The
Pawnee (also Paneassa,
Pari, Pariki) are a Caddoan-language Native American tribe
that historically lived along the Platte, Loup and
Republican
Rivers
in present-day Nebraska
and in
Northern Kansas
.
Their
autonym is
Chaticks-si-Chaticks, meaning "Men of men".
In the 18th century, they were allied with the
French, with whom they
traded.
They played an important role in halting
Spanish
expansion onto the Great Plains
by defeating the Villasur expedition decisively in battle
in 1720.
In the 19th century, epidemics of
smallpox
and
cholera and
endemic warfare with the
Sioux and
Cheyenne wiped out
most of the Pawnee, reducing the population to approximately 600 by
the year 1900. Since then the tribe has begun to recover. As of
2005, there are approximately 5,500 Pawnee.
Traditional culture
- Chaui (Grand)
- Kitkehahki (Republican)
- Pitahauerat (Tappage)
- Skidi (Wolf)
The Chaui are generally recognized as being the leading band,
although each band was autonomous.
As was typical of many Indian tribes, each
band saw to its own, although with outside pressures from the
Spanish
, French
and Americans
, as well as neighboring tribes, the Pawnee began to
draw closer together.
Lodges
The Pawnee
lodges tended to be oval in
shape; the frame was constructed of 10-15 posts set some ten feet
apart which outlined the floor of the lodge. Lodge size varied
based on the number of poles placed in the center of the structure.
Most lodges had 4, 8 or 12 center poles. A common feature in Pawnee
lodges were four painted poles, which represented the four cardinal
directions and the four major star gods (not to be confused with
the Creator.) The framework was covered
with
willow branches, earth and sod, which
inhibited erosion. A hole left in the center which served as a
combined chimney and skylight. The lodge was semi-subterranean,
with the floor dug approximately three feet below ground level. A
buffalo-skin door on a hinge could be closed
at night and wedged shut.
There could be as many as 30-50 people living in each lodge. A
village could consist of as many as 300-500 people and 10-15
households. Each lodge was divided in two (north and south), and
each section had a head who oversaw the daily business; each
section was further subdivided into three families. The membership
of the lodge was quite flexible. The tribe went on buffalo hunts in
summer and winter. Upon their return, the inhabitants of the lodges
would often move into another lodge, although they generally
remained within the village.
Political structure
The Pawnee are a
matrilineal people;
ancestral descent was through the mother and a young couple would
traditionally move into the bride's parents' lodge. Both women and
men are active in political life, with both taking decision-making
responsibilities.
Within the lodge the abovementioned sections were designated for
the three classes of women.
- Mature women who did most of the labor
- Young single women just learning their responsibilities
- Older women who looked after the young children
Amongst the collection of lodges, the political designations for
men were essentially between:
- the Warrior Clique
- the Hunting Clique
Women tended to be responsible for decisions about resource
allocation, trade, and inter-lodge social negotiations. Men were
responsible for decisions which pertained to hunting, war, and
spiritual/health issues.
Women tended to remain within a single lodge, while men would
typically move between lodges taking multiple sexual partners in
serially-monogamous relationships.
Hunting
After they
obtained horses, the Pawnee left their villages and traveled in
both summer and winter westward to the Great Plains where they hunted buffalo. They often
traveled 500 miles or more. In summer the march began at dawn or
before, but usually did not last the entire day. If it did, the
people were exhausted and cross. Most of the meat obtained was
sliced into strips and dried on poles over slow fires and stored;
so prepared, it was usable for several years. Although buffalo was
preferred, other game including elk, bear, panther, and skunk was
hunted for their skins and meat. They returned to their villages to
harvest their crops when the corn was ripe or in the spring when
the grass became green. Summer hunts extended from late June to
about the first of September; but might end early if hunting was
successful; sometimes the hunt was limited to what is now western
Nebraska. Winter hunts were from late October until early April and
were often to the southwest into what is now western Kansas. Once
buffalo were located hunting did not begin until the medicine men
of the tribe considered the time propitious. Then the hunt began by
advancing in a body on the buffalo, but killing of any buffalo was
not permitted until the soldiers of the tribe gave the signal.
Anyone who broke ranks was severely beaten. The hunters guided
their ponies with their knees and wielded bows and arrows. Buffalo
were incapacitated with a single arrow shot into their flank
between the lower ribs and the hip. This distressed the buffalo
greatly, much more than a gunshot would and the animal would soon
lie down and perhaps bleed out. An individual hunter might shoot as
many as five buffalo in the way before backtracking and finishing
them off. Cows and young bulls were preferred as older bulls have a
disagreeable taste.
Further reading
Religion
The Pawnee placed great significance on Sacred Bundles, which
formed the basis of many religious ceremonies maintaining the
balance of nature and the relationship with the gods and spirits.
The Pawnee were not part of the
Sun Dance
tradition, although they did partake in the
Ghost Dance movement of the 1890s.
Pawnee equated the stars with the gods and planted their crops
according to the position of the stars. Like many tribal units they
sacrificed maize and other crops.
