Chapter 19: Urban Living
The dawn wakes you. Other people in the longhouse are already moving. Your wife stirs beside you. Your young son, also asleep in the bed, kicks instinctively; trying to be left alone. But you cannot leave them alone. You are a commoner from the city of Kekionga [Fort Wayne, IN] in the year 1 CE. There is work to be done.
You put on your clothes. As she gets ready, your wife does the same. Men wear briefs. Women wear knee length skirts. Neither sex covers their chests. Children wear no clothes. They grow too fast to bother, at least in the summer.
You only own two sets of clothing. They are made of linen, wapiti leather, dog wool, and animal fur. A major job of your wife is to wash and repair the family’s clothes. The poor cannot afford to repair their clothes. Eventually they will wear rags instead.
In winter, everyone will be buried underneath layers of furs. Most will barely leave the house, if they can help it. Many poor men die in the winter. But it is summer now and there is work to be done.
You put on a sun hat made from straw to shield your head and shoulders from the heat of the sun. It covers your long, braided hair. Long hair in men is a sign of virility. You wear nothing on your feet. Other men wear moccasins. In the winter, snowshoes would be necessary.
Clothing in the classical period, censored for modern audiences
[1]
It is fashionable for women to wear their hair in buns. Your wife carefully uses pins made from bone to put her hair up. Noble women have elaborate and impractical hair styles that make it so they can barely move their heads. Of course, they do not need to work, so the impracticality is the point. Your wife does need to work. Her hairstyle is practical.
Many people wear necklaces and hair pins made of exotic materials. They pierce their ears, noses, and lips to place rings and studs. They have tattoos, marking their place in society or just for decoration. On your bicep is the symbol of Manidoo. Its marks you out as a member of a priestly doodem, in your case the Omakakii doodem or frog clan. It signals to everyone that you are entitled to vote for the Mide.
Your wife has a fine leather necklace with a seashell on it. Whenever you see it, you remember making it and giving it to her on your wedding day. She has two ear studs in her left ear. These are merely decorative. She also has a tattoo of Manidoo on her upper arm. She is from the Nigig doodem or otter clan and also entitled to vote for the Mide.
Noble women paint their faces white with lead based paint. With prolonged use, it causes their eyebrows to fall out and their faces to wither. But, for a time, they are as pale as snow. They add red ochre to their cheeks and their lips for color. Charcoal powder is added under the eyes for contrast.
You put charcoal powder underneath your eyes to lessen the glare of the sun. Your wife goes without. She might wear elaborate makeup on special occasions (like your wedding day) but it was too expensive for everyday use. She is inside most of the day anyway.
Soon you are ready. Your wife has prepared a small porridge made from Kiinwaa [goosefoot] sweetened by the blackberries the city is named for. You stash a few sunflower seeds in your pocket in case you get hungry in the middle of day.
You live in a longhouse with your parents, brothers, uncles, and cousins. Other people live in longhouses with many non-family members. You do not. Your doodem has lived in the city since the beginning. So has your wife’s family.
The longhouse you live in is near but not inside the citadel. You, your wife, and your son share a single room apartment. It has simple accommodations: a bed, a fire for cooking, storage underneath the bed, and a small wooden table and set of chairs for work and play.
The bathroom is communal, near the end of the longhouse. It is little more than a hole in the floor connected to drainage pipes. The drains take the water and waste out of the city and into the nearby rivers. It is flushed using a jug of water that is always left next to the hole. Sometimes your family members will forget or be too lazy to refill the jug. That’s always frustrating.
You make your way out of the longhouse and into the street. Gutters carry water from the roofs of houses into drains by every road. The irrigation and drainage systems are run by the Mide and the priestly doodems, including yours. You carry your tools, made of stone and wood, with you as you walk.
Your job is to maintain and repair the drainage system of the city. Your father does the same thing. He taught you how to do it. You will teach your son how to do it when he is old enough. Your wife helps when the work must be done quickly or when an extra pair of hands is needed. Mostly, she stays home, raising your child and doing the domestic choirs.
In exchange for keeping the drains running, you are given a stipend of manoomin by the Mide. It is more than enough to feed you, your wife, and your son. Whatever is leftover you trade for the other necessities of life. The wives of your longhouse maintain a garden together. They share the produce equally and trade the excess. You will never become rich but you will not go hungry either.
You walk a predetermined route, checking the drains for damage. As you walk the city, you chat with your friends and neighbors. They live in the houses next to yours. You have known them and they have known you all your lives. They know what you are here to do and point out any problems even before you see them. Your route takes you through a large section of the city. Only a small portion of it is your responsibility but you would be expected to help any other maintenance worker if they needed it.
