calumet
A calumet is an elaborately decorated and ceremonially powerful smoking pipe. Complex rituals were developed around the exchange and smoking of the calumet, which symbolically and symbiotically bound the receiver and giver together in a fictive kin relationship for a stated goal—whether political or familial alliance, trade, hunting, peace, or war.
Calumet ceremonies are believed to have been developed by Chahiksichahiks (Pawnee) peoples, earth-lodge dwellers that lived along the Missouri, south of the Heart River Confederacy (later the Awatíkihu).[1] Such ceremonies were developed well before non-Native peoples moved into the region as a means for conducting trade across vast areas of continental North America. Bound parties, even if enemies, were obligated to treat each other as kin for the stated period of time. Parties expected demonstrations of corresponding honor and respect, often expressed through the giving of gifts, and existing records suggest that a failure to show appropriate honor could revoke the underlying ceremonial bindings.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, calumets could also be used to construct relationships with non-Native peoples, particularly among the French; painted versions appear on numerous surviving buffalo adoption robes in French collections.[2] Such extensions were strategic. Despite its long-established centrality to trade, the Awatíkihu had begun to feel intense survival pressures by the end of the eighteenth century.[3] It is thus not surprising to find that leaders of the Awatíkihu extended this project’s pictured calumet to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their visit in 1804 in a bid for alliance building that might ensure their safety and wellbeing—but one built on kinship obligations.