While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Flathead. A name applied to several different tribes
usually owing to the fact that they were accustomed to flatten the heads of
their children artificially. In s. E. United States the Catawba and Choctaw were
sometimes designated by the term Flatheads, and the custom extended to nearly
all Muskhogean tribes as well as to the Natchez and the Tonika. In the N. W. the
Chinook of Columbia r., many of the Vancouver id. Indians, and most of the
Salish of Puget sd. and British Columbia were addicted to the practice, and the
term has been applied to all as a body and to some of the separate divisions.
Curiously enough, the people now known in official reports as Flat-heads the
Salish proper (q. v. ) never flattened the head. Dawson implies (Trans. Roy.
Soc. Can. for 1891, sec. u, 6) that they were so named (Têtes-Plates)
by the first Canadian voyageurs because slaves from the coast with deformed
heads were among them. For the names of the tribes to which the term has been
applied, see Flatheads in the index; consult also Artificial head deformation.
(J. R. S.) See
Flathead Indian Allotments in Montana 1889
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Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Frederick Webb Hodge, 1906