Acoma
Acoma is, along with the Hopi towm of Oraibi, the oldest inhabited settletment in the United States; it is already established when the Spaniards first saw it in 1540. The ancient pueblo, known as the Sky City, is spectacularly situated like a medieval fortress atop its 600-foot-high rock, half way between Gallup and Albuquerque in New Mexico. In the midst of the village stands the seventeenth-century Church of San Esteban with its wonderful polychrome altar, one of the great architectural treasures of the Southwest.
Aleuts
The Aleuts' name derives from the Chukchi word aliat, meaning "island" or "islander." They call themselves Unung'un, the People. The Aleuts are a branch of the Inuit family, with whom they share common ancestors and also vocabulary. They occupy the chain of islands forming the "bridge" between Siberia and Alaska over which men first came to the Western Hemisphere tens of thousands of years ago. The Aleuts fish and hunt in kayaks.
Algonquian
The Algonquians {or Algonkins}, are possibly the larest group of linguistically related tribes in North America, scattered over the whole continent from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains. They include the Algonkik of Ottawa proper, the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ojibway, Sac and Fox, Pottawatomi, Illinois, Miami, Kickapoo, and Shawnee. However, if an Indian legend is said to be of Algonkin origin, it generally means that it comes from an East Coast tribe, such as Pequod, Mohegan, Delaware, Abnaki, or Micmac.
Alsea
The Alsae were a small tribe of Yakonan Indians from western Oregon. Once numerous, by 1906 they were reduced to almost a dozen individuals who took refuge among the Siletz tribe, which has since disappeared also. Their vestiges have been absorbed by a number of other Oregon tribes.
Apache
The name Apache comes from the Zuni word apachu, meaning "enemy." Their own name for themselves is N'de or Dineh, the People. In the early 1500s, a group of Athapascan-speaking people drifted down from their original home in western Canada into what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and the four-corners area. They were split into smaller tribes and bands, including the Lipan, the Jicarilla {from the Spanish for "little basket," refering to their pitch-lined drinking cups}, Chiricahua, Tonto, Mescalero, and White Mountain Apaches.
The Apache were a nomadic people and lived in conical brush shelters {wickups} to which they often attened a ramada-four upright poles roofed over with branches. They hunted and gathered wild plants; much later they also began to plant corn and squash. They usally dressed in deerskin and wore their hair long and loose, held by a headband. Men also wore long, flapping breachcloths. Their soft, thigh-high moccasins were important in a land of chaparral, thorns and cacti, since they were primarily runners of incredible stamina rather than riders {though they acquired horses early and were excellent horsemen}. Their main weapon was the bow, and it was used long after they had guns.
Apache women wove particularly striking baskets, some made so tightly that a needle could not be inserted between their coils. They carried their babies on cradleboards. Women played an important role in family affairs; they could own property and become medicine women.
The Lipan Apache at first kept peace with the whites, whom they encountered in the sixteenth century. Fierce nomadic riders, the Lipans roamed west Texas and much of New Mexico east of the Rio Grande, and eventually became the scourge of miners and settlers, particularly in Mexico. Their great chiefs included Cochise and Mangus Colorado, as well as Goyathlay, the One Who Yawns, better know as Geronimo. Apache attacks on whites were not unprovoked, for those tribes had often been victims of treachery, broken agreements, and massacres by white Americans and Mexicans. They were not finally subdued until the 1880s.
The Jicarillas now numbering 1,500 to 2,000, live on a 750,000-acre resevation high in the mountain of northern New Mexico. The White Mountain Apaches {also called Sierra Blancas or Coyoteros} lived in Arizona and New Mexico, including about 6,000 on the 1,600,000-acre Fort Apache Resevation in Arizona. In 1905, there were only 25 Lipan surivors left, and they were eventually placed on the Mescalero Apache Reservation.
Athapascan
Athapascan refers to a language group, and it represents the most far-flung of the original North American tongues. The Athapascan dialects or related languages are spoken by people in the interior of what is now Alsaka,on the western coast of Canada among some tribes in northern Califonia, and by the Navajo and Apache and New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah.
