Kiowa

The Kiowa, who call themselves Ǥáuigú, are a Native American nation of the Great Plains, today federally recognised as the Kiowa Tribe, with headquarters at Carnegie, Oklahoma. Over several centuries they moved from the northern plains near the Yellowstone country to the Southern Plains, where, as mounted bison hunters allied with the Comanche, they became one of the dominant powers of the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Kiowa is a Tanoan language, related to the languages of Pueblo peoples such as the Tiwa and Tewa, which has long puzzled scholars given the contrast between nomadic Plains life and Pueblo farming villages. One hypothesis links the Kiowa to the Jumano; another, said to fit Kiowa oral tradition better, traces the speech community to the eastern Fremont area around 450 CE, with a drift north towards Yellowstone after 1300. Kiowa tradition places the people's beginnings in the upper Missouri basin, and tells of a creator drawing the first people through a hollow log until a pregnant woman blocked the way. Around 1650 they moved to the Black Hills, where they lived as friends of the Crow, in ten bands of perhaps 3,000 people. Pressure from the Cheyenne, Arapaho and later the Sioux pushed them further south.

Horses, taken in trade and raids from the Spanish and other nations, transformed Kiowa life. Before them, dogs pulled the travois; afterwards the Kiowa could follow bison across far larger ranges and became celebrated horsemen, with wealth counted in horse herds. In 1790, at the place where Las Vegas, New Mexico, later grew, Kiowa visitors proposed peace to the Comanche; the resulting alliance shared hunting grounds and a mutual defence pact, and the two peoples dominated the land from the Arkansas River to the Brazos. The Plains Apache were close partners, sharing much of Kiowa culture.

Kiowa society traces descent through both parents and has no clans, but is organised by kinship, age and gender, with six warrior societies, from the boys' Little Rabbits to the elite Koitsenko. The annual Sun Dance gathered the bands, each with set duties, around the sacred Tai-me bundle. The Kiowa also kept unusual pictorial calendars recording two events a year. Hide painting led to ledger art, notably by men imprisoned at Fort Marion in Florida from 1875 to 1878, and in the twentieth century the "Kiowa Six" painters won international attention, exhibiting in Czechoslovakia in 1928 and at the Venice Biennale in 1932.

The nineteenth century brought conflict on many fronts. In 1833 an Osage attack on a Kiowa camp killed many women, children and elders and seized the Tai-me, which was returned in 1835. From 1821 to 1870 Kiowa and Comanche raids reached deep into Mexico. The Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 assigned the Kiowa a reservation in what became south-western Oklahoma, but resistance continued until the Red River War of 1874; many leaders were then sent as prisoners to Fort Marion. An 1890 census counted 1,140 Kiowa on the shared Fort Sill reservation. An 1892 agreement opened the land to settlers through allotment, and Lone Wolf the Younger's legal challenge failed before the Supreme Court in 1903.

The tribe adopted a constitution in 1970 and a new one in 2017. In 1998 a Supreme Court case brought by the Kiowa affirmed that tribes keep sovereign immunity from private lawsuits. Around 12,000 tribal citizens were counted in 2011, many living near Anadarko, Fort Cobb and Carnegie. The language had only about 20 fluent speakers in 2012, and the tribe runs a language department. Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his novel House Made of Dawn, and the Gourd Dance and Black Leggings societies keep warrior traditions alive.

Our maps draw an approximate Kiowa territory in 1492, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715, once labelled with the Kiowa name Gáuigú; for these centuries the outline is a rough estimate of a people who were still moving south. Neighbours on the same maps include the Pawnee and the Osage.