Southwest
location
• The Southwest culture area is between the
Rocky Mountains and the Mexican Sierra
Madre. The environment is dry, with some
areas getting less than 4 inches (10 cm) of rain
each year; droughts are common. The soil in
most of the Southwest is fertile despite its low
moisture content, coarse texture, and
occasional salty patches.
culture
• The Southwest was home to many different Native
American tribes, including the Yumans, Pima,
Tohono O'odham, Pueblo Indians, Navajo, and
Apache.
• Most peoples of the Southwest engaged in both
farming, hunting and gathering. The degree to
which a given culture relied upon domesticated
or wild foods was primarily a matter of the
group's proximity to water.
• The Yumans, Pima, and Tohono O'odham lived in the
western and southern reaches of the culture area. They
were mostly farmers who lived in riverside hamlets.
The Pueblo Indians lived in compact, permanent
villages and resided in multifamily buildings. They were
also farmers, but they also engaged in hunting and
gathering. The Navajo and Apache were nomadic
people who lived in the range and basin systems south
of the Colorado Plateau. They were primarily hunters
and gatherers, but they also raised some crops.
• The family was a key social grouping
for all of the tribes in the Southwest.
Extended family households of three
generations were typical. Kinship was
usually reckoned bilaterally, through
both the male and female lines.
• Clans and moieties were important social and
political units for many of the tribes in the
Southwest. Clans were kin groups that could
trace their ancestry directly to a known figure in
the historical or legendary past. Moieties were
groups of lineages that were paired together.
Clans and moieties were responsible for
sponsoring certain rituals and for organizing
many aspects of community life.
the pueblos
• The western Pueblo peoples' traditional social and
religious practices are well-known because the Colorado
Plateau's rugged landscape protected them from Spanish
and American colonizers. Less is known about the
eastern Pueblos' pre-conquest practices because they
were located near the Rio Grande and were easily
accessible to colonizers, who often used brutal methods
to assimilate them.
• The Pueblo peoples lived in compact, permanent villages and resided in
multifamily buildings (see pueblo architecture). The women of a household
cared for young children; cultivated spring-irrigated gardens; produced
fine baskets and pottery; had charge of the preservation, storage, and
cooking of food; and cared for certain clan fetishes (sacred objects carved
of stone). The men of a household wove cloth, herded sheep, and
raised field and dune crops of corn (maize), squash, beans, and
cotton. A wide trade network brought materials such as turquoise,
shell, copper, and macaw feathers to the Pueblo tribes; many of
these exotic materials appear to have come from Mexico.
socialization and education
• All of the Southwestern tribes viewed the raising of
children as a serious adult responsibility. Most felt that
each child had to be “made into” a member of the tribe
and that adults had to engage in frequent self-reflection
and redirection to remain a tribal member; in other
words, ethnic identity was something that had to be
achieved rather than taken for granted.
• From the beginning of childhood there was training in
customary gender roles; little girls began to learn food
processing and childcare, and little boys were given
chores such as collecting firewood or tending animals.
However, the most important work of childhood was the
internalization of the abiding precept that individuals were
expected to pull their own weight, at every age grade,
according to their gender, strength, and talent.
religion
• Like most Native American religions, those of the Southwest Indians
were generally characterized by animism and shamanism. Animists
perceive the world as filled with living entities: spirit-beings that
animate the sun, moon, rain, thunder, animals, plants, topographic
features, and many other natural phenomena. Shamans are men
and women who have achieved a level of knowledge or power
regarding physiological and spiritual health, especially its
maintenance, recovery, or destruction. Always in a somewhat
liminal state, shamans had to be acutely aware of the community’s
goings-on or risk the consequences: a number of 19th-century
accounts report the execution of Pima shamans who were believed
to have caused people to sicken and die.
