Indian garb - March 23, 2012

It's absolutely gorgeous weather here: spring breezes, dappled sun and cloud, highs around 70°F. Anya does not want to go inside once she's been out, and who can blame her. And it's a pleasure to walk her.

I've gotten a bit deeper into the book I mentioned in the previous post, Native American Clothing. here's what I'm finding:

1. Not directly related to the questions of weatherproofing I bring to the subject: a sense of dynamic shifting of cultures up to and through the European contact. Because there is such a persistent sense of "eternal" constancy before Europeans came, this is a really useful antidote: there was a civilizational shift in the 600-700 years before contact that was just as instability-inducing, if much less destructive: the introduction of corn agriculture and of Mississippian town-based social structure. The author in particular notes the spread of Mississippian villages in the river valleys up into the Plains in this time, creating a network of trade, which radically changed what had been a pretty bleak and isolated pattern of smaller nomadic groups who followed the buffalo year-round.

2. Also not directly related, but something I had never really gotten before: the Iroquois invasion of the southern Great Lakes in the late 17th century. This pushed not just the Huron (I knew about those) but a number of tribes, out of Michigan and the lands around Lakes Erie and Huron, leaving essentially empty land. The refugees piled in with existing groups in Wisconsin and Illinois, creating another major cultural shift: the Indians who fought Pontiac's War and later Tecumseh's war, were the product of a bunch of previously separated (and even competing) tribes, pushed together and forced to make peace among each other. The Calumet peace pipe ceremony originated here (well, it came from similar needs during the contact discussed in (1), actually).

3. As I said yesterday, one of the big surprises is, even in the north, Indians by and large wore a lot less clothing, and a lot looser clothing. The old pictures and movies, though they lie in many many ways, are spot on here: bare or barely-covered torsos were the norm. A robe in winter, maybe, but clothing was put on for need, and for decoration.

This is the thing that has thrown me with this book: I'm looking for practical information on clothing as durable tool, necessary protector from the elements. And what I'm getting instead is essentially a history of fashion: when this kind of decoration became popular, or that embroidery technique came upriver from some other culture. And so I have to ask myself: how much of this outside-weather-protection thing we Euro-Americans have brought with us, is really necessary to survive?