Native America

Clara Sue Kidwell

Introduction

If a basic premise of science is that systematic observation of the world will reveal uniform patterns of events in the environment, then American Indians were very capable scientific practitioners. Physical aspects of the landscape became markers of the annual solstice points of the sun. The cycles of animal and plant life and the appearance of the moon divided the year into regular months. Native people managed their environments with fire and technologically sophisticated irrigation systems. They domesticated plants, developed agricultural systems that took advantage of complementary relationships among those plants, and were keenly aware of the effects of plants on the human body.

Knowledge about the environment is readily available to anyone who cares to observe, and in theory, everyone could be a scientist. If a second basic premise of science is that there are intellectual explanations for why the patterns of events in the environment exist, then obviously, not all people are scientists. Science in the Western European tradition is an elitist activity, and American Indian societies had their specialists who acquired, guarded, and passed on explanations of the natural world. These explanations have generally been dismissed as myth or folklore, certainly not acceptable science in a modern sense. Without written records, we must work backward from oral traditions preserved in contemporary written form and from physical remains to determine the purposes of ancient activities. What we can know is that Native people were keen observers and recorders of patterns in the actions of the natural environment, whether of stars, or animals, or plants. Those patterns served as predictors of events and allowed people to manage their physical resources in productive ways.

No single construct can be called Native American science. The commonality in the Western Hemisphere, however, can be described as a sense that the forces in the environment were powerful, sentient, and willful beings whose actions had profound impact on human life, but whose actions it was within the province of human beings to influence. By observing closely and noting patterns of activity in their environments, Indian people could exercise control over their resources.

The basic point at which Native practices diverge from contemporary science is in the practice of experimentation. Native people saw themselves in an ongoing relationship with the forces of the environment. They influenced them through their own activities in ceremonies. Human action was necessary to the continuation of natural cycles. Solstices were marked, but ceremonial activity was necessary for continuation of the sun’s movement in its path across the sky. The Hopi would not have considered the possibility of not performing their ceremonies to see if the sun would, indeed, reverse its direction or not. Skepticism had no place in the carefully balanced and maintained worlds of Native communities. A study of American Indian observational practices and systems of explanation can, however, introduce students to some basic ways of conceptualizing principles of present-day science.


Day 1: Astronomy

Astronomy is the prime example of an observational science. Everyone can observe the movements of the sun and moon and stars in the sky. Few people pay attention to the complex patterns of interaction among those bodies. Native observation of the sun, moon and stars produced significant physical records of patterns in their movement and intellectual achievement in discerning the predictive power of those patterns.

Although the most well-known systems are those of the Maya and Aztecs in Mesoamerica, many North American people created solstice markers, and some may have been aware of the rising points of certain bright stars or constellations that preceded solstices. The Pleiades were widely used to determine planting seasons for many agricultural tribes. As a winter constellation, their first appearance in the night sky in the fall marked the approximate date of the first killing frost, and their disappearance similarly marked the last.

The Medicine Wheel in the Big Horn mountains of Wyoming is a solstice marker constructed by hunting people who were probably ancestors of contemporary Shoshone people. For them, knowledge of the turning of seasons was crucial in predicting the movements of game animals. Medicine wheels are widespread on the northern plains, where they served as markers of seasonal changes.

For the Hopi in the Southwest, ceremonial cycles were (and in many cases still are) governed by observation of solstice points. The Hopi also, however, had a sophisticated knowledge of the relationship of movements of the moon to the sun. The Mayan calendar system, which probably derived from early Olmec culture and which was appropriated by the Aztecs along with much of the Mayan intellectual heritage, predicted eclipses of the moon and encompassed extended cyclical patterns in the heavens. The movements of the planet Venus were of particular interest.

