The Great Basin

1
The Great Basin

• Life on the Deserts Edge

2
Great Basin Cultures
Area Between Sierras and Rockies
3

• Language
• Numic Uto-Aztecan speakers (except Washo)
• Related to Nahuatl language (Mixecan)

4
Ecology and subsistence

• Arid and semiarid
• Rain shadow of Sierras
• Great Salt Lake
• remnant of ancient sea
• Key resources
• Piñon (pine) nuts
• Rabbits, hares, antelope, fish, insects, grubs
• Owens Valley Paiutes simple agriculture

Camus bulbs
Pine nut flour and Soapwort brush
Fishtrap
5
Adaptations

• Semi-nomadic disperse (not dense) population
• seasonal rounds.
• Cooperative chores
• Rabbit hunts and antelope drives
• required organization
• Task Leader
• Rabbit boss
• Occasional Headmen
• NO coercive power only persuasion.

6
Social Organization

• Mobility
• Nearly always on the move
• little material possessions - easily portable
• Society
• Extended family
• Some polygyny
• Exogamous
• Increase network
• Join with others
• Technology
• Elaborate basketry
• containers
• small boats etc.

7
Material Culture

• Housing
• Wickiups, grass house
• sturdier housing in winter
• Rock shelter (early)
• Pit house
• Plateau influence north
• Teepee (later)
• Plains influence east and north
• Transportation
• foot
• thatched canoes
• Clothing
• bark or rabbit skin

Making rabbit strips
Thule hut
8
Religious beliefs

• Round dance
• A harvest festival
• But also had cosmological significance
• Restart the cosmic cycle
• Emphasize the unity of the group
• Shamanic visions
• Individual
• But may be connected with round dance
• Individual shamans became leaders of round dances

9
Ethnohistory
Stereotype Digger Indians

• pre-1820 Spanish period
• cultural borrowings
• 1820-1848 Mexican period
• military, settlers
• Change social organization
• larger bands
• Slave trade tradition
• children with Mexican farm families
• an apprenticeship

10
Post-1848 American period
Mormon conflict over land Cooperation to keep
out non-Mormon whites Mountain Meadows
massacre 1857
Sarah Winnemucca
Post-1860s
Miners Comstock Lode silver rush
devastation stealing to survive Sarah
Winnemucca pled for a reservation Disease
events with 75 mortality
11
Paiute Ghost Dance(Early Version)

• 1870 Wodziwob
• train from east brings the dead Indians but no
  whites
• remaking of the world includes death
• led Round Dances
• visions of dead
• Counsel to act ethically, avoid immorality
• Would restore game, banish sickness
• Prophecy failed
• further visions showed him an error in
  interpretation of first vision

12
Ghost DanceLater versions

• 1889 Wovoka
• Round Dance leader.
• Fell ill during eclipse of sun.
• visions of dead Paiutes,
• Happy, healthy and youthful
• Counsel stop violence, cooperate with whites 
• Vision spread across Plains
• Wounded Knee.
• became misinterpreted as militant, militaristic
• Ghost shirts
• Wounded Knee massacre of Lakota in 1890. 

Wovoka ca. 1856-1932 (a.k.a. Jack Wilson)