Turkish literature, the body of written works in the Turkish language.
The Orhon inscriptions represent some of the earliest extant writing in Turkish. These inscriptions appear on two monuments built in the early 8th century ce in northern Mongolia. Other early Turkish writing includes poetry in an 11th-century Turkish-Arabic dictionary by Mahmud Kashgari and Kutudgu bilig (“Knowledge Which Leads to Happiness”) by Yusuf Khass Hajib, which uses poetic forms from the Arabic and Persian literary traditions. During the later 13th century, what came to be known as Turkish literature was produced primarily in Mongol-controlled Anatolia. Among the numerous Turkic dynasties of Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, only the post-Mongol Anatolian states and then the Ottoman Empire maintained Turkish as a literary language. From the 14th through the early 20th century, writing in Turkish flourished in the Ottoman Empire, and it subsequently continued in the Turkish republic. Despite changes in language and culture from the Mongol and Ottoman periods to the emergence of modern-day Turkey, Turkish literature has remained an important means of expression for the Turkish-speaking peoples of Anatolia and the adjacent areas of the Balkans. Much of this region’s literary activity has centred on Istanbul, its central urban metropolis since the mid-15th century.
The same changing attitude toward the function of literature and the same shift toward realism can be observed in Turkey. After 1839, Western ideas and forms were taken up by a group of modernists. Ziya Paşa (died 1880), the translator of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s…
Epic and the emergence of the âşik
The oldest genre of Turkish literature is the heroic epic, of which the prime example is the Kitab-i Dede Korkut (“The Book of My Grandfather Korkut”; Eng. trans. The Book of Dede Korkut), which has survived in two 16th-century manuscripts. The actual date of the work is unknown. At least one of the tales was already circulating in written form in the early 14th century, and Central Asian sources suggest that the shaman-bard Korkut and his tales date from the 9th and 10th centuries. The style of the epic—which consists of prose narrative mixed with verse speeches—suggests oral composition. The language of the text is Oghuz Turkish, containing both Anatolian and Azerbaijani elements. There is no overall narrative framework, but most of the 12 tales revolve around legendary Oghuz heroes. The original poem (if not the 16th-century manuscripts) was evidently created by an oral bard, or ozan, the heir to a partly shamanic tradition, although the circumstances of the epic’s transformation to written literature are unknown, and the work as such had no influence on the subsequent development of Turkish literature. Both manuscripts known at the turn of the 21st century were discovered in Europe, the larger one in Germany in the early 19th century. Yet Turkish interest in the Book of Dede Korkut emerged nearly a century after significant German and Russian work. In the 20th century major studies of the text were undertaken in Turkey, Russia, and Azerbaijan as well as in Europe.
Much of the style of the Book of Dede Korkut predates the heroic tradition of the Oghuz Turkish poet-musician known as the âşik, who emerged in the 16th century in Anatolia, Iran, and the southern Caucasus and eventually supplanted the ozan. The âşik (ashoog in Azerbaijani; from the Arabic ʿashiq, “lover” or “novice Sufi”) was a professional or semiprofessional performer, singing a variety of epic, didactic, mystical, and lyrical songs to the accompaniment of a long-necked lute (saz). The classical âşik of the Anatolian Turkmen tribes was Karacaoğlan, who flourished in the later 16th century or possibly the mid-17th century (his date of death is sometimes given as 1679). He is mentioned in several biographical dictionaries (tezkires) of the period. In its formal qualities his poetry is closely related to folk verse, and he generally treats lyrical themes without the mystical subtext that was common in courtly verse of the period. His style influenced such 17th-century âşiks as Âşik Ömer of Aydin and Gevherî, as well as the âşiks of the 18th century.
During the 17th century the popular urban song (şarkı) was taken up by court poets and musicians, and it became fashionable for courtiers to entertain themselves by performing these songs with the folkloric bağlama. The great 17th-century poet Nâʾilî was the first to include such songs in his divan (collected works), a practice that reached its culmination in the following century with Ahmed Nedim. The outstanding âşik of the later 17th century was Âşik Ömer, who wrote both folkloric qoşma poems and courtly lyrics, or gazels (Persian: ghazals). Thus, during the 17th century the âşiq became a bridge between the literary taste of the court and the people of the towns. The interplay between this popular poetry and the courtly gazel continued into the 19th century, when it was exemplified by the work of İbrahim Dertli.
By the middle of the 13th century, mystical (Sufi) poetry had become a major branch of Turkish literature, with Sufi poets working primarily in Anatolian Turkish. One of the two well-known poets of the 13th and 14th centuries was Âşık Paşa, author of the Garībnāmeh (“The Book of the Stranger”), a didactic poem of some 11,000 couplets that explores philosophical and moral themes. It is considered among the finest mesnevîs (Persian: mas̄navīs) of the era. Yunus Emre, author of a divan and of the didactic mesnevî Risâletʿün nushiyye (“Treatise of Counsel”), was the period’s other well-known poet. Despite Yunus Emre’s evident scholastic learning, he wrote in a language and style that appealed to popular taste. His poetry was read and studied in Ottoman times, and it remains central today to the dhikr ceremony of ritual prayer practiced by Sunni brotherhoods (tarikats) and to the ayîn-i cem ritual of the Alevî Bektashi, an order of tribal Shīʿite Sufis.
Later in the 13th century Seyid İmadeddin Nesimi, probably of southeast Anatolia, created brilliant Sufi verse in Persian and in a form of Turkish rather closer to Azerbaijani. The 15th century saw a split between heterodox Sufi tendencies, as seen in the verse of Kaygusuz Abdal, and the orthodox Sufism of Eşrefoğlu Rumi. Like Yunus Emre, Eşrefoğlu wrote verse in which the Sufi poet functions as a charismatic and sacred figure who writes poetry in order to communicate his sacerdotal authority to his disciples. By the early 16th century, this style of poetry, generally known as ilâhî (“divine”), was practiced by such sheikh-poets as İbrahim Gülşeni and his son Gülşenîzâde Hayali as well as Muslihiddin Merkez, Muhiddin Uftade, Seyyid Seyfullah Nizamoğlu, and Aziz Mahmud Hüdâyî. The growth during the 16th and 17th centuries of this type of poetry, which was intended to be sung in the dhikr ceremony, was a function of the monopoly over mysticism held by the Sufi brotherhoods of that era. The most outstanding representative of this tradition is Niyazi Mısri, a 17th-century poet of the Halvetiye tarikat. His verse was enormously popular in his lifetime and throughout the 18th century. Like Yunus Emre, Niyazî Misrî was able to express subtle mystical insights using very simple language:
I was seeking a cure for my trouble;
My trouble became my cure.
I was seeking a proof for my origin;
My origin became my proof.
I was looking to the right and the left
So that I could see the face of the Beloved.
I was searching outside,
But the Soul was within that very soul.
Poetry of the Ottoman Empire (c. 1300–1839)
While the Ottomans wrote a great deal of prose (especially on history, theology, mysticism, biography, and travel), poetry was the focus of literary thought; hence, the following discussion will confine itself to verse. The forms, genres, and themes of pre-Ottoman and Ottoman Turkish literature—those works written between about 1300 and 1839, the year in which the wide-ranging Tanzimat reforms were begun—were generally derived from those of Persian literature, either directly or through the mediation of Chagatai literature. Anatolia and parts of the Balkans, although increasingly Turkish-speaking, developed a high literary culture of the type known as Persianate.
Forms and genres
The dominant forms of Ottoman poetry from its origins in the 14th century until its decline in the late 19th century were the gazel and the kasîde (originally from the Arabic qaṣīdah). The formal principles of the gazel were the same for both Persian and Ottoman varieties. Composed of a series of couplets (distichs), it was subject to a single metrical scheme and was usually in monorhyme, often using a repeated word (redîf). The pen name (mahlas) of the poet usually appeared in the closing distich. In the 15th and 16th centuries Ottoman gazels might extend from 5 to 10 couplets, but in the mid-17th century 5 became the norm.
