An Ethnohistorical Perspective on Cheyenne Demography

Administrative censuses of the Southern Cheyenne Indians from 1880,1891, and 1900 permit family reconstitution, identification of residence groups, and comparisons of fertility between monogamous and polygynous women, when the records are approached by ethnohistori cal methods. This approach includes an awareness of the aboriginal adoption practices, kinship system, and naming practices. It is argued that the biases and distortions of administrative records can be effectively corrected to add to our store of information on band and tribal societies.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Primitive Worlds People Lost in Time.

Sleman211 p, illus, 25 cm

Yanomamo The Fierce People

xiv.142 hal.;ill

Speech by Napoleon Chagnon, 1992

THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES CELEBRATE NATIVE AMERICANS 1992 INTERVIEW WITH: Dr. Napoleon Chagnon, Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Santa Barbara DATE: November 14, 1992 PLACE: The Institute of Texan Cultures Chagnon: What Greg forgot to mention just now, is that was me speaking in the Shabonos. That is called ...kawahoma..., "to act big," to give forth your strong voice and what I was doing was addressing my Yanomamo friends in the village about what Gregory and I were doing there and what we planned to do the next day which in effect was medical research and medical work that would benefit the Yanomamo. Greg also forgot to point out that he also was in the village with me. I have a great pleasure and awesome task of summarizing many fascinating, well thought out and exquisitely presented talks this morning and this afternoon and I want to briefly touch on each of the talks before I turn to a brief description of some of the work that I've been doing with the Yanomamo and I hope to tie together some of the common themes, some of the common historical dimensions of the experience of the Native North American peoples to the kinds of things that have happened also in South America. Things that are, in some cases, only now beginning to happen in native communities like the Yanomamo who are today perhaps the last large relatively unaculturated Native Americans left in the two hemispheres, 500 years after the coming of Columbus. Our speakers this morning and this afternoon, while each gave a very poignant and very charming presentation of the history of their peoples, the challenges that they had to meet historically, they all once in a while touched on themes that were common in the relative experiences that their peoples had in the Americas after the coming of Europeans. For example, Perry Williams this morning pointed something out that I think is very important for us Anglos or non-native peoples of the Americas to think about and that is that in general the Europeans who came to the Americas were very kindly treated by most of the native peoples. And that's something for us to keep in mind. Gregory pointed this out for example, in a very interesting and thoughtful article that he wrote about the first Thanksgiving, how Native-Americans opened up their arms, shared their food with the early Colonials and then ultimately what these early Colonials did was to steal all of their land. So, one of the things that we should keep in mind is that the native peoples of the Americas in general treated European colonists who came here with great affection and great trust and we should do whatever we can long after the dust is settling to pay some kind of retribution and honor them for many of the kindnesses that they showed us, many of the traditions and many ... and indeed, many of the plant foods and knowledge that they shared with us. Linda Durant gave a very touching discussion of what it was like for her to try to make her way in the city environment, Chagnon 3 the kind of environment that many Native North Americans now find themselves living in. Her discussion of the Texas Rangers assault on the native peoples in northern Texas was particularly touching and poignant and a good example of how brutally many of the Native-Americans have been treated. She also talked about many native peoples being taught to be ashamed of their native culture, how many of the educational systems and the kinds of treatment that Native-Americans get in Anglo cities and Anglo situations, are often taught that their old ways, their tribal ways, their customary ways are unworthy to be allowed to be perpetuated. That often when they go to school they have serious injunctions laid before them to stop speaking their native language. That comment and that observation came out many times by many of the speakers and I think that the mission of groups like The Cultural ... The Texas Cultural Institute have is to again re-enforce among Native-American peoples, the pride that they should feel in their own customs and the importance of teaching their children to continue learning and maintaining their own language. Several speakers here this morning and this afternoon drew attention to that. Marty Silva, the new War Captain of the Tigua, drew attention to, again, how his people played a very important and significant role in helping earlier colonialists in this part of the United States in Texas. He drew attention how Chagnon 4 important it was that they, like other Native-Americans, should be guaranteed just the basic freedom, the privilege of perpetuating their own culture and passing it on the their children. He touched on the importance of history and how it is important to understand history because those who fail to heed the lessons of history are often condemned to relive them. I'm going to come back to this point when I talk about the Yanomamo Indians because I think the collective experience of many Native North American peoples can be brought to bear in an extraordinarily useful and humane way because of the histories of their peoples and the experience