HOW DID INDIANS SHAVE?

It’s All in the Genes

As it turns out, most Native Americans didn’t really need to shave. That’s because genetically they are not predisposed to growing thick hair, unlike Europeans. Whatever sparse hair that grew on their faces, they plucked it out because it was an inconvenient thing for them.

It was also frowned upon in Native American society. At the time of Old World contact, it was considered a sign of being uncivilized and unintelligent. So you can just imagine what they thought about the shaggy Spanish conquistadores when they first saw them shambling on to their shores from big wooden, leaking ships.
So, did Native Americans Shave?

In general, Native Americans plucked their facial hairs and eyebrows, rather than shaving them, because they were sparse and soft to begin with.

They used tweezers made of wood or pinchers made from the shell of a freshwater mussel. The shell was an ideal tweezer because it had a natural spring hinge. It could be held easily in one hand and its sharp lips would cut into the hair at its roots so that it can be pulled off easily.

In instances where the hair on the scalp needed to be shaved off, Indians used obsidian flakes. An obsidian is a type of hard, glasslike volcanic rock that is used by Indians as knives. These are very sharp and cut with great efficiency. However, when they become dull through constant use, they cannot be resharpened. Instead, the Native Americans recycled them into smaller arrowheads.

Of Beards and Conquest

Growing a beard in a culture which valued facial grooming as a measure of social standing would have also affected his attitude during his First contact expeditions. In fact, we happened upon an interesting academic paper of how beard culture has helped explorers like Columbus conquer the Americas.

Alex Kerner, in his paper Beard and Conquest: the Role of Hair in the Construction of Gendered Spanish Attitudes towards the American Indians in the Sixteenth Century, said that the absence of beards among Native Americans gave the conquistadores a sense of superiority that ultimately fueled their perception of the natives as beings that could legitimately be subdued.

He wrote that:

“The reference to hair is sometimes made in conjunction with or right next to a description of what in the view of the Christians, was the natives’ low moral standards, as if the natives’ different attitude to hair also expressed their lack of virtue, their non-observance of moral codes pertaining to sex, and even worse, as an expression of the male natives’ natural tendency towards homosexuality.”
Christopher Columbus

Apparently, for Columbus and his ilk, the general absence of facial hair among Native Americans showed their weakness as a race because he thought it characterized submissiveness and inferiority. His European beard, meanwhile, gave him moral superiority and the license to subdue just about everyone in the New World.

But did the Native Americans really preferred clean faces? Perhaps they were more like Egyptians who shaved frequently because they did not think that having facial hair was hygienic.