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:
“The genius of American culture and its integrity comes from fidelity to the light. Plain as day, we say. Happy as the day is long. Early to bed, early to rise. American virtues are daylight virtues: honesty, integrity, plain speech. We say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no, and all else comes from the evil one. America presumes innocence and even the right to happiness.”
—Richard Rodriguez (b. 1944)
“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)