they had historically in terms of contact with non-native cultures, can be put to very significant and very good use when we look at what is happening to Native-Americans in South America who are only now in their history beginning to experience contact with, and in some cases, destruction from, the colonizing forces that are now invading their lands. Eddie Sandoval emphasized the importance of spirituality, the importance that many matri-lineal societies like the Apaches and the Navaho, attached to the role of women in society. This is an important lesson because Anglo and European culture tends very much to be very patriarchal and we often lose track of the importance and significance and spirituality that the women in all societies really do represent. He, like several of the other speakers, also drew attention, as did, for example, Linda Chagnon 5 and also Marty, of the non-material values that are represented in most aboriginal cultures, Native-American cultures in particular. Eddie drew attention to how many Anglos find it difficult to believe that life if possible without contesting over or being preoccupied with material resources alone. Thus, this dimension of spirituality is something that we should pay very careful attention to and try to learn more about from Native North Americans. Perhaps one of the most touching things that I was told by a Yanomamo is "... that I had almost become human, I almost became a Yanomamo ..." which implied to them that I was ... I had shaken and thrown off the fetters of the extreme materialism with which the kind of people and the kind of culture I represent normally is seen by them. This afternoon Rachel Romo, and I'm not sure I can pronounce her charming name, Kisipienacoa, I don't know how close I came to that, also drew attention to a theme that was very common in many of the other talks we heard this morning and this afternoon, and that is this long history of Native-American peoples being pushed, shoved, forced out of their territory and ending up having to occupy barren rocks and lands that virtually nobody else wanted, until of course, oil was discovered under some of it, and then efforts were made to take even that away from them. She drew attention to the importance of naming and that became something of a fascination with a number of the members of this audience and I want to tell a Chagnon 6 little anecdote about naming and how important it is in many Native-American communities including South American communities and many Anglos don't really realize or understand how Native-Americans get their names or the process by which this is sometimes inflicted on them. In 1988, when I began to realized how serious the jepardy was of the Yanomamo people that I have been working with for nearly 30 years, I had enormous amounts of information about genealogies and kinship relatedness among as many as 25 or 30 villages, I had perhaps as much as 12,000 individuals in computerized genealogy files, information that I thought might be useful to the Yanomamo themselves. What provoked me to think about this was the extreme importance, and this was touched on by a number of the speakers today, of your social role, your social position in society and the importance of belonging to, for example, a lineal descent group such as a "clan" or a "lineage" and how much solidarity and amity and affection is generated from being a member of a kinship group and being related in certain ways to certain kinds of people in your community. And what began bothering me is some of the Yanomamo who had been living at the missions started to obtain what in Venezuela is called a "sedular," it an identification paper that everybody must have or you else you can get thrown in jail. But in order to get a sedular you must have a name. And among the Yanomamo their names are quite secret, quite sacred and not something that Chagnon 7 you would want to reveal to a complete stranger. But since I had worked with them for so many years I became accepted by them and they freely revealed this very important and very sensitive information to me. What I began noticing was that the assignment of names to them was beginning to lead to a situation which would ultimately deteriorate whatever fonts of solidarity might exist in their culture, for example, 4 or 5 brothers in the same family would be assigned a name by some capricious polititian who would say, "Your name is Blanco, your name is Fulano, your name is Jones, your name is Smith." and they would be assigned these pieces of paper and eventually this would lead to situations in which you would have several brothers all with the same lineage and genealogy and membership in their descent groups but all having different last names. Now in Latin culture your last name is quite important, thus it began to bother me that the way Latins ... or the Venezuelans were assigning names to them would ultimately be a very serious erosion of their kinship beliefs, their kinship sentiments, and their very social organization. So in 1988 I went down to the Yanomamo to help them with these genealogies, returning this information to them and working out with them, and with some of the missionaries, a more rational, logical system whereby the assignment of names should it become necessary, as it will be in some of these communites, would proceed in such a way that at least the dignity of their own social Chagnon 8 organization, their own kinship concepts and descent principles would be preserved in how they were assigned names. And of course, this was met with the missionaries with some considerable skepticism and so far as I know it has been abandoned. I hope eventually to turn again to that project in the future because I think it's something that an anthropologist might have some use and some utility in this process of how native peoples gain an identity in western civilization but I'd like to see, in this case, that they gain an