Indians of North America (native americans). Decoration of North American Indian utensils with carved figurines Paintings by American artists on Indian themes

After that meeting, Curtis became interested in the culture of Indian tribes, and for many years he documented their lives. Soon the photographer joined an expedition with which he visited tribes in Alaska and Montana.

In 1906, Edward Curtis began collaborating with wealthy financier J.P. Morgan, who was interested in financing a documentary project about the indigenous peoples of the continent. They planned to release a 20-volume series of photographs called “North American Indians.”

With Morgan's support, Curtis traveled throughout North America for over 20 years. He made over 40,000 images of more than 80 different tribes, and also accumulated 10,000 wax cylinders recording samples of Indian speech, music, songs, stories, legends and biographies.

In his efforts to capture and record what he saw as a disappearing way of life, Curtis sometimes interfered with the documentary veracity of the images. He arranged staged shooting, placing his characters in romanticized conditions, devoid of signs of civilization. The pictures were more consistent with ideas about pre-Columbian existence than with real life at that time.

Edward Curtis's massive work is one of the most impressive historical accounts of Indian life in the early 20th century.

1904 A group of Navajo Indians in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona.

1905 Leaders of the Sioux people.

1908 Mother and child from the Apsaroke tribe.

1907 Luzi from the Papago tribe.

1914 A Kwagul woman wearing a fringed blanket and a mask of a deceased relative who was a shaman.

1914 Hakalahl is the chief of the Nakoaktok tribe.

1910 A Kwakiutl woman catches abalone in Washington.

1910 Pigan girls collect goldenrod.

1907 A girl from the Kahatika tribe.

1910 A young Indian from the Apache tribe.

1903 Escadi from the Apache tribe.

1914 Representatives of the Kwakiutl people in a canoe in British Columbia.

1914 Kwakiutl Indians in a canoe in British Columbia.

1914 The Kwakiutl Indians arrived in canoes for the wedding.

1914 A Kwakiutl shaman performs a religious ritual.

1914 A Coskimo Indian wearing a fur suit and a Hami ("dangerous thing") mask during the Numlim ceremony.

1914 A Kwagul Indian dances in a Paqusilahl outfit (embodied as a man of the earth).

1914 Kwagul Indian in a bear costume.

1914 Dancers of the Kwagul tribe.

1914 Ritual dance of the Nacoaktok Indians wearing Hamatsa masks.

1910 Indian from the Apache tribe.

“With the death of every old man or woman, the world leaves the world with certain traditions and knowledge of sacred rites, which no one else possessed... It is therefore necessary to collect information for the benefit of future generations and as a sign of respect for the way of life of one of the great races of man. It is necessary to collect information immediately or this opportunity will be lost forever.”
Edward Curtis

1907 Indian Hollow Horn Bear of the Brule tribe.

1906 A girl from the Tewa people.

1910 An Apache woman reaps wheat.

1924 A Mariposa Indian on the Tule River Reservation.

1908 A Hidatsa Indian with a captured eagle.

1910 A Nootka Indian takes aim with a bow.

1910 Wigwams of the Piegan tribe.

1905 Hunter from the Sioux tribe.

1914 Kwakiutl shaman.

1914 A Kwakiutl Indian wearing a mask depicting the transformation of a man into a loon.

1908 An Apsaroke Indian riding a horse.

1923 The chief of the Klamath tribe stands on a hill above Crater Lake in Oregon.

1900 Iron Chest, Piegan Indian.

1908 Black Eagle, Assiniboine Indian.

1904 Nainizgani, Navajo Indian.

1914 A Kwakiutl Indian wearing the Nuhlimkilaka ("bringer of confusion") forest spirit costume.

1923 Hupa woman.

1914 Mowakiu, Tsawatenok Indian.

1900 Leaders of the Pigan tribe.

1910 Your Gon, a Jicarrilla Indian.

1905 A girl from the Hopi tribe.

1910 A girl from the Jicarrilla tribe.

1903 Zuni woman.

1905 Iahla, also known as "Willow" from the Taos Pueblo site.

1907 A woman from the Papago tribe.

1923 A fisherman from the Hupa tribe went after salmon with a spear.

A variety of North American Indian household utensils, made of wood or stone, are also decorated with the heads of animals or people, or have the distorted shape of living creatures. Such utensils include festive masks, the fantastic grimaces of which indicate the inclination of the imagination of this people towards the terrible; this also includes gray clay pipes with distorted figures of animals depicted on them, similar to those found in Melanesia; but first of all, pots used for food and fat, as well as drinking cups in the shape of animals or people, belong to this type of work. Animals (birds) often hold other animals or even tiny people in their teeth (beaks). The animal either stands on its feet, with its back hollowed out in the form of a shuttle, or lies on its back, and then the role of the vessel itself is played by the hollowed belly. In Berlin there is a drinking cup in the form of a human figure with sunken eyes and crooked legs.

