What native American tribes used war paint?

Answer 1

Every native American group from Alaska to the southern tip of South America used face and body paints for a variety of purposes.

Some paint served to deter mosquito bites, some was for daily wear (like modern make up used by women), some was for celebrations or religious gatherings, some was used by warriors in warfare.

Uninformed white observers often make no distinction today and call all of these "war paint", when a large proportion of face and body decoration had nothing to do with war.

In some cases it appears that many warriors in a tribe used similar paint schemes in order to help identification in battle: French observers said that the Mohawks favoured black face paint, sometimes a black rectangle covering the face, sometimes in combination with white or red. Individual or clan schemes would have been far more common.

In the case of the Thompson tribe of British Columbia, paint and tattoo schemes were recorded by British explorers. The artist George Catlin recorded face and body paint in use by a wide range of tribes in the USA.

See links below for images, but remember that many of these represent ordinary, everyday paint schemes, or religious or celebratory schemes rather than "war paint":