The tropes and images of the classical Ottoman gazel were extremely conventional; in many cases they appeared as early as the 12th century in the Persian ghazals of Sanāʾī. In general, the images of the gazel cast the poet as the lover singing to his beloved—that is, as the nightingale singing to the rose. The world of the gazel is thus largely confined to a garden, with a vocabulary related to the appearance and growth of flowers and plants and also to birds. A second family of images concerns the hair and face of the beloved, focusing on the eyes, eyebrows, mouth, and cheeks as well as the expressions created by these features. The speaker, addressee, and theme might also change from couplet to couplet. It was mainly religious gazels that retained a single speaker and theme; these single-melody poems were known as yek-ahenk. But by the mid-17th century, with the work of poets Cevri, Nâʾilî, Fehim, and Neşatî, gazels of all sorts became largely monothematic.
The kasîde was an encomium whose object was to praise its subject. It had two major varieties, secular and religious. Unlike the gazel, whose mystical references (as well as its secular ones) were often ambiguous, the religious kasîde had as its ostensible subject God, the Prophet Muhammad, or ʿAlī, Muhammad’s son-in-law and the fourth caliph. Secular kasîdes usually took as their subject individuals—a sultan, a vizier, a pasha, or a high member of the secular bureaucracy (ulema)—or specific events, such as a military victory.
All kasîdes were divided into several sections. In the secular kasîde the lyric prologue (nesîb) often described some aspect of nature or the garden, while in the religious kasîde it might take a more general moral or philosophical theme. The medhîye followed, a section that named and praised the subject. In secular kasîdes this section’s imagery was usually drawn from the Shāh-nāmeh (“Book of Kings”), the epic completed by the Persian poet Ferdowsī in the 11th century, while in religious kasîdes allusions to the Qurʿān and Hadith are very common. After the medhîye came a couplet, the hüsn-i tahallus (literally, “beauty of the pen name”), in which the poet mentions his own name. It led into a section of self-praise (the fahrîye), in which the poet lauds his skills. The poem might end with a hüsn-i taleb (literally, “beauty of the request”), in which he seeks patronage or a favour.
Within these parameters, the kasîde could take a wide variety of forms. Some are centred to such an extent on a specific situation or request of the poet that the distinctions between these sections become somewhat blurred. Other kasîdes share with gazels a lyric mood. During the 17th century a number of kasîdes incorporated into the fahrîye praise for poetry in general or, similarly, broader meditations on the nature of poetry. In size the kasîde varies from 14 to more than 100 couplets.
The Ottomans’ principal narrative poetic form, the mesnevî, was also made up of couplets. (It was common practice for poets to insert gazels or other stanzaic forms into a mesnevî to express the speech of the characters.) Starting with Aşık Paşa and Yunus Emre in the 14th century, the mesnevî was often used by Sufi writers as a vehicle for didactic works. During the late 14th and early 15th centuries, Ottoman writers achieved distinction by writing original mesnevîs, such as the Çengname (“Tale of the Harp”), a mystical allegory by Ahmed-i Dâi, and the satirical Harname (“Tale of the Donkey”), by Sinan Şeyhi. A century later, Lâmiî Çelebi of Bursa initiated translations of the major Persian mesnevîs into Turkish. He was especially influenced by the 15th-century Persian scholar and poet Jāmī. Nevertheless, the major innovations in the narrative structure of the mesnevî created by the brilliant Chagatai poet ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī, who was a student of Jāmī, had little effect among the Ottomans. Indeed, the acknowledged Ottoman master of the genre in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Nevʾî-zade Atâyî, broke up the narrative into small unconnected tales and criticized Navāʾī for the complexity of his mesnevîs. The mesnevî was still used successfully at times for didactic works such as the 17th-century Hayrîyye of Yusuf Nâbî.
By the 17th century both the Persian and the Chagatai mesnevî forms had gone into decline, and Ottoman writers generally ceased to treat the genre as one of first-rate literary significance. Nevertheless, the final two major works of Ottoman literature were written in the mesnevî form: Hüsn ü aşk (1782; “Beauty and Love”), a mystical allegory by Şeyh Galib, and Mihnetkeşan (1822; “The Sufferers”), a self-satirizing autobiography by Keçecizade İzzet Molla. Thus, the Ottoman mesnevî was generally of the first order of literary significance only at the beginning and end of Ottoman literary history. The one striking exception is the Leyla ü Mecnun (Leylā and Mejnūn) of Mehmed bin Süleyman Fuzuli, written in the 16th century. Although this work has been accepted into the Ottoman canon, its author wrote within the Turkmen literary tradition, under the influence of the Chagatai mesnevî.
While the gazel was the Ottoman lyric form par excellence, stanzaic forms were also in limited use. Stanzas ranged from 4 to 10 lines and were of two basic types: the müzdeviç, in which the last line (or couplet) of each stanza has the same rhyme, and the mükerrir, in which the last line (or couplet) is the same in each stanza. The four-line murabbaʾ form seems to have emerged from both Persian quatrain forms (especially the robāʿī) and Turkic quatrain forms (especially the tuyugh). Ottoman murabbaʾs often feature an epigrammatic style.
The tercibend and terkibbend are more-elaborate stanzaic forms. Both feature stanzas with the stylistic features of the gazel, but, unlike gazels, each stanza in these forms is followed by a couplet with a separate rhyme. In the tercibend the same couplet is repeated after each stanza, while in the terkibbend each couplet following a stanza is unique. Poems that use these forms are frequently elegies, in which case they are called mersiyes. A masterpiece of the terkibbend genre is the elegy for Sultan Süleyman I written by Bâkî in the 16th century. Other Ottoman stanzaic forms utilize varying numbers of couplets, such as the müseddes, which has three. A fine example of this form is the “Müseddes der ahvâl-i hod” (“Six-Line Poem on His Own State”), by Nâʾilî. Less common are the müsemmen, with four couplets, the muʾaşşer, with five couplets, and the müsebbaʾ, with seven lines.
The muhammes, a five-line poem, was generally reserved for a type of poetic imitation in which a second poet closed the poem by writing three lines that mimicked the style of the opening couplet, written by a first poet. The second poet might also insert three new lines between the first and second lines of the other poet’s couplet. In the muhammes the aim was for the second poet to subordinate his style to that of the first poet. (The type of imitation used in the muhammes was distinct from that used in certain types of gazel and kasîde in which a poet referred to a poem by another poet—or sometimes by two or three previous poets—in order to “answer” and surpass his predecessors.)
Movements and poets
Poetry’s place within Turkish society prior to the second half of the 15th century is relatively unknown, but the 16th century saw the composition of seven biographical dictionaries (tezkires) by Ottoman poets that make clear the high esteem in which poets and their poetry were held. Of these, five—by Sehî Bey (1538), Latifî (1546), Âşık Çelebi (1568), Hasan Çelebi (1585), and Ali Efendi (1599)—may be considered major examples of the genre. All five are large-scale works that include much biographical material as well as many anecdotes and some aesthetic judgments. Early in the 17th century, three more tezkires were written, of which one (by Riyazî) covers the entire 16th century in detail.
Patronage for Ottoman poets in the classical age took a variety of forms. The location of this patronage varied as well: poets were attached to the imperial household in Bursa or, later, Istanbul, or they were supported at the provincial Anatolian courts of the Ottoman princes. These princes also sometimes took poets along on military campaigns. Aside from the sultan, the leading ministers of state might also contribute toward the upkeep of poets. The simplest form of patronage was the annual stipend. During the 15th and 16th centuries the sultan Bayezid II granted an annual stipend to each of more than 30 poets.
Throughout the Ottoman Empire’s early history, either official patronage or a good position in the bureaucracy—or both—were available (and often attained) by poets who were from provincial cities or otherwise outside the inner circles of Ottoman rulers. During the second reign (1451–81) of the sultan Mehmed II, the poet İsa Necati, who was of obscure origins, was able to attract the attention of the sultan, who read and admired one of his gazels and immediately had him enrolled as a chancery secretary. Hayali Bey, the most influential poet of the first half of the 16th century, was the son of a timar sipahî (feudal cavalryman) from Rumeli, in the Balkans. He began his career with a troupe of wandering dervishes and eventually came under the protection of the vizier İbrahim Paşa. Through the vizier he became a favourite of Sultan Süleyman I, who granted him a yearly stipend and the income of several fiefs.
