Naturally, I find the peoples of North America quite interesting because there are some obvious connections to Siberian indigenous peoples. I do know a lot less about North American indigenous peoples though.
Buffalo, or bison were a big part of the plains peoples' lives. The buffalo were an extremely wild and robust creature and thus were not domesticated like reindeer in Siberia. Nevertheless, I get the impression that the buffalo were extremely important.
Are these chums? Oops, no they are tipis. It is not insignificant that Siberian and North American peoples lived in very similar tents, as the North American peoples migrated across Beringia during the ice age.
One of the main methods that the Cree and other plains people used to hunt buffalo was to force them towards the drop off into a river valley. This method saw a whole herd die simultaneously. But as there were some 30 million buffalo, and far fewer plains peoples, there was no risk of them dying out. The onset of large numbers of European peoples upset the balance, which nearly wiped out the buffalo.
In earlier times trees only grew in river valleys on the prairies. There were two reasons for this. Firstly there were many prairie fires. These do not occur today due to widespread agriculture. Secondly, when a herd of buffalo came running through they would churn everything up, which meant that trees could never establish themselves, even though the grasses would recover quickly. This made the river valleys a special place to gather. When settlers first came to the prairies, they could only find wood in the river valleys to build houses and make fires. Settlers further from the rivers made their homes from sod. Today trees have spread further as the seeds have carried and not faced opposition. There are not tall trees on the prairies though, by Australian standards.
Growing in the valley is this "Canadian thistle" which looks suspiciously similar to the Siberian thistle.
Throughout the valley were these berries. Colloquially they are called "choke cherries". They have a stone inside of them. I can't remember the official name or the Cree name. Abigail called them "chunk berries"!
Above the valley is the prairie plains. This is roughly what the prairie would have looked like before agriculture.
Think "Dances with Wolves". The Souix or Lakota nation are also plains people who had contact with the Cree.
Thousands, perhaps millions of buffalo rubbed up against this stone through the ages. It has quite a smooth side.
Traditional Cree costume.
In the interpretive centre we saw a little of one video where people talked about searching for the "old spirituality." Let me qualify a couple things first. The plains people did believe in a Creator. The early Christians often made a big mistake in teaching the plains peoples that all of theor beliefs were wrong. The correct approach would have been to determine which aspects of the Cree story were searching after the true God and then to help them further along that journey by introducing them to Jesus. Of course there were aspects of the Cree spirituality that were bad, but not everything should have been thrown out. Unfortunately, many Cree people today therefore see Christianity as opposed to their own native spirituality, and that when they search for an "old spirituality" now, they are actually concocting something that their ancestors did not. Their ancestors were more genuine in their search for the truth. The search for old spirituality is not the right approach, rather the search for the "true spirituality" is the correct approach. Spirituality through the Holy Spirit is truth, it can be found today, instead of only within the past. It may be a small semantic split, but it is a significant one.
2 comments:
not all the missionaries were unable to see this. Brebeuf and the Huron Carol show this but there was and maybe still is a feeling within certain church circles that this is inacurate. Many are uncomfortable with singing about fox and beaver pelt as part of their Christmas celebrations. There is also a part of the native culture that says that fiction is lies. I have heard that exact phrase many times while selling books. These two things would have worked together(aided by the enemy) to make seeing the need you discribe almost imposible.
Yes that is true that Brebeuf did make inroads into being culturally relevant. I think he was the minority though. Interestingly, he was Jesuit and a little more open minded than some protestants. (That was why I used the word "often" instead of "always".)
Richard Twiss has a lot to say about these topics, and I think he comes a long way to accurately describing the situation.
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