Great Basin Indian

▪ people

Introduction

 member of any of the indigenous North American peoples inhabiting the traditional culture area comprising almost all of the present-day states of Utah and Nevada as well as substantial portions of Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado and smaller portions of Arizona, Montana, and California. Great Basin topography includes many small basin and range systems and parts of the mountains, high desert, and low desert that define its external boundaries. The region's northern basin and range systems transition rather gradually to the intermontane plateaus of Idaho and Oregon; likewise, the differences between the Great Basin Indians and the Plateau Indians (Plateau Indian) are culturally continuous. Anthropologists sometimes refer to the Plateau and Great Basin jointly as the Intermontane culture area.

      The Great Basin is arid to semiarid, with annual average precipitation ranging from as little as 2.1 inches (53 mm) in Death Valley to 20–25 inches (500–630 mm) in mountainous areas. Precipitation falls primarily in the form of snow, especially in the high country. Because of the surrounding topography, water does not leave the basin except by evaporation or industrial means; brackish and even salty water are common on basin floors, as at the Great Salt Lake. The area is characterized by a vertical succession of ecological zones, each with a dominant xerophytic (desert-type) flora and related fauna. Before industrialization, the region's population density was sparse, ranging from 0.8 to 11.7 persons per 100 square miles.

Traditional culture patterns

Language

      This region was originally home to peoples representing two widely divergent language families. The Washoe, whose territory centred on Lake Tahoe, spoke a Hokan language (Hokan languages) related to those spoken in parts of what are now California, Arizona, and Baja California, Mex. The remainder of the Great Basin was occupied by speakers of Numic languages. Numic, formerly called Plateau Shoshonean, is a division of the Uto-Aztecan language (Uto-Aztecan languages) family, a group of related languages widely distributed in the western United States and Mexico. Linguists distinguish Western, Central, and Southern branches of Numic.

      Western Numic languages are spoken by the Owens Valley Paiute (Eastern Mono), several Northern Paiute groups, and the Bannock. Central Numic languages are spoken by the Panamint (Koso) and several Shoshone groups, including the Gosiute, Timbisha, Western Shoshone, and Comanche. Although they originated in the Great Basin, the Comanche acquired horses during the early colonial period, moved to present-day Texas, and became nomadic buffalo hunters; they are thus typically regarded as Plains Indians (Plains Indian).

      Southern Numic languages are spoken by the Kawaiisu and a number of Ute and Southern Paiute groups including the Chemehuevi. The distinction between Southern Paiute and Ute is cultural rather than linguistic; Ute speakers who had horses in the early historic period are regarded as Ute, and those who did not readily adopt horses are regarded as Southern Paiute.

      The Numic peoples called themselves “Numa,” “Nungwu,” or “Numu,” meaning “people” or “human beings”; the various tribal names such as Paiute and Shoshone were designations given them by other tribes. The Washoe called themselves “Washoe,” a true self-name. Linguistic and archaeological evidence indicates that the Washoe separated from other California Hokan-speaking groups as long as several millennia ago. Similar evidence indicates that the Numic peoples may have been spreading across the Great Basin from southeastern California for the last 2,000 years, reaching their northernmost areas less than 1,000 years ago.

Technology and economy

      The traditional cultures of the Great Basin are often characterized according to their use or rejection of horses (horse), although people inhabited the region for thousands of years before horses became available. Groups that used the horse generally occupied the northern and eastern sections of the culture area. The Southern Ute and Eastern Shoshone were among the first peoples north of the Spanish settlements of New Mexico to obtain horses, perhaps by the mid-1600s. These bands subsequently acted as middlemen in the transmission of horses and horse culture from New Mexico to the northern Plains. As the Northern Shoshone of Idaho obtained horses in the 18th century, they were joined by Northern Paiute speakers from eastern Oregon and northern Nevada to form the Shoshone-Bannock bands of historic times. By 1800 the Southern and Northern Ute, the Ute of central Utah, the Eastern Shoshone, the Lemhi Shoshone, and the Shoshone-Bannock had large herds of horses, used tepees (tepee) or grass-covered domed wickiups (wickiup), and were increasingly oriented toward the tribes and practices found on the Plains; bison became their major prey animal, and they began to engage more heavily in the kinds of intertribal trade and warfare characteristic of the Plains Indians (Plains Indian).

