the development of more productive types of production, this is even worse on Indian reservations.

Only under the condition that the Indians preserve the land and natural wealth contained in the bowels of the reservations, with the economic development of the reservations, can we expect the preservation of the cultural traditions of the Indian peoples.

But this condition, necessary for the further development of Indian ethnic communities, is not observed in a capitalist state. Along with admiring Indian antiquity and conserving customs that retard the growth of Indian class consciousness, everything is being done to destroy the very foundation of the existence of Indian groups, to take away their land.

Indians continue to be the subject of various administrative experiments. If we trace the history of the "Indian" policy of the United States, then it will first of all turn out to be closely connected with the land issue. The appearance of reservations was caused primarily by the requirement of the states to withdraw convenient lands from the Indians; The division of common lands and the transfer of land to private ownership, begun in the 1880s, “freed up” millions of hectares of land for American oil and other companies, as well as for capitalist agriculture. Acts of recent years - the so-called Termination Act of 1953 (Termination act) and the Indian Relocation Act - also entail further alienation of Indian lands. Before presenting the gist of these laws, it should be remembered that the Indians' lands on the reserves are not taxed, and this is one of the advantages for which the Indians naturally strive, and for which many prefer to remain on the reservations.

Ellen Neal (Kwakiutl tribe, British Columbia, Canada) - wood carver

What is the first of these acts? He transferred reservations in some states from the jurisdiction of the federal government to the jurisdiction of the state authorities. Officially, this meant that the Indians of these states no longer needed the guardianship of the government, that is, they rose one more step towards achieving full citizenship. However, the Indians reacted negatively to this measure. “The Indians protested,” Nancy Lurie wrote in a review of the current state of the “Indian” problem, “accurately predicting not only that law and order would suffer damage (states are unlikely to want to take on new responsibility for Indians living on lands that are not taxed tax), but also that agitation for the taxation of Indian lands will begin. "Most Indians are poor," Lurie continues, "before they get their land profitable, if at all possible, they will lose it through taxation." And although Congress decided to take such measures on all reservations, completely freeing the Indians from the federal government (by December 1961 a small number of Indian groups had already been subjected to this new experiment), the Termination Act was suspended due to the protest of the Indians, who were well aware that with by the implementation of the Termination Act, they would fall under the power of the states, and therefore completely dependent on the interests of local capitalist entrepreneurs, whose actions are even more difficult for the public to control than the actions of the Indian Bureau.

As regards the Indian Relocation Act, i.e., moving them from the poorest reservations to the cities, it has the same economic basis. As mentioned earlier, part of the land on the reservations is still in communal ownership.

The land under the forest or rich in mineral resources, the pastures of the Indian poor, is beneficial to exploit jointly, on a cooperative basis. Thanks to the measures taken during the years of the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, technical intelligence appeared in the reservations in the Indian communities, capable of helping to create an economic base for the Indian economy based on the natural resources available on the reservations. This initiative of the Indian tribes is being nipped in the bud.

The Indians are allowed to develop only those industries that cannot seriously compete with American companies and do not affect the natural resources in which the capitalists are interested. But, as a rule, the Indians are not given the opportunity to use for the benefit of their people the natural resources available on the reservations. As soon as minerals are discovered on the reservation that the inhabitants of the reservation could exploit, the government either gives the land to an industrial company or requisitions or buys it for the state. Everything that can bring any serious income is taken from the Indians. So it was with the Indians of Alaska, who decided to independently develop the forest resources on their reservations and build a pulp mill on a cooperative basis - their economic initiative was immediately suppressed, and the forest plots were taken away. In the Papago (Arizona) reservation, rich in gold, silver, lead and other minerals, Indians are not accepted for well-paid work in the mines owned by large industrial companies. There are many such examples - they all indicate that the ruling classes are not interested in actually improving the well-being of the Indian population.

Despite repeated assurances that the lands and natural resources of the reservation would no longer be plundered, the US government in 1955 decided to cancel one of the most important orders for preserving the economic base of the Indian groups, in fact, completely depriving the Indian tribes of any traces of independence. From now on, the Indian has the right to sell his share of land, forests, etc., without the permission of the tribal council. Thus, a new loophole was opened for further robbery of the Indians. From 1948 to 1957, this act alone deprived them of more than 3 million acres of land with forest, water and other riches that could contribute to raising prosperity on the reservations.

It is clear that in this state of affairs, reservations are among the disaster areas where people are languishing from the inability to apply their knowledge, their strength. Instead of helping the Indians to develop productive agriculture, forestry, mining, to develop handicrafts on a large scale, a new way out of the situation has been devised - relocation, voluntary resettlement in cities.

And until 1952 (the year the relocation law was issued), Indians left the reservations for temporary work in the city or on plantations.

Labor contractors even preferred Indians for seasonal work, since they were not unionized, completely defenseless, and therefore content with reduced pay. In addition, they did not want to stay at work and returned to the reservations. Chiroks from Oklahoma were taken by contractors for the cotton harvest to Arkansas. Every year, thousands of Indians from British Columbia (Canada), as well as the states of Montana and Idaho, were hired to collect hops in the Yakima Valley. This work requires a lot of labor and is poorly paid. 35% of the Mi'kmaq tribe (the coastal provinces of Canada) go to harvest potatoes in the state of Maine (USA).

