Pawnee (Pa ‘ ne) comes from the Caddoanpariki, or "horn," referring to the distinctive male hairstyle, or from parisu, "hunter." Their self-designation was Chahiksichahiks, "Men of Men." By about 1700, if not sooner, the Pawnee had divided into four independent subtribes: the Panimaha (Skidi), the Kitkehaki (Republican), the Chaui (Grand), and the Pitahauerat (Tappage). All but the Skidi spoke a similar dialect and were sometimes known as the Southern Pawnees. The Skidi were also known as Loups (French), Lobos (Spanish), and Wolves (English). The Pawnee were closely related to the Wichita and the Arikara and maintained attributes characteristic of southwestern and Mesoamerican cultures.
Location In the sixteenth century, Pawnees were located along the Arkansas, Platte, and Loup Rivers and on the Republican Fork of the Kansas River (Skidi) in east-central Nebraska. Most Pawnees inhabited the Platte River Valley in the late eighteenth century. In the 1990s, Pawnees lived in Oklahoma and in other states.
Population The late-eighteenth-century Pawnee population was about 10,000. The figure stood at about 2,500 in the early 1990s.
Language Panian (Skidi Pawnee, Southern Pawnee, and Arikara) is a Caddoan language.
Historical Information
History Pawnee tradition has the people originating in the Southwest, but they may have their origin in the southeast, perhaps in the Gulf region of southern Texas, and may have been associated very early on with Iroquoian people. Caddoan people occupied the Plains, from Texas to the Arkansas River region of Oklahoma and Kansas, inconsistently for perhaps several thousand years. Caddoans had major ceremonial centers by 500, including large temple mounds.
Upon leaving east Texas (thirteenth century), the Skidi Pawnee separated from the other bands and traveled east across the Mississippi, following the trail of the Iroquois to the northeast and settling in the Ohio Valley. In the sixteenth century, pressured by the initial stages of Iroquois expansion, the Skidis headed down the Ohio. They were joined along the way by the Omaha. Together, the two people traveled to the Des Moines River, where the Skidi left the Omaha, continuing west to join their cousins and settling on the Loup fork of the Platte River.
Despite a separation of several hundred years, the Skidis reintegrated smoothly among the other Pawnee groups and soon became the largest and most powerful Pawnee tribe. They encountered the Spanish during the sixteenth century. Residents of western Pawnee villages were victims of Apache raiders from the mid-seventeenth century into the eighteenth century. The men were killed, and the women and children were sold as slaves. Thus occurred a gradual abandonment of Pawnee villages in western Nebraska and northeastern Colorado. The Illinois and other tribes also raided them for slaves in the eighteenth century.
Pawnees acquired a few horses around 1700, and within a generation they became great raiders and buffalo hunters, slowly relying less on crops and more on the buffalo for their food. Direct contact with French traders began in the early eighteenth century and expanded rapidly. By the 1750s, the French switched from buying Pawnees to buying Apaches, which the Pawnee, among other tribes, gladly provided. The guns they received in trade helped protect them against Apache attacks, which soon ended against them.
From about 1770 to 1800, the Skidi Pawnee, reduced from eight villages to only one, lived with the Taovayas Band of Wichita Indians on the Red River in northeastern Texas. Pawnees first met Anglo-Americans, including Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Zebulon Pike, in the early nineteenth century. After the Louisiana Purchase, more and more Americans entered Pawnee land. Most generally received a friendly and peaceful welcome.
By the terms of the 1805 Treaty of Table Rock, all Pawnee were relocated to a reservation in Genoa, Nebraska. During the 1830s and 1840s, they often fought and raided in the vicinity of the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado and southwestern Kansas. Many also served as scouts for the U.S. Army during that period and later. Presbyterian missionaries arrivedin 1834. Three years later, the Pawnee suffered a major smallpox epidemic.
By 1850, cholera and warfare with the Dakota tribes had greatly reduced the Pawnee population. They held their last tribal hunt in 1873. Pressured in 1876 to cede their reservation, the tribe moved to a new one, of over 200,000 acres, in north-central Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Part of this reservation was allotted in 1892, with more than half then opened for non-Indian settlement. In 1906, the tribal population had declined 94 percent, to about 600 from about 10,000 just a century before. In 1966, the tribe won a land claims award of over $7 million, and in the 1970s they forced the return of tribal lands given by the United States to the city of Pawnee.
Religion Tirawa, the sun, was the great spirit or creator and ruler of lesser deities. Among the Skidi, the morning and evening stars represented the masculine and feminine elements respectively. The celestial bodies formed the basis of a complex mythology.
Much of the rich ceremonial life revolved around the heavenly bodies as well as planting, cultivating, and harvesting corn and hunting buffalo. In the Morning Star ceremony, a young girl, usually a captive, was ritually sacrificed (shot with arrows while tied to a wooden frame) to the morning star at the time of the summer solstice to ensure the success of their crops. Petalesharo (Man-Chief) was responsible in 1816 for forcing the priests to stop holding this ceremony.
Hereditary priests were a large and powerful class of people. They conducted the rituals, knew sacred songs and rituals, and were associated with the sacred bundles. Shamans obtained powers from supernatural beings. They performed a large ceremony in late summer or early fall at which they impressed people with feats such as handling live coals and plunging their hands in boiling water. Shamans were also priests insofar as they were trained to lead ceremonies.