A major basis for this structure of poetic patronage was the bureaucratization of the ulema. (See Ottoman Empire: Classical Ottoman society and administration.) Once the ilmiye (ulema class) had become firmly attached to the imperial bureaucracy, it was possible for a talented poet who was a graduate of a madrassa (Turkish: medrese; a Muslim school of theology) to expect an appointment first as a mülâzim (assistant professor) and eventually as a müderris (professor). Among the many candidates for these professorships, a considerable number composed poetry and were, at least in their own minds, identified as “poets.” Some of the most talented or ambitious could use their poetry to advance quickly in the system. Bâkî is perhaps the supreme example of a poet who achieved success in the ilmiye system of mid-16th-century Turkey, but he is in no way typical. These two trends—the integration of the Islamic clergy into the Ottoman bureaucratic system and the separation (and subsequent expansion) of the secular bureaucracy from the madrassa-educated potential clergy—came to alter fundamentally the meaning of the word poet as a professional designation by the middle of the 16th century.
From the beginning of the reign of Sultan Selim I in 1512 until the 1539 reorganization of the bureaucracy (following the execution of İbrahim Paşa in 1536), the Ottoman state seemed to be able both to fill its expanded bureaucracies and to support leading poets. But it appears that, after this time, the state began to view its bureaucratic and fiscal needs as holding priority over its literary ones. The entry of Rüstem Paşa into the office of grand vizier in 1555 ushered in a new period of fiscal austerity and antiliterary sentiment in which new poets had a much slimmer chance of patronage. The real and apparently inexorable decline in state patronage for poetry set in with the accession of Murad III as sultan in 1574.
Ottoman poetry of the later 15th and 16th centuries represents a mature synthesis of the three major Islamic languages—Turkish, Persian, and Arabic—within a secure matrix of Turkish syntax. Despite the hybridization of courtly literary language, the literary production of the Ottoman court, almost alone among Turkic dynasties of the period, remained predominantly Turkish. A close analysis of the language of the classical-age poets reveals the liberal use of Turkish linguistic features, sometimes linked with popular and humorous effects, even to the point of self-parody.
Stylistically, the 16th century was marked by two major trends: the further elaboration of the Turkish courtly style of the later 15th century, represented by Necati, and the creation of a new synthesis of Sufi and secular concerns. The foremost representative of the former movement was Bâkî; the latter was Hayali Bey. In the second half of the 16th century, the courtly style asserted itself by way of the brilliant poetry of Bâkî. A ranking member of the ulema, Bâkî perfected an essentially secular style that held a central position in the poetry of the period. Among Bâkî’s couplets are
Behold the beauty that expands the heart within the mirror of the rose—
Behold the one who holds the mirror to the shining face of Truth.
Behold the love-addicted heart—a beggar wandering in the street.
Behold the beggar who loves kingship and sovereignty.
In the first half of the 17th century this courtly style was represented most notably by Yahya Efendi, who rose to the position of şeyhülislâm, the highest rank within the ulema. However, this style was challenged by Yahya Efendi’s contemporary Nefʾi, an aristocrat from the eastern Anatolian provinces who was an outsider in the Ottoman capital. Nefʾi was a master of the kasîde, but he is also remembered for couplets such as
I am the wonder-speaking parrot.
Whatever I say is no idle chatter.
He emphasized his outsider identity by perfecting his satirical verse (hiciv; Arabic: hijāʾ) and by adopting features of the new Indo-Persian style of the Mughal court in northern India. In doing so, he initiated a major stylistic movement in Ottoman poetry. The principal poets of this school, some of them students or followers of Nefʾi, were Cevri, Nâʾilî, Fehim, and Neşatî, all of whom wrote some of the very finest verse in Ottoman Turkish. By using an almost exclusively Persian lexicon, however, their poetry reversed the dominant trend of Ottoman poetry.
In the 17th century this newer style of poetry was termed tâze-gûʾî (“fresh speech”) or tarz-i nev (“new style”). (By the early 20th century it had come to be known as poetry of the Indian school, or Sabk-i Hindī.) In the late 16th century the two most important figures had been the Indian-born poet Fayzî and the Iranian Urfî (who was patronized in India). The Persian poets of the next generation, such as Kalîm Kâshânî and Saib-i Tabrizi, were encouraged by the Mughal court to develop their meditations on the poetic imagination. Much of this new philosophy of literature and poetic style influenced a major group of 17th-century Ottoman poets.
The death of the Ottoman sultan Murad IV in 1640 was followed by a series of events that resulted in a progressively weaker basis for governmental patronage of poetry. While higher clerical positions continued to be monopolized by a group of prominent Istanbul ulema families in the mid-17th century, places in the secular bureaucracies were being apportioned largely according to political patronage. Poets continued to rise through the ranks of the bureaucracies, but only rarely was their poetic ability a major factor in their careers or a source of much material benefit for them.
The ulema, however, continued to produce poets, the most illustrious of whom was the şeyhülislâm Bahayî Efendi. Like his predecessor Yahya Efendi, he was the scion of an illustrious ulema family. Bahayî Efendi’s poetry is a continuation of Bâkî’s style as it was developed by Yahya Efendi, and, as such, it furnishes the prime example of the neoconservative tendencies of the poets of his class. It is also indicative of the secondary position of poetry within his life that his divan is very small; it contains only 6 kasîdes and 41 gazels.
The major contemporary source for knowledge about the poets of the mid-17th century is the Teşrîfâtʾ üs-şuarâ of Edirneli Güftî, written in 1660–61—the only Ottoman tezkire composed as a mesnevî. It was not commissioned nor apparently presented to any patron, and its major function seems to have been as a means for the author to satirize and slander many of his contemporaries. It was also a general attack on and complaint about the literary situation in Turkey.
Beginning in the early 17th century, the Mawlawīyah (Turkish: Mevleviyah), an order of dervishes who were followers of the 13th-century Sufi mystic and poet Rūmī, were exerting a major influence on poetry. Cevri and Neşatî are the prime examples of leaders of the “fresh speech” who were committed Mawlawīyah. In the Ottoman capital the order began to create an alternative structure of literary evaluation that was independent of the courtly tradition, which had by this time become largely dominated by the higher ulema.
The leading poet of the later 17th century was Nâbî, a provincial notable who became an intimate of the second vizier, Köprülü Fazıl Mustafa Paşa, and eventually served as his chancery secretary. In his youth Nâbî attracted the notice of Nâʾilî, the most eminent poet of his time. Nâbî’s fame rests mainly on his didactic mesnevî Hayrîyye, which contains moral maxims for his son.
The 18th century witnessed significant changes in style and genre that led ultimately to the dissolution of the classic form of Ottoman poetry. But these changes were incremental and resulted in major stylistic splits only after the middle of the century. The first third of the 18th century was dominated by Ahmed Nedim, scion of an illustrious ulema family, who rose to prominence under the grand vizier Damad İbrahim Paşa between 1718 and 1730. Nedim’s fame rests largely on his kasîdes, the strongest and most original since those of Nefʾi a century earlier, and on two lesser genres that were undergoing development at this time—the tarîh (chronogram) and the şarki (a form of urban popular song). The tarîhs of Nedim display an entirely new awareness of the physical characteristics of the buildings being praised, thereby registering a perceptible shift from formal, highly stylized techniques of literary representation to ones based partly on observation of worldly phenomena. Similarly, his şarkis revel in the physical surroundings of the pleasure grounds of Saʿadābād Palace in Tehrān.
The leading poet of the middle of the 18th century was Koca Ragıb Paşa, whose public life was that of a high bureaucrat and diplomat. His career extended from serving as chief secretary of foreign affairs and, later, as grand vizier to being governor of several large provinces. Ragıb Paşa made no striking formal innovations, but the language of his gazels shows a happy synthesis of the canonical tradition of Bâkî with the “fresh” (or “Indian”) style of Nâʾilî. By this period such stylistic departures no longer aroused the acrimony of a century earlier.