Fine art and ornamentation of North American Indians.

The images on the plane of these peoples are generally more crude and inept than their plastic works. The paintings on an Indian buffalo tent (Berlin Folklore Museum) depict a hunt by three tribes, but the scene is disjointed and unfinished. However, some animals are drawn so vividly that they involuntarily remind us of the proximity of the Eskimos.

In the art of North American Indians, ornamentation is of the greatest importance: this is the most developed eye ornamentation in the whole world, the symbolism of which, closely associated with religious ideas, immediately amazes everyone. The heads of animals and people, no matter how stylized they are and how they are turned into linear figures, are distinguished by much greater spontaneity than the ornamentation of the Rarotonga-Tubuaya group. The eyes of these heads - a particularly prominent part of the entire ornamentation - appear in it in abundance. In their motive, as Schurz explained in detail, they are nothing more than a shortened form of the head from which they originated. The heads themselves are only reduced forms of entire figures of animals and people, which were originally depicted and were supposed to represent the ranks of ancestors. Eyes look at us from everywhere: from walls and weapons, from clothes and pipes, from seats and bedspreads. As one can judge from the leader’s chair (Berlin Museum of Ethnic History), the raven, considered by the northwestern Indians to be the embodiment of the creator of the world, the sun and the eyes, constantly repeating and strangely combined, form the basis of a rich system of red-blue-black-yellow ornamentation. A convincing example of the predominance of the eye in ornamentation is an Indian blanket located in the same museum (Fig. 54); there is something similar to it in the Bremen Museum.

Rice. 54 – Indian bedspread ornamented with eyes.

Indian rock paintings in California

Without leaving Western America for now, let's turn south to California. Here we immediately come across numerous drawings scratched on rocks, found in many places in America, and throwing a ray of light on the culture of the civilized Indians who lived at the time of the European invasion. The Californian "petroglyphs" and the Northern Argentine "kolchakvi" cover stones and rocks in the same way as the Swedish Hällristningar and their predecessors, dimples and marks on the so-called "dugout stones". But whereas in prehistoric Swedish drawings on stones a pictorial, pictographic character predominates, in American images of this kind the written, ideographic character prevails, which is also noticeable in other Indian drawings.

But along with these drawings on rocks, such as figurative writing in California, there are also real paintings of battles and hunting, painted in black, white, red and yellow earthen colors and in some places covering large areas of rocks, on the rocks, under their overhangs and at the entrances to caves. The animals in these images are not nearly as natural and alive as the animals in similar paintings of the Bushmen. People are presented mostly from the front, with their arms raised up, but clumsily, in the form of silhouettes. It is curious that some figures are painted half black, half red, and this coloring is done either along, as, for example, in the cave of San Borgita and under the canopy of the rock of San Juan, or across, as in Palmarito, on the eastern slope of the Sierra -de San Francisco. The connection between the figures awkwardly placed next to each other has to be guessed for the most part. Leon Dicke lists at least thirty places in Baja California where similar images were found.

