Speaker A
There's a knife sheath lying in a museum case right now. A strip of heavy rawhide folded over and sewn shut with sinew.
Discover the Native American knife tradition every senior should know—legal, practical, and rooted in centuries of wisdom and craftsmanship.
Key Takeaways
- Traditional Native American knives were practical tools, not weapons, carried in deep, secure sheaths.
- Modern 'fighting knives' often cause legal issues and are less practical for everyday use.
- The beaded sheath design serves as a cultural marker and legal indicator of a knife’s purpose.
- Proper knife handling and maintenance are essential for safety and legality.
- Understanding state knife laws and carrying knives as honest tools can prevent legal trouble.
What the video covers
- The video explores the traditional Native American knife and sheath design, emphasizing its practicality and cultural significance.
- It contrasts modern perceptions of knives as weapons with the historical use of knives as essential everyday tools.
- The beaded sheath design is highlighted as a key legal and cultural element that distinguishes a tool from a weapon.
- Wes Kingfisher shares knowledge derived from historical records, museum collections, and Native American traditions.
- The video explains how knives were carried safely and securely, preventing loss during physical activity like horseback riding or hunting.
- It discusses the evolution of knives from stone tools to trade steel blades popularized in the 1830s.
- The importance of proper knife care, handling, and legal awareness is stressed for modern users.
- The video promotes a respectful, non-violent approach to knife carrying, rooted in indigenous wisdom.
- Viewers are encouraged to explore a comprehensive book on Native American traditional skills and remedies.
- The video concludes with practical advice on carrying knives legally and responsibly in today’s context.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to the Traditional Knife Sheath
- 01:23Source of Knowledge and Traditional Wisdom
- 02:49Modern Knife Perceptions and Their Costs
- 04:20The Backyard Pharmacy and Native Remedies
- 05:47History of Knives and Trade Steel
- 07:26Design and Function of the Traditional Sheath
- 08:56Cultural Significance of Beadwork and Ownership
- 10:18Knife Handling, Safety, and Legal Considerations
- 12:16Carrying the Old Way in Modern Life
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Somebody covered the front of it in tiny glass beads, light blue and red and white, laid down in rows, one stitch at a time. It's deep, deep enough to swallow most of the handle of the knife that rode in it. So only the very end
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ever showed. And the knife inside was about the plainest thing you ever saw. A single-edged blade of trade steel with a handle of bone. On the plains, men and women both wore a knife like that at the belt, and it did more of the everyday
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work than nearly anything else they carried. Today, folks past 60 tend to hear one of two things about carrying a knife. Buy a big black fighting knife that looks like it belongs in a war movie, or don't carry one at all. But
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the old accounts point to a third way, and it's the plainest of the three. So stay with me to the end because that beaded sheath tells you one thing about how the old ones carried a knife. A thing hardly anybody selling knives ever
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mentions. It turns out to be one of the very things the law in a good many states still looks at when it decides whether the knife you carry is an honest tool or a crime. I'm Wes Kingfisher.
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What I bring you comes from the old accounts, the skills native peoples used on this land for thousands of years, gathered from historical records and traditional knowledge and told the way an elder would tell it. Plain, slow, and in the right order. The old
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ones knew things we've nearly forgotten. So listen close. Today's teaching comes from the knives and sheaths kept in museum collections across this country, from what the curators and historians have written down about them and where your own knife is concerned from the
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plain letter of the law. So, how did something that plain get so complicated? Somewhere along the way, carrying a knife got tangled up with being afraid.
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A lot of what sits behind the glass at the sporting goods store is sold on fear. Black blades with jagged teeth and names like fighter jets. And it usually goes one of two ways. Either you buy the scary one and it lives in a dresser
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drawer because it makes you nervous just to hold it, or you carry nothing at all.
