Bob,
LOL. I once toured the Mandan Indian site in Bismarck ND late in October. Already cold and getting colder, I was looking at the model of the winter wigwam, a huge house for 80 people or so, where they would smear themselves with bear grease and wait out the 7 month freeze eating whatever they had smoked or salted, trying to stay warm and, for fun, going on those spirit journeys made famous by Richard Harris in "A Man Called Horse." Lice, ticks, smoke gets in your eyes, a bath coming soon, just 5-6 months away, and arrowheads in your pectorals, suspended on buffalo ropes. Yow.
A year later I was up in the Alaskan bush above the arctic circle, same time frame, trying to imagine how the Eskimos and Aleuts and Athabascans made it through millenia, and came up empty-minded.
[I gotta say, give me Whistler and Vail and down jackets and goretex, or give me a tropical locale.]
It was, of course, this harsh environment that narrowed the Indians cultural focus and honed his social software to the extent that he could survive, generation upon generation, as long as the software was never changed. When 1603, 1619 happened, all the rules were changed and his culture simply failed, and failed to adapt. By most writing on the subject, it is still failing to adapt in any meaningful way.
Kb |
