Miami people

The Miami, who call themselves Myaamia (plural Myaamiaki), are an Algonquian-speaking people of the Northeastern Woodlands whose historic homeland covered north-central Indiana, south-western Michigan and western Ohio. After a long struggle against American expansion, most were forced west in 1846, and today the federally recognised Miami Tribe of Oklahoma carries the nation forward alongside Miami communities that remained in Indiana. The city of Miami in Florida takes its name from an unrelated people.

Myaamia appears to come from an older word meaning "downstream people", and the Miami also use the name Mihtohseeniaki, "the people". Outsiders sometimes called them Twightwee, a name now traced to the Delaware word for them. Historically "Miami" covered several related bands, including the Wea and Piankeshaw, but over the nineteenth century it came to mean mainly the Atchakangouen, or Crane band. Early Miami are linked by archaeologists to the Fisher tradition, part of the wider Mississippian world of maize farming and regional trade.

French missionaries first recorded the Miami in the mid-seventeenth century near the western shores of Lake Michigan. Miami oral tradition holds that they had gone there only a few generations earlier, fleeing raids by the Haudenosaunee, who used firearms gained through the fur trade to dominate the Ohio Valley during the Beaver Wars. Epidemics of measles and smallpox added to the losses. Around 1700, armed by French traders, the Miami moved back into their old lands along the upper Wabash and Maumee rivers. Their main town, Kekionga, at today's Fort Wayne, controlled a portage linking the Great Lakes with the Mississippi basin, and in 1704 the French built a trading post there.

Britain gained the region after the French and Indian War, then ceded it to the United States in 1783. As settlers crossed the Ohio, the Miami welcomed displaced Lenape and Shawnee to Kekionga, which became the heart of a Western Confederacy led in war by the Miami chief Little Turtle. The confederacy defeated a second American expedition in 1791, known as St Clair's Defeat and regarded as the worst defeat inflicted on an American army by Native Americans. In 1794, however, Anthony Wayne won at Fallen Timbers and built Fort Wayne at Kekionga, and the 1795 Treaty of Greenville ceded most of present-day Ohio. Some Miami later joined the movement of Tecumseh, and their villages were attacked during the War of 1812.

Treaty payments passed through traders who sold goods on credit, and officials used the resulting debts to press leaders into ceding reservation land. In 1846 the government forced most Miami to leave Indiana for Kansas, and later Oklahoma, while several families holding private land were allowed to stay. This divided the nation. The Indiana Miami were recognised in an 1854 treaty, lost that status in 1897 and have not regained it, despite state recognition in 1980.

The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma has about 5,600 enrolled members; since a 1996 constitutional change, hundreds of Indiana Miami have joined it. Their language, Miami–Illinois, was probably no longer spoken natively by the 1970s, but many Miami describe it as "sleeping" rather than lost. Working from French missionary dictionaries and later records, the linguist David Costa reconstructed its grammar, and the Myaamia Center, a partnership between the tribe and Miami University, now leads its revival. Around 500 tribal members were estimated to use the language regularly in 2016.

Our 1492 map draws Myaamia territory, the name used as its label, as an approximate outline; the year reflects the basemap, not when the people began. Neighbours drawn on the same map include the Kickapoo and the Illinois Confederation, whose language was closely related.