Blackfoot
The Blackfoot people were realy three closely allied Algonquian tribes-the Siksikas, or Blackfoot proper; the Bloods; and the Piegans. Siksikas means Blackfooted People, and they may at one time have worn black moccasins. The Bloods probably got their name from the vermilion color of their face paint. Piegan means People with Poor or Badly Dressed Robes.
Those tribes drifted down from Canada into what is now Montana, driving the Kootenay and Shoshoni before them. They were much feared by early white trappers and fur traders, because they killed all white men wh entered their
hunting grounds in search of beaver. Though they inhabited the norhtern edge of the buffalo range, the Blackfoot tribes lived in tipis an hunted bison like other Plains indians.
The Piegans' main ceremonials were the sun dance and the All Comrades festival held by the warrior societies.
About 7,000 Blackfoot, 2,100 Piegan, and 2,000 Bloods now live on the Blackfoot reservation at Browning, Montana, at the southern edge of Glacier National Park, and some have joined the Piegan Agency in Alberta, Canada,
Blood
[see Blackfoot]
Brule Sioux
The Brules belong to the Oceti Shakowin-the seven council fires of the Lakota or Teton-wan, the seven Western Sioux tribes. Their name comes from the French word brule'-"burned." The Bules are very traditional people, maintaining their old customs and rituals, including the sun dance, flesh offerings, the sweat-lodge ceremony, the vision quest, and the so-called yuwipi ceremonies. Many Brukes belong to the Native American Church, which follows the peyote cult. Today they occupy Rosebud, a large reservation in soutwestern South Dakota.
Caddo
The Caddo belonged to a confederacy of tribes of the Caddoan language family, whose southern members were the Caddo proper, the Wichita, and the Kichai. Its norhtern representatives were the Arikara and Pawnees. Mostly sedentary planters, the Caddo, as well as the Wichita, lived in large dome-shaped, thached grass huts, which were first mentioned by members of Coronado's expedition. Caddoans were once scattered thoughout Oklahoma, the Red River area of Arkansas, and northern Texas. About 500 surviving Caddos were eventually settled with the Wichitas in Indian Territory {now Oklahoma}
Cherokee
The name Cherokee comes from chilok-ki, the Choctaw word meaning Cave People. The Cherokee are one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, a term which first occurs 1876 in reports of the Indian Office; these tribes had their own constitutional governments, modeled on that of the United States, the expenses of which were paied out of thrir own communal funds. They also farmed after the manner of their white neighbors.
Wealth and fertil land were the Cherokees' undoing. Under the "Indian removal" policy of Andrew Jackson and Van Buren, troops commanded by General Winfield Scott droved the Indians out of their ancestral lands so that white settlers could occupy them. Herded into the so-called Indian Teritory west of the Mississippi, one third of those removed perished on the march, remembered by them as the infamous Trail of Tears.
Most Cherokees now live in Oklahoma, though a small number managed to stay behind. Their population has increased to about 7,000 people, living on about 56,600 acres on the Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina.
Cheyenne
The name Cheyenne derives from the French chien, "dog," because of their ritual dog eating. The Cheyenne call themselves Tis-Tsis-Tas, the People. They are an Algonquian Plains tribe that came to the prairies from the Great Lakes region some two to three hunderd years ago. They were closely allied with the Western Sioux tribs and fought with them at the Little Bighorn against Custer. Forced after the last battles into a malaria-infested part of the Indian Territory, one group under Dull Knife and Little Wolf made a heroic march back to their old hunting grounds, eventually settling on the Lame Deer Reservation in Montana. Another part of ther tribe, remained in Oklahoma.
Chinook
The Chinook lived near the Columbia River in what in now Washington state. They were met and described by Lewis and Clark in 1805, and their trade jargon or lingua franca was widely used thoughout the Northwest. Such words as "potlatch" and "hooch" are derived from it.
Cochiti
Cochiti is a Keresan-speaking pueblo situated on the Rio Grande south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Cochiti moved to their present reservation from their original home in Frijoles Canyon, now Bandelier National Monument, in New Mexico, and ruins of their old villages can be found on nearby Cochiti Mesa. the population in 1970 was around 500.
Farming, jewelry making, and pottery making are imprtant economic activities. Cochiti is the home of Helen Cordero, the internationally known ceramist, whose pottery group called "Stotyteller," a jolly ceramic figure surrounded by clinging children, is prized by collectors and widely imitated.