The last third of the 18th century saw a lack of faith in older lyric metaphors. Drawing on the tradition of popular theatre, poets turned toward colloquial speech. At times they also embraced a new form of poetic subversion by which the praise characterizing the traditional lyric was replaced by its traditional opposite—hiciv, the poetry of satire. Vâsif Enderunî combined local Istanbul speech with a strong reminder of Nedim’s kasîdes and gazels in his poetry. Fazıl Enderunî went even further in his development of the şehrengiz (city-description) genres, of which Hubanname (“The Book of Beauties”), Zenanname (“The Book of Women”), and Çengîname (“The Book of Dancing Boys”) were part. All of these are replete with dialogue and descriptions that are both satirical and vulgar. The album paintings accompanying manuscripts of these works emphasize the new realism of their style and contents. These tendencies took a somewhat more mature form in the Mihnetkeşan (1823–24) of Keçecizade İzzet Molla, who wrote a humorous autobiographical mesnevî that has been hailed by some as the first work of modern Ottoman literature. Unique in Ottoman literature, the tale has no purpose other than to describe the author’s trials and misfortunes as he was sent into exile from the capital.
One of the most important Ottoman literary classics was created at the end of the 18th century, when Şeyh Galib, a sheikh of the Galata Mawlawīyah dervishes, wrote his mesnevî Hüsn ü aşk (1782; “Beauty and Love”), an allegorical narrative poem. Galib, who had been befriended by Sultan Selim III, wrote with considerable reference to the Indian style, although by his era Ottoman poets were no longer conversant with contemporary Indo-Persian literature. Despite the masterly quality of Beauty and Love, which is perhaps the greatest mesnevî ever written by an Ottoman poet, neither Galib’s mystical theme nor his highly Persianate language were to have much influence on succeeding generations of Ottoman writers.
The last chapter of traditional Ottoman verse was written in the mid- and late 19th century within a bureaucratic circle, the Encüman-i Şuarâ (“Council of Poets”) group of Leskofçali Galib Bey, which also included Arif Hikmet Bey and Yenişehirli Avnî Bey. The Indian-style poets of the mid-17th century, especially Nâʾilî, Neşatî, and Fehim, furnished the models for these late Ottoman poets, who rejected the type of change that began engulfing Ottoman literature in the 1840s. Two of the major poets of this generation, Ziya Paşa and Namık Kemal, began their literary careers as members of this conservative circle, only to break with it in their own mature works.


Supporting Young Emergent Bilinguals: Tips from CUNY-NYSIEB
Background information on Young Emergent Bilinguals
Using CUNY-NYSIEB Principles to Support Young Emergent Bilinguals
Supporting Young Emergent Bilinguals: Tips from CUNY-NYSIEB
Young children with home or primary languages other than English (LOTEs) enter nurseries, pre-school, and kindergarten settings withemergent language repertoires that educators must recognize. These students, whom we refer to as young emergent bilinguals, or Emergent Multilingual Learners (EMLLs), arenot just developing emergent English skills— they are becoming multilingual and multiliterate. As teachers, we can find it challenging to learn about, sustain, and build upon young children’s emergent multilingualism, especially if we do not speak their home languages. This resource is meant to help you understand, educate, and advocate for this student population.
The ideas and examples we share in this resource draw on the expertise and years of experience of the CUNY-NYSIEB support team, whose members have guided dozens of schools across New York State to develop best practices for Emergent Bilingual students, including those in early childhood programs. We draw on our core principles in all the work we do, which view bilingualism as a resource in education and support a multilingual ecology for the whole school.
Before we start, a quick note about language: If you are new to CUNY-NYSIEB’s work, you may be wondering why we refer to students as we do. Labeling so often characterizes emergent bilinguals’ learning experiences in school: they are called ELLs (English Language Learners), and in the case of those IEPs, SWDs (Students with Disabilities) or SPEDs (Special Education Students), all terms that emphasize what they can’t do or the services they receive. We refer to these students as emergent bilinguals to emphasize their skills (bilingualism) and their growth potential (emergence).
I. Background Information on Young Emergent Bilinguals
How do we get to know Young Emergent Bilinguals?
Young emergent bilinguals are children from infancy to 2nd grade who are socialized in homes in which both English and a language other than English are heard. In some cases, the parents and/or siblings are bilingual themselves. In other cases, the parents only speak a language other than English, but children hear English on the television, the radio, and in the surrounding community. Because children are very young, they are developing both English and their home language simultaneously. These children usually enter school with receptive abilities that are typically more developed than their productive performances in either language.
What should teachers understand about the language of young emergent bilinguals?
There is No “Gap” in the Language of Young Emergent Bilinguals
While it is true that the language practices of multilingual children differ from those of monolingual children, we must recognize that the idea of a “language gap” is a fallacy. This “gap”, which aims to describe the alleged disparity in vocabulary that students from underprivileged backgrounds enter school with (mostly bilingual and bidialectal children of color), is based on deficit views of marginalized communities. Their linguistic practices are stigmatized and seen as impoverished because the language practices of privileged monolingual communities have been extensively normalized (García & Otheguy, 2016). Educators must understand that young emergent bilinguals language in ways that are richer and more complex than the language typically recognized in schools.
Young Emergent Bilingual Children Translanguage Naturally
Bilingual infants experience language bilingually so, unlike monolinguals, they produce language bilingually when they begin to babble. Although parents recognize their initial sounds as attempts to say words in specific languages, young multilingual children deploy all of their language features freely, or translanguage, before they begin to realize that it is perceived as deficient by many adults. A 14-month-old’s words, for example, might include “agua,” “meow-meow” “milk,” “guagua,” “bus,” and “choo-choo”. Her words, accompanied by other meaning-making resources, such as gestures, pulling, crying, and onomatopoeic words, are meaningful and must be validated by those with whom she interacts, including her teachers.
The Language of Young Emergent Bilingual Children is Multimodal
Like all young children, the language of Emergent Multilingual Learners is multimodal. That is, young children use gestures, point, act, draw, sing, sign, and find numerous ways to communicate and make meaning. Therefore, many of the language practices young children use to play, ask and answer questions, tell a story, express feelings, and solve problems go beyond what many adults regard as language. Educators must validate the rich and organic multimodal language of young children before they can extend them.
What Can Early Childhood Programs do for Emergent Multilingual Learners?
Young emergent bilingual children flourish in early childhood programs that engage all of their linguistic and cultural identities. Educators should welcome their emergent multilingualism by creating spaces within their classrooms for bilingual languaging, bilingual literacy experiences, and bilingual play. In order to understand, validate, and extend a child’s bilingualism, educators must maintain strong partnerships with their parents and families.
II. Using CUNY-NYSIEB Principles to Support Emergent Bilinguals in Early Childhood
In our experience working with schools, a few strategies have stood out as particularly promising for young emergent bilinguals in early childhood programs. Below, we highlight classroom examples from CUNY-NYSIEB cohort schools where these strategies have been successfully implemented. We distinguish between “school-based” and “classroom-based” practices, to differentiate between what we have seen successfully implemented on a schoolwide level and what individual teachers have accomplished with these students.
A. Supporting Young Emergent Bilinguals on a Schoolwide Level
Learn with and from families
Strong partnerships with parents and families are crucial for the success young emergent bilingual children. Schools should cultivate an environment where parents feel welcomed and are often reminded of the importance of continuing to develop their child’s home language(s). It is also important to encourage family participation in schoolwide decision-making, moving beyond a mere family “involvement” paradigm to instead consider meaningful family engagement or even family leadership in schools (Menken, 2017). These collaborations need to be regular and ongoing throughout the year, not just seen as special enhancements to instruction.
Allotting time for teachers to learn with and from families of is essential. Families have a wealth of language and knowledge that can enrich the learning experience of all of the school community. Successful partnerships require educators to spend time talking to parents, learning about their social histories, their interactions, and their language/literacy use. Some schools organize orientations, community events, open-school days, and other opportunities for families to lead events and share their hobbies, interests, and backgrounds. Educators can also get to know families through in-person meetings, phone calls, or even home visits. Some questions that teachers in our cohort schools have asked to learn more about their young multilingual students and their families include:
- What family members are in your child’s life?
