FOOD AND ECONOMY

The buffalo was the centre of the Plains culture. It provided the main source of food as well as materials for clothing, housing and implements. The buffalo hunt was a major group activity which required considerable planning. The herds were either captured in corrals or stampeded over jumps - steep cliffs - where they crashed to their death. Head-Smashed-in-Buffalo-Jump, near Fort Macleod, Alberta, is now the site of an excellent museum. Plains Indians also ate some roots, berries and other animals like elk and deer.

DWELLINGS

The Plains peoples lived in tipis made from a pole structure covered with hides sewn together by the women. Flaps at the top controlled smoke from the fire. The dwellings were insulated in winter.

TRANSPORTATION

The Plains natives were nomadic people who used a travois to transport their possessions from one site to another. A travois was made by lashing two tipi poles to either side of a dog and attaching a bag behind to carry belongings. Later, horses were used instead of dogs.

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

Families grouped together into small bands headed by a chief. There was also a war chief who handled military campaigns. In summer they gathered in larger groups for the buffalo hunt.

RELIGION AND FESTIVALS

Like most native peoples, the Plains Indians believed that spiritual powers were everywhere, in objects as well as in living things. Young people sought spirituality by spending long periods fasting in solitude. Shamans had special spiritual powers including the power to cure illness. The most important religious event was the Sun Dance (the Cree called it the Thirst Dance). A special circular lodge was built around a central pole and dancers performed for several days, sometimes without food or water, dancing to the rhythm of various prayers. Central to the Sun Dance was the transfer of the “medicine bundle” - a bundle of significant objects (feathers, sacred stones, pipe stems) offered by a virtuous woman from the tribe.

IMPORTANCE OF THE BUFFALO

The buffalo is the largest living animal native to the western hemisphere. Adult males can weigh up to 1000 kilos. At one time, before the Europeans arrived, it is estimated that 60 million of the animals lived in North America.

The buffalo was the main source of food and clothing for the native people of the plains. The buffalo hunt was a major community effort and every part of the slaughtered animal was used. The meat was cut in strips, smoked and dried into a hard food called jerky. When the jerky was ground into a fine powder and mixed with berries and fat it became pemmican.

Buffalo bone was used for knives and ornaments, the hide made clothing and tipis, the sinew provided thread and strings for their bows, the stomach and other internal organs were used for containers, and the hooves were used for glue or made into rattles.

Towards the end of the 19th century the buffalo had been wiped out in Canada. The coming of white settlers and the railway caused a lot of them to be slaughtered because they were in the way of white development. And when native people started to use rifles for the buffalo hunt, the animals were killed off in great numbers.

A few of the almost extinct animals were kept on a native reservation in Montana until 1906 when the Canadian government agreed to buy them and they were herded to Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta where half of the few remaining buffalo in the world roam free today.