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Then the day comes when the seat belt jams after a fender bender, or the twine on the tomato stakes won't give, or the grandbaby's new toy comes sealed in plastic. So tough it ought to be against the law. And all you've got in your
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pocket is a ring of car keys. That's the real cost. The hundred small moments when you can't help yourself. And those fighting knives carry a cost of their own. In a good many places, a knife that looks built for a fight gets treated
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like a weapon by the law, whatever you bought it for. A dagger with two edges or a blade that springs open at the push of a button raises the most questions, and in some states those are against the
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law outright. The knife the old ones carried, the one hiding in plain sight in museum cases all over this country, is about as far from a fighting knife as a knife can get. Hold that beaded sheath in your mind because what it tells you
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about carrying a knife is the part that keeps a body out of a courtroom. And we're getting there. A good knife was only one of the things the old ones carried. And so much of the rest of what
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they knew is written down plain in the Native American way. It's 101 traditional remedies, skills, and recipes from 10,000 years of native knowledge on this land, set down in order one step at a time so it doesn't get lost. The
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backyard pharmacy is in there. The plants the old ones used and exactly how the accounts say they use them. The teas and salves are in there. Wild food by season is in there and fire and shelter and clean water and the winter
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table all in one book. Set it beside a whole pharmacy aisle and a sporting goods store. And remember, it was 10,000 years in the testing. Now, go ahead and grab your phone and open up your camera, the same one you use to
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take pictures. Point it at that square code on your screen and hold it steady for a second. A little link will pop up. Give it a tap and it will take you straight to the book. And if you are
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watching on your phone right now, the link is waiting for you right down below in the description. Take your time.
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There's no rush at all. I'll wait right here. More than 11,000 years ago, people were already quarrying stone from a cliff of black volcanic glass in what's now Yellowstone National Park. The park service calls it Obsidian Cliff. And
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that black glass breaks to an edge so fine that some surgeons use obsidian blades to this day. Stone from that one cliff has turned up more than 1,500 miles away in the river valleys of Ohio.
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Nobody knows for certain how it made the trip, whether it was traded hand-to-hand or carried the whole way by folks who walked it. Think about that for a second. Long before there was a road or a wagon on this land, a good cutting
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edge was worth carrying halfway across a continent. For thousands of years, knives on this land were stone, flint, chert, and obsidian napped to an edge by hand. Then the trade steel came west.
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In the 1830s, a cutler named John Russell started turning out plain, hardworking butcher and hunting knives in Greenfield, Massachusetts, at a water-powered mill he called the Green River Works. The Green River knife became a favorite out west with the
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buffalo hunters and the settlers and the miners and with the plains peoples too. It got so popular that factories in England and Germany started stamping Green River on their own blades to cash in on the name. Here's the part I want
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you to hear. The steel came from back east and from across the ocean. The Lakota and the Cheyenne, the Crow and the Kiowa and their neighbors made those knives their own. Old trade knives from the plains turn up with
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handles of antler or with grips wrapped in rawhide, and they got a home of their own, a sheath. That sheath is where the real teaching is. The old ones could have stopped at a sharp edge. They didn't. Two different museums describe
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those old sheaths the same way. A plain sheath was usually made deep, deep enough to cover the blade and most of the handle, too. One museum's notes put it plainly. A sheath that swallowed the knife kept the blade and the handle out
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of the wet and kept the knife from falling out. Picture the life that knife lived. It rode on horseback at a dead run. It went down on hands and knees at a buffalo kill. And it spent long hours
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over a hide staked out on the ground. A knife that drops in tall prairie grass is a knife you may never see again. And the old ones built the sheath so that just about couldn't happen. The knife went in snug against stiff rawhide and
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it came out when you meant it to with a firm deliberate pull. Hold that thought because it matters for your own knife in a few minutes. By one museum's account, the oldest way was to hang the knife case from a loop around the neck.
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In time, the sheath moved to the belt, and the belt became a kind of toolbox you wore. Plains women often hung a finely beaded knife case right there alongside their other small beaded cases. One held an awl for punching
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holes in hide so it could be sewn with sinew. Another, the strike-a-light bag held flint and steel and tinder for making fire. And there's one old belt from the late 1800s made among the plains Apache. The people the old
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records call the Kiowa Apache. It carried a knife in its sheath, an awl case, a strike-a-light bag, and one more thing, a little case for a wet stone. There's a reason that wet stone rode right beside the knife, and I'll come back to it.
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There's also one detail on those old sheaths that almost everybody misses. A museum's notes on one of them point out that the beadwork designs often marked whose knife it was. Keep that in mind because we're going to come back to what
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a sheath like that was really saying. So, what was all
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Hides were trimmed with it. Raw hide was cut into thongs with it. Kindling was shaved with it. And whatever broke got mended with it. The knife was the first tool, the one that makes the other tools. You're probably nowhere near a
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buffalo kill this week. The jobs are closer than you'd think, though. There's the twine on a bail of straw or a bundle of tomato steaks, a feed sack, a box from the mail, and that plastic packaging we talked about. There's an
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apple to slice on the porch, a tag to cut off a new shirt, a frayed rope to trim down at the dock, there's a strip of cloth to cut for a sling if somebody takes a fall out in the yard, and
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there's the big one, a seat belt that won't let go after a wreck. When folks talk about a knife keeping them safe, a lot of the time that's what safe looks like, being able to help yourself and help somebody else right now without
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waiting on anybody. The old ones understood the knife that way as a tool that kept a person from being helpless.
