Native American Heritage Month Two Tepees

Digital ID: cph 3c01262. Source: b&w film copy neg. Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-101262. (b&w film copy neg.) Retrieve unedited JPEG version (60 kilobytes) TITLE: At the water's edge--Piegan, CALL NUMBER: LOT 12322-C [P&P] REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-USZ62-101262 (b&w film copy neg.) SUMMARY: Two tepees reflected in water of pond, with four Piegan Indians seated in front of one tepee.

Rights Information: Publication and other forms of distribution: Permitted. Photographs in this collection were deposited for copyright between 1899 and 1929. Works copyrighted before 1923 are now in the public domain. The copyright for the works after 1923 was not renewed, so they are also in the public domain. (See the Copyright Office's Circular 1, "Copyright Basics," page 6).

Credit Line: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Edward S. Curtis Collection, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-123456]

MEDIUM: 1 photographic print. CREATED, PUBLISHED: 1910, c1910. CREATOR: Curtis, Edward S., 1868-1952, photographer.

NOTES: J150133 U.S. Copyright Office. Edward S. Curtis Collection. Curtis no. 3235-10. Published in: The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. [Seattle, Wash.] : Edward S. Curtis, 1907-30 suppl., v. 6, p. 195.

FORMAT: Photographic prints 1910. DIGITAL ID: (b&w film copy neg.) cph 3c01262 hdl.loc.gov/cph.3c01262. CONTROL #: 90710666

Algonquian peoples From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Algonquian are one of the most populous and widespread North American Native groups, with tribes originally numbering in the hundreds, and hundreds of thousands who still identify with various Algonquian peoples. This grouping consists of peoples that speak Algonquian languages.

Before European contact, most Algonquians lived by hunting and fishing, although quite a few supplemented their diet by cultivating corn, beans, squash, and (particularly among the Ojibwe) wild rice.

The Algonquians of New England (who spoke eastern Algonquian) practiced a seasonal economy. The basic social unit was the village of a few hundred people related by a kinship structure. Villages were temporary and mobile. They moved to locations of greatest natural food supply, often breaking into smaller units or recombining as the circumstances required. This custom resulted in a certain degree of cross-tribal mobility, especially in troubled times.

In warm weather, villages were constructed of light wigwams for portability. In the winter more solid long houses were used, in which more than one clan could reside. Food supplies were cached in more permanent, semi-subterranean buildings.

In the spring, when the fish were spawning, the natives left their winter camps to build light villages at coastal locations and waterfalls. In March they caught smelt in nets and weirs, moving about in birchbark canoes. In April they netted alewife, sturgeon and salmon. In May they caught cod with hook and line in the ocean, and trout, smelt, striped bass and flounder in the estuaries and streams. They put out to sea and hunted whales, porpoises, walruses and seals. The women and children gathered scallops, mussels, clams and crabs, all dishes in New England today.

In April through October, they hunted migratory birds and their eggs: Canada geese, brant, mourning doves and others. In July and August they gathered strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and nuts. In September they split into small groups and moved up the streams to the forest. There they hunted beaver, caribou, moose and white-tailed deer.

In December when the snows began they recombined in winter camps in sheltered locations, where they built or reconstructed long houses. February and March were lean times. They relied on cached food, especially in southern New England. Northerners had a policy of going hungry for several days at a time. It is hypothesized that this policy kept the population down according to Liebig’s law. The northerners were food gatherers only.

The southern Algonquians of New England relied predominantly on slash-and-burn agriculture. Fields were cleared by burning for one or two years of cultivation, after which the village moved to another location. This habit is the reason why the English found the region cleared and ready for planting. The native corn (maize), of which they planted various kinds, beans and squash improved the diet to such a degree that the southerners reached a density of 287 persons per square hundred miles, as opposed to 41 in the north.

Even with this mobile form of crop rotation, southern villages were necessarily less mobile than northern. The natives continued their seasonal occupation but tended to move into fixed villages near their lands. Society made the adjustment partially by developing a gender-oriented division of labor. The women farmed and the men fished and hunted.

By the year 1600, a convenient terminus for the relatively unstressed native economy and society, the indigenous population of New England had reached, it is estimated, 70,000–100,000.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article, Algonquian peoples

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