Native American technology

Tribes affected: Pantribal

Significance: Technology has had a powerful impact on Native Americans, resulting in both improvement and deterioration of their quality of life

There is an old story about a group of Quechan Indians who were being brought to Mexico City by train to be wined and dined by politicians who wanted to buy some of their land. As the locomotive left the station, one of the Quechan, Yellow Feather, pointed at a nearby bluff and said something calmly in his native tongue that the Mexicans who were with them did not understand. Soon passing an enormous cactus, again Yellow Feather pointed and spoke, though he spoke more quickly this time because the train was moving faster now. As the train picked up steam, now racing through his ancestral lands, Yellow Feather pointed here and there, every moment speaking more quickly and frantically. Then it was quiet. Startled by the sudden silence, one of the Mexican escorts looked over and noticed that Yellow Feather was now only looking out the window and weeping. “What’s wrong with him?” the escort asked. “It is our custom,” replied one of the other Quechan, “to recall who we are and where we come from as we travel through our lands. Landmarks, such as the Coyote’s Blood Cliffs or the Cactus Giant, have stories attached to them, which we tell as we travel by them. This not only helps us to remember who we are, but it is also an honor to the spirits who inhabit each place. Yellow Feather cries because the locomotive travels so fast that it is impossible for him to remember himself.”

Technology and Change

Technology has always been an agent of change. Typically, “technology” refers to the application of an idea to a particular problem. In other words, technology solves problems. When a weight needs to be lifted but is too heavy for a human to lift alone, perhaps a lever and fulcrum may be applied to the weight to shift it. The lever, as simple as it is, constitutes “technology” because it solves the problem of how to move a heavy weight. For the same reason, using a sharp rock to scrape the hair from a hide or tying a piece of leather to one’s forearm to prevent chafing from a bowstring are also technologies. It is important to understand, however, that when a particular technology solves a particular problem, new problems frequently arise from the solution. In the story above, Yellow Feather solves the problem of taking weeks to travel to Mexico City for an important meeting by agreeing to go by train; but because the train moves so quickly, Yellow Feather must forgo the ancient tribal custom of geographic storytelling.

The application of technology accomplishes several things simultaneously. First, it makes living easier in some way—since it solves a problem—though it can make other aspects of life more difficult. Second, technology helps humans control their environment. By building huts with mud-covered stone, many Native Americans were able to keep cool in the heat and warm in the cold. By cutting channels from rivers to farm fields with specially made stone tools, agriculturally based Indians were able to irrigate land that would otherwise have been unusable. Third, technology changes people’s relationship with the environment. An undesirable environment—dry soil, predators, clay that makes fragile pottery—can be changed with irrigation ditches, bows and arrows, and fiber-tempered clay. Finally, technology changes people’s relationship with others. Perhaps a member of a tribe discovers that a harpoon point that rotates freely on the end of its shaft is a more effective weapon for hunting seals than a harpoon with a fixed point. That inventor may become greatly admired among the tribe, and on a more extended level, that tribe may come to be more respected, or despised, by other neighboring tribes. Thus, technology initiates change in both obvious and desirable ways, and in ways unexpected and sometimes disastrous. For both pre- and post-contact Native Americans, the most significant technological developments were made in five general areas: tools, hunting and gathering, agriculture, battle gear, and transportation.

Pre-contact Influences—Tools

Technology, by its nature, requires tools. For pre-contact Native Americans, tools were often as simple as specially shaped stones, bones, and wood. With these materials, hand axes, scrapers, hammers, chisels, files, grinders, and knives were made. As the Native American tools were improved, so were the crafts that they helped make. A good tool can help a craftsperson make an even better tool, which, in turn, can help make the craftspeople develop better technology. For example, early North American spears were tipped with stones that were somewhat sharp, though their characteristics were not uniform because stone-shaping was difficult. To offset the weight of the stone points, hunters used long, heavy shafts; these ensured a more controlled flight. The drawback with these early spears was that because they were so cumbersome, they were difficult to carry and throw, especially in a forest or with heavy garments on. Eventually, hunters found that a dull-pointed piece of bone could flake off small pieces of a stone much more easily than a piece of rock, which had been their previous tool. Using the bone tool, they found that they could better control the shaping of a stone, which subsequently allowed them to make smaller, lighter, and sharper blades than before. This meant that spears and arrows could be lighter, and so could travel farther, and were more deadly.

