The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (29 page)

Many Plains feasts and ceremonies centered on the intergenerational transfers of bundles. In theory each bundle could be sold four times. The first three purchases, however, involved a duplicate bundle. Since four was a sacred number, it was only during the fourth purchase that the original bundle was used. Taking possession of a sacred bundle increased the buyer’s xo’pini, and the more bundles one acquired, the more life force one possessed.

Bundles could be curated either by men or women. It was widely believed, however, that because women did not participate in raiding, they did not need to accumulate as much xo’pini as men. Women also had an alternative strategy: by occasionally sleeping with a renowned elder, a woman could acquire some of his life force. This act, of course, depleted the elder’s reservoir of xo’pini, and that—added to the life force he had already expended during a lifetime of raiding—hastened his senescence. This strikes us as the Plains equivalent of a premise we saw in New Guinea: men grow old and feeble because women drain their life force.

Let us now consider some of the social logic involved in the pursuit of xo’pini, which can be summarized in the following steps:

  1. Suffering leads to a vision.

  2. The vision allows one to create a sacred bundle.

  3. If kept long enough, the bundle acquires a mythical origin and becomes a source of life force for one’s entire clan.

  4. The objects in a bundle are memory aids for the recounting of myths and legends.

  5. Bundles stimulate rituals and lead to the building of new ceremonial lodges.

  6. Each new ritual inspires the self-inflicted suffering of younger individuals.

  7. Step 6 leads to Step 1, continuing the cycle.

While each Plains horticultural society was unique, all shared a set of general principles with other achievement-based societies. Men who sought renown made sacrifices, borrowed food and property from kinsmen to sponsor ceremonies, and directed the building of ritual lodges. To prevent successful men from becoming a permanent elite, however, society discouraged them from accumulating property and encouraged them to lead by example rather than giving them actual political power.

RISING TO PROMINENCE IN MANDAN SOCIETY

There were three levels of the Mandan world: the earth on which humans lived, the world above it, and the world below it. Beings of one kind or another lived on all three.

The earth on which the Mandan lived was the product of First Creator and Lone Man. It floated on water from the lower world, a place from which springs continue to bubble up. Above the earth lay the upper world, an earth lodge whose four huge posts held up the sky. The Sun traveled the roof of this lodge. He had three sisters—Sunrise Woman, Above Woman, and Sunset Woman—who lived at places where the Sun paused to have a smoke.

This Mandan cosmology was recorded by anthropologist Alfred Bowers. His information came from elders who remembered Mandan life in the 1870s at Like-a-Fishhook Village, North Dakota.

It is estimated that the Mandan may have numbered 9,000 before European traders and trappers introduced smallpox. Tragically, by 1910 the Mandan had been reduced to fewer than 200. Bowers visited the survivors during the period 1929–1931 and combined their firsthand descriptions with the historic accounts of Lewis and Clark, Maximilian, Charbonneau, and others.

In days of old the epicenter of each Mandan village had been a big cedar post, driven into the center of a ceremonial circle 150 feet in diameter. This post was as important to the Mandan as the Earth Navel kiva was to the Tewa. Outside the ceremonial circle, families built residential lodges by placing layers of prairie sod over a framework of poles. Once, long ago, Mandan houses had been rectangular; by the time Europeans reached the area, they had become round. The old rectangular shape, however, had been retained for the ceremonial lodge.

Most Mandan villages were defended by a ditch and a palisade of cedar posts. Inside the defensive works were scaffolds for the drying of corn or the exposure of burials to the elements. The Mandan also modified the landscape outside the village. They created catfish traps in the shallows of the river, built game-drive fences for hunting pronghorn antelope, and dug traps on the prairie where eagles could be captured for their feathers.

Mandan villages moved either when their gardens were no longer fertile, or when all available firewood had been used up. Even in wooded riverside locations, where settlements endured for years, villages might be temporarily abandoned for the summer buffalo hunt. Loading their possessions onto a
travois
—a sled pulled by a team of dogs—families moved out onto the Plains, where they lived in tepees until the hunt was over. Once they returned to their village for the winter, they set about building corrals in the cottonwoods along the river, where unsuspecting bison could be driven when they sought shelter from the cold.