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I'll give you the straight version on the other kind of safe too, the self-defense kind before we're done.
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First though, the knife itself and how to choose one for hands that have done a lifetime of work. So, let's choose one and let the old knife teach each part of it. The first lesson is size. Plenty of
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the old trade knives had long blades, some of them close to 8 in. They had buffalo to deal with, and you most likely don't. For you, a small folding knife with a blade under 3 in is the kind least likely to cause trouble in
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the most places, under 3 in. If you can get by with a blade under 2 and 1/2, better still. And I'll tell you exactly why before we're done. The second lesson is shape. The trade knife had one sharp
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edge and a plain back, so look for the same. Pick a blade with one edge and a flat back where your thumb can rest for control. Leave the double-edged daggers and the push button openers on the store shelf. The third lesson is the handle.
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The old ones put handles of bone and antler and rawhide on their knives, and you want a handle you can count on, too.
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Pick a handle thick enough to fill your fist without squeezing hard because your grip may not be what it was. Pick one with some texture so it won't slip when your hands are wet. And pick a light color [music] or a bright one, bone
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white or blaze orange so you can find it when it drops in the grass. The fourth lesson is opening it.
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The knives in those beaded sheets were fixed [music] blades with nothing to open at all. And that's worth thinking about if your fingers are stiff in the morning. A small fixed blade in a good sheath is ready the moment it comes out.
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And whether you can wear one where you live is a question I'll answer at the end. If you'd rather have a folder, pick one with a big thumb hole or a deep nail notch so your fingers can catch it. Make
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sure it has a lock that holds the blade open so it can't fold back on your fingers in the middle of a cut. Opening it with two hands is just fine. Slower is safer. The fifth lesson is the
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sheath. And here's where that snug rawhide comes back. Your sheath or your pocket [music] clip should hold the knife just as tight. It shouldn't fall out when you bend over in the yard, slide into the car, or kneel down to
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pull a weed. And it should come out only when you mean it to with a firm, deliberate pull. The last lesson is the price. Those trade knives were plain everyday working blades made by the thousands. And a plain everyday working
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knife is all you need, too. So that's a small blade under 3 in with one plain edge and a flat back. Add a handle that fills your hand and shows up in the grass. A lock that holds or a fixed
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blade with nothing to open and a sheath or clip that holds it snug and none of it costs much. Back to that little wetstone case on the plain's Apache belt. It rode beside the knife for a good reason. A dull knife is the
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dangerous one. A dull blade makes you push harder. And a knife that's being pushed hard is the one that slips and finds your hand. So, a sharp knife is a safer knife. And keeping it sharp is easier than you'd think. You don't need
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a wet stone on your belt. Keep one in a drawer and touch up the edge whenever the knife starts to drag.
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Let's do it one step at a time and take your time with it. There's no rush. Set the stone on a folded towel so it won't slide. Put a little water on the stone or a few drops of oil if it's an oil
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stone. Lay the blade flat on the stone. Now lift the back of the blade until it sits about 20° off the stone. That's a little less than a quarter of the way up from lying flat. 20°. Push the blade
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across the stone edge first like you're shaving a thin slice off the top. Do that 10 times. Turn the knife over and do 10 on the other side. 10 and 10.
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Then do five and five. Finish with a few light strokes on each side. Wipe the blade clean and [music] dry. To test it, hold up a sheet of paper and slice down into the edge of it. If it cuts clean,
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you're done. If it snags or tears, go back to the stone for a few more strokes. So that's the towel, the water or the oil. 20°, 10 and 10, five and five. A few light strokes, then wipe it
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and test it on paper. The old knife comes with a few rules of its own, too.
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Always cut away from your body. Keep the hand that holds the work behind the edge, never in front of it. Close the knife or sheath it before you walk anywhere. And if you ever drop a knife, let it fall. Step back and let it hit
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the ground. Never try to catch a falling knife. Let it fall. Now, the self-defense part. I promised you the straight version, so here it is. Told plane. First, some good news. The federal government's own crime surveys have have shown for decades. Folks 65
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and older are the least likely of any aged group to be the victim of a violent crime. Least likely isn't never, and I won't pretend otherwise. Still, it's worth remembering the next time a commercial tries to scare you into
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buying something. Second, the law. In most places, a knife used on a person counts as deadly force. The same as a gun. Deadly force is only allowed when you honestly and reasonably believe you're about to be killed or badly hurt
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right then. And some states expect you to get away first if you safely can.