The Morning Star ritual
The Skidi practiced
child sacrifice
(the "
Morning Star ritual")
regularly until the 1810s. Tribal leaders understood that the
practice was abhorrent to Americans and made heroic efforts to
suppress it. The last sacrifice was of
Haxti, a
14-year-old
Oglala girl on April 22, 1838. Typically, a
young girl was captured from another tribe, based on a dream by a
Skidi elder. The girl was well treated for
several days, and an elaborate
scaffold was
built for the sacrifice. The preparations took four days.
When the
morning star was due to rise,
the girl was placed on the scaffold, and at the moment the star
appeared above the horizon, the girl's chest was cut open, after
which her body was shot with arrows.
In her
The Lost Universe (1965), Gene Weltfish makes note
of a young
Lakota captive who was tied
to a tree and shot with arrows. She was thought to be the last
human sacrifice performed by the Pawnee; Weltfish attributes this
peculiarity to their
Aztec kin to the south.
However, this posited connection to Aztec sacrifice has been
disputed
[9839]
History
Tribal territory of the Pawnee and
tribes in Nebraska
Francisco Vásquez de
Coronado visited the neighboring Wichita in 1541 where he encountered a
Pawnee chief from Harahey in Nebraska.
Nothing
much is mentioned of the Pawnee until the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries when successive incursions of Spanish, French and English
settlers
attempted to enlarge their possessions. The tribes however
tended to make alliances as and when it suited them. An interesting
point to note being that different Pawnee subtribes could make
treaties with warring
European powers without
disrupting the underlying unity; the Pawnee were masters at unity
within diversity.
Historian
Marcel Trudel documented that close to
2,000 Pawnee (Panis in French) slaves lived in Canada
until the
abolition of slavery in the colony in 1833. The Indian
slaves comprised close to half of the known slaves in
French Canada (also called Lower Canada).
Native American and First Nations tribes sold slaves captured in
warfare to other tribes and to European traders. In
French Canada, Indian slaves were generally
called
Panis (anglicized to Pawnee) and most seemed to
come from the Pawnee tribe. As early as 1670 there was a historical
reference to a
Panis in Montreal.
A tribal delegation visited
President
Jefferson. In 1806 Lieutenant
Zebulon
Pike,
Major G. C. Sibley,
Major
S. H. Long, amongst others, began visiting the
Pawnee villages.
The Pawnee ceded territory to the United
States government in treaties in 1818, 1825, 1833, 1848, 1857, and
1892; in 1857, they settled on the Pawnee Reservation along the Loup River
in present-day Nance County, Nebraska
. Continual raids from
Lakota from the north and west, and
encroachment from American settlers to the south and east lead to
the abandonment of their Nebraska reservation.
In 1875 they moved to
Indian Territory, (Oklahoma
), a large territory that had served as a receiving
place for tribes displaced from the east and elsewhere. Many
Pawnee men joined the
United
States Cavalry as scouts rather than face the ignominy of
reservation life and the inevitable loss of their freedom and
culture. In the 20th century,
Christianity supplanted the older
religion.
In 1780 the Pawnee are thought to have numbered around 10,000.
Through the 19th century, epidemics of
smallpox and
cholera killed
most of the Pawnee, reducing the population to approximately 600 by
the year 1900. As of 2005, there are approximately 5,500
Pawnee.
Recent history
Pawnee father and son, 1912
The
Oklahoma Indian Welfare
Act of 1936 established the
Pawnee Business Council, the
Nasharo Council, and a
tribal constitution, bylaws, and charter. An out-of-court
settlement in 1964 awarded the Pawnee Nation $7,316,096.55 for land
ceded to the US and undervalued by the federal government in the
previous century.
Bills such as the
Indian
Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 have
gone some way to address the mistakes of the past and help the
Pawnee Nation regain some of their self-government, culture and
pride. The Pawnee continue to practice cultural traditions, meeting
twice a year for the inter-tribal gathering with their kinsmen the
Wichita Indians, and the annual
four-day Pawnee Homecoming for Pawnee veterans in July. Many Pawnee
return to their traditional lands to visit relatives and to take
part in
powwows.
In popular culture
- In Kevin Costner's movie "Dances
with Wolves," the Pawnee are the main Indian antagonists to the
Lakota/Sioux Indians befriended by the main character. In the words
of one reviewer, the Pawnee "are identified as a blood seeking race
. . ." [9840].
- In Arthur Penn's 1970 film, "Little Big Man", the Pawnee play
the antagonists to the Dustin Hoffman's character, Little Big Man,
as it was they who not only killed his family in the beginning of
the film but also side with (serving as scouts) George Custer's 7th
Cavalry; later in the film, they murder his Indian family on the
Washita River.
- In the novel Centennial and the later television miniseries of the same
name, the Pawnee are depicted as the enemies of the Arapaho. In one memorable scene, the Arapaho lead a
raid on the village of Chief Rude Water to rescue an Arapaho girl
kidnapped for the Morning Star ritual.
Pawnee of note
Larry EchoHawk, U.S.
President
Barack Obama nominee to head
the United States
Bureau of
Indian Affairs is Pawnee.
He was elected Attorney General of Idaho
in 1991, for
a term to 1995, the first Native American
elected to a constitutional statewide office in the
US.
See also
References
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