In our current society, we tend to deal with our “troublemakers” (those who steal or cause harm to others) by locking them up in prison.
Did the Native Americans have any sort of prisons? And if not, how did they deal with people who engaged in socially destructive behavior?
Depends very much on the particular tribal structure that was in place: Mohawks or Seminoles or Navajos etc. would all have different social systems.
A common theme would probably be an emphasis on conflict resolution and community harmony rather than punishment of individual wrongdoers as a central goal.
Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation Robert Yazzie discusses traditional Navajo justice systems (pdf).
There’s the story of the Cree medicine man in the Northwest Territories who was hanged by the RCMP at the turn of the century. he was dealing with a very sick woman (apparently very serious mental problems) by putting her in a sweat lodge for therapy, passing a loop of rope through a hole in the wall, and around her neck. Then he pulled on the rope until she was no longer troubled. The RCMP did not approve of this therapy.
Basically, what do you do with troublemakers in a subsistence society? First, the social structure is such that they emphasize consensus and agreement. In the middle of the hunt is not the time to be arguing over details - so the social pressure is for agreement and conformity.
I read a book (very good one, IIRC it was called “Dancing With A Ghost”). Transgressors were sat down with the triabl group and the problem was discussed. Over and over, ad nauseum. Worse than when your progressive parents wanted to sit you down and talk out your problems… Eventually all feelings are internalized. You cannot be angry wth others, or you will have to sit down and talk about it. There is no beatings, no threats, no corporal punishment, because everyone has to pull their weight for the group to survive.
So a troublemaker either learns to get along or is dealt with. The book did not go into detail, but I assume that could mean being murdered by the group or ostracized; a person on their own in the wild would likely not survive long, and leaving someone rogue to wander around was a serious risk too. If there was the least thought in anyone’s mind that a troublemaker would lurk and take it out on the tribe - then they would probably not give the person the opportunity.
After years of group therapy (what else is there to do around the campfire) if the person did not respond to social conditioning, they were toast.
The Inuit used ostracism (cite (pdf)).
I grew up in a small town. When I went to college, my big-city-born friends would often grumble about the “small-town mentality”, where gossip ruled, and people worried a lot about what the neighbors would think, and everybody conformed to the rules, whether they believed in the rules or not.
That’s pretty much the way any small group operates. You conform, or you are cast out. And an outcast is easy prey for predators. (Especially the two-legged predators.)
I heard this story from a former policeman who worked in a small town in Alaska, 1970’s. I gather from questioning him that this incident was unusually “old fashioned,” but still a possibility then.
Two odd drownings had occurred on the float in a small fishing town, both members of the same Native family. My friend asked a dispatcher, also Native, what was going on, off the record. A rape had been committed in a Native village nearby, and the two drowning victims were the cousins of the rapist. In this tribe, which is matrilineal, the uncle is responsible for properly enculterating boys. Thus, the uncle and his clan were being punished for the crime. The man who committed it wasn’t touched in any manner. My friend asked the dispatcher if it was over. “One more,” she said. Within a month, a third cousin was drowned.
That’s the story as told to me, second hand but pretty reliably.
“reliably” based on what? Because you heard this from a former cop who heard it from a dispatcher “off the record” in the 1970s. Did he call “honest injun” or something?
And I don’t buy that Native Americans held a freakin intervention for every crime. Sure if you were just being a lazy jerk who didn’t pull their weight. If you were enough of a jerk, I have no doubt they told you to “fuck off” and effectively banished you. If you raped the chiefs daughter, I’m sure you caught a tomahawk upside the head.
Some troublemakers are simply abided; I remember one ethnography about the Tarahumara in Mexico where one member of the group was described by all the others as a murderer. No action was taken against him, but it was widely acknowledged that he was going to go to hell when he died.
