When the Europeans came to America, an old and complex society came to an end. The people who had lived in this country for many thousands of years had worked out a unique system of trade, warfare and lifestyle unlike anywhere else on the planet. Starting in 2003 I gathered some survival books and started working on projects. The purpose of my study was to learn who the Native Americans were and how they lived before any influence had taken place from other cultures. I came away from this study with a new appreciation for primitive technology and the skills necessary for survival in the wilderness as well as an appreciation of the teamwork it must have taken to maintain a village and raise a family.
When John White and the other explorers sent by Sir Walter Ralegh came to the shores of the Outer Banks they found a peaceful, friendly group of people who were willing to trade food for all the "trifles" the soldiers and scientists had brought with them. And yet, these items were essentially luxury items to them, and labor-saving items because they had everything they needed to live here. In the past I have conducted a presentation of all my craft items and their uses. I thought I would do a mini-online presentation concerning lifeways of the Algonquin people who lived on the Outer Banks. Due to the earliness of contact and the result thereof, the Coastal Algonquin, as a separate culture with their own language, religion, family structure, etc. is gone. There are still northern Algonquin people who are very much alive and are keeping their language and culture alive. But, in terms of finding a group of people with a living culture like what was practiced on the Outer Banks, that is no longer possible. What we can learn through the accounts of early explorers or through archeological study is all there is left of this once vibrant and interesting group of people. What follows is what I would say typically during a presentation about these people who once lived on the Outer Banks.
Corn was the principle grain although they did also eat many different roots and parts of grasses such as the river cane. Fields were laid out in the slash and burn technique and when a field played out in a few years they moved on to another area. Young boys were given the duty of chasing away the crows and other creatures who would spoil the corn harvest. Hoes were constructed of a welk shell attached to a handle or the shoulder bone of a deer was also used. Crops were not irrigated, so the farmers were at the mercy of the rains. Typically they would companion crop, growing corn, beans and squash together, which, as every gardener knows, really cuts down on weeding.
Hunting was an important pastime for the people and yearly the young men and some of the younger women would go inland to hunt in the piedmont forests where there were deer, eastern buffalo and other big game animals. The last eastern buffalo was shot in the Shenandoah mountains and none exist of this type of animal, only the western type survive. Every life was considered sacred and the people would pray for the animals after they took their lives. Survival was not a light thing, even for animals. Hides were carefully tanned to a butter softness using the brain tan method. Pictured is a cattail leaf quiver and arrows made of river cane with turkey fletching using hide glue and pitch pine glue for the stone arrow points. The bow is a "self-bow" meaning all one piece, not laminated.
Transportation was by means of dugout canoes. These canoes were large, made from a single tree and could transport 20-30 people. The trees were cut down by use of fire and stone axes like that pictured. They then used fire to hollow out the inside and an adze to scrape out the charcoal. Which could then be used in cooking fires. I read that canoe-making was a winter activity. Seems like a nice warm way to spend the day. When a canoe was not going to be used for a length of time it was submerged in the river, weighed down with mud or rocks. That is why people still find them from time to time. Since they might have been forgotten or the owners died and did not retrieve their canoe.
Basketry is a very skilled pastime and my feeble efforts do not in any way resemble some of the fine examples of Native American basketry still practiced today. But it is fun and rewarding to do it and you have to start somewhere in learning skills. Pictured also is a whelk hoe, and some actual paleo arrow and spear points as well as a drill point and some bird points. The point on the right is a machine made one I found on ebay. You can really tell the difference between a modern electric grinder and a hand knapped arrow point. Much finer work, much sharper edge.
Hafting a stone knife involves cutting a channel in the antler, wood or bone and then using pitch pine glue, made with pine sap, some grass stubble and charcoal, heated up and applied to the point and in the channel. It is secured with wet rawhide which dries very stiff and tightens around the point to hold it securely. The only problem I encountered with this is that on a very hot day in a very hot car, like 120 degrees, the pitch pine melts and drips out of the socket. Of course, the people we are talking about didn't have this particular problem.
