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Images of the Buffalo Culture
| Article
# : |
15111 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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4 / 1989 |
3,349 Words |
| Author
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Ronald McCoy
Ronald McCoy is a professor of history at Emporia State
Univeristy in Emporia, Kansas. He has wrtten for The World &
I about such topics as Navajo sand painting, Hopi culture,
Plains Indian warrior art, and most recently on the sacred
clowns of the Puebloan Southwest. |
Little more than a century ago, tens of thousands of Indians occupied North America's Great Plains, a sprawling geographic province stretching from southern Canada to the Mexican border, spanning the vast prairies between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in the east and the Rocky Mountains in the west.
These Plains Indians lived in a land of contrasts and extremes, a place of towering peaks and plummeting canyons, of droughts and flash floods, of blistering heat and numbing frost, where life was a miracle and death loomed just over one's shoulder.
Most lived in the roving hunting bands that formed such tribes as the Sioux, Shoshone, Kiowa, and Crow. Dispersing in spring and summer, coming together again in winter encampments, they followed paths laid out by perhaps as many as a hundred million buffalo. Fanned out across the prairie were seemingly endless herds of the shaggy haired, crescent-horned beasts, which provided the hunters with nearly all the necessities of existence: raw materials for the food, clothing, weapons, tools, and tipis that made the Indians' way of life possible.
As Plains Indians looked at the world, they perceived the wonders of nature's color and form, and the magnificence of the plumage, horns, and furs decorating other creatures. In comparison, the people felt naked and tried to fit in by drawing man-made beauty from natural materials.
At its heart, Plains Indian art was utilitarian. Elegant quillwork, flamboyant feathered bonnets, finely carved wooden pipe stems, and painted designs decorating tipis and hide
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