Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah Culture
Pow-Wow
Dancing
Culturally Significant Plants
The Legend of the Dream Catcher
The Paiute
All Basin peoples lived much the same kind of life, and the Paiute furnish a good example of it. Their territory
spread from north to south over the western part of the Basin, interrupted only by the Washo. The Owens Valley
Paiute, who lived just east of what is now Yosemite National Park, had the streams flowing from the Sierras to make their
lives a little easier; but most Paiute lived in very small groups, often just extended families, and never stopped moving
in their search for food. They had no tribal organization, but several bands would get together for dances and feasts
on the rare occasions when they had enough food.
Food, Clothing, and Technology
The Paiute followed a regular seasonal pattern of food-getting within the band's traditional territory, knowing
which roots and bulbs to dig in spring, where seeds and berries ripened in summer, and so on through fall, when
the pinion crop came in. As they pursued plant foods, the Paiute also collected almost anything that walked,
flew, or crawled - larvae and adult insects, grasshoppers, locusts, and ants. Men hunted for meat too, but in a
land where plants were scarce, animals were scarce. With long sticks the men prodded rats, lizzards, and ground
squirrels out of their burrows, and they set traps for rabbits. If rabbits were plentiful, the community held a
rabbit hunt. A real windfall was an antelpe or two.
Women treated nuts and especially seeds by grinding them into flour, which they then boiled or baked into porridge or cakes. It was this preparation that rendered the otherwise inedible seeds into digestible and nourishing food. First the seeds were toasted with hot coals on flat baskets, the women tossing the containers constantly to prevent burning. Then, if making mush, the women stone-boiled the ground seed flour in a basket container. For baking, women added water to the flour to make a dough, which they then baked in hot ashes. Prepared flour could also be stored for some months in anticipation of a later need.
Men's hunting tools were bows and arrows, spears, clubs, and throwing sticks. Paiute bows were not very efficient and consequiently, the Paiute were inefficient at hunting large animals. However, antelopes were exceptions. Communal hunts occurred every six or seven years under an antelope shaman who directed the effort to drive an antelope into a surround, where hunters killed them. The shaman was very important and highly respected because it was believed that he or she had power to charm antelope into the trap to be killed.
For hunting rabbits when the rabbit population was high, the women made nets two or three feet high and as long as a hundred yards. Under the guidance of a rabbit boss, the net was stretched out and secured, then hunters drove the rabbits into the net where they were dispatched by the waiting Paiute. Like the antelope drive, this was a communal project, but an individual hunter might kill rabbits anytime with a bow and arrow or throwing stick. Rabbits were prized for their fur almost more than their meat.
The men could not catch enough animals to make much buckskin, and the people wore little hide clothing - only a loincloth for men and sometimes a skirt for women. Most of the time, women wore fiber aprons, and sandals, if worn at all, were made of fiber as well. Both sexes wore skin moccasins and woven rabbit-skin robes in winter. To make these, the men cut each rabbit skin spiral fashion into one long strip, which they twisted so that fur stuck out on all sides. The strips were twined with a fiber thread into a blanket or robe. Sometimes bird skins with the feathers still on were treated in the same way. Both kinds of robes were light and warm.
Paiute women were basketmakers of great skill. Working with reeds, grasses, bark fibers, or twigs, they made almost every implement except the men's hunting equipment: cradles, mats, seed beaters, hats, and above all, baskets. Baskets served as water jars, dishes, and containers. Large carrying baskets had vertical poles sticking through the bottom to hold them upright on the ground. The women carried those on their backs suspended by a strap called a tumpline across the forehead. To keep the tumplines from cutting into their skin, the women wore basket hats.
Dreams and Curing
Men and women found spirit power in dreams, in which the spirit appeared as an animal or plant, mountains, clouds,
or other natural phenomena. This power brought strength, skill, and endurance, and good fortune, and to shamans
it also gave the ability to cure. Dreams also could cause illness, not necessarily to the dreamer: a member of
an individual's family or friend might become ill if a person dreamed it.
Ghosts too caused illness, for they attempted to steal souls. Witches sickened a victim by magically making some object like a small stone, worm, or lizard enter the person's body. Shamans cured the illness by sucking out the foreign object or going into a trance to retrieve the lost soul. Singing and dancing usually went on along with curing performances, providing entertainment for onlookers. Both men and women could become curers by getting spirit help, either involuntarily from dreams or by a quest in special mountain areas where it was thought the spirits would come to the seeker.
The Paiute never had enough of anything to make them targets for attacks by other Indians. Disagreements in the form of feuds sometimes erupted within the band, but they never lasted long, simply because the job of getting food left little energy for fighting. However, it is instructive to compare the Paiute, who were thoroughly familiar with their territory and how to adapt to and exploit it, to some white pioneers in 1847 who were snow-bound in Paiute territory. Not knowing or ignoring Paiute adaptations, many starved; others survived only by engaging in cannibalism. The Paiute could live in a land where whites perished.