Houses were made of saplings bent over in an arch and secured with cordage made of grasses or vines. Then mats were constructed of cattail leaves and because of the concave nature of the leaf they could provide a shingling effect and shed the rain. Tree bark was also used to cover the wigwams, sometimes called "longhouses." Mats were very large, obviously as large as could be made in order to cover many feet of the length of a house.
Also of use is the river cane which can be split when green and wet and make into an effective screen to block out the sun. Examples of screens like this have been found in the Southwest in the dwellings of the Anasazi.
Pictured in the John White drawings was a crab net like this one made of cordage. They also made other nets of cordage. Net-making is a long tedious process but certainly can accomplish a great deal when fishing that a spear or weir can't accomplish so a net for coastal dwelling fish-eating people was a very big necessity. I had fun making my crab net out of green willow bent in a circle and then a smaller green willow center and applied the cordage outward from the inside circle.
This is a fish weir I came upon at Roanoke Island Festival Park. It is well constructed but not the right material as the John White and Thomas Harriot documents said they used river cane for their weirs. These function like a modern pound net that is put out in the sound in a channel where the fish are known to swim and then they are funneled into it but can't find a way to get out.
Life can't always be just about survival and there has to be time allowed for recreation, worship of the creator and other activities of civilized life. Here pictured are some toys and games that would have been used by young people in the village. A corn husk doll, a game similar to bee-bees in holes like children still play with, a game with a bowl and counters for gambling, pickup sticks which was a Native American invention, another betting game of hiding the stone in the moccasin, a type of bull-roarer, another variation of the familiar cup and ball game.
Gourds grew very large in the native gardens and were used to carry water from the pond. If you chew one end of a willow you have for yourself a paint brush! Very useful. Oysters, besides being eaten in prodigious quantities also provided scrapers for various uses. A clam shell with two halves together makes a set of tweezers. Cordage was always useful and could be made from a variety of materials such as willow bark, marsh grass (spartina), cattail leaves or Yucca leaves. Having a hollow cane to encourage the fire to flare is very useful.
This photo is of the interior of the wigwam at Roanoke Island Festival Park and illustrates the bent sapling under structure. I was disappointed it was some kind of burlap vinyl siding, not very realistic, but more so in the dark of the interior than standing outside. I asked them why they had no Native American interpreters and only recorded museum talk for people to listen to because I thought it would be so much more effective to have a person relating the Native American side of things.
Inside the wigwam would be benches attached to the walls and up off the floor to keep away from fleas and other pestilence. On these were placed grass mats. There is nothing quite so aromatic as working with grass and I suppose sleeping on it would be like sleeping on a hay bale as I used to do as a child on the farm. Grass mats are fairly easy to make, and require just a crude loom and a lot of marsh grass (or in this case, dune grass which is not protected by law). The cats really love this mat so I have to keep it under wraps or it will be all over the house in pieces.
Of course, if you grow grain you also have to have some way to grind it into flour. Flour was also made from live oak acorns. Pictured is half of a mortar and pestle. They were also made of hollowed out logs with a mallet (plunger type) for grinding. I went out and gathered up a bunch of live oak acorns and boiled them to remove the tannic acid. After they dried, I roasted them with a little oil and some salt. Living near the sea, salt would have been easy to obtain, and essential for human health. For fat, the natives used bear grease, or bear fat since there were, as there now are again, quite a lot of bears.
Gourds were also used for storage. If used for water carrying they were first coated with beeswax or some other kind of proofing agent such as cactus pad juice. I tried to use that as a proofing agent but the gourd was still very porous and still leaked so I am not sure what I did wrong. The cactus pads can also be eaten, once you remove the outer skin and I also did that. The red fruit is not very sweet and the inside of the pads taste slightly like green beans. One very big treat that we have on the Outer Banks is the persimmons which come ripe after the first frost. When they are black and look rotten they are at their sweetest. Pictured also is a pottery bowl. The Native Americans on the Outer Banks were accomplished potters and used conical terra cotta pots to cook in by setting the pointed end down in the heaped coals. They loved to make a kind of mash out of the cornmeal, kind of like modern mush and would often incorporate fruit in their meat dishes. Pots were made by the coil method and fired in a fire pit. Sherds of pottery from the Native American Village on Roanoke Island can still sometimes be found on Roanoke Island. With a lot of prayer I found one not long ago.