Coos
The Coos tribe, for whom Coos Bay in Oregon was named, are now almost entirely assimilated into the surrounding culture. They once occupied the Pacific coastal lands of Oregon.
Cree
The Cree Indians, and Algonquian tribe sometimes called Knisteneau, were essentially forest people, though an offshoot, the so-called Plains Cree, were buffalo hunters. They live mostley in Canada, but a few are now sharing reservations with other tribes in North Dakota. They were first encountered by French Jesuits in 1640, lost their people in a smallpox epidemic in 1776, fought many battles with the Sioux, and suffered a great defeat at the hands of the Blackfeet in 1870.
The Cree lived by hunting, fishing, and trapping. Muskrat meat was one of their staples. According to Denig, who lived among them in the 1850s, they made sacrifices to the sun, the Great Master of Life.
Crow
The Crow were a typical Plains tribe of hard-riding buffalo hunters. They split off from the Hidatsa tribe at some time during the second half of the eighteenth century, some say over a quarrel about buffalo meat; others say as a result of rivalry between two cheifs. The Crow later divided into two bands: the River and the Mountain Crows.
Once semisedentary corn planters who lived in earth huts and whose women practiced the art of pottery, the Crow already reverted to a nomadic hunting people when they were first encountered by whites. This change probably resulted from their acquisition of the horse and the gun, both of which made the nomadic way of life easy and glorious. Like other Indians of the Plains, they lived in tipis; reputedly, theirs were the largest of all the tribes. They were fierce fighters and skilled at the universal sport of intertribal horse stealing. The Crows were generally friendly to the whites and furnished scouts for the Indian-fighting army.
The Crows now live on their reservation in Montana, not far from the Custer Battlefield.
Dieguenos
[see Yuma]
Flatheads
The Flatheads are a Salishan tribe encountered by Lewis an Clark in 1805. Their ancestral home was the Bitterroot Valley in Montana, where they were absorbed by the related Salish and Kootenay tribes. Though they lived on the edge of Plains Indian culture, the paintings of Father Nicolas Point, who was in charge of their Catholic mission in the 1840s, show them dressed and hunting bullalo like typical Plains Indians, except that some men wear stovepipe hats bestowed upon them by whites. Contrary to popular belief, the Flatheads did not artificially flatten their foreheads.
Haida
The Haida {Xa'ida-the People} live on Queen Charlotte Island off the coast of British Columbia. The first European to visit them was Juan Perez, who arrived in 1774 in the Spanish corvette Santiago, Followed in 1786 by the famous French explorer La Perouse. Contact with Europeans, as usual in most cases, was catastrophic for the Haida, bringing them impoverishment, smalpox epidemics, and venereal diseases.
The Haida were great hunters of whales and sea otters. Canoes were to them, as one visitor remarked, what horses were to the Plains Indians. Their sometimes very large vessels were hollowed out of single huge cedar trunks. The Haida are best known as totem-pole carvers and as the builders of large, decorated wooden houses. Their gifted artists are still turning out splendid masks and other carved objects.
Hopi
Hopi land is an enclave within the much larger Navajo Reservation in Arizona. Their name, Hopitu-shinumu, means Peaceful People, and throughout their history they have lived up to it. They belong to the Uto-Aztecan language family, though the Hopi in the village of Hano, curiously enough, speak Tewa. The founders of the Hano were Rio Grande Pueblos fleeing their ancient home under Spanish pressure to seek a refuge among the Peaceful Ones.
The Spaniards made periodic attempts to Christianize the Hopis and fought several battles with them, but eventually left their pueblos alone. They were also the westernmost of the pueblos and therefore hundreds of miles from the center of Spanish power-and intrusion.
The Hopi have been planters of corn since time immemorial, skillfully coaxing their crops to thrive even in desert sands. In the traditional partition of labor, the women made pottery and wove beautiful baskets, while the men did the weaving and hunting.
