Teepee
Tipi is the name of a tent used by the North American Indians .
etymology
The word is made up of the following Lakota words:
- thí = live, dwell, stay, dwell
- -pi = plural marker for verbs
Thípi literally means "they live (there)". In today's Lakota parlance, “thípi” means “house”, while “thiíkčeya” stands for the traditional tipi.
Alternative spellings in English are teepee and tepee .
The Absarokee Indians (also known as Crow) called the rest of the volcanic cone that makes up the Devils Tower National Monument , Mateo Tepee , in English: Home of the Grizzly Bear . With the Lakota it is called Mato Tipila with the same meaning.
construction
A tipi consists of a frame made of poles (thin trunks of conifers) and a semicircular tarpaulin. The tarpaulin is placed over the frame, overlapped on the front and put together with small wooden sticks. This results in the typical cone shape. The tarpaulin used to be made of bison leather . Since the bison was almost extinct and the Indians were locked up in reservations , the tipiplane has been made of solid material (canvas).
Tipis have an almost circular base, 3 to 7 m in diameter. In the middle of the tent is a fire pit and the rest of the floor is covered with tarpaulin and fur . Tipis have been almost entirely painted with natural colors , e.g. B. from berries, painted and decorated and thus also indicated the rank in the trunk.
At the front of the tipi there is a smoke opening with two smoke flaps above the entrance, which are held in place from behind with two poles. With these rods, the smoke flaps are aligned depending on the wind direction so that the smoke can escape from the fireplace inside. Because the tarpaulin does not reach all the way to the floor, but ends approx. 10 cm above it, a chimney effect sets in and the smoke can escape. The tarpaulin is anchored to the ground with pegs, which means that it is taut and can withstand even gusty winds.
Inside the tipi there is often a so-called lining (lining, lining). This is tied to the inside of the poles and extends from the floor to a height of around 1.5 m. It mainly serves as a windbreak. Lining tipis are warmer and drier, the fire burns more evenly, and less ashes are raised. In addition, the shadow outlines of the people cannot be seen from the outside.
Before tipis were guyed with pegs, the leather tarpaulin reached down to the ground and was weighed down by stones. Tens of thousands of stone circles that were created in this way can be detected in the Great Plains to this day. However, they need to be distinguished from the more complex and larger Medicine Wheels of the Northern Plains. For the Absarokee ( Crow Indians) the word Biiakashissihipee denotes the mythical prehistory of the people, literally it means "when we used stones to weigh down our tents". They have a legend about a mythical being named Unwatisse who brought them the stakes and thus ushered in a change of epoch.
use
Tipis were mainly used by the nomadic ethnic groups of the prairies and plains because the tents could be set up and taken down very quickly. A family lived in a tipi; H. up to six or seven people.
Today, Indians mostly only use tipis as additional living space for guests or at parties such as Powwows .
Today, tipis are manufactured industrially in many countries around the world and also marketed for non-Indian buyers.
The tipi at the Chancellery in Berlin, a theater for chansons, cabarets, concerts or musicals that appears in a stationary tent, was named after the North American model because of the shape of the tent.
literature
- Silvia McIntosh: A Complete Guide to Making a Tipi , Green Force, ISBN 978-3-922708-41-4
See also
Web links
- THE TIPI OF GREAT PLAINS by Erich Lehner
- Construction plan ( Memento of 24 May 2006 at the Internet Archive ) (Engl.)
Individual evidence
- ↑ National Park Service: First Stories (accessed June 17, 2019)
- ↑ Laura L. Scheiber; Judson Byrd Finley: Domestic campsites and cyber landscapes in the Rocky Mountains . In: Antiquity, Vol 84 (2010), pages 114-130
- ↑ Example: famwest.de. Retrieved September 1, 2019 .