I was looking for a coloring book and found a very interesting text

J.G. Kohl, Journey around the Great Water. 1850
translation of Veshka

Watching a savage in front of a mirror is the most comical sight for a European. Vanity and self-admiration are visible in him, like in a Parisian coquette. He even surpasses her. While she changes the style of her hat and the color of her dress three or four times a year, the Indian changes the color of his face - since his attention is drawn to this part of his body - daily.
I watched three or four young Indians here, and saw them every day with a new coloring on their faces. They belonged to the aristocracy of their band and were obvious dandies. I saw them loitering with great dignity and a very serious air, with green and yellow stripes on their noses and with tubes under their armpits, wrapped in wide blankets-cloaks. They were always together and apparently formed a clique.
Every day, when I had the opportunity, I sketched the coloring on their faces, and after some time I received a collection, the variety of which amazed me. The strange combinations that appear in a kaleidoscope can be called inexpressive in comparison with what the Indian imagination produces on his forehead, nose and cheeks. I will try to give some description, as best as words will allow.
What struck me most about their color arrangement were two things. The first thing is that they did not care about the natural division of the face into parts. And second, an extraordinary mixture of grace and grotesque.
At times, however, they used the natural separation created by the nose, eyes, mouth, etc. The eyes were outlined with regular colored circles. Yellow or white stripes were located harmoniously and at an equal distance from the mouth. A semicircle of green dots was drawn on the cheeks, the center of which was the ear. Sometimes the forehead was also intersected by lines running parallel to its natural contours. It always looked somewhat human, so to speak, because the basic shape of the face remained the same.
Usually, however, these regular patterns are not to the taste of the Indians. They like contrast, and often divide the face into two halves, which they approach the design in different ways. One will be dark - say, black or blue - and the other will be quite light, yellow, bright red or white. One will be crossed with bold stripes made by five fingers, while the other will be intricately colored with thin lines applied with a brush.
This separation is done in two different ways. The dividing line sometimes runs along the nose, and the right cheek and half are plunged into darkness, and the left looks like a flower bed under the rays of the sun. At times, however, they draw a line across the nose, so that the eyes sparkle against a dark background, and everything under the nose is bright and shiny.
I have often asked if there was any significance to these various patterns, but I was always assured that it was a matter of taste. They were simply fancy arabesques, similar to the embroidery of their squaws on moccasins, belts, pouches, etc.
However, there is a certain symbolism in the use of colors. Thus, red usually represents joy and fun, black - sorrow. When someone's sad demise occurs, they rub a handful of coal all over their face. If the deceased is only a distant relative, just a grid of black lines is applied to the face. They also have half-mourning, and they paint only half of their face black after a certain time.
Red is not only their joy, but also their favorite color. Basically they cover the face with a bright red color, onto which they apply other colors. For this purpose they use vermilion from China, brought to them by Indian traders. However, this red is by no means obligatory. Often the color on which other colors are applied is bright yellow, for which yellow crown is used, also purchased from traders.
They are also very partial to Prussian blue and use this color not only to paint their faces, but also as a symbol of peace on their pipes and as a shade of the sky on their graves. A very interesting fact, by the way, is that hardly any Indian distinguishes blue from green. I have seen the sky, which they depict on their graves in the form of a round arch, equally often of both colors. In the Sioux language "toya" means both green and blue, and a much-traveled Jesuit father told me that this mixture prevails among many tribes.
I was also told that different tribes have their own favorite color, and I am inclined to believe this, although I could not notice any such rule. In general, all Indians seem to take special care of their own copper skin color and enhance it with vermilion when it does not seem red enough to them.
I discovered while traveling among the Sioux that there was a certain national style of face painting. The Sioux were talking about a poor Indian who had gone crazy. And when I asked some of his compatriots who were present how his madness manifested itself, they said: “Oh, he dresses up in feathers and shells so funny, and paints his face so comically that you can die of laughter from it.” This was said to me by people so decorated with feathers, shells, green, vermillion, Prussian blue and crown yellow that I could hardly contain my smile. However, I concluded from this: there must be something generally accepted and typical about their colorful style that can easily be violated.
In addition, a little later, at the American State Fair, I was able to make a grand discovery out of my drawings. They showed a giant Indian, and although his face was painted, I insisted that his coloring was fake. I, of course, got only a general impression, and could not show in which lines the error consisted, but I was sure of it. And it was definitely confirmed that he was a pseudo-Indian, none other than an Anglo-Saxon, clumsily dressed up as a savage.

It is difficult to reliably convey the awe with which educated Europe looked at the Indian tribes of North America.
“The Indian war cry is presented to us as something so terrible that it cannot be endured. It is called a sound that will make even the bravest veteran lower his weapon and leave the ranks.
It will deafen his ears, it will freeze his soul. This battle cry will not allow him to hear the order and feel shame, or indeed retain any sensations other than the horror of death."
But what was frightening was not so much the battle cry itself, which made the blood run cold, as what it foreshadowed. The Europeans who fought in North America sincerely felt that falling alive into the hands of monstrous painted savages meant a fate worse than death.
This led to torture, human sacrifice, cannibalism and scalping (all of which had ritual significance in Indian culture). This especially helped to excite their imagination.

The worst thing was probably being roasted alive. One of the British survivors of the Monongahela in 1755 was tied to a tree and burned alive between two fires. The Indians were dancing around at this time.
When the groans of the agonized man became too insistent, one of the warriors ran between the two fires and cut off the unfortunate man's genitals, leaving him to bleed to death. Then the howls of the Indians stopped.