Inuit
The Inuit are the native inhabitants of Greenland and the North American subarctic regions. The more fimiliar name Eskimo, meaning "those who eat their food raw," was actlally a term used by neighboring Indians. The Inuit are hunters who chased seals, walrus, caribou, and an occasional polar bear. On the land they move with the help of dogsleds; on the water they use their kayaks and umiaks, open boats made with wooden frames and skins. While they can still build igloos when and if they have to, today most live in European-style houses with electricity and other modern conveniences. Today the Inuit live through the Arctic, with major settlements in Alaska, Greenland, and northern Canada, and a few have crossed the Bering Strait and settled in Siberia.
Iroquois
The name Iroquois, meaning "real adders," is of Algonqian origin. The Iroquois referred to themselves as We Who Are of the Exteded Lodge. They are not a tribal group at all, but an alliance of tribes that dominated the vast area stretching fom the Atlantic Coast to Lake Erie, and from Ontario down into North Carolina. Acording to tradition their league was formed about 1570 by the efforts of Hiawatha, a Mohawk (not to be confused with Longfellow's romantic hero), and his disciple, Dekanawida, a Huron by birth. The original Five Nations confederacy was made up of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Senca, tribes which before that time had often been at war with each other. In 1715 the Tuscarora joined the league, and from that time the Iroquois have been known as the Six Nations. The league formed a democratic tribal republic with councils of elected delegates. Chiefs were elected from nominations by the tribe's matrons, and acted with the consent and cooperation of the women of child-bearing age.
Isleta
Isleta is the southernmost pueblo, situated about twelve miles south of Albuquerque. Approximately 2,000 Ialetans occupy their reservation of some 211,000 acres. The Franciscans established a monastery at Isleta as early as 1629. In 1681 Spaniards commanded by Governor Otermin destroyed Isleta as a punishment for having taken part in the Great Pueblo Revolt. The village was rebuilt and resettled early in the eighteenth century by Tiwa Indians who had taken sanctuary among the Hopis.
The people of Isleta speak Tiwa, in the Kiowa-Tanoan linguistic family. A government report of the 1890s called the Isletas industrious farmers who raised cattle and maintain larg vineyards; they probably learned to cultivate grapes, a rare activity among Indians, from the Franciscan monks who came from California.
Jicarilla Apache
(See Apache)
Kalapuya
The Kalapuyans were a group of tribes who once occupied the Willamette Valley in northwestern Oregon and practiced a mild form of slavery. Marriage was arranged by purchase. The Kalapuya also flattened the fronts of their heads by "fronto-occipital pressure." In 1824 their population was decimated by epidemics introduced by whites.
Karok
The Karok (from karuk-"upstream") called themselves Arra-Arra, meaning Men or Humans. A tribe of salmon fishers, they lived along the Klamath River between the more numerous Yurok below and the Shasta above them. Due to the absence of redwood in their own area, they made no canoes but bought them from the Yurok. Their culture closely resembled that of their Hupa Yurok neighbors.
Kwakiutl
The Kwakiutl are a tribe of Indians which, with the Nootka, belonged to the Wakashan language group. Kwakiutl, according to some linguists, means "beach at the north side of the river," though some tribal elders translate it as "smoke of the rivers." They are located on Vancouver Island and along the coast of British Columbia.
The Kwakiutl used to live in large painted houses decorated with carvings, and their elaborate totem poles and masks are famous. They fished and went to war in huge canoes often painted and decorated with carved prow figures. They gave solemn potlatch feasts, during which a slave was sometimes clubbed to death with an ornamental "slave killer" to show the owner's contempt for property. They waged war for prestige as well as to capture slaves.
The Kwakiutl had secret societies, such as the Cannibal society, whose members were supposed to have power from the Cannibal Spirit of the North and who put on a spectacular-and strictly ceremonial-cannibal (hamatsa) dance. Today the Kwakiutl fish with modern boats and equipment; they also work in canneries and the timber industry in British Columbia.
Lipan Apache
(See Apache)
Lumni
The Lumni are a Salishan tribe of northwestern Washington. Thrie culture was that of a typical coastal tribe: salmon was thrie main food, and their ceremonies revolved around salmon and fishing. The women made fine baskets and were renowned fo their specia dog-hair blankets. The Lumni fought annual ceremonial battles with the Haida for the purpose of capturing slaves. These enconters are still remembered in the yearly stommish, or "warrior," ceremony which includes canoe racing, dancing, and a salmon steak barbecue. Some 700 Lumnis and related Nooksacks now live on the 7,000-acre Reservation with headquarters at Bellingham, Washington.
