Redman's America; 1; How They Came

[Ruth Underhill] That's a Sioux Indian greeting. It's a beginning of a series of pictures of American Indian life ways: their food, their costumes, their houses, and what we can manage about their government and their history up to the present. Now many people are going to say Indians are old stuff. We know all about them, seen them in the movies, seen them in advertisements. But let me introduce you to some Indians and see if they really are so familiar. Now these, of course, are modern Indians who don't always wear the old costumes. But today they have authentic clothes of the sort that used to be worn by their people. The first one is familiar. This is a man from the plains, the great country between the Mississippi and the Rockies. I will call him Kills Two Enemies, because, we'll say, that in the great fight with the Cheyenne that is just exactly what he did. Now his people, living on that plains country, are hunters. They almost, all their livelihood comes from the buffalo. He's wearing therefore clothes and moccasins, you'll find out later, have buffalo

skin soles. But the rest of his clothing comes from animals. It's the clothing of a hunter. First you'll see the enormous, gorgeous headdress with which most people are familiar. That's eagle feathers which he may have trapped himself or he may have found some friend or some person with power may have got those eagle feathers by trapping these birds. Then his shirt is buckskin and it's a beautifully embroidered with porcupine quills. You know, those long strips down from the shoulders are yellow actually with some red and other colors for a little addition. Then there are fringes. His leggings are also a buckskin and they have long strips of colored porcupine quills. And the moccasins are of buckskins with the heavy buffalo skin sole. So later we're going to hear that moccasins are not all the same, that anybody who knows anything about Indians can differentiate a little among the kind of moccasins. Now next comes a

girl from the Pueblo of San Juan, New Mexico in the Rio Grande. I will call her Blue Flower. Her people are a corn raisers, farmers, entirely different from the hunters of the plains, a different kind of life. She is wearing a cloth dress. In old days it would have been cotton. And, before the whites came, it would have been cotton raised by the people themselves. After the Spaniards came to the, to our southwest they brought their sheep and then the pueblo people very early learned to raise and shear sheep. So that her dress is a square blanket made of, woven of sheep's wool. But woven by the people themselves. The men, as it happened, not the women. And her sash is red and green of, in a very complicated, almost braiding technique and then she has ancient beads. Her hair might be done up in various styles according to whether she was married or single, but

today it's ready for a ceremony; hanging down. And she didn't mention, I believe, that she's not wearing moccasins. People needn't think that all Indians wore moccasins. And we'll be hearing later that some had sandals, and in fact, her people did when they were on journeys, but most of the time the women went barefoot. Now we get the third one, and she's from a different part of the country and a different way of life. This is ?Kocktu? we'll say, from the coast of Washington on the Pacific. Now her people were not even hunters or farmers; they were fishermen because in her country the salmon come up the rivers almost (break in video) People could fish enough within two or three months and dry the fish so that they'd have food for all the rest of the year. Therefore, of course, we don't find cloth here and we don't find skins. Because the costume that she wears is made of the roots, or else the branches of trees split up extremely fine. Her hat, I believe she borrowed that from a tribe a little further North, it is made of

spruce root. You see look at all it is fine if you can see it as that (break in video) Her people jumped in and out of canoes and waded in the water half the time so that they certainly couldn't have used the buckskin that Two Enemies is wearing. Well, then that's three very different kinds of Indians: the hunting people, the farming people, and the fishing people. And as we go on with the pictures of various Indian tribes we can see how extremely different they are in all their ways of living and how they, how they have the way of getting their food influenced their houses and made clothing, of course, as you see here. And also their

social habits and perhaps their idea of what their spirits were like. Now there, they not only were different in ways of living but in language. I've been asked sometimes about "the" Indian language. Do I speak the Indian language? And then I have to answer, well, which of the hundred and fifty north of Mexico do you mean? Or do you think I speak South American too? And there were almost that many different Indian languages. Now let's hear the Indians and see what we think of that. Two Enemies would you say something in your own language? [Two Enemies speaks] [untranscribable] Return or three or more per ......continued untranscribable language). [Underhill] That is Siouxan and he said my people have been here a long time . . . (break in video) Thought. You others, did you understand it? Not at all. Not at all. And I'm not going to ask Blue Flower, she's a very acculturated Indian, but I am going to ask Kocktu. Would you say something in a Salish now? [Kocktu speaks] (untranscribable language) [Underhill] And you others? [Underhill] And you otheres? Did you understand that, Two Enemies? And of course none of the rest of us did.