      The tribes to the south and west in the Great Basin proper and on the western Colorado Plateau did not take up the general use of horses until 1850–60. The Washoe did not use horses prior to colonial settlement in the region and rarely used them thereafter. The Numu and the Washoe built two types of shelters: semicircular brush windbreaks in the summer and domed brush, bark-slab, grass, or reed-mat wickiups in the winter. Whether equestrian or pedestrian, Great Basin peoples generally sited their winter villages along the edge of valley floors near water and firewood; their summer encampments were moved frequently so as not to exhaust the food resources in any given locale.

      Aside from horse-related technology, such as halters and saddles, the tools of equestrians and pedestrians were quite similar and very typical of hunting and gathering cultures (hunting and gathering culture): the bow and arrow, stone knife, rabbit stick, digging stick, basket, net, and flat seed-grinding slab and hand stone. Some Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and Southern Ute groups made a coarse brownware pottery; some Northern Shoshone made steatite jars and cups. Lines and hooks, harpoons, nets, and willow fish weirs were used on rivers and lakes. Rodents were taken with snares and traps or pulled from burrows with long hooked sticks. Rabbits were driven into nets and clubbed or were shot with bows and arrows; rabbit drives provided an occasion for people to congregate and socialize, gamble, dance, and court. Antelope were driven into corrals and traps. Waterfowl were netted, trapped, or shot with arrows that had rounded heads and were intended to stun the bird; some groups made decoys of tule reeds covered with duck skins. Deer, elk, and mountain sheep were taken by individual hunters with bows and arrows or in traps or deadfalls.

      Great Basin peoples followed an annual round that encompassed several ecological zones, exploiting plant and animal resources as they became available. Typically, more than 70 percent of the food supply was vegetal. More than 200 species of plants were named and used, principally seed and root plants. Pedestrian groups gathered nuts from piñon pine groves in the upland areas of Nevada and central Utah each autumn, storing large quantities for winter use; early spring was a difficult time, as such resources were often exhausted, plants immature, and prey animals lean and wary. Some Southern Paiute bands practiced limited horticulture along the Colorado and Virgin rivers, and some bands of Owens Valley Paiute, Northern Paiute, and Western Shoshone irrigated patches of wild seed plants to increase their yield. Groups with large lakes in their territories did considerable fishing, especially during spawning runs.

      Like the pedestrian peoples of the Great Basin, the horse-using groups followed an annual round; however, the latter were able to range over a much larger area than those on foot. They hunted bison, deer, elk, and mountain sheep and collected seed and root foods as these became available. After autumn bison hunts on the northern Plains, groups returned to the Bridger Basin, the Snake River area, or the Colorado mountains for the winter. Shoshone and Shoshone-Bannock peoples caught salmon during the annual spawning run each spring; fresh salmon was an important food source after the long winter, and some salmon was also dried or smoked for later use. Certain kinds of roots, and especially camas, were also an important food source, although the latter's onionlike bulbs required detoxifying by pit roasting or steaming.

 Clothing for those groups that did not use horses consisted of sage bark aprons and breechcloths, augmented by rabbit-skin robes in the winter; their artistic efforts were often expressed through fine basketry and rock art (petroglyphs and pictographs). The horse-using peoples wore Plains-style tailored skin garments. Like their Plains trade partners, these groups painted their tepees, rawhide shields, and bags and containers, as well as decorating clothing and other soft goods with dyed porcupine quills and, later, glass beads.

      Traditionally, western Great Basin groups engaged in trade involving shells (including marine shells), tanned hides, baskets, and foodstuffs. Horse-using groups actively traded among themselves and with others, including fur traders; Shoshone clothing was particularly prized in trade for its beauty and durability. Between about 1800 and 1850, mounted Ute and Navajo bands preyed on Southern Paiute, Western Shoshone, and Gosiute bands for slaves, capturing and sometimes trading women and children to be sold in the Spanish settlements of New Mexico and southern California.

