Caddo

The Caddo are a Native American people whose homeland lay in the Piney Woods where Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma meet. Their ancestors built great earthen mounds between about 800 and 1400 CE, and at European contact they were organised in three confederacies. Today they form the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, headquartered at Binger, with some 6,000 enrolled citizens; their own name is Hasí꞉nay.

Archaeologists see the Caddo as growing out of earlier Woodland peoples, the Fourche Maline and Mossy Grove cultures, who lived in the region from about 200 BCE to 800 CE. By 800 some villages had become ritual centres, with flat-topped platform mounds for temples and elite houses arranged around swept plazas, and by 1000 a distinctly Caddoan society had formed. Maize farming produced surpluses that supported denser settlement and skilled crafts, and the culture flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Spiro Mounds in eastern Oklahoma, among the most elaborate in North America, were built by ancestors of the Caddo and Wichita, at the western edge of the wider Mississippian world. Archaeological evidence shows unbroken continuity from these mound builders to the modern Caddo, and the Caddoan languages link them to the Wichita and Pawnee.

In Caddo tradition the people emerged from a cave near where the Red River joins the Mississippi, led by Moon, carrying a drum, a pipe, fire and seeds of corn and pumpkin, until the wolf looked back and the opening closed. Religion centred on the "Leader Above", and a head priest, the xinesi, could speak with spirits near the temples. Ceremonies followed the corn-growing year, and tobacco was, and still is, used in ritual. Women made pottery and most tools, and both men and women decorated their bodies, women often with extensive tattoos.

When Europeans arrived the Caddo were grouped into the Natchitoches of northern Louisiana, the Hasinai of East Texas and the Kadohadacho near the Red River borderlands. Hernando de Soto's expedition clashed with the Tula, a Caddo band, in Arkansas in 1541. Spanish missions failed to draw people away from their temples and sacred fires, while French traders built posts beside Caddo villages; towns such as Natchitoches and Nacogdoches keep Caddo names, and the name Texas itself comes from the Hasinai word táysha, "friend". Smallpox, measles and other new diseases caused heavy losses, and the Osage pushed the Caddo out of northern parts of their territory.

After the Louisiana Purchase the Caddo stayed neutral, but the removal policies of the 1830s reached them too. In 1835 the Kadohadacho agreed to move to Mexican Texas. After Texas joined the United States, the Hasinai and Kadohadacho were confined to the Brazos Reservation; in December 1858 a vigilante band attacked a Caddo camp, and in 1859 many Caddo were moved to Indian Territory, later settling between the Washita and Canadian rivers. In the late nineteenth century the Caddo/Delaware leader John Wilson became an important figure in the Ghost Dance and introduced the Big Moon peyote ceremony; the nation remains active in the Native American Church.

The Caddo strongly opposed allotment, which cost them much of their land. They reorganised under the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, adopting a constitution in 1938 and a new one in 1976, governed by an elected eight-member council. Mary Pat Francis became the first woman elected tribal chair in the early 1980s. Factional disputes in 2013–14 ended with new elections in 2015. The nation runs a summer culture camp, and the Hasinai Society and Caddo Culture Club teach and perform Caddo songs and dances.

Our maps draw an approximate Caddo territory in 1492, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715. Neighbours on the same maps include the Wichita and the Natchez.