In these and many other Native American cultures, having many wives could give a leader ties to other nearby groups, as well as a wealthier and higher-status household. Polygamy also allowed cultures in which captive-taking was common to integrate women and children from rival groups into a household.
Plural marriage was somewhere between an exception and a rule among Plains Indian tribes. Plenty of chiefs and warriors, such as the respected Lakota leader Red Cloud, had one wife. Many had two or three, and some had as many as seven.
In the early 1830s, Smith extended this view of the role of men to include polygamy as it was practiced by Old Testament prophets like Abraham. Smith taught that a righteous man could help numerous women and children go to heaven by being “sealed” in plural marriage.
Humans are a diverse lot, but before Western imperialism, 83 percent of indigenous societies were polygynous, 16 percent monogamous, and 1 percent polyandrous (where women have multiple husbands).
Sometimes the second or third wife would be a two-spirit, a man who had taken a woman's role. Polyandry-the marriage of one woman to more than one man at the same time-was common among many American Indian cultures, but tended to be unseen by the patriarchic-oriented Europeans.
Today it is illegal in India amongst Hindus. As for a Hindu or a person who practices Hinduism, polygamy is both prohibited and illegal. Both under the Indian Law and as per the Hindu Marriage Act. Now, it's illegal for a Hindu to marry more than one person or keeping two spouses at the same time.
In comparison, in the 1800s the average age of a male Choctaw at marriage was 25 and the average age of his bride was 23, while the Blackfoot female married at age 10 to 16, but Blackfoot men didn't marry until they were at least 35.
Many indigenous communities recognize at least four genders (feminine female, masculine female, feminine male, masculine male), and most indigenous communities and tribes have specific terms for sexual and gender fluid members. The Two-Spirit tradition is primarily a question of gender, not sexual orientation.
In essence, men are only socially monogamous rather than genetically monogamous.
Scientists at University College London believe monogamy emerged so males could protect their infants from other males in ancestral groups who may kill them in order to mate with their mothers.
Polygamy is most often found in sub-Saharan Africa, where 11% of the population lives in arrangements that include more than one spouse. Polygamy is widespread in a cluster of countries in West and Central Africa, including Burkina Faso, (36%), Mali (34%) and Nigeria (28%).
(“Bigamy” is the act of marrying someone while still legally married to another person, and it is usually the term used in laws against plural marriage. Polygamy is illegal because bigamy is. The words “bigamy” and “polygamy”—and their derivatives—are sometimes used interchangeably.)
Why did some early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practice polygamy? Some leaders and members of the Church practiced polygamy during the mid 1800s because they were commanded by God to do so. So marriage then between one man to several women was according to God's will.
The typical Native American family had around three to four children. This was small compared to the average European family at the time, which typically had around six or seven children.
Legal developments
Thus polygamy became illegal in India in 1956, uniformly for all of its citizens except for Muslims, who are permitted to have four wives and for Hindus in Goa and along the western coast where bigamy is legal. A polygamous Hindu marriage is null and void.
Cousin marriage was historically practiced by indigenous cultures in Australia, North America, South America, and Polynesia.
Monogamy in humans is beneficial because it increases the chances of raising offspring, but it is actually very rare in mammals – less than 10 per cent of mammal species are monogamous, compared with 90 per cent of bird species. Even in primates, where it is more common, only about a quarter of species are monogamous.
For humans, monogamy is not biologically ordained. According to evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss of the University of Texas at Austin, humans are in general innately inclined toward nonmonogamy. But, Buss argues, promiscuity is not a universal phenomenon; lifelong relationships can and do work for many people.
"In the case of polygamy, there is a universal standard – it is understood to be a sin, therefore polygamists are not admitted to positions of leadership including Holy Orders, nor after acceptance of the Gospel can a convert take another wife, nor, in some areas, are they admitted to Holy Communion."
As a result, Native peoples have some of the lowest documented condom use rates. However, innovations in culturally integrating condoms and safe sex messages into Native cultural ideals are proving beneficial.
In most colonial texts squaw was used as a general word for Indigenous women.
At the point of contact, all Native American societies acknowledged three to five gender roles: Female, male, Two Spirit female, Two Spirit male and transgendered.
North American inhabitants have a history of divorce which is very similar among both Indian and non-Indian populations. While the procedures of divorce differ, the grounds for divorce remain basically similar.
A divorce among common married people could be obtained in cases of mere “disagreement.” Because daily labor was divided between the sexes and every adult needed at least one opposite-sex partner to get all the work done, marriage was encouraged among the Indians as a means of survival.
Not surprisingly, given the stringent and ethnocentric prerequisites to intermarriage imposed by the Europeans, few marriages between settlers and Indians occurred in the seventeenth century. Yet liaisons between European men and Indian women were not uncommon.