Social organization

      The social organization of the Great Basin's pedestrian bands reflected the rather difficult arid environment of the culture area; groups were typically small, moved frequently, and had very fluid membership. These mobile bands moved through a given territory on an annual round, exploiting the available food resources within a particular valley and its adjacent mountains. Food supplies were seldom adequate to permit groups of any size to remain together for more than a few days. People usually came together in larger groups only for certain brief periods—during rabbit drives in the spring or during the piñon nut season in the autumn. Where conditions allowed, as for the Washoe at Lake Tahoe and the Northern Paiute and Ute groups at lakes in their districts, people would also aggregate when fish were spawning. These periodic gatherings are perhaps best understood as aggregations of several extended families; they involved no sustained sense of political cohesion.

      The same fluidity of social organization was characteristic of the equestrian bands. Possession of horses permitted larger numbers of people to remain together for much of the year, but this did not lead to the development of formal political hierarchies within the tribes. Among both equestrian and pedestrian groups, a particular leader was followed as long as he was successful in leading people to food or in war. If he failed, people would simply join other bands or form new ones.

Kinship and marriage

      The basic social unit usually consisted of a two- or three-generation family or the nuclear families of two brothers, augmented occasionally by other individuals with ties to the core group. Kin ties were reckoned bilaterally, through both the mother and the father, and were widely extended to distant relatives. Such extension permitted people to invoke kin ties and the customs of hospitality that rested upon them in order to move from one group to another if circumstances warranted.

       marriage practices varied across the culture area, with a tendency among some groups to marry true cross-cousins (cross-cousin) (mother's brother's or father's sister's child) or pseudo cross-cousins (mother's brother's or father's sister's stepchild). Both the sororate (marriage between a widower and his dead wife's sister) and the levirate (marriage between a widow and her dead husband's brother) were practiced, as were their logical extensions, sororal polygyny and fraternal polyandry. Although polygynous marriages were formally recognized by communities, polyandry was usually informal, consisting only of a couple extending sexual privileges to the husband's brother for a limited period of time.

      There was no set pattern of postmarital residence. A newly married couple might live with the bride's family for the first few years until children were born, but the availability of food supplies was the key factor in determining residence. Marriages could be brittle, especially between young adults; divorce was easy and socially acceptable. Nonetheless, the difficult environment favoured a division of labour that led most individuals to be married (whether to one person or in a series of partnerships) during most of their adult lives.

      Children began to learn about and participate in the food quest while very young. Grandparents were responsible for most caregiving and for teaching children appropriate behaviour and survival skills; adults of childbearing age were engaged in providing most of the food for the group. There was little emphasis on puberty rites except among the Washoe, who held a special dance and put a girl through various tests at the time of menarche.

Religion and ritual

      Religious concepts derived from a mythical cosmogony, beliefs in powerful spirit-beings, and a belief in a dualistic soul. Mythology provided a cosmogony and cosmography of the world in which anthropomorphic animal progenitors, notably Wolf, Coyote, Rabbit, Bear, and Mountain Lion, were supposed to have lived before the human age. During that period they were able to speak and act as humans do; they created the world and were responsible for present-day topography, ecology, food resources, seasons of the year, and distribution of tribes. They set the nature of social relations—that is, they defined how various classes of kin should behave toward each other—and set the customs surrounding birth, marriage, puberty, and death. Their actions in the mythic realm set moral and ethical precepts and determined the physical and behavioral characteristics of the modern animals. Most of the motifs and tale plots of Great Basin mythology are found widely throughout North America.

      Spirit-beings were animals, birds, or natural or supernatural phenomena, each thought to have a specific power according to an observed characteristic. Some such beings were thought to be benevolent, or at least neutral, toward humans. Others, such as water babies—small long-haired creatures who lured people to their death in springs or lakes and who ate children—were malevolent and feared. Great Basin peoples also had conceptions of a variety of other beings, such as the Southern Paiute unupits, mischievous spirits who caused illness.

       shamanism was prominent in all Great Basin groups. Both men and women might become shamans. One was called to shamanism by a spirit-being who came unsought; it was considered dangerous to resist this call, for those who did sometimes died. The being became a tutelary guide, instructing an individual in curing and sources of power. Some shamans had several tutelary spirit-beings, each providing instruction for specific practices, such as the power to cure disease, to foretell the future, or to practice sorcery. Among Northern Paiute and Washoe and probably elsewhere, a person who had received power became an apprentice to an older, practicing shaman and from that mentor learned a variety of rituals, cures, and feats of legerdemain associated with curing performances. Curing ceremonies were performed with family members and others present and might last several days. The widespread Native American practice of sucking an object said to cause the disease from the patient's body was often employed. Shamans who lost too many patients were sometimes killed.

