Note: As this is the history of the USA, I have avoided mentioning or concentrating on any tribes who settled in Canada. This article only concerns those who moved into North America (possibly from Canada) and stayed there.
Tribe*: Yupik (including Central Alaskan, Siberian and Alutiiq)
Territory**: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population*** (approx): 35,589
* Note: I struggled with how to categorise the various peoples; began with race, but that didn't sound right, and so I've gone with tribes. It may not be exactly correct, but for my purposes I think it does the job.
** As tribes, nations, peoples and even confederacies got moved and pushed around America by the government, many ended up far from their homeland, and insofar as I can, I'm trying to restrict this to the lands they settled in originally. Sometimes this isn't possible, as Wiki does not always differentiate between where the particular tribe began and where they ended up, but I've tried to concentrate, where I can, on what the descendants of these people would consider their ancestral homelands.
*** Population, on the other hand, refers to now; how many are left alive in America today.
An offshoot of the eskimo and aleut peoples, the Yupik’s main subsistence is on fish. Often racist cartoons of eskimos sitting outside their igloos with a line dangling into a hole punched in the ice may not be too far from the truth. After all, there would be little available game in a frozen wilderness like Alaska, at least the region the Yupik settled in, and the only available food would be fish from the sea, and seals too, whose oil they used in their lamps. The original Yupiks would have been a form of hunter-gatherers, following the source of food across the frozen wastes, only all getting together in winter in the communal house or
qasgiq to dance, sing and tell stories.
Unlike many other Native American tribes, the Yupik kept the sexes separate, women in one house, men in the other, though there were often interconnecting tunnels between the two. They also practiced a form of role-reversal I’ve not heard of before (certainly not in so-called civilised society) where for from between three and six weeks boys would be sent to the
ena, or women’s house, to learn skills such as cooking, tanning, sowing etc while the girls would transfer to the
qasgiq and learn how to hunt, fish and use weapons.
Tribe: Inuit
Territory: Alaska (mostly Canada, but we’re just concerned with American settlements here)
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 148,863
If, like me, you think inuit is another word for eskimo, take my advice: don’t use the word around any inuits, as it’s considered offensive to them. They are a separate society from the eskimos, and their grouping with the other culture was more or less a result of we white men’s tendency to lump races together if they look the same to us. I’ll chance quoting a risque (though not really in the seventies) passage from the classic comedy
Fawlty Towers, which illustrates in sad if comedic vein the way colonial whites saw blacks, or indeed anyone else.
The Major is telling Basil about a woman he once knew. In his typical rambling style, he goes on about how much he was attracted to her.
Major: “I must have been keen on her, because I took her to see, ah, India!”
Fawlty: “India?”
Major: “At the Oval!” (The Oval being an English cricket ground, which makes the joke that he took this unnamed woman to see a cricket match between England and India). “And the strange thing was, all through the match she kept referring to the Indians as ni
ggers.”
Fawlty: “They do get confused, don’t they? I see it with Sybil all the time.”
Major: “No, no, no! I told her. That’s the West Indians! These chaps are wogs!”
Sure, you can frown now, but in the context it’s framed it’s mildly amusing. However it does show how the Englishmen and women of the Major’s generation (he’s about seventy, eighty at the time, which, if the programme’s original date is taken as being the time he made this speech, would have had him a young man around about 1890, just in time for things like “the Scramble for Africa” and the Boer War) saw all black and brown people as one race, something that still goes on today sadly.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah: stay out of my booze. But back to the inuits. They seem to have been one of the first societies, not to domesticate dogs surely, but to use them as transport. We’re all familiar with the idea of huskies pulling sleds across the ice, and when you think about it, well, there weren’t any horses and you can’t exactly harness up a seal or a polar bear to your sledge now can you? This innovation - possibly as important for them as the invention of the wheel was for the rest of the world - allowed them to become one of the largest of the circumpolar peoples, resulting perhaps in their still being around and going strong in places like Greenland, Denmark and, as already mentioned, Canada, as well as Alaska.
