Quotes About Plains Indians

Granted, he found little to say for the Plains Indians, an uninteresting race in need of humanization, made hideous by nature. He assumed everyone was an enemy until proven otherwise, and expected they would have to be killed, since violence was "the only corrective they understand.

year away. Finally this was the country of the Plains Indians, horse Indians, nomads, buffalo hunters, the most skillful, the most relentless, and the most savage on the continent....Mountain craft was a technological adaptation

He had been counting coup on me, that ancient game of the Plains Indians. It was the ultimate insult if you were a Lakota, a failure of manhood so shameful it could actually end a warrior's life when it happened, to be touched by an enemy while you stood helpless—but I was not a Native American.

The Plains Indians decorated their moccasins with not less than three different colors of quills. Their favorites were yellow, red, green and purple. Beaded moccasins had a larger range of colors, the average being four or five, and the preference was white, red, green, yellow and blue. The background color, almost exclusively, was white, although the Assiniboin tribe used blue for the background color.

The Plains Indians made cuffs and gauntlets which they wore on ceremonial occasions. The Blackfoot especially liked the gauntlet with its large beaded and fringed tops. These were no doubt copied after the riding gauntlets of the United States Cavalry in the Indian territory. The Sioux, Crow, Ute, and Cheyenne made the cuff part only. These, too, were decorated with bead and quill work.

Early ethnographers have described North American Plains Indians so hypnotically involved in gambling with buffalo rib bones that losers would often leave the tepee without clothes in the dead of winter, having wagered away their weapons, horses, and wives as well.