- What does your family enjoy doing on the weekends?
- What are some of your family’s favorite television shows?
- What print do you have in your home? (i.e., books, newspapers, etc.)
- Does your child use the internet or any digital/online games?
- What do your family members do for a living?
- Would you feel comfortable sharing your hobbies/skills/talents/interests with our class community?
Questions to Learn About Families’ Linguistic Backgrounds:
- What languages do your family members speak at home?
- In what language do you speak to your child most of the time?
- What languages does your child understand?
- In what language does your child speak to you… to others?
- What are some ways your child uses gestures or objects to communicate?
- In what language does your child attempt to read/write?
- In what languages do you sing, read, or tell stories to your child?
- How has your child learned English so far (television shows, siblings, childcare, etc.)?
For more intake questions and ideas about getting to know multilingual children of early childhood ages, see “Right from the Start: A Protocol for Identifying and Planning Instruction for Emergent Bilinguals in Universal Prekindergarten”.
Professional Development and Collaborative Planning for Teachers
Ongoing schoolwide support is imperative for educators to leverage young children’s emerging bilingualism to enhance their learning. Teachers benefit from time and space for collaborative inquiry and planning that allows them to share expertise and reflect on their students’ multilingual practices.
In one of our cohort schools, early childhood teachers organized a Professional Learning Community (PLC) around play and bilingualism. Teachers met once a week to share anecdotes, ideas, and challenges around play-based instruction that welcomes and builds on students’ bilingualism. This collaborative space allowed the teachers to reflect on their own learning and implement new approaches in their classrooms.
For a guide to developing a PLC around early childhood and bilingualism, see our resource, “Professional Learning Community on Early Childhood Education and Bilingualism”.
B. Supporting Young Emergent Bilinguals at the Early Childhood Classroom Level
Holistically observe the language practices of young emergent bilinguals
To better understand and support the language development of young emergent bilinguals, teachers must observe them holistically and from a perspective of strength. This means that rather than focusing on the absence of specific words or attending to what is “appropriate” in one language or another, educators must focus on the messageof each interaction and the way students use all of their language (verbal and non-verbal) to express themselves and make meaning.
Educators can gain a broader perspective of multilingual children’s linguistic repertoires by observing each child in various contexts and taking note of how and when the child interacts with others. Such continuous and holistic observations allow teachers to design ways of validating and extending the linguistic repertoires of young emergent bilinguals.
Validate, nurture, and extend young bilingual children’s language practices
Young emergent multilingual children enter early childhood classrooms with creative, flexible, and multimodal linguistic repertoires that are reflective of their lived experiences outside of the classroom. Their emergent language practices must be validated and celebrated before they are extended to help them meet expectations in contexts outside of the home. Teachers can understand, welcome, and build upon children’s full linguistic repertoire in creative and authentic ways throughout each day, even if they are not familiar with a child’s home language practices.
Build and sustain meaningful partnerships with families of Emergent Multilingual Learners
Parental partnerships should be commonplace, rather than a special enhancement to early childhood instruction. Regular and ongoing collaborations with families of young emergent bilinguals are especially fundamental, since cultural and linguistic differences often increase the distance between school and home. Parents who speak languages other than English often believe that they don’t have the language, knowledge, or skills that are valued in schools. Inviting families to share their cultural and linguistic backgrounds, as well as their interests and skills with the school community (i.e., storytelling, cooking, drawing, singing, planting, knitting) is a powerful way of reminding them that their wealth of language and knowledge is valuable and that they are their child’s primary educators—both in and out of the classroom. Phone conversations, audio and video recordings, and mobile applications are some creative and convenient ways to collaborate with families from afar.
Enhance play centers in ways that build on and sustain multilingualism
Young children develop language and learn about the world through play. During play, children feel safe to use their entire multimodal linguistic repertoire as they language freely and explore new ideas. For this reason, play is an opportunity to observe, welcome, and build on young children’s emergent multilingualism. Teachers can maximize young bilingual students’ learning and language development by creating opportunities for their bilingual imaginations to flourish during play.
To celebrate and build on students’ bilingualism during play, educators can:
- Label and refer to play centers in the different languages of the class.
- Add toys and objects that reflect the diverse cultures and home languages of the class. Families can be asked to assist in selecting pretend foods, dress-up clothing, and playthings that encourage children to share their cultures and languages as they play.
- Model enthusiasm and interest in the diverse multimodal language practices that children exhibit as they play.
- Ask purposeful questions to better understand students’ language practices, and to support their bilingual development.
- To expand children’s linguistic repertoires, highlight different ways in which children use language during play and model other ways of using language to socialize, inquire, express feelings, and solve problems.
- Provide access to other resources such as audio, video, realia, and manipulatives, that support multimodal learning and translanguaging.
- Invite parents to play with students and share their multicultural and multilingual imaginations.
- Cultivate bilingual reading identities by extending children’s favorite books to play centers (see below).
For more about modeled play and purposefully-framed play, read Play-based Learning and Intentional Teaching: Forever Different? by Susan Edwards.
Foster bilingual reading identities
As educators engage young children in emergent literacy activities, it’s essential that they maintain their bilingual identities at the forefront of their learning. Educators should:
Read culturally and linguistically sustaining books
Thoughtful selection of culturally and linguistically sustaining books allows children to connect to literature, engage their bilingual imaginations, and begin to develop identities as bilingual readers. These include books written in students’ home languages, stories with characters who translanguage, texts that highlight children’s cultures, and books that tell everyday stories of diverse characters (for lists of such texts, see CUNY-NYSIEB’s Culturally Relevant Books and Resources).
Elicit multicultural and multilingual interpretations of books
Educators can also cultivate bilingual reading identities by engaging children’s bilingual imaginations when reading traditional storybooks like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Teachers should encourage young children to use their unique multicultural and multilingual perspectives to interpret and reimagine stories. Adding book-related and culturally-relevant props to play areas is one way to promote multilingual interpretations of books. Families should be invited to assist in selecting pretend foods, dress-up clothing, and playthings that may encourage children to transform stories in ways that reflect their dynamic multilingual worlds. See Fostering Bilingual Reading Identities in Early Childhood Programs: Storybook Extensions.
Language Development & Play in Preschool – VIDEO by Teacher Scott Harding at Maury Elementary School, DC Public Schools.
iTEO: Examining the use of the App iTEO for teaching and learning languages in preschools and primary schools. (Research by professor Claudine Kirsch (PI)
We Need Diverse Books — A non-profit and grassroots organization committed to diversity in children’s books.
Further Reading and References:
Axelrod, Y. (2017). “Ganchulinas” and “Rainbowli” Colors: Young Multilingual Children Play with Language in Head Start Classroom. Early Childhood Education Journal (45), 1, pp. 103-110.
Edwards, S. (June 2017). Play-based Learning and Intentional Teaching: Forever Different Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 42(2).
Espinosa, C. and Lehner-Quam, A. (To be published 2019). Sustaining Bilingualism: Multimodal Arts Experiences for Young Readers and Writers. Language Arts.
García, O. and Otheguy, R. 2016). Interrogating the Language Gap of Young Bilingual and Bidialectal Students. International Multilingual Research Journal, 11(1), pp. 52-65.
Genesee, F. (2015). Myths about early childhood bilingualism. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 56(1), 6-15.
Halgunseth, L. (2009). Family engagement, diverse families, and early childhood education programs: An integrated review of the literature. YC Young Children, 64(5), 56.
Gort, M. (2012). Code-switching patterns in the writing-related talk of young emergent bilinguals. Journal of Literacy Research, 44(1), pp. 45-75.
Kultti, A. & Pramling, N. (2017). Translation activities in bilingual early childhood education: Children’s perspectives and teachers’ scaffolding . Multilingual Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 36(6), pp. 703-725.
Maldonado, N. & Espinosa, C. (2012) Thinking and Speaking: Enhancing Oral Language Development in Emergent Bilingual Children’s Play Experiences. IPAUSA journal, pp. 31-37.