identity that is consistent with their own system of social reckoning and social classification. So we've seen then, a number of different common themes discussed by several of the speakers this morning and this afternoon. Themes, that I'm sure are ... can be found in the histories and experiences of all Native-Americans and at this point I would like to change the subject slightly and attempt to relate many of the things that we have heard about and listened to this morning and this afternoon to what is now happening, and has happened in many cases, to Native peoples in South America. Like the situation in North America the contact that Native-Americans had with Europeans was very shocking, sudden and drastic in many areas. Europeans, of course came by boat and therefore the impact was the strongest and the most violent, early in the contact period, on the coasts. Columbus landed Chagnon 9 as did many of his followers in Carribean and immediately these elaborate, elegant chieftan societies, that were aboriginally found in the Carribean, collapsed almost immediately shortly after the coming of Columbus and his epigone. There exists today in the Carribean almost no Native-Americans at all. There are rumors that there are still a few Carribe speakers on the island of Dominque, but so far as I'm able to determine they are merely a handful and their culture has virtually disappeared. Elsewhere in the Americas when the Spaniards got to the western side, the western coast, their they encountered some of the high civilizations in the new world, the Inca in particular, and of course, with the greed and avariciousness of the Spaniards for precious metals, they immediately set about destroying the Inca. In a very short period of time, upwards of 7 million people in the Andes were pressed into indentured servitude to extract tin and gold and other minerals from the mines where the devastation caused by the poor living conditions was so severe that almost 7 million people died in a very short period time because of the mining. In fact, the situation got so bad that the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope had to declare in an encyclial in the 17th century declaring that Native-American peoples had souls, that they were just like "other" people, so that having souls, hopefully, from the point of view of the Church would mitigate to a certain extent the Chagnon 10 brutality that the Spaniards were inflicting on the native peoples, on the assumption that being non-European they were therefore non-human. Other forms of contact led to immense decimation elsewhere in the South America region, and that is going on today. The largest pocket of native peoples left who retain any semblance of the kind of culture that existed 500 years ago, are mostly all found today in the Amazon Basin where at this very moment areas as large as the State of Deleware are cut and burned almost every day as the Brazilians go about the process of attempting to clear the Amazon Basin to make room for grass on which they can grow cattle, the grass grows for maybe three years, the rain comes washes the thin soil away and then the land turns to a parched, brown clay surface on which nothing will grow, not even the grass that they planted to feed the cattle and of course, by that time the jungle cannot reclaim itself because of the severity and vastness of the destruction. Not only is timbering ... or cutting of the jungle going on for agriculture purposes, to raise cattle, but logging interests are now wreaking havoc in the Amazon Basin. Prior to that, sugar plantation cultivators would raid into the interior of the Amazon Basin, enslave native peoples, work them on the plantations until they died, also contributing to the vast destruction of the native peoples of South America. A more recent plague that is developing in South America Chagnon 11 is the spread of the cocaine market and cocaine traffic and many native peoples are now giving up their traditional way of life and cultivating and although they are not becoming addicted to cocaine, they are being articulated to a vast world market system that involves them at the lowest end of the economic ladder where they are giving up their subsistence economies in order to cultivate cocaine or coca leaves that are then sold to collectors who then turn it into drugs that get on the streets in the United States and get back to places like the Kickapoo and other Native-American populations and in the process of doing this the Native-Americans who are involved in this are becoming more and more dependent on these market economies and single cash crops. The Amazon Basin today represents the last major area in the Americas where there are still people somewhat like the conditions that they lived in 500 years ago, the Yanomamo being perhaps the last largest independent population of that sort and I'd like to now finish my comments by giving you a kind of rapid tour of Yanomamo culture and draw attention to some of the changes that I've seen taking place gradually over the past 30 years of my research. And during that 30 year period one can see how Western Civilization, chronically, inevitably, gradually, erodes the values, the customs, the independence of these native peoples and recently with the discovery of gold in Brazil in Yanomamo territory, this gradual, cumulative change Chagnon 12 has suddenly become catastrophic. In 1987 gold was discovered on the Brazilian side of the border which touched off an immediate, frantic, viscious gold-rush into Yanomamo territory, into a region were approximately 9,000 Yanomamo lived almost all of whom were isolated and relatively uncontacted and overnight 120 airstrips were cut from the jungle, 50,000 miners poured in, malaria became epidemic, hepatitis appeared, syphilis, gonorrhea, other venereal diseases, the miners began shooting and killing the Yanomamo and perhaps as many as a 1,000 Yanomamo have died just