Now the fact is, of course, that the Indians did not understand each other. Their languages were not written, but by degrees, students of among the white people have been analyzing them and writing them. Certainly they haven't got them all written yet. And they have grouped the Indian languages into six great families. Now a family doesn't mean that the people in it all spoke the same language. It means they spoke a rather a similar one, like French, English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese; All similar with a general language structure. There are six big language families of that sort in North America. And this map gives you just a sketchy picture of them. Here at the North are the Eskimos. Then next comes the great stretch of Athabascan. The Navajo and Apache really belonged to this group, but they're to be found down here. Then North a stretch of Algonquin all the way across the top part of the continent. And then the Muskogian that includes Siouxan and

Iroquoian. And the USO Aztecan. Then there are some little groups. Now that means that the people who spoke related languages must have lived perhaps together at one time, maybe even spoke the same language and then, over a long, long period, they spread apart and their languages got rather different, just as the European languages got different. Well then our next question is where, how did all this happen? How did these Indians get where we were Columbus and later people found them, and how did they spread in this way? That's a great question that isn't completely decided. But first we might ask the Indians. Two Enemies, what do your people say was their origin? Where did they come from? [Two Enemies] We were told that we originated out of the water. [Underhill] And do they say where that water was? No? It's a belief that was pretty vague. Now I'm not going to ask our acculturated Blue Flower, but I'll ask Kocktu. I'll tell for her, though. Her

people as I've mentioned were farmers. They were used to seeing the plants come out of the earth and the picture they made was that people had come out of the earth, just the way the plants do. That they had climbed up from the hidden fourth womb of earth and finally got up into the sunlight. But they don't say where that happened. Or sometimes they say it happened right where they are. Which we happen to know by some of the relics, couldn't have couldn't be exactly so. Well, now Kocktu, what do your people say? [Kocktu] My people say we came from the birds. [Underhill] From [Underhill] Birds? Well that doesn't help us either. The birds might have been on the spot or they might have beenanywhere. So however the students are generally agreed that Indians did not originate in North America, even though the birds and the water that these Indians speak of may have been in North America. They say that man has been on earth for perhaps a million years, more or less. I have to qualify all the time statements. But we've been in the old world for that time.

People that were barely human in the old world. But signs like that are not found in the new world. The people who came to the new world had good tools and they knew how to use them. And they were fully developed human beings. So where did they come from then? Now, let's look at the world map to get some ideas. Here are the two Americas and you can see very plainly the enormous stretch of water on each side of them. The time when some of the earliest Indian relics in America are found is 20,000 years ago, or perhaps more, we can't be accurate about that, naturally, such a long time. 20,000 years ago then, how would simple people without ships, and without compasses, have got across this ocean? We know that much later rafts were used. But those were fairly civilized rafts. They were not used by the sort of people we had 20,000 years ago. Well then how could they have come? Were there sunken continents here? Some of the stories tell us that there were. But the geologists say that although land sank in the past, human beings were not on earth at that time. So we give up that fairy story. Then where? Now up

here, at what we now call Bering Strait, you can scarcely see on the map the gap between Siberia and Alaska. Actually that gap is only 56 miles wide. And between, there are two islands where people could have stopped if the sea voyage looked very dangerous. But as a fact, you can generally see land all the way across from island to the next. So very primitive people, with skin boats perhaps such as the Eskimos had, could have come over by water. Or it's possible that there was no water. Now that is a very interesting story and one of course still under much discussion. I shall have to be pretty careful what I say about it. But certainly, we know the fact that during the million years that man has been on earth, earth has gone through some very dramatic changes, called the ice ages. We know that ice during that time and maybe it was a shorter time, that ice spread down from the

north, both of Europe and of America, and at it's greatest extent, here is a glacier map, that shows how North America looked at the, at the height of one of the ice ages. Now those, that ice age wasn't continuous. The ice spread down, it melted, we find trees in Greenland. We even find coal in Greenland, which of course means decayed, ancient large vegetation. And I mean, that's within Alaska. And we find the Greenland ice cap melted and the ice came down again. Then it receded, then it came down again. Now at the fourth event, that's the time we begin to think of for mankind and some of his movements. That also had some little advances and recessions. And a map, over here, will show you what happened at toward the end of the fourth ice age event. You see that now, that around Hudson Bay and Eastern Canada, there is white, that means ice. Then you see along the

