EASTERN WOODLANDS INDIAN

any American Indian of the largely wooded area stretching easterly across North America from the Mississippi River valley to the Atlantic coastline. The northern boundaries of the Eastern Woodlands Indians included the Great Lakes and extended into present-day Canada; southern boundaries included the areas that became Illinois and North Carolina. The Indians in this region spoke languages of the Iroquoian, Algonquian, and Siouan families. The Eastern Woodlands Indians were concentrated largely in open areas where natural resources were readily available and where agriculture could be practiced. Thus the majority of people inhabited the more southerly regions or the areas near seacoasts, rivers, lakes, and other water sources. Women took responsibility for home and child care along with tending crops and making clothing and baskets; men hunted and fished, built houses and tools, and went to war. In addition to the larger tribe, the social organization of life among the Eastern Woodland Indians included the band. Bands comprised the people occupying a particular area who took a name and shared common interests. A tribe consisted of several bands and was a cultural as well as a political unit. Often, tribes also contained clans, whose members might include people from other communities or other tribes. Northeastern Indian leaders were chiefs, or sachemspositions that were often inherited. Because problems were settled by unanimous agreement at often lengthy councils, leaders had to be clever, persuasive speakers. Economic systems were relatively simple and related to the use of an abundance of natural resources. Some agriculture was practiced, particularly by the Iroquoian tribes, in the areas where the growing season was long enough for corn (maize) to mature, and principally included the cultivation of three crops: corn, beans, and squash. The Indians used the hoe and the digging stick but not animals. Other food sources were plentiful through hunting, fishing, and gathering; Indians moved to different locales as the seasons dictated. Wigwams and longhouses were the common forms of housing, both being made of raw materials provided by the forests. Natural resources also provided the materials for canoes, snowshoes, and clothing. Clothing consisted of capes, robes, skirts, leggings, moccasins, and breechclouts for men. Jewelry, paint, and tattoos were common decorations. The belief systems of this culture involved medicine societies in conjunction with a knowledge of herbal medicines, attention to a spirit world, and an emphasis on the power of dreams. Confederacies of Indian bands, such as the powerful League of the Iroquois, were established to counteract encroaching European settlement from the 17th century. It appears that warfare among the Indians generally increased with European influence. Europeans actively traded guns and other manufactures to Indians for beaver and other furs, and they introduced wampum as a form of currency. The Europeans also introduced new diseases that decimated the tribes. The first Indians to be heavily affected by the European influence were the coastal Algonquins. Uprisings against European encroachment, including the Pequot War in 1637 and King Philip's War from 167576, were not successful, and European ways were adopted as a means of survival; some Indians left the area altogether and moved west or north into Canada. The inland Indians, largely Iroquois, and those of the upper Great Lakes region were not affected until later, because of their inaccessability and the desire on the part of the Europeans to maintain good relations in the interest of trade. They remained organized and formidable until the American Revolution. Most Indians who did not adopt the white culture were gradually eradicated or were forced west or north into Canada. Some were regionally contained on reservations, and a few of these reservations remain today: Algonquin reservations are found in New England and on Long Island, Iroquois reservations exist in New York state, and upper Great Lakes Indians still live in that area. Otherwise, the culture of the Eastern Woodlands Indians has been virtually lost. Distribution of Eastern Woodlands Indians. member of any of the aboriginal North American peoples living in the area from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean and centring on the Great Lakes. At the time of the European discovery of North America, the area stretching from Lake Superior to the Atlantic coast was occupied by many different Indian groups. These peoples spoke languages that are classified within three distinct language families: Iroquoian, Algonquian (Algonkian), and Siouan. The major speakers of northern Iroquoian languages include the Iroquois Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and, later, Tuscarora), Huron, Tionontati (Petun or Tobacco Nation), Wyandot (Wendat; a group of Hurons and Tionontati), Neutral, Wenrohronon, Erie, Susquehanna (Conestoga), and Laurentian Iroquois. The major speakers of Algonquian languages include the Passamaquoddy, Malecite, Abnaki, Penobscot, Pennacook, Massachuset, Nauset, Wampanoag, Narraganset, Niantic, Pequot, Mohegan, Nipmuc, Pocomtuc, Mahican, Wappinger, Montauk, Delaware (Lenni Lenape), Powhatan, Ojibwa (Chippewa), Menominee, Sauk (Sac), Kickapoo, Miami, Shawnee, and Illinois. The Winnebago, who also lived in the eastern woodlands, spoke a Siouan language. Although the area generally was a wooded one, it was in the open spaces in the forests that many of the best natural resources were to be found. In consequence, the heaviest population concentrations were near or along the seacoast, lakes, ponds, marshes, creeks, and rivers. There animals could be hunted, fish caught, birds taken, leaves, seeds, and roots of wild plants gathered, shellfish collected, and crops grown. Certain areas were favoured with resources not found elsewhere in the region. In certain parts of the upper Great Lakes area, wild rice (Zizania aquatica) grew in abundance, and the Menominee especially depended on it. Buffalo (bison) roamed the plainsprairie area, and such groups as the Sauk, Fox, Illinois, and Miami, who lived near the prairie, hunted them. On the Atlantic coast, shellfish were plentiful and played an important part in the diet. Additional reading Indian cultures of the area are summarized in Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada's Heroic Age Reconsidered (1985), covering the period from 9000 BC to the mid-19th century; Howard S. Russell, Indian New England Before the Mayflower (1980); Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 15001643 (1982), a pre-European-contact analysis; Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 16201675, rev. ed. (1979); Robert E. Ritzenthaler and Pat Ritzenthaler, The Woodland Indians of the Western Great Lakes (1970, reissued 1991); W. Vernon Kinietz, The Indians of the Western Great Lakes, 16151760 (1940, reissued 1991); Helen Hornbeck Tanner et al. (eds.), Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (1987), with an extensive bibliography; and Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 16501815 (1991).Descriptions of particular cultures include Wilson D. Wallis and Ruth Sawtell Wallis, The Micmac Indians of Eastern Canada (1955); Frank G. Speck, Penobscot Man: The Life History of a Forest Tribe in Maine (1940, reissued 1970); Kenneth M. Morrison, The Embattled Northeast: The Elusive Ideal of Alliance in Abenaki-Euramerican Relations (1984); Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry (eds.), The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation (1990); Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (1991), discussing the 1977 land-claims lawsuit; William Wilmon Newcomb, The Culture and Acculturation of the Delaware Indians (1956); Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (1989), and Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries (1990); Lewis H. Morgan, League of the Ho-d-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851, reissued as League of the Iroquois, 1993); George T. Hunt, The Wars of the Iroquois (1940, reissued 1978); Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire (1984), on the period from the early 1600s to 1744; Daniel K. Richter and James H. Merrell (eds.), Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 16001800 (1987); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (1992); Jack Campisi and Laurence M. Hauptman (eds.), The Oneida Indian Experience (1988), academic and native essays covering the period from before the American Revolution to the present; James W. Bradley, Evolution of the Onondaga Iroquois: Accommodating Change, 15001655 (1987); Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (1970); Elisabeth Tooker, An Ethnography of the Huron Indians, 16151649 (1964, reissued 1991); Bruce G. Trigger, The Huron: Farmers of the North, 2nd ed. (1990); Paul Radin, The Winnebago Tribe (1923, reissued 1990); Walter James Hoffman, The Menomini Indians (1896, reprinted 1970); Ruth Landes, Ojibwa Sociology (1937, reprinted 1969); J. Anthony Paredes (ed.), Anishinabe: 6 Studies of Modern Chippewa (1980); Gerald Vizenor, The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories (1984); Peter S. Schmalz, The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario (1991), on both their past and present; William Thomas Hagan, The Sac and Fox Indians (1958, reissued 1989); Frederick O. Gearing, The Face of the Fox (1970, reprinted 1988), a description of reservation life; Bert Anson, The Miami Indians (1970); and James H. Howard, Shawnee!: The Ceremonialism of a Native Indian Tribe and Its Cultural Background (1981). Elisabeth Tooker The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica