All about the ancient tribes
Did all Native American societies live in teepees?
Tipis are cone-shaped dwellings that many Plains Indigenous peoples used to live in until the mid-1800s.
Tipis still do make sense for glampers, reenactors and the like. But no one, including Native Americans from the plains region —- the only place Indians lived in tipis —- lives in tipis today. And they haven’t in a long time, Mann says. You, too, can own a tipi.
The tepee was an ideal home because it held up to the hot weather in the summer and the cool weather in the winter. The tepee was also very durable to the extreme winds which blew across the Plains from the west. Native Americans used their structures such as tipis (also spelled teepees or tepee) for many purposes.
The Cherokee never lived in tipis. Only the nomadic Plains Indians did so. The Cherokee were southeastern woodland Indians, and in the winter they lived in houses made of woven saplings, plastered with mud and roofed with poplar bark. In the summer they lived in open-air dwellings roofed with bark.
A tipi is distinguished from other conical tents by the smoke flaps at the top of the structure. The tipi is durable, provides warmth and comfort in winter, is cool in the heat of summer, and is dry during heavy rains.
Teepees were useful for tribes were moved a lot because they could easily be taken apart. They were usually used by the Iroquois tribes. As their name suggests, they were long—they could be 200 feet long and twenty feet wide.
Walking between the fire and any seated person was offensive. Everyone walked behind people seated by the fire. Bird reported that tepees were comfortably warm in winter and cool in summer when the lower part of the tepee was rolled up to allow the breeze to flow through.
Wigwams are used by Native Americans of the American Northeast; tipis are used by the Native Americans of the Great Plains. Wigwams are more permanent structures. They are made of a wooden frame, and the roofing material varies from grass, rushes, brush, reeds, bark, cloth, hides of animals, mats, etc.
There are no teepees on the Navajo Nation. The traditional dwelling is an eight-sided log structure with an earthen roof. The Navajo Code Talkers are national heroes. More than 400 Navajo Marines contributed to a wartime code that confounded the Japanese during World War II.
By the 19th century, White American settlers had classified the Cherokee of the Southeast as one of the “Five Civilized Tribes” in the region. They were agrarian, lived in permanent villages, and had begun to adopt some cultural and technological practices of the white settlers.
They were farming people and had been farming people for more than a thousand years. They did not live in teepees, but had permanent villages with substantial houses. At the time of their removal, the Cherokee had a higher literacy rate than the non-Indian Americans.