vertical strip of white, which means the Rockies, they had, were completely covered with snow and ice, probably. Then you see the Sierras toward the coast. You can't see too well, but there in Alaska, but the high mountain there were glaciated. But if you look at the black in the white, that will show that was a good deal of black which means un-glaciated land. Now people of the North land that saw it in Siberia and in Alaska. It's also possible though there's lots of discussion as to just how it happened, it's possible that there was so much water pinned up in ice on the mountains and in the glaciers that the sea was very much shallower and that therefore Bering Strait lost a great deal of its water. Now in order to lose all the water that separates Siberia and Alaska, it's going to have to lose less than 200 feet. And it seems most probable that that did happen. And that there was a sort of land bridge between those two at some time, we'll say around 20,000 years ago, though I mustn't be quoted on that. The

facts change with almost every new bit of digging. At least we do imagine that primitive people moved across from ancient Siberia into ancient Alaska. And when they got there they must have found magnificent hunting. Doubtlessly, they came, of course, because of hunting. They didn't just go off exploring. Primitive people were too busy getting living to do that. So they probably came following game to get their food. And when they got to central Alaska where we saw the, we saw the empty black part, they found a magnificent, almost a game preserve, I might say. Animals which we have no more now. Here is a very, a rather imaginative picture giving the facsimile of what animals were. The most important one is the wooly mammoth. Mammoths were enormous, big creatures related to elephants. And this one has great tusks, but he has a huge, wooly

coat that protected him from the northern ice. Then there were musk oxen. You can't see them very well but they are back there in the background and they still exist, just up in the north. And there were mountain sheep and goats. Really, it was a magnificent paradise for game hunters. But, of course, they had extremely primitive weapons with which to handle these animals, and I'll get to that in a moment. Now, of course, they had not come in a great army, just marching across the land bridge and then deploying right and left into various game preserves. They had probably come in little family groups, slowly oozing along and seeing that, after camping perhaps two or three years, they'd find that the game looks good just over there, and they would move, and then they'd move again. Until we can imagine that there was quite a population in Alaska. And that the population was still coming from Siberia. So that, finally, some of the people began to move. Now, what's the

move? Of course they didn't go as fast as this white line that you see pulling down through, there's the one going east of the, west to the Rockies and there's another east of the Rockies. And then it is branching. That is probably what happened, of course, over a period of thousands of years, so that there ultimately people reached all that part of America which is glaciated in this picture, but ultimately was clear. And they got down, across the across the Panama and into South America. When they got to New Mexico and Arizona, you might have seen on the map, that there the land's black. No more ice there. But of course there had been just as much precipitation in that part of the country, instead of being snow it was rain. So that there were rivers and lakes where now you see white sands, such as barren place that they can use it to set off rockets and atomic bombs with no danger to

animals or people. At that time it was a country of lakes and trees and woods. This is a picture a little bit later which shows California, where we have found the remains of very ancient creatures, and this was the hunting to be found then. Another mammoth, but this time he hasn't wool, he's hairy. And you can't probably see the other animals, but one is a saber toothed tiger. That famous, great animal which disappeared long ago. One's the lion. Then there was a horse. The were horses in America in that very ancient day. They disappeared, we don't know how. Then there's the ground sloth and varied. Again this was a hunting paradise and the Indians, or the Indian ancestors, must have had pretty good meat. Here we have one picture of the methods of hunting. Now an animal as big as the mammoth would scarcely, he wouldn't be possible to kill by a man just rushing up to him with a spear and stabbing him. He is a very fierce and

enormous creature. But what they did was to dig a pit and it had to be an extremely large pit of course, if it was going to hold a mammoth. They dug it with sticks. Then they laid sticks across it. And as the great creature came pounding along, he would likely to slip through. And then they could come with their primitive knives and possibly stab him or cut him up. They had one weapon. Not the bow and arrow, I said before, bow and arrow we'll find later is quite an improved method of warfare that came along, far along in Indian history. They had spears which they threw with the force of a man's arm. But the man didn't really hold out his arm with the spear at his end. He had a sort of part, of something like equipment, a long, grooved stick. On which he laid the spear. You see here's the man holding out his right arm and another man with his hand. And then there is the stick.

It lengthens his arm. And the spear lay along that so it was really like he had an arm twice the length. And he's sent his spear into one of the ancient animals. Now, what was the spear like? Those implements have been found and they've been dated. More on this, of course, don't take my dates as absolutely black and white, but there's a pretty good reason for saying what we do. These are some of the most ancient spear points. You can see they're small and they look rather rough. They were found in such a geological situation that it seems agreed that they are at least twenty thousand years old. And that was down in New Mexico. So if people had got down to New Mexico with their spears, going after these magnificent animals, 20,000 years ago. That was pretty obvious they came across the Bering Strait before that. Here was a much larger one which was used out in the plains. They were going then after great

