Kickapoo

The Kickapoo are an Algonquian-speaking Indigenous nation whose homeland lay in the Great Lakes country of the Northeastern Woodlands. Repeated moves over three centuries carried them south and west, and today they form three federally recognised tribes in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, together with a community in the Mexican state of Coahuila. Their own name is also written Kiikaapoa or Kiikaapoi, and Spanish speakers call them Kikapú.

Kickapoo is a Central Algonquian language, regarded either as a dialect of the Fox language or as a very close relative of it, and it is mutually intelligible with the speech of the Sauk and Meskwaki, the peoples to whom the Kickapoo are most closely tied. The name is said to come from a Kickapoo word describing someone who moves about, standing first in one place and then another. Kickapoo in Mexico are also known for a whistled form of speech.

Catholic missionaries in southern Wisconsin left the earliest written record of a Kickapoo encounter with Europeans, in 1667. In 1682 they met the expedition of La Salle in the Illinois Country, and French traders soon set up posts near Native villages along rivers such as the Wabash. After the British victory in the Seven Years' War, Britain claimed the lands east of the Mississippi and expanded trade with the Kickapoo. The Kickapoo belonged to the Wabash Confederacy alongside the Piankeshaw, the Wea and the Miami, and after the war many settled in what is now southern Illinois.

The Kickapoo signed the Treaty of Greenville with the United States and neighbouring nations in 1795, then gave up land in a series of further treaties as settlers pressed westwards. They were among the closest allies of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, fought at Tippecanoe in 1811 and sided with Britain in the War of 1812. Under the 1819 Treaty of Edwardsville they surrendered their Illinois holdings, close to half of the present state, for a tract in Missouri already held by their Osage rivals. Rather than move there, about half the people crossed into Spanish Texas, while others stayed in Illinois under Kennekuk, a non-violent prophet who led them during the removals of the 1830s to a reservation in Kansas, where he died of smallpox in 1852.

Spanish authorities had welcomed Kickapoo into Texas as a buffer against American settlement, but by 1839 most had left for Mexico or Indian Territory. Mexico granted land at Nacimiento, Coahuila, in 1852. Two villages that settled in Indian Territory received a reservation in 1883, only to see it broken into household allotments in 1893 under the Dawes Act; the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma reorganised in 1936.

Around 3,000 Kickapoo are enrolled tribal citizens. The Kansas reservation lies in Brown, Jackson and Atchison counties, around the town of Horton. The Oklahoma tribe, based in McLoud, reports 2,719 enrolled citizens. The Texas community near Eagle Pass, which in the 1980s was still living beneath the international bridge over the Rio Grande, gained state recognition in 1977 and a federal relationship in 1985, and now funds housing, education and social services from its businesses. Its members move between Texas, Oklahoma and Nacimiento, where ceremonies are held. A language immersion programme began at Horton in 1985, although no children are now reported to grow up speaking it as their first language.

Our 1492 map draws Kickapoo territory, labelled Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), as an approximate outline; the year marks only when the basemap records it, not when the nation began. Other peoples drawn on the same map include the Anishinaabe, the Illinois Confederation and the Shawnee.