Nobody would suggest, and neither will I, that everything was rosy before the white man stuck his nose in - just like the Native American tribes, the inuit had disputes and even wars with other peoples long before Columbus had even picked up a map. They’re human after all, and we humans just can’t stop finding reasons to hate and fight with each other. But these wars would of course have of necessity been primitive and very limited (no cannon or gatling guns on the frozen Arctic wastes!) though possibly quite brutal in their way. The first non-Arctic people they came in contact with was the Vikings, though there are no records existing to show how these meetings went.
Next came the Little Ice Age, in 1350, which forced Canadian inuits south as the whales they hunted began to seek warmer waters, and given that they would have been encroaching on the territory of the Alaskan lads, there was a probably a bit of name calling and pushing and shoving, maybe a war or two. Just a few friendly disagreements.
Tribe: Alaskan Athabascans
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 6,400
The oldest of the Alaskan people, I can’t see any figures for how long they’ve been around, but they appear to have originated in Alaska, which is odd, as the other peoples in that region all seem to have come from Russia, from Siberia. At any rate, they are another hunter-gatherer folk, fishing in inland creeks and waterways, with their only domestic animal - I guess pet - being the dog. They are a matrilineal society, meaning their children are more identified with the mother than the father (which I guess is different from a matriarchal society, where the women are in charge).
Tribe: Ahtna
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 1,427
Though their name translates as “ice people” they are often called “Copper Indians”, due to their ancestral homeland being the Copper River. Again I see no mention of where they came from, though they are said to have moved into Alaska about 2,000 years ago, but then again this seems to have been from one area of the state to another, which they occupied for 7,000. There aren’t that many of them, about less than 1,500 in total. Whether eskimos actually live in ice houses called igloos or not I don’t know, but the Ahtna live in houses, often half-underground, made of wood covered with bark and animal skins. They travel in moose-hide boats by water and toboggan by land.
While many would consider them uncivilised and “savage”, they knew enough to keep an eye on the numbers of predators - wolves, bears, eagles - and cut them down so that the natural prey of these animals, the moose, caribou, sheep and rabbits would not be hunted to extinction and leave them without any means of sustenance. Oddly enough, wolves seem to have been sacred to their forefathers, and often the hide of a killed wolf would be propped up and offered sacrifices. A kind of “sorry dude, no hard feelings” idea? Weird. They originally had no currency and bartered for goods.
Tribe: Gwich’in
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 4,375
There are only three clans of these people left, the third one reserved for those degenerates who marry within their own clan, something the Gwich’in consider on a par with incest, though it does not seem to be a crime as such. Nevertheless, this third clan is looked down upon as a lower stratum of Gwich’in society. They seem to have a fairly well-developed sense of morality, prizing kindness, intelligence, hard work, generosity and mercy among the most desirable of traits, and things to aspire to. Their gods, or legendary heroes, seem to be mostly of the trickster variety, the tales of them rife with buffoonery and humour. They believe that once animals could talk to men, and vice versa. They believe they and their main source of food, the caribou, were once one entity, and the animal holds very special significance for them as a cultural symbol, almost as much as the buffalo was to the Native Americans. In fact, they describe themselves as “the caribou people”.
Tribe: Tanana
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 900
Another matrilineal hunter-gatherer society, they had no tribal organisation but were fiercely territorial. They hunted caribou, moose, sheep and small animals, and were semi-nomadic, following the season shifts of their quarry. It seems they traded with the Ahtna for copper, which the Tanana used in their tools and weapons. These guys live and hunt in a subarctic boreal forest, and also hunt waterfowl such as swans, ducks and geese. They used, or use, canoes to approach the birds and then shoot them with bows and arrows. They also eat fruit and berries, roots and tubers and other plants, or use them for decoration and medicine. Unlike some of the other Arctic peoples, the Tanana seem to welcome, and even require, cross-cousin marriage. That isn’t marrying your uncle’s daughter who has a bad temper, by the way, but marrying the child of the opposite sex of the parent. Yeah. Still sounds incestuous to me.