McLeod, S., Verdon, S. & Theobald, M. (2015). Becoming Bilingual: Children’s Insights About Making Friends in Bilingual Settings. International Journal of Early Childhood, (45), 3, pp 385-401.
Morell, Z. (2017). Rethinking Preschool Education through Bilingual Universal Pre-kindergarten: Opportunities and Challenges. Journal of Multilingual Education Research, 7(2).
Pontier, R. & Gort, M. (2016). Coordinated Translanguaging Pedagogy as Distributed Cognition: A Case Study of Two Dual Language Bilingual Education Preschool Coteachers’ Languaging Practices During Shared Book Readings, International Multilingual Research Journal, 10:2, 89-106.
Reyes, I., DaSilva Iddings A. C. & Feller, N. (2015). Promoting a Funds of Knowledge Perspective: Preservice Teachers’ Understanding about Language and Literacy Development of Preschool Emergent Bilinguals through Family and Community Interactions. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 15(2) 1-26.
Rodriguez, M. (2015). Families and Educators Supporting Bilingualism in Early childhood. School Community Journal, (25), 2, 177-914 — http://www.schoolcommunitynetwork.org/SCJ.aspx
Schwartz, M., Moin, V., & Leikin, M. (2011). Parents’ discourses about language strategies for their children’s preschool bilingual development. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education: An International Journal, 53(3), 149–166.
Schwartz, M. & Yagmur, K. (2018) Early language development and education: teachers, parents and children as agents. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 31:3, 215-219.
Soltero-Gonzalez, L. and Butvilofsky, S. (2015). The early Spanish and English writing development of simultaneous bilingual preschoolers. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. (16), 4, pp 473-497.
Souto-Manning, M. (2016). Honoring and building on the rich literacy practices of young bilingual and multilingual learners. The Reading Teacher, 70(3), 263-271.
Souto-Manning, M. (2017). Is play a privilege or a right? And what’s our responsibility? On the role of play for equity in early childhood education. Early Child Development and Care, 187(5-6), pp. 785-787.
Tazi Morell, Z. and Aponte, A. (2016). Right from the Start: A Protocol for Identifying and Planning Instruction for Emergent Bilinguals in Universal Prekindergarten. Educator’s Voice, 9, pp. 12-25
Tazi, Z., Gunning, A., and Marrero, M. (March 2015). Engaging Parents as Coteachers – Educational Leadership. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar15/vol72/num06/Engaging-Parents-as-Coteachers.aspx
Velasco, P., & Fialais, V. (2016). Moments of metalinguistic awareness in a Kindergarten class: translanguaging for simultaneous biliterate development. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1–15.
Wells Rowe, D. and Miller, M. E. (2015). Designing for diverse classrooms: Using iPads and digital cameras to compose eBooks with emergent bilingual/biliterate four-year-olds. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy (16), 4, 425-472.
Welsch, J. (2008). Playing Within and Beyond the Story: Encouraging Book-Related Pretend Play. Reading Teacher, 62(2), pp. 138-160.
Worthy, J., & Rodríguez-Galindo, A. (2006). “Mi hija vale dos personas”: Latino immigrant families’ perspectives about their children’s bilingualism. Bilingual Research Journal, 30(2), 579–601.
Yoshida, H. (2008). The cognitive consequences of early bilingualism. Zero to Three, 29(2), 26–30.
This CUNY-NYSIEB resource was created by Gladys Aponte and Laura Ascenzi Moreno. Ofelia García, Kathryn Fangsrud Carpenter, Cecilia Espinoza, Zoila Morell, Kate Seltzer, Ivana Espinet, and Maite Sánchez, served as advisors to the authors. We would like to give special thanks to the teachers and administrators who provided feedback on this resource.


Native American, also called American Indian, Amerindian, Amerind, Indian, aboriginal American, or First Nation person, member of any of the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere, although the term often connotes only those groups whose original territories were in present-day Canada and the United States.
Pre-Columbian Americans used technology and material culture that included fire and the fire drill; the domesticated dog; stone implements of many kinds; the spear-thrower (atlatl), harpoon, and bow and arrow; and cordage, netting, basketry, and, in some places, pottery. Many indigenous American groups were hunting-and-gathering cultures, while others were agricultural peoples. American Indians domesticated a variety of plants and animals, including corn (maize), beans, squash, potatoes and other tubers, turkeys, llamas, and alpacas, as well as a variety of semidomesticated species of nut- and seed-bearing plants. These and other resources were used to support communities ranging from small hamlets to cities such as Cahokia, with an estimated population of 10,000 to 20,000 individuals, and Teotihuacán, with some 125,000 to 200,000 residents.
At the dawn of the 16th century ce, as the European conquest of the Americas began, indigenous peoples resided throughout the Western Hemisphere. They were soon decimated by the effects of epidemic disease, military conquest, and enslavement, and, as with other colonized peoples, they were subject to discriminatory political and legal policies well into the 20th, and even the 21st, century. Nonetheless, they have been among the most active and successful native peoples in effecting political change and regaining their autonomy in areas such as education, land ownership, religious freedom, the law, and the revitalization of traditional culture.
Culturally, the indigenous peoples of the Americas are usually recognized as constituting two broad groupings, American Indians and Arctic peoples. American Indians are often further grouped by area of residence: Northern America (present-day United States and Canada), Middle America (present-day Mexico and Central America; sometimes called Mesoamerica), and South America. This article is a survey of the culture areas, prehistories, histories, and recent developments of the indigenous peoples and cultures of the United States and Canada. Some of the terminology used in reference to indigenous Americans is explained in Sidebar: Tribal Nomenclature: American Indian, Native American, and First Nation; Sidebar: The Difference Between a Tribe and a Band; and Sidebar: Native American Self-Names. An overview of all the indigenous peoples of the Americas is presented in American Indian; discussions of various aspects of indigenous American cultures may also be found in the articles pre-Columbian civilizations; Middle American Indian; South American Indian; Arctic: The people; American Indian languages; Native American religions; and Native American arts.
Native Americans form an ethnic group only in a very general sense. In the East, centuries of coexistence with whites has led to some degree of intermarriage and assimilation and to various patterns of stable adjustment. In the West the hasty expansion of…
Native American culture areas
Comparative studies are an essential component of all scholarly analyses, whether the topic under study is human society, fine art, paleontology, or chemistry; the similarities and differences found in the entities under consideration help to organize and direct research programs and exegeses. The comparative study of cultures falls largely in the domain of anthropology, which often uses a typology known as the culture area approach to organize comparisons across cultures.
The culture area approach was delineated at the turn of the 20th century and continued to frame discussions of peoples and cultures into the 21st century. A culture area is a geographic region where certain cultural traits have generally co-occurred; for instance, in North America between the 16th and 19th centuries, the Northwest Coast culture area was characterized by traits such as salmon fishing, woodworking, large villages or towns, and hierarchical social organization.
The specific number of culture areas delineated for Native America has been somewhat variable because regions are sometimes subdivided or conjoined. The 10 culture areas discussed below are among the most commonly used—the Arctic, the Subarctic, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Plains, the Southwest, the Great Basin, California, the Northwest Coast, and the Plateau. Notably, some scholars prefer to combine the Northeast and Southeast into one Eastern Woodlands culture area or the Plateau and Great Basin into a single Intermontane culture area. Each section below considers the location, climate, environment, languages, tribes, and common cultural characteristics of the area before it was heavily colonized. Prehistoric and post-Columbian Native American cultures are discussed in subsequent sections of this article. A discussion of the indigenous peoples of the Americas as a whole is found in American Indian.
This region lies near and above the Arctic Circle and includes the northernmost parts of present-day Alaska and Canada. The topography is relatively flat, and the climate is characterized by very cold temperatures for most of the year. The region’s extreme northerly location alters the diurnal cycle; on winter days the sun may peek above the horizon for only an hour or two, while the proportion of night to day is reversed during the summer months (see midnight sun).
The indigenous peoples of the North American Arctic include the Eskimo (Inuit and Yupik/Yupiit) and Aleut; their traditional languages are in the Eskimo-Aleut family. Many Alaskan groups prefer to be called Native Alaskans rather than Native Americans; Canada’s Arctic peoples generally prefer the referent Inuit.
