Pawnee

The Pawnee, whose own name Chatiks si chatiks is usually translated "Men of Men", are a Caddoan-speaking people of the Great Plains. For centuries they farmed and hunted along the Platte, Loup and Republican rivers of present-day Nebraska and northern Kansas; since the 1870s their home has been in Oklahoma, where the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma has its headquarters in the town of Pawnee.

Archaeology shows the ancestors of the Pawnee following a pattern of settled village life and seasonal hunting on the plains from about 1250 CE. Villages stood on high river banks and were made up of large, partly sunken earth lodges, entered from the east, each housing perhaps 30 to 50 related people. Women grew many varieties of maize, beans, squash and pumpkins in the bottomlands, keeping strains apart and setting aside a sacred "Holy Corn" for ceremonial bundles. In summer and winter whole villages left on long buffalo hunts, later on horseback, and returned for planting and harvest.

The Pawnee are matrilineal: children belong to the mother's line, and couples traditionally lived with the bride's family. Women decided much about resources and trade, while men led in hunting, war and ritual. The people were organised in two broad divisions, the northern Skiri, or Skidi, the most numerous, and the South Bands, among whom the Chaui usually took the political lead.

Pawnee belief gave the stars a central place: the Morning Star and Evening Star were said to have produced the first woman, and planting followed the heavens. Priests kept sacred bundles for the ceremonial year. Among the Skidi, a Morning Star rite involved the sacrifice of a captive girl; reformers such as Knife Chief and Petalesharo opposed it, and the last reported sacrifice took place in 1838. Whether the rite had Mesoamerican roots, as some older scholars proposed, is now disputed.

Spanish records from 1541 describe Coronado meeting the grass-lodge villages of "Quivira" and the people of "Harahey", whom one historian identified with the Pawnee. From the mid-seventeenth century, raiders armed with French metal weapons carried off so many Pawnee captives that in French Canada "Panis" came to mean any Indigenous slave. By around 1719 the Pawnee had their own horses and metal weapons, and in 1720 they destroyed a Spanish expedition under Villasur in Nebraska, killing Villasur, 45 other Spaniards and 11 Pueblo allies. Smallpox epidemics from about 1760 reduced the Skidi, who had lived in eight large villages in 1725, to a single village by 1800.

Estimated at more than 12,000 people in the early eighteenth century, the Pawnee had fallen to about 4,000 by 1860. They ceded land to the United States in a series of treaties from 1818 onward and settled on a reservation on the Loup River in 1857, under constant pressure from the Sioux and Cheyenne. Between 1864 and 1877 Pawnee Scouts served with the US Army against these old enemies and against the Comanche and Kiowa. In 1873 a Sioux war party killed about 70 Pawnee at Massacre Canyon; by then the nation numbered around 2,400, and most moved to Indian Territory in 1875. Allotment followed in 1892, and the 1900 census recorded only 633 Pawnee.

The nation reorganised under the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of 1936, with a Business Council and the chiefs' Nasharo Council. In 1964 it won a settlement of $7,316,097 for undervalued lands ceded in the nineteenth century. About 3,200 Pawnee were enrolled in 2011. Pawnee Nation College was founded in 2004, the nation meets twice a year with its Wichita kin, and in 2005 the last seeds of Pawnee Eagle Corn were successfully sprouted, reviving a ceremonial soup.

Our maps draw an approximate Pawnee territory on the central plains in 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715. Neighbours on the same maps include the Osage and the Apache.