Iowa people

The Iowa, also written Ioway, are a Siouan-speaking Native American nation who call themselves Báxoje. Once at home in the prairies and river valleys of the upper Mississippi, they gave their name to the American state of Iowa. Today they belong to two federally recognised tribes: the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma.

Báxoje is usually translated "grey snow". The Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma explains it as a reference to winter lodges whose snow cover was greyed by smoke from the hearth fires; older renderings such as "dusty noses" are considered mistaken. The English name came through French aiouez from a Dakota word.

According to tribal and scholarly accounts, the Iowa, Otoe and Missouria were once one people with the Ho-Chunk in the Great Lakes region, all speaking forms of Chiwere, a language close to Ho-Chunk. Some time around the 16th century the three groups broke away and moved south and west. Archaeologists believe the Oneota culture, which flourished between the eastern Plains and the Great Lakes from around AD 900 until about 1650 or 1700, developed into several historic Siouan peoples, the Ioway among them.

The first recorded European meeting with the Iowa came in 1676 at Green Bay, Wisconsin, where some were living among the Ho-Chunk. In the 17th century their villages lay in northern Iowa and southern Minnesota, and they long frequented the red pipestone quarry region. They combined Woodlands farming, growing maize, with hunting on horseback in the manner of Plains peoples such as the Omaha and Osage. Homes included bark lodges, earth lodges and portable tipis for the hunt. They traded furs and the pipes they made with the French. Society was divided into two halves, the Buffalo and Bear clans, which took turns to govern through the year.

Smallpox cut their numbers from an estimated 1,100 in 1760 to about 800 by 1804. In the 1820s and 1830s the Iowa signed a series of treaties ceding their lands in Minnesota, Iowa and Missouri, and in the later 1830s most were moved to a reservation on the Great Nemaha River near the Kansas–Nebraska border, beside Sauk and Meskwaki allies. Chief Mahaska, White Cloud, led them in this period. Some 45 Iowa men served in the Union army in the American Civil War. From the late 1870s and 1880s a southern group, preferring a village way of life, moved to Indian Territory and became the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma, while the northern group stayed in Kansas and Nebraska. Both saw their lands divided by allotment.

The Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, based at White Cloud, Kansas, has a council of five members and runs a farm, a casino and other businesses on a reservation of about 1,500 acres of checkerboard land. The Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma, headquartered in Perkins, has about 800 enrolled members, its own police and housing authority, a gallery of Iowa artists and an annual June powwow held since 1985. Chiwere is critically endangered: its last fully fluent speakers died in 1996, though around 30 members of the Oklahoma tribe still speak some of the language, and workshops have been held to teach it.

Our maps for 1492, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715 draw an approximate Iowa territory in the upper Mississippi and Missouri valleys. On the 1650 map it borders the Oto, the Missouri, the Omaha, the Yankton and Santee Sioux and the Illinois Confederation, with the Pawnee close by to the west.