in the last few years because of the effects of both the brutality of the miners and the spread of diseases introduced by the miners. The Venezuelan side of the border has been relatively isolated from that kind of impact, the Venezuelan Government has carefully monitored and controlled access to the area, but since gold exists on the other side of this otherwise invisible boundary that is the divide between Venezuela and Brazil, it almost surely exists on the Venezuelan side and that puts the Yanomamo on that side of the border in a very serious condition of peril and plight. So, those of you who are Native-Americans in this room, I hope you appreciate when you see some of the slides that I'm going to show you now, what it might have been like many years ago in your own tribal populations, among your own ancestors, and think about all of the tragedies that happened to you as you see some of them now unfolding for the first time, just Chagnon 13 as we speak, in another group of Native-American people, the Yanomamo. May I have the slide projector turned on if it's not already done so? ( I haven't got it turned on ....... oh, that's the antenna ... ) I generally like to walk around while I'm talking, I hope I'm not hooked to some umbilical cord, ... I guess I am, my hand is. We're going to see some slides up here and I'll try to go through as quickly as I could. I gave a talk last night and apparently I went on for an hour and a half instead of one hour which caused some of the people in the audience to fall asleep I think. I'll try to go through as quickly as I can and then perhaps we'll have time left over for the audience to ask questions, not only of me but also to some of the other speakers that we heard this morning and this afternoon. That's South America ... I just simply put it up there to show you that the Amazon Basin dominates the central part of the continent, the Yanomamo live at the extreme northern end of South America near the Guyana Shield, a very rich area in minerals, this is the Amazon Basin that goes all the way up to the eastern Andes Mountains. Can you hear me in the back of the room? For those of you who want a more specific location, that's the northern part of South America, this is the border between Venezuela and Brazil and the Yanomamo occupy this large shaded-in area - I've drawn a circle around the area that I Chagnon 14 have been working in since 1964. This is what Yanomamo villages looked like in the middle of tropical forests, their population has been growing very rapidly over the last several hundred years, as the villages get large they fission into two smaller groups and eventually the two groups separate from each other, move away from each other and begin their political careers as new entities. There are about 20,000 Yanomamos, nobody knows for sure because there are still some villages that have never been contacted by the outside and we don't even really know how many people there are in the tribe in general. There are approximately 250 villages of Yanomamo, 3/4 of which are on the Venezuelan side, the others are on the Brazilian side. They are cultivators or gardeners as most of the tropical forest peoples are in South America, they clear the land by cutting down the trees, allow them to dry out, burn the brush and then cultivate their plants in between the fallen timbers and eventually take the timbers away as firewood. They heavily dependent upon plantains which is a kind of banana and ironically these were introduced into the Americas after the Europeans got here, so they are dependent on a crop, to a large extent, that is not aboriginal to the Americas. On the other hand, all of the tribes in New Guinea are dependent on sweet potatoes which is a crop that came to New Guinea introduced there from South America. And if you think that's unusual, Karl Marx once Chagnon 15 mused that the agricultural revolution ... or the industrial revolution in Europe would have been impossible had it not been for the white potato which was introduced to Europe from the Andes. So people often acquire useful food items long before the individuals that brought them even become known to them. This crop spread widely through the Amazon Basin very soon after Europeans came here. There is however a relative of the banana found aboriginally in the Americas and that's rabenella but it produces a pod that looks very different from and tastes very different from bananas, actually there are little seeds in it that taste like corn. As you can see, the women do an awful lot of the heavy work, men can extend their infancy and adolescence until age 40 or 45, just as we can do in our own society, and there's always the problem of what to do with the superfluous men,

Demographic structure of a primitive population: A simulation This work has been supported in part by grant AT(11-1)-1552 of the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission.

A stochastic computer simulation model has been used to study the demography of the YanomamÖ Indians of Venezuela and Brazil, whose social organization is typical of many primitive societies. It has been found by simulation that perhaps one third of all YanomamÖ marriages involve individuals related as first or second cousins, and that more than 16% of all males must leave their villages to find wives, in spite of a strong preference for village endogamy. In the process of validating and experimenting with the model, we discovered (1) the role of sibship size in determining a man's ability to obtain wives; (2) the variability in frequency of cousin marriages through time; and (3) the importance of wife trading in assuring that few men complete the reproductive period without having married at least once. In addition, we strengthened our impressions, gathered from ethnographic data, that the YanomamÖ are an expanding population.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/37512/1/1330350206_ftp.pd