The Arctic peoples of North America relied upon hunting and gathering. Winters were harsh, but the long hours of summer sunlight supported an explosion of vegetation that in turn drew large herds of caribou and other animals to the inland North. On the coasts, sea mammals and fish formed the bulk of the diet. Small mobile bands were the predominant form of social organization; band membership was generally based on kinship and marriage (see also Sidebar: The Difference Between a Tribe and a Band). Dome-shaped houses were common; they were sometimes made of snow and other times of timber covered with earth. Fur clothing, dog sleds, and vivid folklore, mythology, and storytelling traditions were also important aspects of Arctic cultures. See also Arctic: The people.
This region lies south of the Arctic and encompasses most of present-day Alaska and most of Canada, excluding the Maritime Provinces (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island), which are part of the Northeast culture area. The topography is relatively flat, the climate is cool, and the ecosystem is characterized by a swampy and coniferous boreal forest (taiga) ecosystem.
Prominent tribes include the Innu (Montagnais and Naskapi), Cree, Ojibwa, Chipewyan, Beaver, Slave, Carrier, Gwich’in, Tanaina, and Deg Xinag (Ingalik). Their traditional languages are in the Athabaskan and Algonquian families.
Small kin-based bands were the predominant form of social organization, although seasonal gatherings of larger groups occurred at favoured fishing locales. Moose, caribou, beavers, waterfowl, and fish were taken, and plant foods such as berries, roots, and sap were gathered. In winter people generally resided in snug semisubterranean houses built to withstand extreme weather; summer allowed for more mobility and the use of tents or lean-tos. Snowshoes, toboggans, and fur clothing were other common forms of material culture. See also American Subarctic peoples.
This culture area reaches from the present-day Canadian provinces of Quebec, Ontario, and the Maritimes (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island) south to the Ohio River valley (inland) and to North Carolina (on the Atlantic Coast). The topography is generally rolling, although the Appalachian Mountains include some relatively steep slopes. The climate is temperate, precipitation is moderate, and the predominant ecosystem is the deciduous forest. There is also extensive coastline and an abundance of rivers and lakes.
Prominent tribes include the Algonquin, Iroquois, Huron, Wampanoag, Mohican, Mohegan, Ojibwa, Ho-chunk (Winnebago), Sauk, Fox, and Illinois. The traditional languages of the Northeast are largely of the Iroquoian and Algonquian language families.
Most Northeastern peoples engaged in agriculture, and for them the village of a few dozen to a few hundred persons was the most important social and economic unit in daily life. Groups that had access to reliably plentiful wild foods such as wild rice, salmon, or shellfish generally preferred to live in dispersed hamlets of extended families. Several villages or hamlets formed a tribe, and groups of tribes sometimes organized into powerful confederacies. These alliances were often very complex political organizations and generally took their name from the most powerful member tribe, as with the Iroquois Confederacy.
Cultivated corn (maize), beans, squash, and weedy seed-bearing plants such as Chenopodium formed the economic base for farming groups. All northeastern peoples took animals including deer, elk, moose, waterfowl, turkeys, and fish. Houses were wickiups (wigwams) or longhouses; both house types were constructed of a sapling framework that was covered with rush matting or sheets of bark. Other common aspects of culture included dugouts made of the trunks of whole trees, birchbark canoes, clothing made of pelts and deerskins, and a variety of medicine societies. See also Northeast Indian.
This region reaches from the southern edge of the Northeast culture area to the Gulf of Mexico; from east to west it stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to somewhat west of the Mississippi valley. The climate is warm temperate in the north and grades to subtropical in the south. The topography includes coastal plains, rolling uplands known as the Piedmont, and a portion of the Appalachian Mountains; of these, the Piedmont was most densely populated. The predominant ecosystems were coastal scrub, wetlands, and deciduous forests.
Perhaps the best-known indigenous peoples originally from this region are the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, sometimes referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes. Other prominent tribes included the Natchez, Caddo, Apalachee, Timucua, and Guale. Traditionally, most tribes in the Southeast spoke Muskogean languages; there were also some Siouan language speakers and one Iroquoian-speaking group, the Cherokee.
The region’s economy was primarily agricultural and often supported social stratification; as chiefdoms, most cultures were structured around hereditary classes of elites and commoners, although some groups used hierarchical systems that had additional status levels. Most people were commoners and lived in hamlets located along waterways. Each hamlet was home to an extended family and typically included a few houses and auxiliary structures such as granaries and summer kitchens; these were surrounded by agricultural plots or fields. Hamlets were usually associated with a town that served as the area’s ceremonial and market centre. Towns often included large earthen mounds on which religious structures and the homes of the ruling classes or families were placed. Together, each town and its associated hamlets constituted an autonomous political entity. In times of need these could unite into confederacies, such as those of the Creek and Choctaw.
People grew corn, beans, squash, tobacco, and other crops; they also gathered wild plant foods and shellfish, hunted deer and other animals, and fished. House forms varied extensively across the region, including wickiups (wigwams), earth-berm dwellings, and, in the 19th century, chickees (thatched roofs with open walls). The Southeast was also known for its religious iconography, which often included bird themes, and for the use of the “black drink,” an emetic used in ritual contexts. See also Southeast Indian.
The Plains lie in the centre of the continent, spanning the area between the western mountains and the Mississippi River valley and from the southern edge of the Subarctic to the Rio Grande in present-day Texas. The climate is of the continental type, with warm summers and cold winters. Relatively flat short-grass prairies with little precipitation are found west of the Missouri River and rolling tallgrass prairies with more moisture are found to its east. Tree-lined river valleys form a series of linear oases throughout the region.
The indigenous peoples of the Plains include speakers of Siouan, Algonquian, Uto-Aztecan, Caddoan, Athabaskan, Kiowa-Tanoan, and Michif languages. Plains peoples also invented a sign language to represent common objects or concepts such as “buffalo” or “exchange.”
Earth-lodge villages were the only settlements on the Plains until the late 16th century; they were found along major waterways that provided fertile soil for growing corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco. The groups who built these communities divided their time between village-based crop production and hunting expeditions, which often lasted for several weeks and involved travel over a considerable area. Plains villagers include the Mandan, Hidatsa, Omaha, Pawnee, and Arikara.
By 1750 horses from the Spanish colonies in present-day New Mexico had become common in the Plains and had revolutionized the hunting of bison. This new economic opportunity caused some local villagers to become dedicated nomads, as with the Crow (who retained close ties with their Hidatsa kin), and also drew agricultural tribes from surrounding areas into a nomadic lifestyle, including the Sioux, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Comanche, Arapaho, and Kiowa.
Groups throughout the region had in common several forms of material culture, including the tepee, tailored leather clothing, a variety of battle regalia (such as feathered headdresses), and large drums used in ritual contexts. The Sun Dance, a ritual that demanded a high degree of piety and self-sacrifice from its participants, was also found throughout most of the Plains.
The Plains is perhaps the culture area in which tribal and band classifications were most conflated. Depictions of indigenous Americans in popular culture have often been loosely based on Plains peoples, encouraging many to view them as the “typical” American Indians. See also Plains Indian.
This culture area lies between the Rocky Mountains and the Mexican Sierra Madre, mostly in present-day Arizona and New Mexico. The topography includes plateaus, basins, and ranges. The climate on the Colorado Plateau is temperate, while it is semitropical in most of the basin and range systems; there is little precipitation and the major ecosystem is desert. The landscape includes several major river systems, notably those of the Colorado and the Rio Grande, that create linear oases in the region.
The Southwest is home to speakers of Hokan, Uto-Aztecan, Tanoan, Keresan, Kiowa-Tanoan, Penutian, and Athabaskan languages. The region was the home of both agricultural and hunting and gathering peoples, although the most common lifeway combined these two economic strategies. Best known among the agriculturists are the Pueblo Indians, including the Zuni and Hopi. The Yumans, Pima, and Tohono O’odham (Papago) engaged in both farming and foraging, relying on each to the extent the environment would allow. The Navajo and the many Apache groups usually engaged in some combination of agriculture, foraging, and the raiding of other groups.