Hunting and Gathering

North American natives originally drew their sustenance from hunting and gathering food that grew in the wild. Crudely made stone axes and knives were in use more than seventy thousand years ago for activities such as scraping and cutting hides, stripping the bark from branches, and chipping other stones into new tools. By the 1500’s, Native Americans were using their tools to design and build complex equipment that helped to make their lives easier. They were perfecting stone arrow and spear points and shafts for maximum penetration; they were experimenting with improved nets and weirs, and were developing highly efficient traps and snares; they were inventing new ways to prepare foods, including stone ovens and nonmetallic containers that could contain and store hot liquids; they were developing airtight and waterproof baskets; and they were becoming increasingly aware of how best to protect themselves from the elements using a combination of natural fibers and leather. These improvements were changing the Native Americans.

Provided that the natural resources were available, hunting and gathering in Native American culture became more effective and efficient: With a bow and arrow, a hunter’s stealth becomes less important than his or her accuracy with the weapon. Airtight containers meant food could be preserved longer, making wandering tribes less dependent on locating wild crops. Better garments meant fewer injuries, which meant more healthy workers to help support the tribe. All of these technological improvements created new problems, such as having too many healthy, hungry people for a given area to support and migration delays that resulted in the people arriving late to areas and finding that the region’s food had rotted and that the game had already migrated or hibernated.

Agriculture

Many anthropologists attribute the waxing of American Indian agriculture and the waning of hunter-gatherer societies to technological development. According to this theory, as tools, weapons, and pottery became more effective, it became less necessary for the people to wander from location to location looking for food. With their improved tools, it was now easier to stay in one place, harvesting the local crops and hunting the local animals, and storing the surplus for difficult times. By developing ways of planting and irrigating soil, that is, by controlling their environment, the agriculturally inclined Native Americans were better able to control their food supplies, and thus their lives. As their technology improved, they became less subject to the whims of nature.

Battle Gear

As in any other culture, desperation, envy, jealousy, and greed often compelled Native American neighbors to fight with each other, sometimes quite ruthlessly. The tools used in Native American warfare were developed along with hunting tools and weapons. Wooden and leather shields were constructed to protect against arrows and spears. Arrow tips were designed to pierce the new shields, as were more powerful bows. Stories abound as to the power of these weapons, one of the most telling being found in a nineteenth century diary that describes a man’s skull suspended from a tree trunk and held in place by a single deeply embedded arrow piercing both sides of the bony cranium. Simple forms of body armor and helmets were developed by some tribes to protect them in battle from throwing knives, throwing sticks, and clubs. Like other technologies, the development of Native American weapons was self-perpetuating. Curved arrow shafts gave way to artificially straightened arrow shafts that dramatically improved the arrow’s flight and the archer’s accuracy. Spears went from being heavy and short-ranged to being lighter and having more range. Even in these early times there was an arms race.

Transport

Because other developing technologies were encouraging the transformation of the hunter-gatherer into a farmer, the technologies involving transportation remained fairly undeveloped in pre-contact times. The primary means of getting around were by foot, raft, and canoe. Improved footwear in the form of sandals, moccasins, and boots made foot travel more comfortable. This comfort made the traversal of longer distances and difficult terrain more possible. Pre-contact rafts, usually fashioned from logs and branches lashed together with vine and water weeds, were more often grasped than ridden. More often than transporting people, rafts carried supplies. Canoes at this time were mainly hollowed-out tree trunks, sometimes with an outrigger for stability. In general, a tribe’s transport by land or water increased its contact with other people, environments, and customs. This created situations that were sometimes complementary and sometimes hostile.

Post-contact Influences

After 1500 c.e., Native American technology changed more than it had in the previous fifty thousand years. Along with the technological changes, there were also tremendous social and cultural changes. The primary catalysts for these changes were the Europeans, who, having discovered the “new world,” were now enduring danger and hardship to explore it and claim it as their own. As they encountered Native Americans, they sought to “civilize” them by encouraging them in more or less hostile ways to abandon their natural developmental process and to adopt a way of living, technologically speaking, that was hundreds of years in the Native American’s future. After contact, Native American technological changes were not so much developmental as they were adoptive.