Sacred bundles, connected with various rituals and associated with specific villages, dominated Pawnee life. Wrapped in buffalo skin, many bundles contained smoking materials, paints, feathers, and corn. Chiefs kept the bundles, but priests used them. There were also many secret societies, each with its own paraphernalia and rituals. Sacred animal lodges were associated with the Southern people.
Government The chieftaincy was inherited through the female line. Villages were political units, each of which had chiefs, priests, bundles, and a council. The four independent subtribes were united in a confederation.
Councils made all final civil and military decisions. They were established at the different levels of societal organization (village, tribe, confederacy). Each successive level of council was composed of members of the preceding level.
All but two of the Skidi villages were joined in a political and religious confederation before they were forced to consolidate into one village following the smallpox epidemic of 1780-1781. The Chaui had but one village.
Customs A dual division, winter and summer people, came into play during games and ceremonies. Descent was matrilineal. Most people married from within the village. Corpses were wrapped in matting and buried in a sitting position, usually on high ground away from the village. The grave was covered with mounds of dirt.
People owned the right to perform dances and ceremonies. A society of single and elderly women effected shabby dress and tortured prisoners of war. There were various men’s societies as well, generally revolving around military and religious themes. Pawnees played various games, including contests, dice (women) and shinny, and hoop-and-pole (men). Only a few old female doctors were allowed to smoke.
Dwellings By 1500, some Pawnees were living in permanent villages of between 5 and 15 earth lodges. The lodges were round, semiexcavated, and about 40-60 feet in diameter. They featured a pole framework interwoven with brush and grass, covered with a thick layer of soil and clay. Some had separate sleeping areas partitioned by mats or wickerwork. Such lodges were designed to last eight to ten years. Religious ceremonies accompanied lodge construction.
By the early nineteenth century, most Pawnees used temporary semicircular summer tents that differed from standard tip is. After driving small, arched poles into the ground along the circumference, people placed four larger posts vertically across the front. They also used standard skin tip is on buffalo hunting trips.
Diet Unlike their neighbors who lived at similar longitudes, Pawnee women grew corn, beans, pumpkins, and sunflowers in small gardens. There were generally two harvests, one in midsummer, of green corn (boiled or roasted, shelled, dried, and stored in bags), and the main one in late summer to early fall.
The people also hunted buffalo in early summer and in winter. They preferred two or three small drives to one massive slaughter. Meat was quickly butchered and dried. Those less able stayed at the villages to protect the crops. Before they acquired horses, Pawnee men stampeded buffalo over cliffs or into swamps.
There was also at least one antelope drive each year, during which the animals were surrounded and clubbed or lanced. The people depended about equally on corn and buffalo, although more on buffalo in the nineteenth century. Men also hunted antelope, elk, deer, and small game, including fowl and birds. Women gathered roots, berries, plums, grapes, chokecherries, and nuts.
Key Technology Women wove twilled, plaited baskets and shallow gambling trays as well as mats used for floor coverings and bedding. People used both pottery and buffalo-hide containers. Babies were wrapped in fur or fleece and tied with buckskin lacing onto decorated flat wooden cradle boards. Garden tools included hoes from buffalo or elk shoulders, digging sticks, and antler rakes.
Trade Pre-seventeenth century Skid is traded with the Omaha and other related Siouan tribes. In the early to mid-eighteenth century, they exchanged Apache slaves, buffalo robes, and animal pelts with the New Orleans French for French guns, tools, and other items. By later in the century they were trading guns for Comanche horses, which they traded in turn to the Omaha, Ponca, and other tribes.
Notable Arts Pawnee art included basketry and incised pottery. They occasionally smoked their fine tanned hides. Tipis, robes, and shields were painted with heraldic designs.
Transportation Dogs pulled the travois until they were slowly replaced by horses during the seventeenth century.
Dress Women made most clothing of antelope or elk rather than buffalo hide. Men wore breechclouts and moccasins, plus leggings and a robe in the cold or on special occasions. They also tied a scarflike turban around their heads and plucked their facial hair. Women wore moccasins, a skirt and cape, and leggings and a robe in winter. Both sexes painted their faces. Warriors stiffened a lock of hair with paint and fat, making it curve like a horn (a style known as a roach).
War and Weapons Enemies included the Apache (mid-seventeenth to eighteenth century), Dakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa. The Pawnee raided a huge area, more or less the entire Plains. Allies included the Comanche and, later, the United States. On the Plains, the Pawnee adhered to the system of war honors known as counting coup. Weapons included the bow and arrow, club, and buffalo-hide shield.
Contemporary Information
Government/Reservations The Pawnee tribe still owns several hundred acres of land in Pawnee and Payne Counties, Oklahoma. The present tribal government was established in 1934. The tribe is governed by two eight-member bodies, the Nasharo (chiefs) Council, chosen by band, and an elected Business Council.
Economy An annual annuity (from the 1857 treaty) and funds obtained from mineral (oil and gas) leases and agriculture are disbursed on a per capita basis. The tribe also sponsors bingo games. There is chronic high unemployment around Pawnee.
Legal Status The Pawnee Indian Tribe is a federally recognized tribal entity.
Daily Life Administrative offices, ceremonial roundhouse, recreation room, community building, and campground are located on the tribal land. The tribe administers various social programs with the help of federal grants. Traditional activities surviving at least in modified form include various dances (war, ghost, round) and the hand game. However, the Pawnee language is approaching the point where complete decline may be irreversible. Most people are Christians; some are also members of the Native American Church. The many social clubs sponsor various activities. There is a four-day Pawnee homecoming in July.