Maidu
The Maidu are a northern California tribe, now living above the San Francisco Bay Area. They are known particulary for their exquisite basketry.
Maliseet
The name Maliseet or Malecite comes from the Micmac word malisit, "broken talkers," or mahnesheets, " slow tongues." An Algonquian family, the Maliseet were part of the loosely knit Abnaki confederation in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine. Linguistically the were closely related to the Passamaquoddy. Champlain met them in 1604 and wrote: "When we were seated they began to smoke, as was their custom, before making any discourse. They made us presents of game and venison. All that day and the following night they continued to sing, dance, and feast until day reappeared. They were clothed in beaver skins." By 1904 the Maliseet were reduced to about 800 people in New Brunswick and Quebec provinces, Canada.
Metis
The Metis, who are part French and part Indian, live in Canda. Their name comes from the French metis, "mixed." The Ojibway called them wissakode-winini, "burned trees" or half-burned wood man," alluding to their part-light, part-dark complexions. Some Metis have adopted Indian customs and speek a patois up of native, French and English words. Some consider themselves white Canadians; others proudly call theselves Metis and stress their Indian ancestry. Their tales show marked European influences.
Micmac
Micmac comes from migmak or nigmak, meaning "allies." The Micmac are a large Algonquian tribe of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick. They were first visited by Cabot in 1497; in fact, the three Indians he took back to England were probably Micmacs. The Micmacs were expert canoeists and fisherman. Fierce and warlike, they sided with the French during the French and Indian Wars.
Miwok
The Miwok, whos name means Man, were a central California tribe of Penutian stock, living between what now the modern city of Fresno and the Sierres. They ate nuts, acorns, even grasshoppers; fished; and hunted deer and rabbit. They live in conical houses made of poles, and their women used communal, many-hold grinding stones to make meal from seeds, nuts, and acorns. Their mystery ceremony was the kuksu dance, in which the participants wore feathered headdresses. The Miwok had a rich mythology and, before the gold rush, were a large tribe occupuing 100 villages. They are now practically extinct.
Modoc
The Modoc, meaning "southerners," are of Penutian stock and speak a language nearly identical with that of the Klamath tribe. They lived arounded the lwer Klamath Lake in southwestern Oregon and foght hard and long when the goverment tryed to force them onto reservations. Led by Chife Kintpuash, called Captain Jack by the whites, they holed up in the Lava Beds, a region of basalt rocks, deep crevasses, and many caves, in the so-called Modoc War of 1872-1873. THey defended themselves for months against thousands of soldiers equipped with cannons. After their surrender, the Modoc leaders were hanged, supposedly for killing two members of a U.S. peace mission. Part of he tribe was removed to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma; others wre settled on the Klamath Reservation, where a few hunderd survive to ths day.
Mojave
The Mojave (or Mohave) from the most numerous and warlike of the Yuman tribes living on both sides of the Colorado River. Described by early travelers as handsome, athletic, and brave, they cultivated corn, squash, pumpkins, beans, and melons; geathered pinon nuts; and caught fish. They used to paint and tattoo their bodies, and they cremated their dead. They lived in scattered four-sided stick, brush, and mud dwellings and stored their grain in cylindrical flat-roofed structures. At first they welcomed the Spaniards, but later resisted fiercely when the invaders tried to force the white man's way of life upon them. The Mojaves and their cousins, the Chemehuevis, now share the Colorado River Reservation in Arizona, roughly 270,000 acres supporting slightly less than 2,000 people.
Mojave-Apache
(See Yavapai)
Multnomah
The Multnomah tribe occupied what is now estern Oregon, near Portland, and the few remaining members have been almost entirely assimilated into the white cultures which surround them.
Navajo
The Navajo are an Athapascan tribe that drifted down from northwestern Canada int the Southwest around 1300. They call themselves Dineh, the People, as do their linguistic cousins in Canada and Alaska, from whom they are separated by some 1,500 miles. Fierce, skin-clad, nomadic raiders, they terrorized the sedentary corn-planting tribes of the Southwest. The Pueblos called them apachu, meaning "enemy-strangers." This led to the mixed Tewa and Spanish "Apaches de Nabahu," which ultimately became "Navajo."