That’s not to say that serious long term troublemakers are never dealt with in a hunter gatherer or agriculturalist culture, though. There’s a famous story from an ethnography done by anthropologist Jane M. Murphy about an Inuit group near the Bering strait that had a word, “kunlangeta,” that some psychologists today think corresponds roughly to what we would call a psychopath. Kunglangeta seemingly cannot follow the rules of the social structure. The Inuit told Murphy that a kunglangeta "repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and … takes sexual advantage of many women—someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment.” When Murphy asked what was done with a kunglangeta, they responded that eventually someone just pushed him off of the ice when nobody else was around. My undergrad anthropology department head had a similar story about the New Guinea stone age agriculturalist culure he did his ethnography on. If a particular member of the group couldn’t keep from taking other’s property, sleeping with wives, and otherwise causing repeated problems, it would eventually be decided by the group that he had to be killed. No plans were made, no public execution, no designating who was going to do the deed: the first man alone with him simply killed him.
If those stories are true, it’s really hard for me not to negatively judge the culture that will casually kill someone for being a troublemaker. Then I try to imagine how else they could have dealt with these types of people, and I have to admit I got nothin’. So maybe it wasn’t such a barbaric way of dealing with things after all?
In “The People of the Forest,” Colin Turnbull related an incident among the group of African pygmies he was studying. One night, a man had attempted to sleep with a woman by pretending that he was her husband. But before he could do the deed, she figured it out and ran screaming from her hut, yelling to everyone about the crime.
Turnbull asked the pygmies what would be done with the would-be rapist and he got the general response of, “Well he will be left in the forest by himself to die.” Turnbull thought that this was a very harsh sentence, but it turned out to not be the entire story. The man was ostracized from the group, but he continued to trail after them as they moved from camp to camp, and other members of the tribe would leave food for him. One day after several weeks of this treatment, the man nonchalantly slipped in with the rest of the tribe while they were walking through the forest. Nobody said anything about it, and he rejoined the group permanently. (Disclaimer: this is all from my memory of the book.)
So it seems at least in that hunter-gatherer society, temporary ostracization was solution for trouble-makers.
Also, you’re going to have a lot less crime in a group where everybody is related to everybody else, owing to closer social bonds and the sheer unlikelihood of getting away with it. Hostilities within small groups are often turned outward towards other groups in the context of intertribal warfare.
That’s a common and pretty normal reaction to viewing another culture that varies wildly from your own in some aspect or another, because it’s so hard to view another culture without looking through the lens of your own, but as you note it’s not exactly as though they can call the cops or have the troublemaker thrown in jail for a while. That’s why modern anthropology is focused on the methodology of cultural relativism, the idea that cultures should be understood on their own terms rather than evaluated in terms of our own (not to be confused with moral relativism, the idea that any value judgment is equal to any other).
No. They did hold interventions, and discussed things ad nauseum.
Think about it. Subsistence hunter-gatherer groups are NOT that large. They cannot afford to lose someone; it takes X people to hunt and bring back food, the males (typical troublemakers, us all) are the most likely culprits but also the hunters and warriors (defence).
There’s no prison, per OP. There’s no money or possessions that can go for fines. The intervention-type group therapy sessions are designed to talk it all out and make everyone feel better and put it all behind them. Not only do they need the perp, but they also need the victims to get along with him, and everyone works together.*
Anger is not allowed. A group that harbours enough resentment that they want to boil over into fights is primed for trouble, and will fall apart when it comes time to cooperate in a big game hunt or divide the spoils afterwards.
If, as Cheech and Chong would say “I’ve talked to you and talked to you until I’m blue in the face and I’m done talking to you…” Then ostracism is the kindest action. Wendigo is the bogey man of the forest who runs alone, and sometimes eats human flesh - the absolute BIGGEST no-no in a subsistence society. This is where some of these criminals end up. The other option - death. Of course, these people are not stupid, and after growing up with a person, they know whether he will go quietly or will be a menace out in the forest lurking around.
I have a personal theory that climate governs temperment. In Eskimo or northern Indian societies, like northern European, people are stuck indoors with each other, need settlements and structures because it’s too freekin cold outside much of the time; whereas in warmer climes like the mediterranean and the tropics, people yell and argue and scream and insult each other, go away to cool off outside, and a day later all is forgiven and forgotten and steam is blown off. Meanwhile the cold climate people internalize their feelings, are polite to each other, and harbour nasty deep long-term grudges.