The study of archaeoastronomy is fascinating for what it shows about the accumulation of knowledge over long periods of time. Although the pattern of movement of the sun along the horizon marked by the solstices can certainly be obvious within the span of a single human lifetime, lunar eclipses are much less frequent. Patterns in the motion of Venus are more complex. To discern them was probably the work of several lifetimes and the accumulation of evidence by a number of viewers. The hieroglyphic writing systems of Mayan and Aztec cultures could allow for such accumulation and recording of information, but other traditions in North America, such as those concerning the Pleiades, occurred among tribes that did not have written languages. The Pawnee Indians on the central Great Plains had an elaborate oral tradition about the morning star and the evening star as the progenitors of the human race. It was evidently based on changing relationships in the positions of Venus, Mars, and Jupiter throughout the year.

Anthony Aveni’s excellent introduction to astronomy with the naked eye can give students the skills they need to understand complex celestial phenomena and the process of systematic observation.

Student Reading
Cesi, Lynn, "Watchers of the Pleiades: Ethnoastronomy Among Native Cultivators in Northeastern North America," Ethnohistory, XXV (4) (Fall, 1978): 301-317.
Eddy, John A., "Astronomical Alignment of the Big Horn Medicine Wheel," Science, 174 (June 10, 1974): 1035-43.
McCluskey, Stephen C., "Historical Archaeoastronomy: The Hopi Example,” from Archaeoastronomy in the New World, A.F. Aveni (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Kidwell, Clara Sue, “Ethnoastronomy as the Key to Human Intellectual Development and Social Organization,” in Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance, Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins (eds.) (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2003),
pp. 5-19.

Extended Reading:

Film:
"The Sun Dagger," available through the Extension Media Services, University of California, Berkeley. It shows the passage of a streak of light through a spiral carved into a rock face at Fajada Butte, New Mexico, which has been interpreted as an ancient Pueblo solstice marker.

The primary journal for the study of archaeoastronomy is Archaeoastronomy, published by the Center for Archaeoastronomy at the University of Maryland, directed by John Carlson.

Day 2: Mathematics

Mathematics is an essential tool of science in that it allows manipulation of information about relationships among objects. Mathematical systems in the Americas range from the highly developed base 20 system of the Mayan cultures to very simple counting systems noted on one's fingers. The Mayan system was used for calendrical notations rather than operations such as multiplication or division. It was important for keeping linear count of the days in the Long Count and for keeping track of the correlation between the 260-day ritual calendar and the 360-day Vague Year.

Other systems of recording and manipulating numerical information include the quipu of the Inka, a series of knotted cords tied to a main cord. The patterns of knots are thought to be a kind of numerical system to keep track of quantities of goods for trading purposes or held as tribute by the Inka (emperor). Unlike the Mayan system, where scholars have made significant progress in recent years in deciphering hieroglyphic writing, the code of the quipu has not been broken. Contemporary Andean people still use quipus but their use does not obviously correspond to the use at the time of European contact when they were first observed. It is possible that part of their purpose was to record celestial cycles.

The system of directional shrines that encompasses the city of Cuzco in Peru today has been likened to a quipu laid over the city, dividing it into ceremonial zones controlled by different groups of people during different parts of the year. The shrines may mark the passage of the sun and moon and divide the Inka universe not only into discrete units of time but also into political or religious units.

Without readily translatable explanatory texts, contemporary scholars must work backward from the visible results of the intellectual activities of the precontact cultures of the Americas to try to reconstruct the origins of those activities. This is particularly true in the case of mathematical systems.

Student Reading

Extended Reading

Day 3: Environmental Management

Human beings act upon and are acted upon by their environments. This mutual interaction is a process that shapes both environment and culture. Native people took an active role in shaping their environments through the use of fire, irrigation systems, and domestication of plants. Indians in North and South America adapted to an incredibly wide range of environments and spoke an incredible variety of languages, and this diversity must be acknowledged.