The Navajos adopted many cultural practices from their Pueblo neighbors, such as masked dances (yebichai),
basketry, and pottery. They became fine silversmiths, learning the craft from the Spaniards, just as they learned weaving from the Pueblos. During the mid-nineteenth century they began making jewelry and weaving rugs; their simple chiefs' blankets have evolved into the well-known Navajo rugs of today.
With a population of over 130,000, the Navajo are the largest tribe in the United States. Their reservation extends over 200 miles of New Mexico and Arizona, from the Gallup area all the way to the Grand Canyon, and contains such natural wonders as Monument Valley and Canyon de Chelly, as well as large coal and oil deposits. Navajos are a comparatively wealthy nation; they farm and raise large herds of sheep, as well as some cattle. The women still wear their traditional costume-velveteen blouses, colorful ankle-length skirts, and silver and turquoise necklaces. Their traditional home is the hogan, a low, dome-shaped structure of mud-covered logs with a smoke hole at the top.
Nez Perce
The Nez Perces (French for "pierced noses") got this name from thrie custom of wearing a piece of dentalium shell through their septum. They belonged to the seminomadic Plateau culture, roaming over the dry, high country of Idaho, eastern Oregon, and eastern Washington. They were known for their trading acumen, their bravery and generosity, their skil in breeding the famous Appaloosa horse, and the fine basketry of their women. They were consistently friendly to the whites. A large tribe of the Shahaptian language family, they live in larg communal houses containing several families. Unjustly driven from their beloved Wallowa Valley, they fought fiercely and skillfully during the Nez Prerce War of 1877 under their great leader, Chief Joseph, who won te admiration even of his enemies by his courage and humanity in conducting this war. Today some 1,500 members of the tribe live on the 88,000-acre Nez Perce Reservation with headquarters at Lapwai, Idaho.
Ojibway
The Ojibway, or as the whites misname them, the Chippewa, are an Algonquian tribe living today on a number of reservations, mainly in Minnesota. They migrated from the East late in the sixteenth or early in the sevententh century. They were usually allied with the French, swapping beavers and other pelts for firearms, which they used to drive the Sioux to the West. The Ojibway took part in Pontiac's upriseing, and by 1851 white settlers had pushed them beyond the Mississippi. Their most valuable food plant is wild rice. Their culture hero is Manabozho, the Great Rabbit, whose deeds they depict on bark paintings.
Okanogan
The Okanogan (or Okinagan) were a small Salishan tribe of seminomadic plateau people who were scattered over the high country of Idaho, western Oregon, and eastern Washington. They were grouped in small, roving bands of hunters, fishermen, and gatherers of cama roots, wild seeds and berries. Like many Salishans, they were good basket makers. In 1906 there were some 525 Okanogans left in Washington state and a further 825 in British Columbia. Today about 3,000 people, descendants of related tribes, lived on the Colville Reservation in Washington, among them the former Okanogans.
Oneida
The Oneida--the People of the Rock--are one of the original Five Nations of the Iroquois league. Like other Iroquois, they live in longhouses occupied by several families and owned by women. They traced their decent through the mother. The tribe originaly live near Oneida Lake in New York but, under pressure, sold their ancestral lands and moved to Wisconsin in 1838. Unlike other Iroquois tribes, the Oneida at first stayed neutral and eventually joined the Tuscarora as the only Iroquois nations siding with the Americans against the British in the Revolutionary War. Today roughly 1,800 people reside on the Oneida Reservation Wisconsin.
Osage
The Osage, or Wazhazhe, are Plains Indians of the Siouan language group. Their original villages were situated in Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois. According to their legends, they originated in the sky and descended through four layers of sky until they alighted on seven rocks of different colors near a red oak tree. Later the people received four kinds of corn and four kinds of pumpkin seeds which fell form the left hind legs of four buffalo.
The tribe was divided into gentes, which monopolized certain tasks, such as making moccasins, pipes, war standards, and arrowheads. One gente furnished heralds (camp criers) to the tribes.
The Osage were eventually removed to Inaian Territory in Oklahoma, where they now live.