Mastering a fire drill is no easy task and requires a bowdrill, the right kind of wood for a fireboard, the right kind of wood for the spindle and a rock for the socket. Once all the elements are assembled you are only halfway there. I got a lot of smoke but never got an ember. So I thought I would trade with the sailors from the ships passing by for a steel striker to go with my piece of flint. Or pray for a great lightning strike in a tree. Also pictured are some antlers used for various sewing purposes of hide and a rawhide painted knife sheath. You can split willow shafts to make a sort of clothespin, pictured in the front.
Wearing lots of jewelry was a requirement for almost everyone back then but no glass beads were used. Instead, they used shell, bone, wood, clay or horn to make their beads. Considering that they had only stone drills, the work they did is quite superb and must have taken a long time to construct. I made a few beads out of a cherry branch and some from sea shells and it is really a lot of work. It requires patience as well because there is a lot of breakage. I think the high level of jewelry making they practiced would indicate that it was not all survival, every minute about food gathering but in fact, there was a lot of free time to engage in activities for the pure pleasure of doing them, i.e. Artistry!
When fishing with a hand-line in clear water you can sometimes use a "gorge" hook, at least you used to be able to, though I think it is now illegal. This is the type of hook that was used. Needles for sewing were made of splits of deer bone. These can be incredibly sharp. Or you can also wet only the rear portion of deer leg sinew and use the dried part to function as a needle, which works in soft material and effectively gives you the needle and thread all in one piece. You can also make containers from tree bark if the bark is strong enough and doesn't fall apart.
At least among the Southeast Mound builders which was a long time before John White & Co. showed up (destroyed by Spanish intrusions), the Native Americans wove cloth and wore clothing made from cloth, which was probably hemp fiber or nettle fiber. Pictured is a tumpline made by the card weaving method which gives you an incredibly strong piece of strapping. I don't know if they practiced card weaving but tribes in the North made sashes on a small inkle loom so perhaps it was like that. Burdens were sometimes carried on the back with a tumpline, or a strong strap that went across the forehead. You need strong neck muscles to pull this off. Over the course of the study I made an abundance of leather pouches since every large project (like a dress or apron) left a lot of little hide scraps that could be used. (Waste not, want not!) So I have quite a lot of little tobacco pouches, belt pouches and pouches of all kinds! The leather belts were made by cutting in a circle on a piece of hide and then pulling the resulting strip taut to take out the bends and then braiding 3 strips together.
I am also not very good at coil baskets. There are Lumbee Native Americans that I know that can produce breath-taking baskets of the longleaf pine needles. This one was a start using dune grass. We also have on the Outer Banks not very long loblolly needles. It is tied off with some strips of yucca leaves. It's a start but I didn't finish it. Sometimes trade networks got started because one group was much better at making something than another group. So I will have to think of something I am good at to trade for some better coiled pine needle baskets.
Points for spears or arrows on the Outer Banks were very creative, using shark teeth, the spines of horseshoe crabs, just the bare wood sharpened and tempered in the fire or a triangular piece of flint, probably obtained by trading with Native Americans in the interior where there are, like, actually, rocks, since we don't have any here. Sometimes rocks will wash down from the rivers or in from the ocean, but otherwise the Outer Banks was rockless.
