Myths and Misnomers: the Tipi

Besides war bonnets, the most common prop or backdrop for Native portraits and pictures is often a tipi.  There's just one minor problem.  Eastern Woodlands nations, which are the focus of this blog, would not have lived in tipis.  Natives built their homes according to long-standing custom, with whatever materials came naturally in the surrounding environment.  A tipi is made of buffalo hide(s) secured around a frame of wooden lodge poles.  It can be disassembled quickly and its components transported to a new site for reassembly.  It makes a perfect dwelling for semi-nomadic hunters in an environment where buffalo are plentiful, which is why it was used by the Plains tribes. 

Eastern Woodlands Natives lived, for the most part, in settled villages and most practiced farming.  Men left the villages to hunt while women stayed behind and tended the fields.  Ever so often the village would be moved to take advantage of more fertile soil.  Thus, Natives in these tribes had dwellings that reflected this lifestyle.  The Iroquois/Haudenosaunee longhouse was large enough to accommodate a clan's matriarch, her daughters and their families, and other female-side relatives.  Although this structure was most often associated with the Haudenosaunee, other tribes also used longhouses.

Another structure made of wooden slats and bark mats was the Algonquin wetu or wigwam.  This was a single family dwelling of an inverted bowl shape similar to the wickiup of Southwestern Natives.  Other Algonquian speaking tribes built cabins, similar to those inhabited by White settlers.  Temporary shelters could be constructed of animal dens hollowed out and covered with sod, similar to a prairie sod house.  Still, no tipi. 

The Cherokee and other Southeastern tribes also used cabins, or similar homes made of wattle-and-daub with thatched roofs.  Still others used cabins.  Some Cherokee had an open-sided home made of saplings and bar for the summer, with a more sturdy wattle-and-daub home in winter.  The Seminole chickee, a tropical-looking open-sided shelter on stilts, was that tribe's answer to creating temporary shelter during the period of the first two Seminole Wars, 1816-1842, when their cabins had been burned repeatedly and they needed to be prepared to pick up and move to new villages with no warning.  A chickee can be constructed quickly using whatever wood and grasses are available.  It's on stilts to avoid the inevitable flooding and mud that came with living in or near swampland in rainy Florida. 

Other Natives, particularly elite status families of chiefs and leaders, preferred homes that were not much different from well-to-do families around them.  Southeastern leaders often built homes that resembled plantation manor houses, but on a smaller scale.  Joseph Brant of the Mohawk, on the other end of the Atlantic coast, built a home in Burlington, Ontario that was a copy of Johnson Manor in New York, where his sister Molly had lived with her companion, British Indian Agent Sir William Johnson.