Rufus Putman, a private in the Massachusetts Provincial Troops, wrote the following in his diary on July 4, 1757. The soldier, captured by the Indians, “was found roasted in the most sad manner: his fingernails were torn out, his lips were cut off to the very chin below and to the nose above, his jaw was exposed.
He was scalped, his chest was cut open, his heart was torn out, and his cartridge bag was put in its place. The left hand was pressed against the wound, the tomahawk was left in his guts, the dart pierced him through and remained in place, the little finger on his left hand and the small toe on his left foot were cut off."

That same year, the Jesuit Father Roubaud encountered a group of Ottawa Indians who were leading several English prisoners with ropes around their necks through the forest. Soon after this, Roubaud caught up with the fighting party and pitched his tent next to theirs.
He saw a large group of Indians sitting around a fire and eating roasted meat on sticks, as if it were lamb on a spit. When he asked what kind of meat it was, the Ottawa Indians replied: it was roasted Englishman. They pointed to the cauldron in which the remaining parts of the severed body were being cooked.
Sitting nearby were eight prisoners of war, scared to death, who were forced to watch this bear feast. People were gripped by indescribable horror, similar to that experienced by Odysseus in Homer's poem, when the monster Scylla dragged his comrades off the ship and threw them in front of his cave to devour them at his leisure.
Roubaud, horrified, tried to protest. But the Ottawa Indians did not even want to listen to him. One young warrior said to him rudely:
-You have French taste, I have Indian taste. For me this is good meat.
He then invited Roubaud to join them for their meal. The Indian seemed offended when the priest refused.

The Indians showed particular cruelty to those who fought with them using their own methods or almost mastered their hunting art. Therefore, irregular forest guard patrols were at particular risk.
In January 1757, Private Thomas Brown of Captain Thomas Spykman's unit of Rogers's green uniformed Rangers was wounded in a battle on a snowy field with Abenaki Indians.
He crawled out of the battlefield and met with two other wounded soldiers, one of them was named Baker, the second was Captain Spykman himself.
Suffering from pain and horror because of everything that was happening, they thought (and this was great stupidity) that they could safely make a fire.
Almost instantly the Abenaki Indians appeared. Brown managed to crawl away from the fire and hide in the bushes, from which he watched the tragedy unfold. The Abenaki began by stripping Spykman and scalping him while he was still alive. They then left, taking Baker with them.

Brown said the following: “Seeing this terrible tragedy, I decided to crawl as far as possible into the forest and die there from my wounds. But since I was close to Captain Spykman, he saw me and begged, for God’s sake, to give him a tomahawk so that he could have committed suicide!
I refused and urged him to pray for mercy, since he could only live a few more minutes in this terrible state on the frozen ground covered with snow. He asked me to tell his wife, if I lived to see the time when I returned home, about his terrible death."
Shortly thereafter, Brown was captured by Abenaki Indians who returned to the site where they had been scalped. They intended to impale Spykman's head on a pole. Brown managed to survive captivity, Baker did not.
“The Indian women split the pine into small chips, like small skewers, and stuck them into his flesh. Then they built a fire. After that, they began to perform their ritual rite with spells and dances around it, I was ordered to do the same.
According to the law of preservation of life, I had to agree... With a heavy heart, I feigned fun. They cut his bonds and forced him to run back and forth. I heard the unfortunate man beg for mercy. Due to unbearable pain and torment, he threw himself into the fire and disappeared."

But of all the Indian practices, scalping, which continued into the nineteenth century, attracted the greatest attention from horrified Europeans.
Despite some ridiculous attempts by some benevolent revisionists to claim that scalping originated in Europe (perhaps among the Visigoths, Franks or Scythians), it is quite clear that it was practiced in North America long before the Europeans arrived there.
Scalps played a significant role in North American culture, as they were used for three different purposes (and perhaps served all three): to "replace" dead people of the tribe (remember how the Indians always worried about the heavy losses suffered in war, hence the reduction in the number of people) in order to appease the spirits of the dead, as well as to alleviate the grief of widows and other relatives.

