1. The Plains
By: Joseph, Ken, Tasos

2. Content Clothing Subsistence Shelter Transportation Religion
What type of clothing did they wear?
What did they use to make the clothing?
Subsistence
What type of food did they eat?
How did they obtain food?
Shelter
What type of shelter did they build or reside?
What type of materials did they use for their shelter?
Transportation
What form of transportation did they use?
What material did they use to build their transportation?
Social Organization and Government
How were members of the group divided or established?
Who were the leaders and how were they chosen?
Religion
What were their spiritual beliefs? Who or what did they worship?
What were the rituals or ceremonies? How were they conducted?
Kinship
How are family relationships organized (patrilineal, matrilineal, or both)?

3. Subsistence What type of food did they eat? How did they obtain food?
Hunters disguise themselves and creep up on Buffalo
The buffalo was their main source of food,
also ate some roots, berries and other animals like elk and deer.
Bows and Arrows and spears were used to hunt for food like big animals like buffalo, deer ,and elks.
But for Small animals like rabbit, wolves, and coyotes were caught with traps.

4. Clothing What type of clothing did they wear?
What did they use to make the clothing?
Clothing
They wore tunics, leggings, skirts, breechcloths and moccasins
Dress decorations and designs varied from tribe to tribe
They used bison hide, deer skin, fur, and intestines.
Breastplates were made of bones and shells.
Women’s dress were made out of buckskin.

5. Shelter What type of shelter did they build or reside?
What type of materials did they use for their shelter?
They build a tall, cone like buildings, it was called a tipi.
The tipi is waterproof and can last long.
The tipi was warm in winter and cool in summer
The tipi is made out of buffalo hide and with poles to support their cone structure.

6. Transportation What form of transportation did they use?
What material did they use to build their transportation?
They used dogs to hitched food, clothing, tipis, and household belongings.
Horses were used to hunt and travel around and pull larger travois than a dog.
Plains people crossed rivers with canoes, rafts, and bull boats.
In winter, dogs was used to pull people in sleds.
The outer covering of the canoe was made from large sheets of white birch and the inside from white cedar.
The travois was consist of a platform or netting mounted on two long poles.

7. Social Organization and Government
How were members of the group divided or established?
Who were the leaders?
Families grouped together into small bands headed by a chief
Each small band lived in a tipi
The chief in the small band of families
A war chief, who handled military campaigns
Within each nomadic group, there would be a band chief

8. Religion What were the rituals or ceremonies? How were they conducted?
What were their spiritual beliefs? Who or what did they worship?
Young people spent long periods fasting in solitude
Shamans, had spiritual powers, including the power to cure illness
Conducted by the most important religious event, the Sun Dance
Believed spiritual powers were everywhere
They worshiped objects as well as living things
Plains Indians believed in a great god
‘Wakan Tanka,’ meaning the Great Spirit

9. Kinship
How are family relationships organized (patrilineal, matrilineal, or both)?
Kinship by intermarrying within the other tribes
By having children
Both patrilineal and matrilineal

10. Map for THE PLAINS
The Native people of the Plains, occupied the southern portion of the three Prairie Provinces, from the woodlands from southeastern Manitoba to the Rocky Mountains.
The climate is continental. It is a climate of extremes, including long, hot, summers, cold winters and little precipitation.
Vegetation was grassland, and trees grew only in the river valleys.

11. Source Book: Crossroads: A Meeting of Nations. By, Michael Cranny
Internet: “Plains Natives”,