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Anything short of that and you're the one in trouble. Third, and this one surprises people. In a good many states, pulling a knife out to scare somebody off when your life isn't truly in danger is a crime. all by itself, even if you
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never touch anybody. California calls it brandishing. So, the knife stays where it is unless there's truly no other way. And I [music] won't teach anybody to fight with a knife. The old accounts aren't for that. And a knife fight is a thing nobody walks away
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from clean. Least of all somebody whose knees complain getting out of a chair. If you want something from the old ways for this park, take the habit every hunter on the plains live by paying attention, seeing trouble while it's
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still a long way off. So, park under a light, walk with your keys already in your hand and your phone where you can reach it. Look up from the phone and look around. A sturdy walking stick is lawful nearly everywhere. It steadies
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you on a bad day and it keeps some distance between you and anybody who crowds you. And if somebody wants your wallet or your purse, hand it over.
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Things can be replaced. You can't. That's the honest truth about a knife in self-defense. It's a last resort the law watches closely. And for most folks, the day a knife really matters is the day the seat belt jams. Which brings us back
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to that beaded sheath and what it was saying all along. A sheath covered in beads was not made to hide a knife, but to show one. It rode on the belt in plain sight, and the bead work on it
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often told folks whose knife it was. One museum describes cases like these as factory steel wrapped in something deeply personal. Everybody in camp knew you carried it and everybody knew what it was for. Now, here's why that matters
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to you. Whether a knife is hidden or out where people can see it is one of the questions knife laws keep coming back to. And the answer flips depending on where you live. In California, state law says a knife in a sheath worn
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openly hanging from the waist is not concealed. Hide that same fixed blade under your coat and you can be charged with carrying a concealed derk or dagger [music] which can be a felony there. Go to New York City though and it's the
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other way around. there. Wearing any knife in open view on a public street is against city law unless you're actually using it for work or for something like fishing or camping.
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And a blade 4 in or longer is against the law there no matter how you carry it. So the same knife worn the same honest way can be lawful under California state law and against the law on a sidewalk in Brooklyn and even
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inside California. Some cities add rules of their own. That's why nobody can honestly promise you a knife is legal everywhere.
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So carry the old way into your own life. Look up your state's knife law and your [music] towns before you put a knife on.
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Your county sheriff's office or your city hall can tell you. Then carry it the way your law allows. Whether that means in plain sight on your belt or out of sight in your pocket. Remember that 2 and 1/2 in I mentioned?
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That's the line the federal weapons law draws for a pocketk knife in a federal building. And it's one more reason a little blade is the easy choice.
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Even so, plenty of courouses won't let a knife pass the door, and neither will a school. So, anywhere there's a metal detector at the door, leave the knife at home. And if you're flying, the knife goes [music] in your check bag, in its
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sheath, or wrapped up tight. Never in your carry-on, not even a small one. And there's one last thing that sheath teaches. That knife was a tool used all day long and everybody could see it was a tool. Some laws look hard at what a
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knife is carried for. In New York, carrying a dangerous knife with the intent to use it unlawfully against somebody is a crime all by itself. So carry yours is what it is, a working tool, and use it like one every day for
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the hundred small jobs the way the old ones did. A tool worn honestly, kept sharp, and ready for the work. That's what the beaded sheath was saying all along. It's the Native American way of carrying a knife, and it still works.
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And a great deal more of what the old ones knew is set down plain in the Native American way so it doesn't get lost. Now go ahead and grab your phone and open up your camera, the same one
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you use to take pictures. Point it at that square code on your screen and hold it steady for a second. A little link will pop up. Give it a tap and it will take you straight to the book. And if
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you are watching on your phone right now, the link is waiting for you right down below in the description. Take your time. There is no rush at all. I'll wait right here.
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So, there it is. The plain knife of the plains deep in its sheath, kept sharp on the stone, and carried the honest way your own law allows. Tell me in the comments what knife the folks who raised you used to carry. That's exactly the
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kind of thing that gets lost when nobody asks. I read every single one. Next time I'll show you the crooked knife, the bent little blade, the CRE, and the other northern woodland peoples drew toward their own chest to carve canoe
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ribs and snowshoe frames. And I'll show you why pulling a blade toward yourself, the very thing your mother warned you never to do, was exactly right for that one knife.
Topics:Native American knifeself-defense knifelegal knife carrytraditional knife sheathWes Kingfisherknife safetyknife historytrade steel knifeNative American cultureknife law
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