Cultural Lesson Plans for Teachers about the ... - Brown University

EXPLORE THE CULTURES OF THE WORLD
Cradleboards and the Kiowa and Comanche Peoples
of the Southern Plains, USA
Above: American Buffalo or Bison
Left: Vanessa Paukeigope Jennings,
Kiowa, Oklahoma
The Haffenreffer
Museum of Anthropology
BROWN
About the Kiowa and Comanche
Although many Kiowa and Comanche people live today
in the Southern Plains of the United States, neither group
started out there. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the Kiowa lived in present-day Montana. They
then moved to the Black Hills in South Dakota and into the
Southern Plains — Oklahoma and Northern Texas — by
the 1820s. The Comanche lived in the Rocky Mountains
of Colorado, along the Arkansas River. Kiowa and
Comanche tribes were nomadic people and hunted bison
as their primary food source. In 1867, the United States
government assigned the Kiowa and Comanche people
to a reservation in Southwestern Oklahoma. Their entire
way of life changed. The government sent children to
schools where they were not allowed to speak their own
languages or dress in traditional ways. The government
built houses for them instead of letting them live in tipis
and they had to give up hunting bison to become farmers.
The United States government closed the reservation in
1906, yet many Kiowa and Comanche people still live in
the Southern Plains region.
Cradles and Their Uses
Many Native peoples in North America used cradleboards
to hold their babies. Kiowa and Comanche men and
women made beautiful lattice cradles for their babies.
Many of the most highly decorated ones were made
between 1870 and 1920. Men made the frames for the
cradles, but the women, who made the beaded covers,
were considered the cradle makers due to the long hours
of work that they spent on the beadwork. Two long boards
formed the base of the cradle frames. These were held in a
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