Indian people managed their environments by fire, water, and deliberate cultivation of stands of wild plants. Burning in grasslands controlled the extent of forest areas. In wooded areas it provided new browse for animals. It cleared fields for agriculture and created nutrients for the soil. Fire had significant ceremonial association for many tribes because it was associated with the Sun. The Lakota saw the Sun as one of their primary dieties, and they set fire to prairie grasses occasionally to drive buffalo to areas where they would be killed for food.

Hohokam farmers in the Arizona desert built extensive irrigation systems to develop their agricultural system. In Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, Puebloan peoples constructed the single largest dwelling in North America prior to the early twentieth century—Pueblo Bonito, a five-story tall ediface that had approximately 800 rooms. An elaborate water control system channeled water down the walls of the steep canyon. The system allowed for agriculture that provided subsistence for the approximately 25,000 people who lived along the Chaco River flowing through the canyon. The system could not, however, overcome the effects of a period of severe drought from 1130 to 1190 C.E. The Chaco Culture dissipated, and the population dispersed.

Current debates over global warming indicate the limitations of current scientific theories to account with absolute precision for natural phenomena. Students should be able to think about how environmental management affects their own lives, how people's pragmatic use of the environment affects their survival, how attempts to control the environment have effects on all things—plants, animals, and humans—in the environment, and how scientists are limited in their ability to control the environment.

Student Reading

Extended Reading

Day 4: Agriculture

Domestication of plants marks a signal human achievement in the advance of culture. It is based on systematic observation and human selection of desirable qualities in plants. It also entails establishing a symbiotic relationship between humans and plants—plants feed humans. Domestication of plants occurred when Native people (most likely women, since they were the primary gatherers) selected the seed heads that held the seeds most tightly, thereby providing the gatherer the greatest return for her effort. This selection on a regular basis favored plants which could not broadcast their own seeds and which became dependent on humans to detach seeds from stems and plant them.

Although corn is generally considered the epitome of Indian agriculture, other plants were domesticated and played important roles in subsistence patterns through the eastern woodlands. Indians in meso and south America are credited with the domestication of corn and potatoes, but recent scholarship reveals that Indians in the eastern woodlands of North America domesticated sun flowers, chenopodium, sumpweed, marsh elder, may grass, and possibly squash. Although these plants declined in importance as food sources when corn, a more nutritious and stable crop, was introduced into the eastern woodlands from mesoamerica, native people made the woodlands an independent agricultural hearth relatively recently recognized.

The triad of corn, beans and squash became the staple agricultural complex for agriculturalists throughout North America by the end of the first millenium C.E. Although Native people did not conceptualize the modern relationships of beans as nitrogen fixers and corn as a nitrogen processor, they generally recognized a mutual dependency among the three crops. Beans could use corn stalks to climb, and squash leaves provided a ground cover that kept soil cool and uniformly moist.

Student Reading

Extended Reading

Film:
“Hopi: Songs of the Fourth World” is available from New Day Films, 22D Hollywood Avenue, Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey 07423. It shows the importance of corn in the culture of the Hopi Indians.

Day 5: Medical Practices

The uses of medicinal herbs and plants by Native Americans represent a particular world view concerning power in the environment. In contemporary society, Native uses of plants have received attention as a source of commercially valuable pharmaceuticals. Many people are aware that aspirin is a synthetic form of natural components found in willow bark, which was widely used by Indians in teas brewed to treat fever and pain. Scholars have recorded extensive evidence of pragmatic uses of plants by native people, and some have attempted to correlate the expected outcome indicated by those uses with chemical components of plants that can produce specific physical effects.

The modern scientific explanation of native curing practices involves chemical components of plants that cause changes in the human body. Native people attributed the changes to the sentient spirits of the plants who responded to human appeals for assistance. Knowledge of medicinal herbs was generally esoteric in that certain practitioners had particular things that they used. In some cases, such as the Midewiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Chippewa in the Great Lakes region, knowledge of herbs was passed on as part of initiation into the Society.