Oto
The Oto, also called Otoe and Wat'ota, are a Siouan tribe, probably an offshoot of the Winnebago, from whom they are said to have separated at Green Bay, Wiaconsin, as they wandered westword in pursuit of buffalo. This group later split further int three closely related tribes--the Oto proper, the Iowa, and the Missouri. Marquette knew of them, and Le Sueur met them in 1700 near Blue Earth River in what is now northwest Minnesota.
They lived in earth lodges, though they used skin tipis when traveling or hunting. They were rudimentary farmers but avid buffalo hunters, and they early adopted Plains Indian culture. In 1882 the last remnants of the tribe left Nebraska, where they had been liveing along the Platte River, and settled in Oklahoma.
Papago
The Papago--the Bean People--are a Southwestern tribe closley related to the Pima. They are probably descendants of the ancient Hohokam. The Papago are an agricultural people who irrigate by flooding. Though frugal and peaceful, they could be tough when atacked, and they defended themselves stouty against raiding bands of Apaches. Papago women are renowned for their wonderful baskets woven from yucca fiber. Their traditional houses were round, dome-shaped, and flat-topped, 12 to 20 feet in diameter, and usually had a brush shelter (ramada) attached. They now live on a four-part reservation almost three million acres in Arizona. Some offshoots also live in Sonora, Mexico.
Passamaquoddy
The name Passamaquoddy comes from peskede makadia, meaning "plenty of pollock" (a species of herring). They are a tribe of forest hunters and fishermen speaking a coastal Algonquian dialect. They were experts at canoeing, fishing, and traping and lived in conical wigwams covered with birch bark or woven mats. Several families often shared one dwelling. They belonged to the larger Abnaki confederation, an alliance of Northeast woodlands tribes that also included the Penobscot and Maliseet. Some 600 Passamaquoddy now live on the Pleasant Point and Indian Township Reservations in Washington County, Maine.
Pawnee
The Pawnees, members of the large Caddoan family, were a federation of tribs living near the Platte River in what in now Nebraska. Yhey were semisedentary, lived in earth lodges, planted corn, and hunted buffalo and other game. Their tribal name comes from pariki, meaning "horns," probably because they used to dress their hair in a horn-like coil stiffened with grease. Their own name for themselves was Men of Men. Their chief deity was Tirawa Atius, the Creator, who "threw down from the sky to the human beings everything they needed." Hereditary keepers maintained their sacred bundles, and they had secret societies related to supernatural animals spirits.
The Pawnees, who once numbered 25,000, lost half their population to cholera between 1840 and 1850 owing to contact with westbound settlers taking the Platte River Trail. By the end of the century their numbers had dropped to a few hundred. Though many Pawnees had served the U.S. Army faithfully as scouts durring the Indian Plains wars, They shared the fate of many other tribes, being removed in 1876 to Oklahoma, where they settled with the Ponca and Oto.
Penobscot
The name Penobsoct means Rockland or It Flows on the rock,
alluding to a waterfall near their village of Old Town
Maine, a few miles above Bangor. The Penobscot are a
once-powerful New England tribe of Algonquian stock. They
belong to the Abnaki confederation, which included such
tribes as the Malecites and Passamaquoddies. They made
canoes, fishnets, shell wampum, carved pipes, and intricate
beading and quillwork. They had a reputation for
peacefulness and hospitality.
Some 500 Penobscot now live on a reservation comprising
4,500 acres at Indian Island, Old Town, Maine.
Pequod
The Pequod or Destroyers, once a much-dreaded Algonquian people, were originally part of the Mohegan tribe. They occpied a strip of land reaching from what is now New London, Connecticut, into Rhode Island. The Pequod were conquered by English settlers in 1637 during the so-called Pequod War. Spurred on by Puritan preachers who called the Indians "fiends of hell" and "childern of Satan," the settlers stormed the Pequod village on the Mystic River in Connecticut, slaughtering and burning to death more than 600 of the inhabitants. Surving prisoners became slaves of New England colonists; some were even sold to West Indian planters. In 1832 there was a remnant of about 40 mixed-blood Pequod left. In the early 1900's about 12 people remained who considered them-selves in some way the decendants if the Pequods and Mohegans. They are now considered comletey exterminated.
Piegan
[See Blackfoot]