Bowers found that surviving Mandan families belonged to at least 16 clans, all claiming descent in the mother’s line. Nine of these clans were grouped into a West moiety and seven into an East moiety, a dual division like that of the Summer and Winter moieties of the Tewa. Each clan owned its own sacred bundles, which were ritually transferred from one generation to the next. Possession of certain bundles conferred the right to perform a specific ceremony, and each clan felt that it held a copyright to the songs, chants, dances, and costumes used in that ritual.

Like the Nootka and Tlingit, the Mandan had a strong concept of intellectual property. The difference is that while Nootka and Tlingit nobles could simply bequeath that property to their offspring, a Mandan youth was required to purchase it. This is a significant difference between achievement-based and hereditary leadership.

Some sacred bundles gave their owners the rights to rituals that guaranteed success in eagle or catfish trapping or the driving of bison into corrals. Anyone who wanted to carry out those activities had to purchase the rights from the clan owning the bundle. There were also personal bundles that could be purchased for their life force; the price might be garden produce, bison hide robes, or even horses, once the latter had arrived in the Plains. A good horse could cost a man three war bonnets, the end product of 108 black-tipped feathers from nine eagles. This made eagle trapping a crucial activity, one requiring payment to the owner of the eagle trapping bundle.

In theory the fact that all clans owned sacred bundles kept the playing field level. In practice, however, not all ceremonies were of equal importance. The most crucial Mandan ceremony was the
Okipa,
a four-day ritual recapitulating the creation of the earth. Because the Waxi’ Ena clan of the West moiety owned the sacred Okipa bundle, it held a position of ritual importance like that of the Bear clan at Old Oraibi.

One became a Mandan gradually, moving up one step at a time through a system that anthropologists call age-grades. Such a system had both age-cohort aspects, like those of the Ao Naga, and grades of accomplishment, like the ritual societies of the Tewa. W. Raymond Wood and Lee Irwin list eleven age-grade societies for Mandan males and seven for women.

Several of the age-grades deserve special mention. One age-grade for older men was the Black Mouth society, whose members had proven themselves to be implacable warriors. One of the most important age-grades for women was the Goose society, whose members possessed exceptional ritual knowledge. Additionally, women who had passed menopause became eligible for the prestigious White Buffalo Cow society.

All Mandan boys and girls who were able to do so had their parents or grandparents purchase their membership in the next age-grade society. This purchase was carried out so that youths could work their way up to the status of elder. The latter was everyone’s goal because all villages were run by elders. The elders, however, led by consensus and bent over backward to avoid offending any faction.

From among the male elders, one brave warrior was chosen to be the community’s War Leader, and one consummate ritual expert was chosen to be Peace Leader. To avoid resentment, these two leaders were drawn from opposing moieties. The Peace Leader outranked the War Leader until the village suffered an enemy attack, at which time their relationship would be reversed.

Both boys and girls began fasting at age eight or nine, hoping to induce a vision of their destiny. They also performed self-torture, cutting off finger joints or suspending themselves by skewers inserted through the skin of their backs or chests. Pieces of skin or fingertips might be offered in sacrifice to the spirit world. As youths grew older (and with the help of their family), they began accumulating food and valuables to pay for the right to host a ceremony like the Okipa.

While women most often chose a ritual route to prominence, men could gain prestige by stealing rival tribes’ horses, killing and scalping enemies, or “counting coup” by touching an enemy in battle and living to tell about it. A man who had scalped an enemy was allowed to paint one of his buckskin leggings black and the other yellow or white. He could also wear a coyote tail at each ankle or an eagle feather in his hair.

Many lineages wanted their young women to marry successful warriors, and they were willing to buy a sacred bundle for the groom in order to increase his life force. Advancing through warfare, however, was a high-risk pathway. Each time a warrior risked his life, he expended some of his accumulated xo’pini, and if any of the men he led into battle were killed, he lost respect. In fact so many Mandan men were killed in raids that some unmarried women had no choice but to become a man’s second wife.

