Native American Indian Pawnee

Hello everybody and welcome back to segment number 5 of our Native American unit. This is going to be all about the pawnee Indians. The pawnee were part of the plains Indian tribes and they lived in the central portion of the U.S. in the region that we now refer to as the great plains. So if you would please take out your map and highlight this region right here, label it the great plains include the pawnee tribe there. If you need to hit pause to do so, please do. Remember your responsible for anything that's underlined in these PowerPoints, either to put down on the map or the rest of the PowerPoint on your grid. The pawnee, who are sometimes called the panacea, historically lived along the platte river in what is now Nebraska. Where did they live? Well, rather, what did they live in? They had two types of homes. One, that was a permanent or a stationary lodging, called an earth lodge. And the other type that they used only when they hunted called tepee. This is what we typically think about when we think of Indian housing. We tend to associate the teepee. Here they are. The pawnee. The only ones that lived in the deep east. What did they wear? Well, the pawnee women wore deerskin skirts, and Apache like blouses, the pawnee ladies dresses, or warriors shirt, was fringed and often decorated with beadwork and painted designs. Um, someone else had that, too, who is that? The breech cloth and moccasins were the only essential parts of a man's clothing, leggings and a robe were worn in cold weather, men did not usually wear shirts, but when warriors sometimes wore special butt skin war shirts for special occasions. The pawnee war moccasins on their feet and in cold weather they wore long buffalo hide robes. Like this gentleman right here is wearing. The pawnee, rather than wearing Indian feathered headdresses or anything like this. We're very famous for what was called the porcupine hair roach, no, not a cockroach. It was this thing. It's a little tuft of hair with a feather that came out of it, and they just kind of tucked it on in the back of their head like that. The porcupine hair roach is a head ornament worn by men. It is typically constructed of porcupine guard, hair, not quills, and hair from the tail of the white tailed deer, which is this tufty part right here. Pawnee women gathered wild nuts, berries, and seeds, and they also grew corn, beans, pumpkins, and melons. The men were the hunters of the tribe, and as we talked about, they had a very clear division of labor, the men were the hunters, and the women were the gatherers. And the men, they hunted small birds, fish, in the fish and the streams and the rivers. The staple food for the pawnee though were buffalo or bison. One bison was enough to feed one member of the tribe for one year. But the problem is they didn't have refrigerators, they didn't have any way to keep that meat. So they kind of had to eat it as they got it. Every part of the bison was used for something. No part of it was ever wasted. The meat was eaten. The skins were used to make clothing and blankets and covers for the teepees. The bones were used to make tools and weapons. Here's an example of a buffalo skin being stretched and dried in the sun and over here are examples of using the bones and down here. This is actually the jawbone of the buffalo. It was actually used as a weapon of war. It was a club and they committed. At one point it was estimated that 60 million bison roamed the great plains area before Lewis and Clark went on their famous expedition. By 1900, the white sportsman had reduced their number to fewer than 300 in the United States. Now today there are some 250,000 bison freely roaming the plains once again. Now you might ask yourself what happened to all of them? Well, the white sportsman happened. There was a great deal of hatred and animosity towards the American Indian and it was widely known that the buffalo was the staple of their food and shelter, and they very much relied on them, and they thought they could get rid of the bison, they could get rid of the Indians. So they were hunted. And often, as the trains would drive westward, they would come across a great herd of them, and everybody would run and open the windows on whatever side of the train they were on, and everyone would just shoot them as the train drove by. They'd never stop. They wouldn't come to pick them up. They simply killed them to kill them. All in an effort to hurt and triple and weaken the pawnee Indian tribes in the great plains tribes in general. It's just a tragic tragic period of our history. All right, that's all we got for this one. Thank you. We got one left and thank you all very much for taking good notes if you need to back up and review anything. Please do. Otherwise, have a wonderful night. We'll see you soon.