The houses cluster together to form kanata. Kanata is both the word for village and the word for neighborhood. In Kekionga, some of the kanata were villages before the city formed. They banded together to form a single government or were conquered by the nearby city. Others formed after the city had already begun.
Map of a kanata or neighborhood
[2]
Kanatas are formed by ethnic ties, family units or by clusters of workers. Each one elects an Ogimaa and owes taxes as a unit. They each have their own well and communal open space. Some are home to members of a single clan but most hold many unrelated people. The land is owned and worked communally by each kanata in the city, just as it was by the rural villages.
You pass through the kanata of the beaver clan, who were all smiths. Like your ancestors, they had been in the city since it began. They worked metals: gold, silver, lead, and copper. The ones who worked copper had their hair turn green and their skin turn yellow. Even so, they were hot marriage prospects due to the wealth they had.
The next kanata you pass through is one of several that housed potters. They did not all come from a single clan nor did they all descend from founders. Some potters specialized in bowls and pots. Others made smoking pipes. A few made ceramic sickles. Most painted art on whatever they made. Even the poor would have a few pieces of pottery with simple artwork.
The potters mixed sand and freshwater mussel shells into the clay to make the ceramics strong. Then, they coiled the clay into shape
[3] and used large, purpose built kilns to fire many pots at the same time.
Bowl made to resemble a falcon
[4]
Some potters made mud bricks. Mud bricks were used to build houses, aqueducts (what you call
asin ziibiwan or “stone rivers”), and, most importantly for you, pipes. Different cities had different standard brick sizes. You use bricks and quick lime made by the potters to repair the drainage system.
Originally women had been the potters and many of them still made small ceramics for their household. As the trade became commercialized, however, men took over running it. Your wife still occasionally makes bowls, using the straw and potsherds for tempering. She carefully shapes them, air dries them, and then fires them in the communal earthen oven. They weren’t as pretty and didn’t last as long as the stuff bought at the market but they helped to stretch the budget when times were tough.
The next kanata you passed housed tanners and their workshops. Poor men sold their urine to the tanners who used the ammonia to make leather from Wapiti skins. Like the potters, the tanners sold to everyone. Everyone needed leather.
As you walk the city, you see a few zhimaaganish warriors, distinguished by their hairstyle. All of their hair is plucked out except for a single long pony tail in the back. It singles them out to everyone they meet. But these are just individuals going about their daily lives. Kekionga and the Black Swamp Confederacy are strong. Here, there is peace.
In the heat of the day, many zagimeg [mosquitoes] bother you. The rice bogs [paddies] in the surrounding countryside ensure that they are everywhere in the city. You chew a few sunflower seeds.
The city of Kekionga lies on the portage between the Maumee and Wabash rivers. This is important because the Maumee flows into Lake Wabishigami [Lake Eire]. You saw Lake Wabishigami when you and other drain repairers were sent to help Wathipi [Toledo, OH] with major storm damage. The Wabash flows into the Ohiyo River (you have met people who have seen it but never seen it yourself) which flows into the Mishi River (which you have heard of by way of vague rumor) which flows into the Gulf of Chitti [Gulf of Mexico] (which you do not know exists).
The portage is about six miles. A healthy man can walk it in about one and one-third diba’igan (or about two hours). The road between the river landings forms the main boulevard of the city. It is wide, level and paved with stone. Houses line both sides of it.
There is also a road that heads west to Mishawaka [South Bend, IN] but it is not paved with stone. A similar road follows the Maumee River to Wathipi but it is only used when travelling upriver. The rural villages along the way are supposed to maintain those roads. Some of them do a better job than others. No roads head north to Miyamee [Detroit, MI], the enemy of Kekionga, but there are many paths in the wilderness.
Slaves owned by the Sagamos and Ogimaa sweep and clean the streets inside the city. While you check the drains for damage, you check for blockages. If you find a blockage, you direct one of the sweeping slaves to clear it. Such a job is too good for a man like you. It is fit only for a slave.
You see that the water level in the drains is low. You use a special machine to lift the water from a reservoir on a lower level and into the drains to wash away the filth.
This special machine is a lever, with a counterweight on one end and a bucket on the other. The end with the counterweight is short and the end with the bucket is long. With the right counterweight and lever length, you can fill and lift a heavy bucket full of water with barely any effort.
People half a world away, whom you have never met and will never meet, call this machine a shadoof. You call it
ashagi moona’ibaan, or a heron well. The one you are using is even painted like a heron, its beak dipping into the water every time you fill the bucket.
A horn blows, signaling that sunset is near. You have done all the work you can do today. You finish using the shadoof and gather your tools to head home. You decide to take a short cut through the citadel, which lies about halfway between the Wabash and the Maumee. The citadel is the center of the city. To the nobles, Sagmos, and priests who inhabit it, it might as well be the entire city. It is protected by a rammed earth wall.