This is also a common theory why Indians are so violent when they do hit the bottle. Socially, they must ignore all of each others’ petty slights and insults, resentments over better luck or success, etc. Drink releases these inhibitions and they say and do things they would never do sober. Most murders in northern communities are drunken rages, and most victims are close friends and relatives. (Of course, that describes half the community, so it’s not that big an indicator…)
OTOH, many reserves are well past the group therapy size, and the trouble-makers form their own clique/gang which can ignore the tribal elders and the demands for council; so ostracism does not work. Meanwhile, those still using the old way are conditioned not to escalte or fight back so it makes being a gang or bully that much easier.
Let’s get one thing straight. There were few “subsistence hunter/gatherer” groups of Native Americans. Most NAs were farmers. and some lived in huge cities that would rival anything in Europe at the time. Prior to 1492 there could have been as many as 100M people living in the Americas. After 1492, disease wiped out maybe 90% of the population, and that disease spread faster than the European expansion did. Still, most NAs who did take up some sort of h/g lifestyle did so only after being driven off they traditional land and/or having had their population decimated by disease or fighting.
So, the question of what was done to criminals is going to vary tremendously, just as it would have in Europe prior to the modern state with police forces and jails.
And the idea that crime is less of an issue in a closely knit h/g group is a fairy tale. Murder rates often exceed those found in NYC. And inter-tribal conflicts in primitive h/g or pastoral societies (eg, New Guinea) can take just as big a toll. The fossil record tells us that our ancestors died of violent deaths at higher rates than “civilized” people do today.
Yes, sorry, obviously - the way a nomadic or subsistence society deals with trangressions is different - whether we are talking pre-1700’s native Americans, Mongolian nomadic herders, Lapps, or Australian aborigines. OTOH, the Aztecs and similar settled civilizations had the resources, manpower, and structures to handle captives, slaves, and do executions - no different than urban civilizations around the world. I guess the question is what was done too in intermediate (actually subsistence farmer) groups like smaller Iroquois longhouse settlements?
My educated guess, they executed anyone who was a threat and could not be rehabilitated, since they could not afford the resources or manpower to continuously supervise captives or slaves.
Keep in mind - what are we talking about? It’s not like tribe members mugged each other for their paycheques or smuggled heroin. Greedy as in helping themselves to too much of the kill, using someone else’s tools, or refusing to share would be dealt with by social pressure. Anger management issue - ditto, with years of social conditioning and immediate feedback. Psychopathic behaviour like trying to rape a tribe member - by then the tribal elders would recognize if this is unusual behaviour or the person is out of control and is it time to apply the ultimate solution…
Mrs. Napier, who has a little Native American ancestry, tells me that there are what we might most simply translate as “clowns” or “comics” that serve a number of purposes, among them converging on extreme troublemakers. Nothing in particular happens, but when they disperse again the troublemaker is dead.
I have to note that several other of Mrs. Napier’s accounts have turned out to be inaccurate, and this comes without citations.
extremely excellent Canadian film on this very subject: The Fast Runner
It was filmed entirely in an Inuit language. I have got to see that again.
other notes:
Colin Turnbull has a bad rep re: accuracy and other things.
in central coastal California, where true hunter/gatherers lived, the punishment was ostracism, according to Malcom Margolin in The Ohlone Way. For some reason I can’t locate my copy but I remember that. Although maintaining life was comparatively easy in CA, it was still a feared punishment.
The term “Native American” is moderately meaningless as you are lumping together vastly different cultures.
Shunning is the way I’ve often heard many primitive cultures dealt with troublemakers. Without the collective resources of a tribe, a shunned persons chances of long term survival were slim.
The Aztec would kill you, generally. For lesser things, there was humiliation…shaving your head, and things like that. Then there was always property confiscation/slavery for restitution purposes. That was popular.
Serious Inca punishments were punished by death, minor ones with the chicote…a whipping with a rope.
In some form or another, this probably describes a lot of societies prior to the introduction of prisons, doesn’t it?
For instance, IIRC, English common law punished all felonies by death. I don’t recall what happened for lesser infractions, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were remedies involving confiscation or humiliation.
The Aztecs were a bit more … creative … though, weren’t they?