Algonquian Indians

Men would hunt for food and protect the tribe.

Women would take care of the children, gather plants and would tell stories.

Boys would sometimes go hunting with their dad, play with toys and do chores.

Girls would do the same thing, play around and do chores.

The types of clothes algonquians would wear is wolf fur jackets and leather from bison. (Wrong - they lived on the Ottawa River in Canada. There were no Bison in this northern woodland forest area. They actually hunted moose, deer, and beavers.)

Also shirts made out of lambs or smaller animals. (Wrong again. They did not raise sheep or lambs. They hunted for the animal skin that they used for clothing.)

They wore animal skin and robes they were made out of moose and deer skin,they would also be naked and show their dicks and boobs. (Correct, sometimes. But only in the summer.)

The Algonquin did some farming, but were mainly hunters; they hunted, trapped and fished. The Algonquian lived somewhat outside the wild rice region which provided an important part of the diet for other tribes in the northern Great Lakes.

Although a few southern bands were just beginning to grow corn, the Algonquian relied heavily on hunting for their food which made them excellent hunters and trappers. They used fish to fertilize their corn fields and tapped maple trees for sap to make their sugar.

The Algonquin Indians that lived on the coast. They often had clambakes; a picnic where they ate clams, oysters, lobsters, mussels, and other shellfish. During these clambakes the Indians wrapped fish in seaweed then cooked it in a pit dug in the earth.

The Great Lakes Tribes were excellent hunters, farmers, and food gatherers. They ate wild birds, deer, moose, and rabbit and the men hunted moose, caribou, beaver, otter, and other small animals. The women gathered roots, seeds, wildrice, nuts, greens, and berries and grew corn, beans, and squash which were called "The Three Sisters" two other things they grew were potatoes, peppers. A main food was the wild rice the Indians gathered that grew in the marshlands around the Great Lakes. The Indians of the Great Lakes knocked off the grains with sticks so the rice fell into their canoes.

It is wrong to generalise about native Americans as if they were all exactly the same, but the idea of native Americans wearing headbands is generally pure fiction.

One of the major culprits is the film industry of the USA, which for a very long time refused to employ genuine natives to play the role of "Indians", instead using white Americans or Mexicans kitted out with far-from-realistic war paint and black wigs. These wigs needed to be kept on and the wardrobe departments came up with headbands; sadly this fantasy became ingrained in the white American idea of how a native should look.

Today even genuine native Americans have taken to wearing headbands, pandering to this false image.

The vast majority of native American women never wore headbands before the 1930s, when tourists began to expect such things. Some wore feathers at certain times, but not in a headband; some ceremonies and religious gatherings saw native women adopt unusual face paint, costume items and feathers that would not have been worn ordinarily.

By far the most common hair style for women and girls was to wear their hair very long and entirely loose, with the centre parting painted red for adults. The second most common style was two braids hanging down in front of the shoulders.

Algonquin Indians would build wigwams by:

1. First they would pick the level and area for their wigwam.

2. Then they would stick sticks in the ground in whatever shape their wigwam would be.

3. After that, they would bend the sticks over to meet one another and tie them together securely.

4. Next the Algonquin Indians would repeat step 3 and would use the remaining poles to make 4 hoops around the wigwam staring from the bottom up.

5. Then the people would decorate the inside of the wigwam.

6. Finally the Algonquin Indians would cover their wigwam with mats or tree bark.

The use of canoes depends not just on the availability of water courses, but that these waterways must be available in the direction people need to travel. For that reason there were no canoes on the Great Plains; there are some streams and rivers but they mainly flow from west to east - when the herds of elk, antelope and buffalo migrate annually from north to south and then north again.

Any map of the north-eastern US and the eastern half of Canada clearly shows many hundreds of lakes and very many streams and rivers that flow in many directions, allowing relatively easy journeys by canoe between almost any two points. There were also many native trails from one waterway to another, where the very lightweight canoes could be carried (portaged) for short distances.

On the far west coast of North America, large sea-going canoes were constructed for fishing and whaling by many tribes (including totally unique plank canoes constructed by the Coast Chumash of southern California).

Canoe construction depended on available materials: the Secotan, Seminoles and other south-eastern tribes used dugout canoes; the Micmac, Malecite, Nascapi, Algonkin, Cree, Ojibwa, Shawnee and most of the eastern Algonquian tribes used birchbark over a wooden framework; the Iroquois further north used elm bark. The Chippewyans of Canada made their canoes of spruce bark, as did the Kutenai and Plateau Salish.

The links below take you to images of some native canoes:

Many people are confused about the meanings of the words "Algonquin" and "Algonquian".

The Algonquin tribe, also called Algonkin, Anishinaabe or Omàmiwininiwak, live today where they have always lived - along the Ottawa river valley between Quebec and Ontario in Canada.

Many other tribes in the USA and Canada speak languages which are classed as Algonquian (meaning "like Algonquin"). They lived across most of North America; the Blackfoot, Arapaho and Cheyenne of the Great Plains all spoke Algonquian languages, so did the Powhatan, Secotan and Pamunkey of Virginia, the Delawares, the Shawnees, the Ojibwe/Chippewa, the Cree, The Montagnais, Abenaki, Penobscot and Mi'kmaq, the Menomini, Sauk and Fox and very many other tribes.

So it is not possible to say that the Algonquian people lived in any one place - they were many tribes living across many thousands of square miles of territory.

Many people are confused about the meanings of the words "Algonquin" and "Algonquian".

The Algonquin tribe, also called Algonkin, Anishinaabe or Omàmiwininiwak, live today where they have always lived - along the Ottawa river valley between Quebec and Ontario in Canada.

Many other tribes in the USA and Canada speak languages which are classed as Algonquian (meaning "like Algonquin"). They lived across most of North America; the Blackfoot, Arapaho and Cheyenne of the Great Plains all spoke Algonquian languages, so did the Powhatan, Secotan and Pamunkey of Virginia, the Delawares, the Shawnees, the Ojibwe/Chippewa, the Cree, The Montagnais, Abenaki, Penobscot and Mi'kmaq, the Menomini, Sauk and Fox and very many other tribes.

So it is not possible to say that the Algonquian people lived in any one place - they were many tribes living across many thousands of square miles of territory.