Gifts from the Thunder Beings: Indigenous Archery and European Firearms in the Northern Plains and Central Subarctic, 1670-1870

1. Bows, Guns, and Diverging Views on Indigenousand European Technology

1 Bows, Guns, and Diverging Views on Indigenous and European Technology In 1908 Indian agent James McLaughlin held a novel ceremony at Timber Lake on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota. His aim was to impress upon the Lakota men who had signed up to receive allotment lands the importance of U.S. citizenship and to mark their transition from “savagery” to “civilization.” Journalist Fergus M. Bordewich provided a vivid description of such an event: They [the Lakota] stood resplendent in the feathers and fringed buckskin of a bygone age, facing Major James McLaughlin, a shrewd and hard man who was known to all Sioux as the Indian agent who had ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull in 1890. Ramrodstiff , cigar in hand, McLaughlin watched as each Indian solemnly stepped from a tepee and shot an arrow to signify that he was leaving behind his Indian way of life. Moving forward, he then placed his hand on a plow to demonstrate that he had chosen to live the farming life of a white man.1 During the early twentieth century non-Aboriginal policy makers and the public at large in Canada and in the United States believed the complete assimilation of Aboriginal peoples into the dominant society to be the only valid solution to what was then perceived as the “Indian problem.” One of the measures devised in the United States to accomplish this was the allotment of reservations into parcels for individual families under the Dawes Act, or General Allotment Act, of 1887. 2 Bows, Guns, and Diverging Views James McLaughlin and his colleagues in the Bureau of Indian Affairs could hardly have found a more poignant and fitting symbolism than archery gear. While to them the plow was a central symbol of civilization , the men from Washington had also hit the mark precisely concerning the central significance of the bow and arrow to the Plains peoples. Changing Perceptions of Aboriginal Archery By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, non-Aboriginal peoples attached increasingly negative connotations to Native American archery. At a time when social Darwinist models of cultural and ethnic hierarchies had become an integral part of intellectual culture, Native American archery was considered a relic of bygone times, representing Aboriginal technological and cultural inferiority. For example, in Ancient Society, published in 1877, Lewis Henry Morgan, then a leading American anthropologist, divided the evolutionary scale of civilizations into lower, middle, and higher savagery, lower, middle, and upper barbarism, and civilization. As the distinctive mark of higher savagery, he considered the invention of the bow and arrow. In contrast, his hallmark of civilization was the invention of writing.2 This indicates a link in scholarly and informed popular perceptions between archery and “savagery,” a cultural backwardness when comparing cultures of “higher savagery” (i.e., Native American) to those of “civilization” (i.e., Euro-American). Morgan’s notions might have at least in part informed the ideas of people like James McLaughlin and others who invented the competency ceremonies and their archery component. To Bureau of Indian Affairs officials like McLaughlin the bow and arrow stood for “savagery,” violence, and technological inferiority while to Plains Indians it was a symbol of military prowess, economic independence , and masculinity, an expression of their role as providers and protectors.3 As early as 1754, Blackfoot or Gros Ventre people in the Northern Plains had rejected the Hudson’s Bay Company’s invitation to visit its posts on Hudson Bay to trade for guns and other goods. Presenting an archery outfit to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Bows, Guns, and Diverging Views 3 emissary Anthony Henday, they stated that these weapons served them well enough.4 In spite of assessments to the contrary by later writers, fur trader and explorer David Thompson, who observed Aboriginal archery during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, confirmed the effectiveness of Plains Aboriginal bows in a skirmish between Gros Ventre des Prairies and Iroquois trappers: “The Willow Indians [Gros Ventre] were but a few more than the Iroquois and mostly armed with Bows and Arrows, which whatever maybe thought by civilized men, is a dreadful weapon in the hands of a good archer.”5 Fig. 1. Competency ceremony at the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota, 1916. Note the man standing underneath the flag, drawing a Plains bow and arrow, and the man on the far right resting his hands on...