Pictured left is a deerhide braintanned dress that I made for a friend. This garment would have been worn in the winter along with moccasins, fur leggings and a fur cape. They were not really into hats that I can see, and the men weren't really into even having hair, so I guess they were quite a lot warmer blooded than the English or than we modern people are today. At any rate, there are no pictures to substantiate a garment like this in John White's collection. Possibly, this was in the collection that ended up getting tossed out by the sailors in their haste to get the colonists off the island before the big storm. I like to think that anyway. This is a typical 3-hide dress worn by women on the great plains. What they wore on the Outer Banks was a kind of apron, not really a breechclout which goes from front to back through the legs but just hung from a belt. A unisex garment as both sexes were pictured wearing this. This outfit is problematic for all sorts of reasons. From a purely practical position, it is not the least bit warm, especially if the wind is blowing, not that modest either. Breezy in summer might be most advantageous but not in all the other seasons. Some people are pictured in John White's drawings as having a shift like garment with one strap going over the shoulder or two straps over the shoulders. Some wear two aprons, one front and one rear. Reenactors have been struggling ever since with these little outfits and you see all manner of adaptations to keep them in the land of modicum and decorum. Ha, ha. I wasn't really sure how to solve the problem of wearing the authentic apparel and still am not sure. But it is a most interesting topic for discussion. Pictured is a shift made from linen in a style similar to the drawings. This would have been hemp or nettle cordage woven into cloth.
Something I learned about this study was that resources can be utilized in really interesting ways and as always, necessity being the mother of invention, having only natural materials to work with, and even more limiting, only those found on the Outer Banks for the most part, was actually not limiting at all. River cane or Switch cane is segmented and tapered so that it can make little tight-fitting stoppers of vials. A nifty place to keep powdered herbs, paints, etc. I am going to close with this as an example of everything that I learned over the years of this study.
In conclusion, I really wanted to find a traditional way of life that was in keeping with those of my ancestors. My ancestors lived in Europe at the end of the stone age in a manner similar to the original people of the Outer Banks, though they went on to found a culture that used metal in many ways. We all have a Paleolithic culture like they had here on the Outer Banks at our roots. Sometimes it is important and helpful to go back to the roots of something -- in this case a lifestyle. It seems to me that we are missing so much by living the way we do now, so cut off from nature, so isolated from each other and from the way people always lived before the modern era.
As an exercise to see if I could find any areas I had missed, I tried to imagine a typical day in the life of the Native Americans who lived here and in every season, since tasks and food varied with each season. At the end of the study I felt as though, if transported by time machine to Fall 1580, Roanoke Island, I could walk into the village, past the barking dogs quarreling over a bone, and the children playing games, past the cook fires and the women cooking in their earthen pots, past the cornfield and the boys shooing away the crows, past the old men sitting chatting in front of a wigwam, past the young men pulling up with their canoe and their catch of fish -- and really feel like I knew what was going on and how these people lived on the Outer Banks -- and maybe in some small way, know them and understand them and in the end, love them for the people they once were. And by doing so, have a life today in harmony with nature and be able to find and love all that is still here.
As with most things Outer Banks, events tended to revolve around the sea, ships and trading routes. Communities sprang up for different reasons. Ocracoke, having a navigable inlet, began as a "Pilot Town," or place where pilots could be hired to take a ship or boat through the treacherous shoals, up river to towns like Bath and Edenton. It was reported that there were settlers in Nags Head Woods at an early date. Other communities sprang up as fishing villages along the sounds. Some people came by way of shipwrecks, but most were dissatisfied Virginia colonists looking for a more independent life. John Lawson observed that there were still Native Americans on Hatteras when he visited there and they were intermarried with the white settlers who had come there. Modern day people have made the claim that these Indians were descendants of those who helped the Lost Colonists, and possibly even descendants of them, but there is little conclusive proof of that. As the century progressed, more and more conflict arose with Native Americans all over the colonies. In North Carolina one of the most devastating conflicts became known as the Tuscarora War. At this time the European powers were all vying for a piece of America and supported any efforts of Native Americans to cause difficulty, mostly to further their own ends. These tribes already had long established allies and enemies and so these European powers, notably, France, Spain and England, would use them as pawns against each other and against colonists of opposing countries. In my opinion, if they had all banded together, the European-American population would be the minority now and we might be speaking Algonquin or Iroquoian. That would be okay with me.