The highlight of any year was the Okipa, an elaborate four-day ceremony held in a special ritual lodge. The ritual depicted the creation of the Mandan world, and the lodge in which it was performed symbolized Dog Den Butte, the mythical hill where Speckled Eagle had once kept all living things prisoner. Costumed dancers impersonated Speckled Eagle, the culture hero Lone Man, The First Day of Creation, Night, and important animals such as bison, bears, beavers, swans, and snakes. Permission to perform the songs and dances was purchased from the Waxi’ Ena clan, which held the permanent intellectual rights. Many young Mandan saw the Okipa as an opportunity to suspend themselves from the lodge’s roof by ropes attached to skin-piercing skewers, paying for life force through suffering.

Balancing Prestige and Equality

Mandan life allowed for social advancement without the emergence of a hereditary elite. On the individual level, one could accumulate xo’pini through fasting, self-torture, offering flesh, purchasing sacred bundles, sponsoring ceremonies, accumulating ritual knowledge, or displaying bravery in scalping and coup counting. On the community level, however, War Leaders and Peace Leaders were chosen from opposing moieties—each clan owned the rights to its sacred bundles and rituals, and the elders led by consensus. To be sure, one clan held intellectual rights to the Okipa, but anyone could sponsor the ritual as long as he or she paid for it.

RISING TO PROMINENCE IN HIDATSA SOCIETY

The Hidatsa lived just to the north of the Mandan, along the Missouri and its Knife River tributary. In the past, before their decimation by smallpox, the Hidatsa numbered more than 4,000.

Even after losing part of their population to smallpox, the Hidatsa retained much of their traditional organization. Seven clans claiming descent in the mother’s line were grouped into two opposing moieties, four clans in one and three in the other. Men advanced toward elder status through 12 age-grade societies, each of which owned the intellectual rights to a series of songs, dances, and costumes. One difference from Mandan society was that members of the Black Mouth society were not warriors but senior men who occupied the final age-grade before becoming village elders.

For their part, Hidatsa women had four or five age-grades. Two of the most senior were the Goose society and the White Buffalo Calf society. The most prestigious, however, was the Holy Women society, whose members were supreme in their knowledge of religious lore.

The Hidatsa had an important ceremony called the
Naxpike,
which, like the Mandan Okipa, lasted four days. Rather than recounting the creation of the world, however, this ritual was a dramatization of the sacred Naxpike bundle’s origin myth. The bundle was said to represent the Hidatsa culture hero Long Arm, leader of the People Above, who had directed the self-torture of a mythical figure named Spring Boy. During the four-day ceremony the Naxpike bundle was transferred to the next generation, with the seller of the bundle impersonating Long Arm and the buyer impersonating Spring Boy. As with the Okipa, the Naxpike was seen as an opportunity for young men to cut off finger joints, suspend themselves with skewers, or endure branding with hot irons in pursuit of xo’pini.

In the Hidatsa system each ascending age-grade purchased the rights to the next grade from the group ahead of it and sold the rights to its grade to the group coming along behind it. As with the Mandan, senior Hidatsa tried to be fair and democratic elders. They sometimes chose multiple Peace Leaders and War Leaders from opposing moieties. Peace Leaders curated the village’s most important sacred bundles and, if they could, kept their leadership positions in the family by allowing their sons to purchase the bundles at the appropriate time.

Hidatsa babies were thought to have an origin like that of some Australian Aborigine babies. They began as spirits who lived in certain sacred hills, waiting for the chance to enter an unsuspecting woman’s body. Virtually from birth, the Hidatsa prepared children for their adult roles, encouraging them to fast, endure pain, accumulate life force, and seek the vision that would determine their destiny. Hidatsa men received extensive tattoos on their bodies and were sent out in war parties to take scalps and steal horses. Each man paid for his wife with a gift of horses, and each man was also expected to hunt for his wife’s household, an obligation similar to the one we saw earlier among the Hadza.