animals, like the antique bison probably. Then here is a very beautiful one. This is the famous Folsom point, which everybody seems to have heard of. It is far better made than this one. You see, and if you could look at it closely, you'd see the fine flaking along its edge which gives it almost a knife edge, and then it had a groove down the middle, so that a stick, a split stick could be, it could be put inside a split stick. That made it about 10,000 years ago, as far as the geologists and the paleontologist can work it out. And then these are later weapons yet. They are quite beautiful, long, slender spear points, used again in the plains perhaps for the antique bison. Now all of those are hunting implements and they are used by the people who have been mostly east of the Rockies in the wide plains country where the great animals could find grazing. We notice that some people may have come west of the Rockies in that land between Rockies and Sierras. And those people, of course, did hunt. But also they must have found

more wild seeds and wild plants because of the equipment that they left. This is something that had belonged to those early people perhaps west of the Rockies. It's a seed grinder. We only have part of it, really, it's been broken. It is a flat stone, rough, so that it has a surface on which seeds could be crushed. They gathered a little seed, tiny little seeds, little things that must have meant immense labor. Placed them on the stone in their hard little shells, then took a another very smooth stone, rounded, and rubbed it over the cracked shells until the seeds were exposed. And they finally blew the shells off in various ways, and left the seeds that they could roast or mix with water and make porridge. Those ?grand? seed gathering people, some of the anthropologists think, may have been the ones who went down, across the Central America, and across Panama, into South America. They used the,

before I show you the map to see how that might have been, they also used these choppers. These we find and quite often in Asia, and we found the same sort of thing here, used by people who were interested not only in hunting but they chop, they could with this sharp stone, chop off small limbs of trees. They could perhaps cut off the skin of a mammoth. They could pound berries and do both a little cutting and a little chopping. The varied, it looks like a crude tool, but it has a place for your thumb and a place for the forefinger, a place for the other fingers. It's a, when you think of it, it's not at all a man's first attempt at getting something to work with. Now those people whom we've traced down through North America must also have gone all the way down across the Isthmus of Panama and into South America. And we do find, that over here, in that place you can hardly see, on the western or near the western slope of the Andes, was a wonderful place for wild plants, better than North

America, a bit warmer. And also it had been separated from North America sometime in geologic history, and plants had developed there that never did develop in North America. So the people who went all the way south were able to develop corn, beans, squash, potatoes, a tomotoes, a number of plants, which some of them never arrived in North America but some did. Now the ones which our Indians up here, learned to use were corn, first of all. A corn, we find beginning something like 4,000 years ago, there was a little seed in a cave that looks like corn. And that means a wild plant that perhaps was mixed with other wild plants, and little by little developed into that thoroughly nourishing food that Indians used. Now when you read Indian history, you constantly get the statement, when they learned about corn. And as soon as they learned about corn, then it is understood, then they began to raise it. There was no idea that they were too conservative to raise it. They wouldn't do it. No, anybody who thinks Indians were conservative needs only to realize how fast the knowledge of corn spread. And we'll find as we go on hearing about Indians, that it spread just as far as the climate would permit and it differentiated into just as

many kinds as Indians could manage in the sort of climate and sort of soil they had. Now for the rest of these programs we're going to follow, not the corn raisers, not the original corn raisers of South America. Their story is so complex and so elaborate that it takes another whole course of lectures. But we're going to follow the Indians only in the United States. And that is enough. We'll find then that some of these people had been able to raise corn. They had the right climate and they, that was in fact all they needed. They perhaps imported the seeds, and with them they often imported ceremonies to make the seeds grow. But a large number of the Indians in the United States, mostly towards the southern part of our

country, learned to raise corn and they therefore could settle down with their fields near their homes. They didn't have to wander around hunting and finding their food wherever it was. They could get their own food right next to their homes. They never did domesticate animals as the Europeans did and we can talk about that later, there are many reasons. But some raised corn, and then there were others those who could not or did not raise corn, and those were the hunters. So as we go on, there will be a great difference between the corn raisers with their villages and their settled way of life, and their regular ceremonies who's dates they couldn't give because they were living right there and so they knew when the ceremony could come, and the hunters who had to wander about, couldn't have definite dates, couldn't have settled villages. Those will come in the next of all these 30 talks, I believe it is. Now the old Indian women in Kocktu's country used to tell stories to their children and insist that their children stay awake and listen. They were penalized if they didn't. When the old lady

had finished her story and was going to tell the children, now my dears you may go to sleep, she used the term, Oh-so-so, you can go to sleep. So, now as a goodbye, I will say: Oh-so-so. [drumming and singing] [Announcer] This is

National Educational Television.