Working with Native American archival materials, you run into some pretty odd stuff. In previous posts, I’ve described bullet-riddled war books and bloodly banners, but today I’m going to explore another set of objects quite common in these archives—playing cards.
When you think about it, playing cards were the stuff of social life in America until just recently, as social media and online gaming began elbowing out the old Bicycle deck and games like pinochle, cribbage, poker, and gin.
The website for what is perhaps the most famous playing card company in the world, Bicycle, offers a short history of the playing card:
The earliest playing cards are believed to have originated in Central Asia. The documented history of card playing began in the 10th century, when the Chinese began using paper dominoes by shuffling and dealing them in new games. Four-suited decks with court cards evolved in the Moslem world and were imported by Europeans before 1370. In those days, cards were hand-painted and only the very wealthy could afford them, but with the invention of woodcuts in the 14th century, Europeans began mass-production.
[www.bicyclecards.ca/pages/playing_card_history/37.php]
Among the more interesting trivia about cards the website cites is the fact that “France gave us the suits of spades, clubs, diamonds and hearts, and the use of simple shapes and flat colors helped facilitate manufacture,” while (of course) Americans invented the Joker.
But the playing cards associated with American Indians are often quite distinctive. At the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA, for example, you can examine a leather deck used by Apaches in the 19th century.
Apache playing cards (Between 1850 and 1900). Paint on leather; 9.5 x 6 cm. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.
Chiricahuas and Western Apaches made these cards when Mexican printed playing cards became impossible to obtain as the tribes’ warfare with Mexico closed off all commerce between the nations. The cards are made from horsehide and painted with designs that reflect an intriguing blend of Spanish and Mexican designs with traditional Apache motifs. Virginia and Harold Wayland, in their book Playing Cards of the Apaches: A Study in Cultural Adaptation (2006), explain that “as early as 1581, Indian tribes in contact with Spaniards had access to paper cards in what is now northwestern Mexico and the American Southwest. When renewed hostilities with Mexico stifled trade, Apache painting of rawhide cards began about 1830 and continued for another century, with Chiricahua fugitives in northern Mexico using such cards as late as 1932.”
Much more common in archival collections, however, are decks of cards missionaries distributed among Native people to do double evangelical duty—wipe out gambling and inspire Bible reading. Of course, they didn’t achieve either goal completely, but their presence in several archives suggest yet another set of material practices that might be reclaimed from the archives to shed some light on Native people’s everyday life in the centuries after the arrival of Europeans.
Mohegan missionary Samson Occom makes reference to “Bible cards” several times in his voluminous diary. At one of his circuit stops in 1785, Occom comments, “after supper we had little exercise, with my Printed, Versified Notes of Christian Cards.” He is probably referring to professionally printed excerpts from the Psalms and other parts of the Bible that were circulated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This example of a card found in the archives of the American Philosophical Society, is probably very similar to the ones Occom used in his missionary travels.
Throughout the 1760s, his journal entries are punctuated with comments about the kind of Christian sociability such cards offered him. It seems that the cards were used to supplant games of chance with games of “providence.” That is, a player drew a card and read its verse as a kind of “fortune,” or jumping off point, for disputation and discussion among the card players. Occom mentions playing these card games with “poor negroes,” fellow Native peoples, and white settlers with whom he took tea.
Another set of cards, housed at the Newberry Library in Chicago, reflect the continued importance of gaming evangelism throughout nineteenth century, this time in Mvskogee country. These flowery, Victorian cards were less about chance than about social calling and brightening up a household with conversation pieces whose subject was Christian doctrine.
Prayer cards in English and Creek. New York : American Tract Society, c1882-c1883. [Call Number: Ayer BS345 .C81 1888]. Courtesy the Newberry Library
Such objects are known in the archives as “collecting cards.” In this case, the individual decks sport names like “Words of Strength” and “Manna for the Day.” The display side of the cards feature bright chromolithographs of popular garden flowers, thus encouraging the Mvskogees who were given them to participate in mainstream middle class decorative visual culture. The reverse side of each card features a Bible passage. These cards’ intermingling of civil and religious material culture reflect a common pattern in Euro-American “assimilation” projects. John Eliot, the English minister who led the first concerted missionary effort in New England, articulated this policy as early as 1649, when he insisted he would “carry on civility with religion.”
In the 1880s, Bible cards made their way to Tsimshian villages on the northwest coast of the continent. This example, also from the Newberry Library, exhibits the truly global reach of Native Christian material culture at the end of the nineteenth century.
Prayer cards in Tsimshian. Manchester : Mrs. Grimkè, [1888]. (Call Number: Ayer BS345 .T77 1888). Courtesy the Newberry Library.
These cards were produced by Mrs. Emma Grimke of Manchester, England, who was widely known as the founder of the Text Card Mission. In advertising her wares, Mrs. Grimke boasted “having now 50 languages, [I] wish to send out one million text cards to missionaries this year, cost about 500, proposing to double all gifts sent by Christians whose aid she now asks. Many variety of English, some very superior, F.M sheets, Tracts, Quilt Texts on Calico, &c., always on sale.”
The engraving was produced by the Kaufmann printing concern in Baden, Germany, a firm that still exists today. Close examination of the images on these cards shows how Christian missionaries repurposed engravings for many different constituencies. Ships with European rigging join craft of vaguely middle eastern origin across seascapes and inland waterways bordered by solitary cypress trees and dense hardwood forests. There in an emphasis on the sea, which might appeal to Tsimshian people, who were themselves able and avid sailors and fishermen. But the images are also interchangeable with other seafaring communities the missionaries were trying to reach.
Prayer cards in Tsimshian. Manchester : Mrs. Grimkè, [1888]. (Call Number: Ayer BS345 .T77 1888). Courtesy the Newberry Library.
Prayer cards in Tsimshian. Manchester : Mrs. Grimkè, [1888]. (Call Number: Ayer BS345 .T77 1888). Courtesy the Newberry Library.
Having gotten acquainted with Mrs. Grimke’s ambitious project, I will now be on the lookout for “quilt texts.” They may lead us to another important material practice that many Native communities continue to embrace to this day–quilting and quilt “give aways.”
Bright Star Quilt, 1996. Paula White (Chippewa) Bena, Minnesota 79″ x 93″ Collection of MSUM, acc# 1996:97.1. Photo: Elbinger Studios, Inc
There is little recorded evidence concerning the use of these cards in Native communities. Some, like those Occom describes, appear to have provided a comfortable space for social interaction among rural Christian converts who had been marginalized by Euro-American congregations. Others, like the Apache cards, show great wear, suggesting the Chiricahuas enjoyed lively matches of games of skill or chance. Of the Tsimshian and Mvskogee cards, not much has been written or spoken. Perhaps they functioned more as collectors’ items for outsiders. One thing is certain, Native communities already had plenty of games to play without them. The southeastern tribes were famous for their outdoor games of Chunkey since at least the twelfth century. Out in Southern California, games of Peon are still played in the spring. Among the indigenous communities of the Great Basin and the Plains, spring is the season for hand games that can still attract a crowd, and fill the air with song.
Further Reading
Virginia and Harold Wayland, Playing Cards of the Apaches: A Study in Cultural Adaptation (2006).
Lawrence Johnson, Hand Game: The Native North American Game of Power and Chance (2000) [Video]
