This is a mid-19th century North American painting entitled _Indian Women Playing the Game of Plum Stones_, and testifies to the ubiquitous practice of dice gambling that American Indian women played in pre-colonial times.
As evidence summarized by Warren DeBoer suggests, gambling was a pastime that American Indian women seemed to have enjoyed across the continent, from very early times. Gray Bull of the Crow peoples of the Plains, told a white observer in 1883 that “the women always went off by themselves in playing [the dice games], and he himself does not understand it though he had lived with the Crow women all his life”.
Lots of materials were used for the dice games, such as beaver teeth and shells, but plumstones — with one side of each stone burned or otherwise distinguished — were the most popular. Often they would be tossed in wood bowls, but the number of markers and the rules of the games varied.
The games could be rowdy affairs, as Roger Williams remarked about the Massachuset Indians in 1634: “They have a kinde of Dice which are Plum stones painted, which they cast in a Tray, with a mighty noyse and sweating . . . “.
Besides the inherently interesting ways that women’s activities have shaped the culture of American Indians, the dice games also suggest that we look at how these indigenous peoples might have exchanged goods for reasons outside of the usual suspects: commercial transactions or religious purposes. As DeBoer argues, a lot of goods made their way around North America, traded through gambling games.
P.s. men gambled with dice too, but the evidence shows mostly women
Sources: Painting by Seth Eastman, 1853. “Of dice and women: gambling and exchange in Native North America,” Warren R. DeBoer, _Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory_, Sept 2001, vol 8, no 3, pp. 215-268.
