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Don’t have enough people to matter. Interesting thought, lets look at that.
My people the Odawa have never been a large tribe, before contact or otherwise. We are however, Ahnishnabek. The “K” in that word means that it is plural, nishnabe is a root word meaning “the people”. So what we are talking about here is membership to a greater collective. Other Ahnishbabek people include, but are not limited too, the Ojibway, Potowatomi, Cree, Sauk, Fox, Mickmac, etc. The Ojibway alone are the second or third largest Indian Tribe in North America today. Before contact, which is what I was referring too, we dwarfed the population sizes of many communities even today. Some accounts have as high or higher than the population of Detroit in the Detroit area. One quarter of the American continent is hardly “unimportant” do to small numbers.
Additionally, just because we wore clothing does not mean we were hung up on this nudity point you are making. Men wore leggings because we didn’t like our legs tore up in the forest. We just didn’t have the fore sight it would have taken to know that in order to clearly illustrate our comfort with nudity to someone from a different culture in the twenty-first century we would have had to not wear any cloths at all ever … atoll.
I do not often speak for other tribes, we consider it to be rude, but it is quite plain that other tribes throughout the America have held the same view. This is, of course, if you keep your nose out of Wikipedia. I recommend Francis Densmore. You can even find some of her work on line. She wrote around the turn of the 20th century so the whitemans poison was already firmly entrenched in the Ojibway (whom she was primarily concerned with writing about) but there were traditionals around even then. Densmore does give you a jumping off point though to read more periods works, some even written at the time of contact.
Brett makes a good point about doing your research thoroughly. A few years ago, before I finished graduate school, I heard one of the faculty at the college I was attended say, “What the Internet has taught us in academia is that you no longer have a right to your opinion. We cannot afford to say that anymore. You only have a right to an INFORMED opinion.” To that point I would add that anything is possible as long as you don’t know what you are talking about.
If you find that a bit harsh I am sorry. I know I found it to be the first I heard it. It is, however, the reason I decided to post here. I am responsible, for my part, in the proliferation or stopping the proliferation of erroneous ideas. The idea that Indians had a garden of “Eden”, that our culture was identical to the dominant culture today or that we used crystals in out ceremonies are all examples of that. That list goes on and on by the way so I will leave you with just the three.
Asaudan, if you are pointing that straw man at me please don’t. I think we are trying to have a serious conversation here.
--Tim
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