I saw The Revenant today. There’s a bit in it where DiCaprio's character is talking to a Pawnee man about how they've both lost their families to conflict, the Pawnee says "revenge is in the Creator's hands". Does that line make any sense with regard to what the Pawnee actually believed?

by grapp
uglychican0

This would be a bit tricky to find out today. The Pawnees were resettled in Oklahoma in the 1870s. After resettling in Oklahoma, the Pawnee life and religious lifestyle was changed. They were gathered up by Christian missionaries and became Christian. Others joined the peyote church (Native American Church) that swept through Oklahoma tribes starting with the Comanches in the early 1900s.

So today's Pawnees can not clearly give an example of Pawnee spirituality as it was almost 200 years ago in their traditional lands. Even the Lakotas, who are pretty neat to ancestral lands, have a hard time trying to hold on to centuries old traditions. Keep in mind also that Indian spirituality was illegal or at least suppressed during those periods.

I am Native American (Taos pueblo and Kiowa Apache) and know many historians throughout Indian country and stay close to my roots and ceremonies. We know that our ceremonies have modernized including our views of "creator" or "God" as it has now been melded with the western religious God although many natives just view him through an Indian lense.

Indian country is rather small actually and we all know many people from different tribes across North American, especially ceremonial leaders and pow wow big wigs.

KayakAndTonic

Not sure if this is still allowed here or not, but I would like to piggyback a question.

How accurate would the presence of the French be in Montana in what appears to be between 1820-1870 judging by forts referenced?

zexez

I'm unsure if this is the correct subreddit for this but, another follow up question. Was the language that they were speaking in the movie (as referenced in this post) actually the language that the pawnee people spoke/speak?

Gorrest-Fump

I highly doubt that a Pawnee would have said something like this, unless he was influenced by Christian missionaries. Revenge was central to the logic of warfare of the Pawnees, as with other Plains people. In effect, it was a system of law in which the loss of a kinsman's life needed to be balanced out by killing a member of the group responsible for the death - in other words, lex talionis, or an eye for an eye. More specifically, the main type of war on the Plains was what Marian Smith, following G.A. Dorsey, termed the “mourning war”, fought to avenge the death of kin and expunge the grief associated with their loss:

Revenge is frequently said to have been among the motives for the formation of war parties. Certainly one of the surest ways of arousing the fighting spirit was to remind young men of the wrongs which their tribe had suffered at the hands of an enemy. There was, however, no state of continued blood feud existent in any Plains tribe. The whole machinery for long-enduring and systematic revenge was completely absent. War parties were loose aggregates of individuals only temporarily united and they cut across all the religious, political and social groupings which normally function to join men for cooperative effort. Men might be urged by relatives and leaders to go to war, but only one thing served to bind the members of a party together: the desire to fight and to return home successful. Nevertheless, if the material is examined closely certain connections between death and war emerge. War parties were commonly instigated by persons who had lost a spouse, a child or a close relative, yet the impulse was the same whether the loved one had been killed by the enemy or not. The causal agent of death seems to have been relatively unimportant. The attitude toward death was realistic, sorcery and witchcraft were not connected with it. Yet, "saddened and angered by sorrow, it is a conmmon thing for the men, at loss of friend or kin to announce the fact that their heart is bad, and start at once on the warpath.”

(Marian W. Smith, “The War Complex of the Plains Indians,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Jan. 31, 1938), 435)

What's more, warfare was one of the means by which the Pawnee came into contact with the sacred forces of the world. The Pawnees believed that the universe was created by the Tiiraawaahat (literally, "This Expanse" or "The Universe”). Beneath the creator were two celestial spirits, Morning Star (a male power who represented the ideal for Pawnee wars) and Evening Star (a female power who served the same function for women). Both these spirits offered protection for the Pawnees against starvation, disease and other misfortune, and it was important to maintain good relations with them. One of the ways they could please the stars was through offerings: sometimes through maize, but also through human sacrifices (particularly the Morning Star ritual). There is some evidence that suggests that the killing, torture and scalping of enemy warriors was associated with this complex, and could be used as a means of propitiating the spiritual forces that controlled the Pawnee world.