      In the western Great Basin, some men were thought to have powers to charm antelope and so led communal antelope drives. Beliefs that some men were arrow-proof (and, after the introduction of guns, bulletproof) are reported for the Northern Paiute and Gosiute but were probably general throughout the area. Among the Eastern Shoshone, young men sought contact with spirit-beings by undertaking the vision quest. The Eastern Shoshone probably learned this practice from their Plains neighbours, although the characteristics of the beings sought were those common to Great Basin beliefs.

      There was a concept of soul dualism among most, if not all, Numic peoples. One soul, or soul aspect, represented vitality or life; the other represented the individual as he was in a dream or vision state. During dreams or visions, the latter soul left the body and moved in the spirit realm; at those times, the person could be subject to soul loss. At death, both souls left the body. Death rites were usually minimal; an individual was buried with his possessions, or they were destroyed. The Washoe traditionally abandoned or burned a dwelling in which a death had occurred.

Modern developments

      Contact with Spanish and Euro-American colonizers drastically altered Great Basin societies and cultures. The Southern Ute were in sustained contact with the Spanish in New Mexico as early as the 1600s, but other Great Basin groups had little or no direct or continued contact with Europeans or Euro-Americans until after 1800. Between 1810 and 1840, the fur trade brought new tools and implements to those residing in the eastern part of the region. In the 1840s, Euro-American settlement of the Great Basin began, and a surge of emigrants traveled through the area on their way to Oregon and California.

      As elsewhere in the United States, government policy in the Great Basin was overtly designed to assimilate the tribes into Euro-American society. assimilation was accomplished by undercutting the indigenous subsistence economy, removing Native American children to distant boarding schools, and suppressing native religions in favour of Christianity. Beginning in the 1840s, for instance, private-property laws favouring Euro-American mining, ranching, and farming interests either destroyed or privatized most indigenous food-gathering areas. Piñon groves were cut for firewood, fence posts, and mining timbers, and the delicate regional ecosystem was disrupted by an influx of humans and livestock.

      The indigenous peoples of the Great Basin attempted to resist colonial encroachment. Mounted bands of Ute, Shoshone, Shoshone-Bannock, and Northern Paiute fought with ranchers and attacked wagon trains in attempts to drive the intruders away. The struggle culminated in several local wars and massacres in the 1850s and '60s. After 1870 the tribes were forced onto reservations or into small groups on the edges of Euro-American settlements; their land base was reduced to a small fraction of its former size. This forced the abandonment of most aboriginal subsistence patterns in favour of agriculture and ranching, in those areas where land remained in native hands, or in wage work, usually as farmhands and ranch hands.

      The Great Basin peoples were perhaps most successful in resisting religious assimilation. In 1870 and again in 1890, so-called Ghost Dance movements started among the Northern Paiute of western Nevada. The dances were millenarian, nostalgic, and peaceful in character. The 1870 movement, led by the Paiute prophet Wodziwob, centred in Nevada and California. It was an elaboration of the round dance, a traditional ceremony for the renewal and abundance of life. Wodziwob's vision indicated that the dance would resurrect the victims of an epidemic that had decimated the region a year earlier.

      The 1890 movement, led by the Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka, was adopted by many tribes in the western United States. Wovoka's movement stressed peace, accommodation of Euro-American development projects, truthfulness, self-discipline, and other tenets of “right living,” including performance of the round dance; his message was so apt for the time that he was soon mentoring novitiates from throughout the trans-Mississippi West. Despite Wovoka's best efforts at promoting the core aspects of the new religion, the Ghost Dance message evolved from one of renewal to one of destruction as it was taken home by novitiates from the Plains. Particularly among the many bands of Sioux, ghost dancing was thought to have the power to effect an apocalypse; if properly performed, it was believed, the tribes would have the opportunity to annihilate the colonizers (or at least drive them back to the sea), the dead would be resurrected, the bison herds would be repopulated, and traditional ways of life would be restored. Ultimately, Euro-American fears related to the movement contributed to the 1890 massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek (in present-day South Dakota). In the Great Basin, however, the movement's original message endured, and Ghost Dance congregations became important reservoirs of traditional culture that persist into the 21st century.