The major agricultural products were corn, beans, squash, and cotton. Wild plant foods, deer, other game, and fish (for those groups living near rivers) were the primary foraged foods. The Pueblo peoples built architecturally remarkable apartment houses of adobe and stone masonry (see pueblo architecture) and were known for their complex kinship structures, kachina (katsina) dances and dolls, and fine pottery, textiles, and kiva and sand paintings. The Navajo built round houses (“hogans”) and were known for their complex clan system, healing rituals, and fine textiles and jewelry. The Apaches, Yumans, Pima, and Tohono O’odham generally built thatched houses or brush shelters and focused their expressive culture on oral traditions. Stone channels and check dams (low walls that slowed the runoff from the sporadic but heavy rains) were common throughout the Southwest, as were basketry and digging sticks. See also Southwest Indian.
The Great Basin
The Great Basin culture area is centred in the intermontane deserts of present-day Nevada and includes adjacent areas in California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. It is so named because the surrounding mountains create a bowl-like landscape that prevented water from flowing out of the region. The most common topographic features are basin and range systems; these gradually transition to high intermontane plateaus in the north. The climate is temperate in the north and becomes subtropical to the south. Higher elevations tend to receive ample moisture but other areas average as little as 2 inches (50 mm) per year. Much of the region’s surface water, such as the Great Salt Lake, is brackish. The predominant ecosystem is desert.
The Great Basin is home to the Washoe, speakers of a Hokan language, and a number of tribes speaking Numic languages (a division of the Uto-Aztecan language family). These include the Mono, Paiute, Bannock, Shoshone, Ute, and Gosiute.
The peoples of this region were hunters and gatherers and generally organized themselves in mobile, kin-based bands. Seeds, piñon nuts, and small game formed the bulk of the diet for most groups, although those occupying northern and eastern locales readily adopted horses and equestrian bison hunting after Spanish mounts became available. Some of these latter groups also replaced wickiups and brush shelters, the common house forms until that time, with Plains-style tepees; peoples in the west and south, however, continued to use traditional house forms well into the 19th century. Other common forms of material culture included digging sticks, nets, basketry, grinding stones for processing seeds, and rock art. See also Great Basin Indian.
This culture area approximates the present states of California (U.S.) and northern Baja (Mexico). Other than the Pacific coast, the region’s dominant topographic features are the Coast Range and the Sierra Nevada; these north-south ranges are interspersed with high plateaus and basins. An extraordinary diversity of local conditions created microenvironments such as coasts, tidewaters, coastal redwood forests, grasslands, wetlands, high deserts, and mountains.
California includes representatives of some 20 language families, including Uto-Aztecan, Penutian, Yokutsan, and Athabaskan; American linguist Edward Sapir described California’s languages as being more diverse than those found in all of Europe. Prominent tribes, many with a language named for them, include the Hupa, Yurok, Pomo, Yuki, Wintun, Maidu, and Yana.
Many California peoples eschewed centralized political structures and instead organized themselves into tribelets, groups of a few hundred to a few thousand people that recognized cultural ties with others but maintained their political independence. Some tribelets comprised just one village and others included several villages; in the latter cases, one village was usually recognized as more important than the others. The relatively few groups that lived in areas with sparse natural resources preferred to live in small mobile bands.
Agriculture was practiced only along the Colorado River; elsewhere hunting and gathering provided a relatively easy living. Acorns were the most important of the wild food sources; California peoples devised a method of leaching the toxins from acorn pulp and converting it into flour, thus ensuring abundant and constant food. Fishing, hunting, and gathering shellfish and other wild foods were also highly productive. Housing varied from wood-framed single-family dwellings to communal apartment-style buildings; ceremonial structures were very important and could often hold several hundred people. The California peoples were also known for their fine basketry, ritualized trade fairs, and the Kuksu and Toloache religions. See also California Indian.
The Northwest Coast
This culture area is bounded on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the east by the Coast Range, the Sierra Nevada, and the Rocky Mountains; it reaches from the area around Yakutat Bay in the north to the Klamath River area in the south. It includes the coasts of present-day Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, much of southern Alaska, and a small area of northern California. The topography is steep and in many places the coastal hills or mountains fall abruptly to a beach or riverbank. There is an abundance of precipitation—in many areas more than 160 inches (406 cm) annually, but rarely less than 30 inches (76 cm). The predominant ecosystems are temperate rainforests, intertidal zones, and the ocean.
This culture area is home to peoples speaking Athabaskan, Tshimshianic, Salishan, and other languages. Prominent tribes include the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Bella Coola, Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), Coast Salish, and Chinook.
The peoples of the Northwest Coast had abundant and reliable supplies of salmon and other fish, sea mammals, shellfish, birds, and a variety of wild food plants. The resource base was so rich that they are unique among nonagricultural peoples in having created highly stratified societies of hereditary elites, commoners, and slaves. Tribes often organized themselves into corporate “houses”—groups of a few dozen to 100 or more related people that held in common the rights to particular resources. As with the house societies of medieval Japan and Europe, social stratification operated at every level of many Northwest Coast societies; villages, houses, and house members each had their designated rank, which was reflected in nearly every social interaction.
Most groups built villages near waterways or the coast; each village also had rights to an upland territory from which the residents could obtain terrestrial foods. Dwellings were rectilinear structures built of timbers or planks and were usually quite large, as the members of a corporate “house” typically lived together in one building. Northwest Coast cultures are known for their fine wood and stone carvings, large and seaworthy watercraft, memorial or totem poles, and basketry. The potlatch, a feast associated with the bestowal of lavish gifts, was also characteristic of this culture area. See also Northwest Coast Indian.
Lying at the crossroads of five culture areas (the Subarctic, Plains, Great Basin, California, and Northwest Coast), the Plateau is surrounded by mountains and drained by two great river systems, the Fraser and the Columbia. It is located in present-day Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Topographically, the area is characterized by rolling hills, high flatlands, gorges, and mountain slopes. The climate is temperate, although milder than the adjacent Plains because the surrounding mountain systems provide protection from continental air masses. The mountains also create a substantial rain shadow; most precipitation in this region falls at higher elevations, leaving other areas rather dry. The predominant ecosystems are grassland and high desert, although substantial forested areas are found at altitude.
Most of the languages spoken in this culture area belong to the Salishan, Sahaptin, Kutenai, and Modoc and Klamath families. Tribes include the Salish, Flathead, Nez Percé, Yakama, Kutenai, Modoc and Klamath, Spokan, Kalispel, Pend d’Oreille, Coeur d’Alene, Walla Walla, and Umatilla. “Flathead” is incorrectly used in some early works to denote all Salishan-speaking peoples, only some of whom molded infants’ heads so as to achieve a uniform slope from brow to crown; notably, the people presently referred to as the Flathead did not engage in this practice (see head flattening).
The primary political unit was the village; among some groups a sense of larger tribal and cultural unity led to the creation of representative governments, tribal chieftainships, and confederations of tribes. This was possible in part because the Columbia and Fraser rivers provided enough salmon and other fish to support a relatively dense population; however, this region was never as heavily populated or as rigidly stratified as the Northwest Coast.
Efficient hunters and gatherers, Plateau groups supplemented fish with terrestrial animals and wild plant foods, especially certain varieties of camas (Camassia). Most groups resided in permanent riverside villages and traveled to upland locales during fair-weather foraging excursions; however, horses were readily adopted once available and some groups subsequently shifted to nomadic buffalo hunting. These groups quickly adopted tepees and many other Plains cultural forms; they became particularly respected for their equine breeding programs and fine herds (see Appaloosa). Plateau fishing villages were characterized by their multifamily A-frame dwellings, while smaller conical structures were used in the uplands; both house forms were covered with grass, although canvas became a popular covering once available. In terms of portable culture, the Plateau peoples were most characterized by the wide variety of substances and technologies they used; continuously exposed to new items and ideas through trade with surrounding culture areas, they excelled at material innovation and at adapting others’ technologies to their own purposes. See also Plateau Indian.