My husband's Crow, so I'm going to have to ask him a lot of questions and come back to this thread after. I especially want to ask him about that painting of the "Crow Chief", as it doesn't look very much at all like the photographs I've seen of Crow elders and warriors.
My husband has thick, black, coarse hair with a bit of a wave to it. He was probably 1c when longer, possibly 2a. Before I knew him he'd grown it to somewhere between TBL and Classic, but he'd cut it off by the time I met him.
All his girl cousins were jealous of his hair.
I can't say much about other tribes, but in Crow culture only your parents and immediate siblings and spouse are allowed to touch your hair. If anyone else does it's considered a sexual advance. I think this idea is slowly fading away, but in my husband's generation it's still quite prominent.
In the Crow tradition, boys and men wore 3 braids and girls and women wore 2. Boys and men had the crown hair sectioned off into one braid, and then the hair beneath that is divided in half and braided into two more braids. Women parted their hair down the middle and braided each half. They still follow this when they dress in traditional regalia at powwows. (If you want to see pictures of powwows, Google "Crow Fair" and you should get some good ones. Crow Fair is a huge powwow that happens practically in our backyard every August.) Hair was (and sometimes still is) cut as a sign of mourning. My husband cut his long hair off when his grandmother died.
Nowadays, and especially in the current generations younger than the age of 30, the old traditions are falling away or nearly lost. There are a few families that still follow more traditional ways as best they can, and there are others who reject the old traditions completely. And then there are some who do a little bit of both. The language is dying, and with it a lot of the other things, like hair practices. The only thing my husband knows about pre-conquest haircare is that the women used to boil some part of the Yucca plant and wash their hair with it. It lathered up just like shampoo.
The most persistent hair traditions that I see, at least with the Crow who live on the reservation, is that hair is still important, though the care of it has changed. Little girls are used to having their hair yanked into super tight braids for most of their younger years. Some little boys still are given the traditional 3 braids, but they're getting fewer and fewer, and unless they're dressed in superhero clothes or camouflage or something else "manly", outsiders mistake them for girls. I see more and more young girls with their hair loose. Some of them still have it quite long, but it's often unkempt. The older girls have switched from super long lengths to hopelessly fried and flatironed shorter styles. It's not universal, but it's the most common. My husband's older sisters grow their hair out long (classic-ish) and then cut back to shoulder/APL-ish. Two of them have very curly hair, and they don't really know what to do with it, so it just hangs there. There seems to be one sort of universal bun the longer-haired women do that involves scrunchies or claw clips, and that's it. The only "growing out" method they use when growing hair is to take prenatal vitamins, which usually they can get from a relative who is or was recently pregnant and who got them for free from the IHS (Indian Health Service). When I first moved here and wanted to grow my hair, my husband asked a couple of his pregnant cousins to get prenatals for me that way. And they did. I honestly don't know if it's helped or not, but I've taken them on and off ever since, as I tend to be slightly low on iron anyway.
One nice thing is that, even though a lot of ladies here don't grow their hair to extreme lengths anymore, they still admire very long hair and think of it as a cool accessory rather than some weird crazy hippie thing or something. It probably also doesn't hurt that we have a Hutterite community living nearby (on the reservation since no one bothers them here) and also a lot of Pentecostals just off-Rez, some of whom have fairly extreme lengths. I know of one Crow woman who has hair at about Knee length, but she's in some sort of feud with one of my sister-in-laws, so I doubt I could get any friendly tips from her. Around here, if someone doesn't like you, then by extension their whole family hates your whole family. And families are big.
I feel like I'm rambling. Been up a bit too long. This is a cool thread, though. I wish I had something more useful to contribute.
Re: Native American hair
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Originally Posted by Dragon Faery
My husband's Crow, so I'm going to have to ask him a lot of questions and come back to this thread after. I especially want to ask him about that painting of the "Crow Chief", as it doesn't look very much at all like the photographs I've seen of Crow elders and warriors.
Lady Móreadhiel, Whisperer and Guardian to the Creatures of Silence in the Order of the Long Haired Knights.
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