As trade began between the Europeans and the natives, stone knives and axes gave way to the metal knives and axes that were more easily handled and that could hold a sharper edge better. Iron and steel tools, such as chisels and plows, became highly desirable among the tribes, especially among those that were quickly adopting European ways of life.

While early European guns were inferior to bows and arrows both for hunting and warfare, their foreignness, complexity, and loudness impressed Native Americans. Oral and written accounts of how natives used guns suggest that, prior to the development of a reliable repeating rifle, natives used guns as symbols of their wealth, rather than as weapons; it required many supplies to trade for a single firearm, and more still to get the lead and black powder to fire it. Frontier journals indicate that a skilled archer could powerfully and accurately shoot at least ten arrows in the time it took an early rifler to shoot once, reload, and fire again.

The development of railroads and commercial waterways also changed the ways of Native Americans, especially since both of these transportational technologies helped bring in more invaders. Eventually, Native Americans learned to distrust the European Americans, who with increasing frequency broke treaties and invaded their lands with large machines.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the technologies that govern natural resources became particularly important for Native Americans. For more than a century, Native Americans have fought for the right to exploit the natural resources that exist on their lands but that are being stolen by European American technologies such as dams, artificially made canals, oil drilling, strip mining, and timbering. Using legal and political power, contemporary Native Americans are slowly regaining some of the rights over the oil under their land, the ores in their mountains, and the waters that flow through their land.

Technology allows people to solve problems and to dominate particular forces. When the Europeans came to North America with their more advanced technologies, Native Americans were often awed, impressed, and afraid. In the diaries and journals written on the early American frontier by Europeans making their way through “Indian country,” one gets the sense that, for these invaders, the Native Americans were the problem to be solved. The old saying, “The pen is mightier than the sword” is particularly relevant to the issue of Native American technology, because with both of these technologies—the pen that wrote treaties never meant to be kept, that wrote bills of sale for millions of acres of land for a few supplies, that signed away the children of illiterate Native American parents to European mission schools; and the sword, which was brought to bear on natives who would not cooperate with the pen—the European invaders dominated all of North America, ultimately changing the oldest inhabitants on the continent into one of the most oppressed peoples in the Western Hemisphere.

Bibliography

Ambler, Marjane. Breaking the Iron Bonds: Indian Control of Energy Development. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990. A well-researched and developed book that introduces the history of federal Native American policies, particularly those that relate to reservation energy development. Includes numerous illustrations, maps, and tables, as well as an excellent bibliography and index.

Browman, David L., ed. Early Native Americans: Prehistoric Demography, Economy, and Technology. New York: Mouton, 1980. An anthology of articles with varying perspectives addressing the issues surrounding the entry and early technological development of human beings in North America. Many excellent photographs, charts, and time lines, along with an index of names and an index of subjects.

Johnson, Jay K., and Carol A. Morrow, eds. The Organization of Core Technology. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987. A collection of essays that reexamine the way that tool manufacturing developed in North and Central America up to the contact period. Several dozen tables detail locations, materials, and types of early tools.

Laubin, Reginald, and Gladys Laubin. Photographs by Gladys Laubin. Drawings by Reginald Laubin. American Indian Archery. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. An engagingly written book about bows, arrows, spears, and darts that combines scholarship and anecdote. Includes both black-and-white and color photographs along with numerous drawings, a bibliography, and an index.

Sassaman, Kenneth E. Early Pottery in the Southeast: Tradition and Innovation in Cooking Technology. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. A book that discusses the socio-economic and political importance of early pottery and cooking technology, refuting long-held interpretations about the significance of these technologies on the Native Americans’ change from hunters and gatherers to farmers. A lengthy bibliography and an index.

Van Buren, G. E. Arrowheads and Projectile Points: With a Classification Guide for Lithic Artifacts. Garden Grove, Calif.: Arrowhead, 1974. Basically intended for field researchers, this book details a system by which stone tools can be correctly identified and archived. There are many excellent photographs and drawings of tools such as scrapers, arrow points, and spear heads, as well as historical and formative information about them. Contains a bibliography and index.