No real surprise to see that the main religion here is animism, and like the Native Americans they revere the earth, the sky, the waters and the animals. The shaman or medicine man is the central figure in their worship, their high priest if you will, as is the case again with most of the Native American tribes. The basic belief that “everything is nature is fundamentally spiritual and must be treated with respect” is something you really can’t argue with, and surely a good motto for a good life. This belief in the power of animals and inanimate objects extended to the practice of, having killed a wolf, apologising to it and explaining that it was necessary to feed one’s family.
There are a lot of important taboos in Tananan culture, mostly centred around ethics of hunting. Otters, wolves, wolverines, ravens, cranes, foxes and dogs are off the menu, as are bears for women of child-bearing age, and dogs may not be fed the bones of slain animals lest it bring bad luck to the clan in hunting. They also had an odd tradition that the only animal allowed to be domesticated was the dog. At midwinter the clans would get together in a gathering called the
potlatch, which could go on for a week and covered anything from a marriage ceremony to a funeral one, though the funeral
potlatches only took place a year after the death, and were more a way of honouring the dead than burying him or her.
Unlike many of their Alaskan brethren, the Tanana don’t tend to use dogs to pull sleds, though they do often use sleds. However they pull these themselves. Mostly they just walk everywhere, in snow shoes.
Tribe: Haida
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 10,764
Thought to have been one of the most warlike of the Alaskan peoples, the Haida are said to have practiced slavery, something that has not been mentioned with the others so far. They were also known for their seamanship and trading skills, with one anthropologist likening them to the Vikings. They also host
potlatches, including funeral ones, and they carve totem poles as well as ornate jewellery and woven art. They wore transformation masks, masks carved to represent an animal becoming another animal, or a spiritual being, which were meant to illustrate their journey into the afterlife. The Haida believed in reincarnation and transformation of the spirit. They were one of the few Arctic peoples to embrace the idea of the vision quest, a spiritual - and physical - journey undertaken by young adults to determine their future by meeting the animal which would be their spirit guide. Their main god seems to take the form of a raven (making this bird sacred to them) and is or was called
Ne-Kilst-lass.
The Haida were greatly feared as a fighting force. They often took revenge on enemies for decades-old insults or grievances, or to raid them for slaves. When victorious, it was customary to burn down the enemy’s village and slaughter everyone in it. Warriors who had fallen in the victory were ceremonially burned, along with their slaves. They used daggers, bow and arrows and wore a highly effective form of armour, but never carried shields.
Tribe: Tsimshian
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 8.162
Not at all nomadic, the Tsimshian people built longhouses of cedar wood and in fact towns sprung up, making them perhaps one of the first of the Alaskan peoples we’ve read about to consider such a premise. They lived mostly on salmon, fishing in the rivers and the sea. Their religion sounds very like Christianity: they worshipped a “Lord in Heaven”, who would send sacred messengers to them in times of need, and they believed charity and purification of the body was the way to the afterlife. Their
potlatch is called a
yaawk (sounds like someone ate too much salmon if you ask me!) and their main material for manufacturing was red cedar, which they used to make clothes, tools, houses and to cover canoes.
Tribe: Eskimo
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 183,500
Although seen by many races as a sort of ethnic slur these days, the word eskimo is still in use, and it covers such people as the Yupik, Inuit and Aleut. For those of us who don’t know any better, including me, eskimo is the word we use to describe anyone living in the Arctic Circle, at the North Pole, or living on any sort of frozen wasteland. Interestingly, though it might have been thought to have been apocryphal, the idea that eskimos have over fifty words for snow has been accepted by academics. But Captain Kirk still never said “Beam me up, Scotty” and the people who tried to overturn democracy on January 6 2021 were all Trump supporters.