      The 20th century fostered other religious movements in the Great Basin as well. The practice of ingesting peyote in a religious context was introduced to the Ute and Eastern Shoshone in the early 1900s by Oklahoma Indians. It later spread to other peoples in the region. Most peyote groups became part of the Native American Church, a nationally recognized religious organization. Great Basin peyote rituals are generally a mixture of aboriginal and Christian elements. Ceremonies are led by experienced individuals known as “road chiefs,” because they lead believers down the peyote “road” or way. A peyote ceremony, which typically lasts all night, includes singing, praying, and ingesting those parts of the peyote cactus that produce a mild hallucinogenic experience. The tenets of the Native American Church stress moral and ethical precepts and behaviour. The Eastern Shoshone and Ute also adopted the Sun Dance from the Plains tribes. The four-day dance continues to be performed, usually annually, to ensure health for the community and valour for the participants. The Sun Dance spread to some other Great Basin groups in the second half of the 20th century. For the Ute, the bear dance, a spring ceremony, also remains important.

      The U.S. Indian Reorganization Act (1934) led to the establishment of local elected tribal councils for the various reservations and colonies in the region. These councils have since developed a number of tribally based economic enterprises, including ranching, light industry, and tourism. They have also been plaintiffs in lawsuits seeking to reclaim ancestral lands. In 1950, for instance, the U.S. judicial system found that the Ute tribe had been illegally defrauded of land in the 19th century; while the courts did not revert title to the land, they did mandate substantial monetary compensation.

      In the 1950s many tribes in the United States—including several bands of Utes and Southern Paiutes—were subject to termination, a process whereby they lost federal recognition of their Indian status and thus their eligibility for federal support of health care and other services. Although most bands fought this process, some did not regain federal status until the 1980s. Others continued to fight for recognition and land well into the early 21st century; the Western Shoshone, for instance, turned to the international court system in their efforts to regain their traditional landholdings. (See also North American Indian: The evolution of contemporary cultures (Native American).)

Don D. Fowler Catherine S. Fowler

Additional Reading

There is no general monograph on all Great Basin Indians, but William C. Sturtevant (ed.), Handbook of the North American Indians, vol. 11, Great Basin, ed. by Warren L. d'Azevedo (1986), provides summary articles on various groups and aspects of Great Basin anthropology; it also updates the approximately 6,500 references listed in Catherine S. Fowler (compiler), Great Basin Anthropology: A Bibliography (1970).There are many descriptions of particular Great Basin cultures. The earliest systematic study of Great Basin Indians was by John Wesley Powell; his work is detailed in Don D. Fowler and Catherine S. Fowler (eds.), Anthropology of the Numa: John Wesley Powell's Manuscripts on the Numic Peoples of Western North America, 1868–1880 (1971). Ethnographic studies from the 20th century include Julian H. Steward, Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups (1938, reprinted 1970 and later); Robert F. Murphy and Yolanda Murphy, Shoshone-Bannock Subsistence and Society (1960, reprinted 1976); Virginia Cole Trenholm and Maurine Carley, The Shoshonis: Sentinels of the Rockies (1964, reissued 1981); James F. Downs, The Two Worlds of the Washo, an Indian Tribe of California and Nevada (1966); Isabel T. Kelly, Ethnography of the Surprise Valley Paiute (1932), and Southern Paiute Ethnography (1964, reprinted 1976); and Catherine S. Fowler, In the Shadow of Fox Peak: Ethnography of the Cattail-Eater Northern Paiute People of Stillwater Marsh (1992).Religious beliefs are treated by Willard Z. Park, Shamanism in Western North America: A Study in Cultural Relationships (1938, reprinted 1975); Beatrice Blyth Whiting, Paiute Sorcery (1950, reprinted 1971); Michael Hittman (compiler), Wovoka and the Ghost Dance (1990); and Jason Baird Jackson, Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning, and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian Community (2003).The histories of indigenous Great Basin peoples are explored in Steven J. Crum, The Road on Which We Came: A History of the Western Shoshone (1994); Martha C. Knack, Boundaries Between: The Southern Paiutes, 1775–1995 (2001); Timothy Braatz, Surviving Conquest: A History of the Yavapai Peoples (2003); and Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (2006).Don D. Fowler Catherine S. Fowler

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