You pass the citadel wall. Today the top of the rammed earth wall is empty. The gates are open and unguarded. On the outside of the citadel is a moat around the wall. Right now, it is a dry ditch. It would only have been filled when the city was threatened or after a rain. There are many nobles and peasants alike who have business in the citadel. There is no need to impede them when there is no threat.
Inside the citadel, all the roads are paved with stone and the houses are arranged in a grid. The houses all have running water, with pipes and aqueducts carefully constructed to carry clean water in and carry waste out. Many of them are built on mounds.
Temples dot the inside of the citadel, sitting on huge mounds. The temples are built from limestone. The limestone is quarried just a few miles away
[6] by Paanii slaves. It is carved with gods and monsters acting out the sacred stories. They are brightly painted. Even brief glimpses awe and frighten you. Some days, you go to the temples to pray. Not today though. You keep walking.
Near the temples is the madoodiswan, or sweat lodge. This was the public bath, though many of the nobles had their own private baths. The madoodiswan was run by the Mide. Anyone could use it at any time, for a small fee. Boys and girls going through their man and womanhood ceremonies used it for free. During those ceremonies, the heat and humidity was increased in order to induce religious visions.
Today there are no ceremonies. As you pass the madoodiswan, you think how nice and relaxing it would be to enter it. But the sweat lodge is also notorious for the prostitutes, both male and female, that use the facility for their trade. Some of them pay the priests protection money. Some the priests even act as pimps. You do not approve of that. Few do but it keeps happening. You head home instead.
Not far from the citadel is the kisewa, a large area used for divining what day of the solar year it was. At its center was a large carved turtle. Its back was a water pool. A small hole in the mouth of the turtle let the water drain slowly out of the pool.
You know that the turtle is a water clock. The water drains from the pool at a known rate. Priests know how long it takes for the whole pool to drain. They use a sundial to know when to start draining the pool. There are marks on the walls of the pool at set distances apart, each one further down. The same amount of time elapses between each mark. The time between each mark is called a
diba’igan. There are ten marks on the pool. Therefore there are ten diba’igan every day. That is how the priests knew when to blow the horn to signal the end of the day. The clock is not perfectly accurate because the rate of drainage varies slightly with the temperature. Even so, it is more accurate than any other way you know of keeping time.
Smaller amounts of time can be measured using a bowl with a small hole in the bottom. The time it takes for the bowl to fill was the same every time or near enough as to make no difference. This time was called a
diba’igaans. Priests carefully measured the weight of the bowls and the size of hole to ensure there were ten dib’igaans for every dib’igan.
Past the kisewa is a large open space. This is where the market is. On market days, this is where merchants gather. The market of Kekionga was cosmopolitan. Siouan traders from the west, Ongweh’onweh traders from the east, and Tunica and Yuchi merchants from the south all came to Kekionga to buy and sell their goods. Some of the Sioux and Ongweh’onweh even live in kanata filled with their own kind.
The merchants paid their tolls upriver and then carried their goods to the market. The most valuable items would be carried by the merchant themselves. Their slaves and servants carried most of the items in large baskets on their backs. A few men used well trained elk to carry heavy loads but this was few and far between.
Permanent shops were also few and far between in the market. Most only set up their stalls on market days, a few times a month in the summer. At other times, festivals would fill the market with thousands of city dwellers. The rest of the time the field sat mostly empty. Today was not a market day and it was not a festival day so the market sat empty.
At last, you make it home. Your wife has made manoomin soup. It has summer squash from the garden. Flour made from bede [Apios Americana] thickens the broth. As you enjoy the meal, you entertain your wife and child with the story of the duck in winter that you heard from your grandfather when you were a child. They have heard it many times but enjoy hearing it told again. After dinner, you get ready for bed and fall asleep soon after.
Next time, we will discuss the elections and government of the Mishigami.
[1] Modified from:
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/fd/6f/4e/...d82f0d2--american-indians-native-american.jpg
[2] Taken from:
https://preview.redd.it/c61uo34xxt2...ed&s=f20d8dce3c1e3698d484760e3220bb75750e57c7 Actually a neighborhood in Cahokia
[3] They do not have pottery wheels yet. Or significant wheels of any kind for that matter.
[4] Taken from:
https://www.museum.state.il.us/muslink/nat_amer/pre/images/MB038_250.jpg
[5] Taken from:
https://whbailey.weebly.com/uploads/1/5/7/3/15738528/header_images/1520559238.jpg
[6] Hanson Quarry, Fort Wayne, IN
https://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/54829
[7] Taken from:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d9/ff/6c/d9ff6cc109f345bd84dacfcd9f8a8cc0.jpg
Long one today. I thought about breaking it up into multiple updates but I think it works better as a single, continuous story.
Comments? Questions?
