Culture
The Iowa have had customs similar to those of the other Siouan-speaking tribes of the Great Plains, such as the Omaha, Ponca and Osage. They were a semi-nomadic people who had adopted horses for hunting, but they also had an agricultural lifestyle similar to the tribes inhabiting the Eastern woods. They planted maize, manufactured alum pipes and traded these along with furs with the French colonizers.
Their more permanent houses were oven shaped, covered with earth for protection from extremes of temperature and oriented to a cardinal direction. A smoke hole enabled ventilation from a central hearth. During the hunting season or in their bellic incursions, they used the portable teepee. Like the Osage or Kansa, they shaved their heads and decorated them with deer skin. Like the tribes of the Great Plains, they valued three feats during a battle.
Read more about this topic: Iowa People
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“He was one whose glory was an inner glory, one who placed culture above prosperity, fairness above profit, generosity above possessions, hospitality above comfort, courtesy above triumph, courage above safety, kindness above personal welfare, honor above success.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)
“... we’ve allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyond fifty, sixty, or seventy—all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics—many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)