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Káma-Kapúska! Making Marks in Indian Country, 1833–34

Cross Reference: Portraiture as Calumet

From: ■ Portraiture as Calumet

“Adoption in the neighboring Awatíkihu (Five Villages) that surrounded Fort Clark happened through the calumet.‍[13] Calumets were common among Missouri River peoples as a means to create the adoptive kin relationships needed for trade. A typical trade event lasted for days and could occur between hostile parties, as long as the calumet was invoked, to create a temporary connection:

Exchange events typically began with advance messengers giving notice to a host community that a group planned a trading visit. Following a period of preparation on both sides, the host community extended an invitation to enter the village and feasts were held, along with a council to fix prices. After several days the calumet ceremony itself was held, cementing a fictive kinship relationship between leading men of each group, and by extensions [sic] their followers, both men and women. The event concluded with social dances, dancing for gifts, and gambling. Goods changed hands at each step of this complex process.‍[14]”

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calumet 7 numak'aki theme plain 2023-01-08T14:57:49+00:00
A calumet is an elaborately decorated and ceremonially powerful smoking pipe. Complex rituals were developed around the exchange and smoking of the calumet, which symbolically and symbiotically bound the receiver and giver together in a fictive kin relationship for a stated goal—whether political or familial alliance, trade, hunting, peace, or war.
Calumet ceremonies are believed to have been developed by Chahiksichahiks (Pawnee) peoples, earth-lodge dwellers that lived along the Missouri, south of the Heart River Confederacy (later the Awatíkihu).‍[1] Such ceremonies were developed well before non-Native peoples moved into the region as a means for conducting trade across vast areas of continental North America. Bound parties, even if enemies, were obligated to treat each other as kin for the stated period of time. Parties expected demonstrations of corresponding honor and respect, often expressed through the giving of gifts, and existing records suggest that a failure to show appropriate honor could revoke the underlying ceremonial bindings.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, calumets could also be used to construct relationships with non-Native peoples, particularly among the French; painted versions appear on numerous surviving buffalo adoption robes in French collections.‍[2] Such extensions were strategic. Despite its long-established centrality to trade, the Awatíkihu had begun to feel intense survival pressures by the end of the eighteenth century.‍[3] It is thus not surprising to find that leaders of the Awatíkihu extended this project’s pictured calumet to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their visit in 1804 in a bid for alliance building that might ensure their safety and wellbeing—but one built on kinship obligations.

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óhate (society) 7 numak'aki theme plain 2023-01-08T15:04:14+00:00
All residents of the Awatíkihu (Five Villages), at various points in their lives, were members of age-appropriate óhate, roughly translated in English as “societies.” Starting in late childhood, cohorts of boys and girls would join together to gather the material goods necessary to buy óhate rights. Once the goods were obtained and those holding the rights agreed to the transfer, elaborate ceremonies held over many days trained the new cohort in the associated knowledge, songs, dances, ceremonies, and objects of the procured óhate. When the cohort was practiced enough and gained the goods necessary for the next transfer—usually several years later—the process was repeated.
Members of óhate had specific communal and ceremonial roles that could be carried out in the public arena, within and among specific Native communities, or privately, for the óhate only. For an adoption in the Numak'aki village of Nuptadi (Second Village), for instance, Mató-Tópe’s óhate of Íschohä-Kakoschóchatä attended to “dance the medicine pipes,” enacting the calumet ceremony. Later, however, Mató-Tópe led the same óhate to Fort Clark, where the group’s dance enforced their fictive kinship with American Fur Company personnel. Any ceremonies and dances carried out for the former, which involved a Numak'aki-specific audience, were likely very different from the latter, which included non-Awatíkihu and non-Native outsiders. Óhate members also shared rights, songs, ceremonies, and knowledge among themselves that only fellow members could know.
In the Awatíkihu, all men who hoped to be chosen as leaders had to have memberships in óhate. They could also be members of multiple óhate simultaneously; Mató-Tópe was a member of at least two at the time of Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied’s visit. Both Mató-Tópe and Péhriska-Rúhpa posed for their portraits with objects that were associated with their óhate memberships. The ka-ka (keeper) of óhate objects were often those voted to óhate leadership positions by their cohorts.

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kin 4 numak'aki theme plain 2023-01-08T15:02:31+00:00
To invoke kinship in many Native communities was to invoke familial obligations of respect, duty, alliance, and provision. Calumet ceremonies and adoption cemented these bonds, as did a range of shared activities: smoking, dancing, feasting, gifting, visiting, hunting, and trade. Many of these practices are noted in Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied’s journal entries.
Adoption could be real or fictive. The Fort Clark leader James Kipp, for instance, adopted the Numak'aki youth Síh-Sé (Be-Red Feather), who split his time between Fort Clark and the village of Mít uta hako'sh (First Village). Síh-Sé may have been an orphan or Kipp’s own métis (mixed heritage) child, or his adoption may have followed calumet, kinship, or clan obligations through Kipp’s Numak'aki wife. Regardless of the relationship specifics, Síh-Sé was integrated into both fort and village life, moved easily between both, and was provided for through his kin in both locations.

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