ARIKARA TRIBE WARRIOR (painting by Carl Bodmer). LOOKING IN DETAILS. US Indians

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ARIKARA TRIBE WARRIOR.
Painted by Carl Bodmer.

Created: between 1840 and 1843 date.

It is believed that the name of the tribe "Arikara" comes from the word - Horns. Associated with the ancient custom of the Arikara, who wore two bones in their hair.
The picture clearly shows these two bones in the hair.

On the chest of a warrior of the Arikara tribe, the scars that remained after a sacred ceremony called the Sun Dance are clearly visible.

The Sun Dance is a grueling ordeal for dancing warriors, a physical and spiritual ordeal that they sacrifice to their people. During this test, young people dance around a pole to which they are tied with rawhide straps threaded through the skin on their chests. The ceremony is considered complete when the skin on the chest is torn and the subject is freed.

Arikara religious beliefs and practices centered around a belief in a principal creator, Nesharu, and a principal helper, Mother Corn. Mother Corn led the Arikaras out of the underworld and taught them what they needed to know to live in this world.

Long before European Americans entered the Great Plains, the Arikaras, who called themselves Sahnish, meaning "People," separated from the Skiri Pawnees and moved northward to the Missouri River valley in present-day South Dakota. From that time on, they were associated more with the nearby Siouanspeaking Mandans and Hidatsas than with their fellow Caddoan-speaking Pawnees to the south.

The Arikara and Pawnee tribes are thought to have split in the 15th century. The Arikara and Pawnee languages ​​are similar but not identical.

Like the Mandans and Hidatsas, the Arikaras centered their lives on the river, using its high bluffs for their earth lodge villages and the rich soil of the bottomlands for gardens of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco.

In the last quarter of the 17th century, the Omaha and Ponca tribes attacked the Arikara. During this period, these tribes migrated to Nebraska. But the war was short and not too cruel, as a result, the tribes settled nearby and peace and cultural exchange were established. Arikara taught people from the Omaha tribe to build earthen houses (the so-called Indian dugouts).

At the end of the 18th century, the Arikara tribe suffered great damage from the smallpox epidemic, the number decreased from 30,000 to 6,000 people.
The social structure of the Arikara tribe was disrupted. This was because smallpox reduced the number of Arikara settlements along the Missouri from 32 to two between 1780 and 1782.

This gave rise to wars in which the Arikara were drawn into, fighting as if among themselves. But wars also broke out with other Indian tribes.

The cruelty of wars became prohibitive by the standards of the Indians of the past: if earlier a war in which 10-20 people were killed was considered bloody, then, for example, in one village of Arikara, in the early 1780s, the remains of 71 women and children were found with traces of painful death The bones were badly mutilated.

The Sioux benefited the most from the weakening of the Arikara.