French veterans of the Seven Years' War in North America left many written memories of this terrible form of mutilation. Here is an excerpt from Puchot's notes:
“Immediately after the soldier fell, they ran up to him, knelt on his shoulders, holding a lock of hair in one hand and a knife in the other. They began to separate the skin from the head and tear it off in one piece. They did this very quickly , and then, showing the scalp, they uttered a cry, which was called the “cry of death.”
We will also cite a valuable account of a French eyewitness, who is known only by his initials - J.K.B.: “The savage immediately grabbed his knife and quickly made cuts around the hair, starting from the top of the forehead and ending at the back of the head at neck level. Then he stood up with his foot on the shoulder of his victim, who was lying face down, and with both hands he pulled the scalp by the hair, starting from the back of the head and moving forward...
After the savage had removed the scalp, if he was not afraid of being pursued, he stood up and began to scrape off the blood and flesh that remained there.
Then he made a hoop of green branches, pulled the scalp over it, like a tambourine, and waited for some time for it to dry in the sun. The skin was painted red and the hair was tied into a bun.
The scalp was then attached to a long pole and carried triumphantly on the shoulder to the village or to the place chosen for it. But as he approached every place on his way, he uttered as many cries as he had scalps, announcing his arrival and demonstrating his courage.
Sometimes there could be up to fifteen scalps on one pole. If there were too many of them for one pole, then the Indians decorated several poles with scalps."

It is impossible to minimize the significance of the cruelty and barbarity of the North American Indians. But their actions must be seen both within the context of their warrior cultures and animistic religions, and within the larger picture of the overall brutality of life in the eighteenth century.
City dwellers and intellectuals who were awed by cannibalism, torture, human sacrifice and scalping enjoyed attending public executions. And under them (before the introduction of the guillotine), men and women sentenced to death died a painful death within half an hour.
Europeans did not object when “traitors” were subjected to the barbaric ritual of execution by hanging, drowning or quartering, as the Jacobite rebels were executed in 1745 after the uprising.
They did not particularly protest when the heads of those executed were impaled on stakes in front of cities as an ominous warning.
They tolerated hanging in chains, dragging sailors under the keel (usually a fatal punishment), and corporal punishment in the army - so cruel and severe that many soldiers died under the lash.

European soldiers in the eighteenth century were forced to submit to military discipline using the whip. American native warriors fought for prestige, glory, or the common good of the clan or tribe.
Moreover, the mass plunder, pillage, and general violence that followed most successful sieges in European wars exceeded anything the Iroquois or Abenaki were capable of.
Holocausts of terror like the sack of Magdeburg in the Thirty Years' War pale in comparison to the atrocities at Fort William Henry. Also in Quebec in 1759, Wolfe was completely satisfied with bombarding the city with incendiary cannonballs, without worrying about the suffering the innocent civilians of the city had to endure.
He left behind devastated areas using scorched earth tactics. The war in North America was a bloody, brutal, and horrific affair. And it is naive to consider it as a struggle between civilization and barbarism.

In addition to the above, the specific question of scalping contains an answer. First of all, the Europeans (especially irregular groups like Rogers' Rangers) responded to scalping and mutilation in their own way.
The fact that they were able to descend to barbarism was facilitated by a generous reward - 5 pounds sterling for one scalp. This was a significant addition to the ranger's salary.
The spiral of atrocities and counter-atrocities rose dizzyingly upward after 1757. From the moment of the fall of Louisbourg, the soldiers of the victorious Highlander Regiment cut off the heads of every Indian they came across.
One of the eyewitnesses reports: "We killed a huge number of Indians. The Rangers and soldiers of the Highlanders gave no quarter to anyone. We took scalps everywhere. But you cannot distinguish a scalp taken by the French from a scalp taken by the Indians."

The epidemic of European scalping became so rampant that in June 1759, General Amherst was forced to issue an emergency order.
“All reconnaissance units, as well as all other units of the army under my command, are prohibited, regardless of all opportunities presented, from scalping women or children belonging to the enemy.
If possible, you should take them with you. If this is not possible, then they should be left in place without causing any harm to them."
But what use could such a military directive be if everyone knew that the civilian authorities were offering a prize for scalps?
In May 1755, Massachusetts Governor William Scherl appointed 40 pounds sterling for the scalp of a male Indian and 20 pounds for the scalp of a woman. This seemed to be in accordance with the "code" of degenerate warriors.
But Pennsylvania Governor Robert Hunter Morris showed his genocidal tendencies by targeting the childbearing sex. In 1756 he set a reward of £30 for a man, but £50 for a woman.

In any case, the despicable practice of setting rewards for scalps backfired in the most disgusting way: the Indians resorted to fraud.
It all started with an obvious deception when the American natives began making "scalps" from horse hides. Then the practice of killing so-called friends and allies just to make money was introduced.
In a well-documented case that occurred in 1757, a group of Cherokee Indians killed people from the friendly Chickasawee tribe just to collect a bounty.
And finally, as almost every military historian has noted, the Indians became experts at "reproducing" scalps. For example, the same Cherokees, according to general opinion, became such craftsmen that they could make four scalps from every soldier they killed.