Medical practices among non-Indian colonists and Native people in nineteenth-century America were very similar. White settlers brought the tradition of medicinal “simples” from Europe, and they readily adopted herbal remedies that they learned from Indians or that resembled European "simples." Indian practices of bleeding or cupping represented the same kind of mechanical manipulation that European physicians used. Pragmatic treatment of dislocated joints involved tying a rope around the affected limb, throwing it over a tree branch, and pulling the joint back into place. On the Great Plains, fractures were splinted with rawhide, which dried and tightened around the broken limb. A small window was cut in the hide to allow access to wounds caused by compound fractures.

A typical treatment regimen for generalized aches and fevers was that prescribed by Iroquois curers in upstate New York. The patient was put through a sweat lodge for purification, given large quantities of willow bark tea to drink (willow bark contains salicen, the natural source of acetyl salacylic acid—aspirin), and then wrapped in buffalo robes and put in the corner of the longhouse to rest for several days. The cure was usually effective. Medicine is more of an art than a science, but its practice depends upon careful observation of cause and effect relationships and systematic application of knowledge. In this regard, Amerian Indian medicine was as efficacious as the European medical practices that were imported into the Americas, and the two systems were based on many of the same principles.

Student Reading

Extended Reading

Day 6: The Concept of Ethnoscience

The act of categorizing natural phenomena is an important aspect of science. The Linnean system is still the basis of modern botany. Native people developed their systems of categorization based on their observations of the world. These were specific to groups rather than applied universally, but in each case they represented a way of organizing knowledge, and in some cases they had predictive power.

The Navajo in the American Southwest, for instance, classify plants (as well as rain) as male and female. Woody plants are male, while pliable plants are female, and this categorization is based on physical characteristics associated with behavioral characteristics. Birds and storms were identified with each other among the Saulteaux, an Ojibwa band around the Berens River in Ontario, because birds followed the same paths as storms in their yearly migrations. A very rational inference based on systematic observation is that birds cause the storms. The Saulteaux associated storms with birds in the Thunderbird, a great, powerful, and very real being.

Another example of classification based on association can be found among the Thompson Indians of British Columbia. The woodbetony (Pedicularis bracteosa), which they used in basketmaking, was with species of willow weed (Epilobium), and its name was skikens a. sha’ket, meaning “companion of willow weed.” Association could be based on behavior. The Navajo put bats in the same category as insects because of an origin tradition in which insects and bats lived together in a previous world. The badger was classified with the wolf, mountain lion, bobcat and lynx (which were grouped as predatory animals) because he was their friend.

Classification systems were important to native people, and they reveal the results of careful observation and thinking about the nature of the world. The categories in those systems are more likely to be based on their usefulness to humans or associations with other beings in the physical world than to simple physical form. Contemporary science judges the validity of native classification systems by how well native names distinguish among animals and plants of different genera and species, i.e., how closely native people recognize the same features that scientists do. But the Tzetzal in Chiapas, Mexico, distinguish relatively few of the modern botanical categories of plants in their environment. They do, however, distinguish a number of different kinds of beans within a single modern species. And they lump numbers of species together in single names. In other words, they find many differences in plants that are important to them, and very few in those that are not.

The commonplace knowledge that “Eskimos have fifty names for snow” should be interpreted as acknowledging the ability of Native people in arctic regions to make fine discriminations among kinds of snow—a skill often necessary to their survival and often predictive of changing environmental conditions. The ability both to categorize and to recognize subcategories is based on the power of sustained and consistent observation of the environment.

Student Reading

 

Possible Topics for Student Research
1. How does a particular tribe use plants, and in what ways do those uses represent scientific activity?
2. Students may practice their own naked-eye observations of celestial events over a certain period and study native accounts of the stars that they see. They can then assess how tribal explanations differ from modern astronomical ones for what they have viewed.
3. How can agricultural practices in a particular tribe conform to principles of contemporary ecology?
4. How do traditional agricultural practices promote genetic diversity or uniformity in plants? Why is genetic diversity important?

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