Great Father and Great Mother

[1] First Nations peoples and Native Americans most often organized themselves by clan and family; ties of kinship were considered central to intertribal relations and the understanding of tribal political power.

David Laird invoked the phrase while explaining Treaty 7 to the Blackfoot:[3] "The Great Spirit has made all things—the sun, the moon, and the stars, the earth, the forest, and the swift running rivers.

[4] In the United States, the primacy of the Great Father was promoted through elaborate displays of military pageantry, the use of mystical language to describe the far-removed President, and the distribution of "peace medals" bearing the portrait of the sitting head of state (giving gifts, such as peace medals, further reinforced the paternal nature of the relationship as gift giving, in many Native cultures, was typically reserved for parent-child interaction).

As in Canada, Native peoples were referred to as the "children" of the Great Father; so intense was the myth created surrounding him that chiefs brought to Washington, D.C. to meet the President often manifested symptoms of terror prior to an audience.

"On occasions when territory would pass from the influence of one Western nation to another, the new power might refer to the former Great Father in past-tense, as when William Henry Harrison addressed the Shawnee, declaring that "my children, let us look back to times that are past.