Iroquois from reserves in Canada and the United States are constantly leaving for rural work and logging, and in the post-war years, an increasing number of Iroquois work in industry, mainly in construction.

Ojibwe Indians from the Lac du Flambeau reservation make up 80% of the workers at the local factory. It is interesting to note that most of the Indians working at the plant are women.

Most of the active Indian population in British Columbia works in the fishing industry.

This testifies to the process of proletarianization of part of the Indian population that began several decades ago.

Forced assimilation, carried out before the laws of the 30s of the 20th century, was suspended with the introduction of the Reorganization Act. The implementation of certain measures that temporarily stopped the plunder of land on reservations, the development of handicrafts, and the restoration of social ties between people of Indian origin contributed to the rise of national feelings among the Indians. At the same time, the introduction of Indians to the culture of the dominant nation did not stop. They became more and more Americans in their way of life, perceiving, as far as possible, the material achievements of modern society, mastering modern knowledge, especially practical knowledge necessary to raise living standards.

Over the past decade, a lot has changed in the position of the Indians. The Second World War caused an unprecedented activity of the Indian population of the USA in the last 50-60 years. Many volunteered for the front. The Indians fought in the most difficult areas of the war, served as signalmen, pilots, showing considerable courage. During these years, quite a lot of both men and women left the reservations and worked in factories, mines, plantations side by side with workers of other national origins. Both war veterans and workers returned to the reservations after the war as different people. They were no longer so afraid of life in the city, they recognized not only the hostility of stupid officials and townsfolk, but also the solidarity of American workers.

It was after the Second World War, which contributed to the awakening of all colonial, oppressed peoples, that the Indians of the United States rebelled against the dictates of officials, protested against the plunder of the natural wealth of reservations, raised their voice in defense of their right to develop their own economy, receive an education equal to others, the right to stand in a single row with all the peoples of the country and cease to be an object of charity, the right to decide their own fate, the fate of their culture.

Under these new conditions, the emergence of the law on relocation was met by the Indian public as another gross violation of their human rights. The implementation of the measures connected with the act of relocation brought the Indians, instead of improving their economic situation, new complications.

If for the majority of settlers life and work in the city seemed to be a temporary measure that should help improve their skills, gain new knowledge for their application on the reservation, where many wanted to return, then the Indian Bureau involved in relocation will bring the final solution to the “Indian problem” in it. Settlers are helped in getting a job, the Indian Bureau gives a loan, finds housing. And as soon as the Indian family has found shelter, and the head of the family has found a job, the Indian Bureau relieves itself of responsibility for the fate of the settlers, although, as a rule, they find themselves in a difficult situation. The unskilled Indians are given the hardest and lowest paid jobs, most often temporary ones, which they quickly lose. Skilled workers also don't last long, as often, lacking the money to pay union dues, they are deprived of union protection and are the first to be fired. Deprived of the support of the Indian Bureau and ineligible for unemployment benefits due to insufficient residence in this city, the Indians cannot return home, as they are usually settled as far from the reservation as possible.

Thus, instead of real help, they are thrown into the cities, where they fall into the number of the most distressed part of the population.

The relocation program, like the aforementioned act on the end of the US government's "trusteeship" of the Indian tribes, is an expression of a policy of forced assimilation, brought to life by economic and political reasons. Indian lands in reservations, the natural wealth stored in the bowels of these lands, continue to attract the interest of capitalist companies. The alienation of the land is facilitated by the further destruction of the Indian community, the reduction to zero of self-government, the sovereignty of the councils of Indian tribes.

In order to please the interested circles, the indigenous population of the United States is subjected to continuous experiments, forced to obey conflicting laws. He is either dragged back into the past, or forcibly pulled into the very thick of capitalist society. Under whatever sauces various reforms are carried out, the Indians do not have the opportunity to independently decide their own destiny.

W. 3. Foster. At the dawn of American history. Preface to G. Apteker's book “The History of the American People. Colonial era. M., 196Í, p. 8.

Yu. P. Averkieva, E. E. B l about m to in and with t. Modern population of Canada. "Peoples of America", vol. I. M., 1959, p. 538.

Yu. P. Averkieva. Indians of the northwest coast of North America. The Peoples of America, vol. I, p. 342.

See Noel Hume's report "Virginia Indian Pottery" at the regular conference on American Indian ethnic history in the article "Two Scientific Meetings in Washington". "Owls. ethnography”, 1959, No. 4, p. 132.

I. W. Powell. Indian Linguistic families of America North of Mexico (7th Annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington, 1891).

Contributions to North American Ethnology. Department of Interior U.S. Geographical & Geological Survey of Rocky Mountain Region, vol. I-VII, IX.

See Yu. Averkieva. Service value of ethnography in the USA. Bulletin of the History of World Culture, 1959, No. 4, pp. 67-74; G. M a k r e g o r. Ethnography in US Government Offices. Bulletin of the History of World Culture, 1959, No. 4, pp. 75-85.

A. Parker. The life of general Ely S. Parker. buffalo. New York, 1919.

Yu. P. Averkieva, E. E. Blomk in i s. Indians of the northeastern and lakeside regions of the USA (Iroquois and Algonquians). The Peoples of America, vol. I, p. 217.

Oliver la Farge, ed. The changing indian. Norman, 1942.

Yu. P. Averkieva, I. A. The current situation of the Indians and Eskimos of North America. The Peoples of America, vol. I, p. 342.

The Indian in modern America, p. 68.