Shawnee

The Shawnee are an Algonquian-speaking people of the Northeastern Woodlands whose homeland was probably centred in southern Ohio. Famous for their far-flung settlements and for leading Indigenous resistance to colonial expansion from the 1750s to the War of 1812, they were removed west in the nineteenth century. Today the Shawnee Tribe, the Eastern Shawnee Tribe and the Absentee-Shawnee Tribe, all federally recognised, are based in Oklahoma. The collective name in Shawnee is šaawanwaki.

Some scholars link the Shawnee to the Fort Ancient culture, which flourished along the Ohio River from about 1000 to 1650 and built earthwork mounds; others think the Shawnee arrived later and reoccupied Fort Ancient sites. A gap in the archaeological record separates the two, but similarities in material culture, art, mythology and oral history support a connection. The Shawnee called the Lenape their "grandfathers", and northern Algonquian nations regarded the Shawnee as their southernmost branch.

A Dutch map of 1614 may record them east of the Delaware River, while French explorers met Shawnee on the Ohio. In the later seventeenth century, probably driven by the Beaver Wars, in which the Haudenosaunee pushed west to control hunting grounds, Shawnee groups spread across a vast area, from the Savannah River, where they allied with the English of Charles Town in 1674, to Pennsylvania, Illinois, Alabama and Florida. In 1699 the French founder of Louisiana, Iberville, called them the one nation to fear. Their language became a trade lingua franca. A town might hold 40 to 100 bark-covered houses around a council house.

Shawnee society was traditionally organised into five divisions, Chalahgawtha, Hathawekela, Kispoko, Mekoche and Pekowi, each with its own principal town and duties for the whole people; war chiefs came from the Kispoko. Cutting across these were six name groups, such as the Turkey, Turtle and Rabbit groups, so each person had a place in both systems. Decisions on war and alliance were usually made by individual towns and bands.

The Shawnee fought first as French allies in the French and Indian War, made peace with the British in 1758, and joined Pontiac's War in 1763. When the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, agreed between Britain and the Haudenosaunee without Shawnee consent, opened Kentucky to settlers, Cornstalk fought Virginia in Lord Dunmore's War of 1774. Most Shawnee sided with Britain in the American Revolution, and afterwards they and the Miami led a confederacy against the United States until defeat at Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the Treaty of Greenville. Tecumseh, with his brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, then built a new intertribal alliance; it suffered defeat at Tippecanoe in 1811, and Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813 during the War of 1812.

After the war, Shawnee groups ceded their remaining lands. A band that had settled in Missouri moved on to Spanish Texas, becoming the Absentee Shawnee, until the Republic of Texas expelled them. The Ohio Shawnee left their last reservations in the 1830s for Kansas, and about 1,400 Missouri Shawnee were relocated in 1825. After the Civil War the Kansas Shawnee were forced to north-eastern Oklahoma, where they were long counted as part of the Cherokee Nation.

The "Loyal" or Cherokee Shawnee later won separate federal recognition by act of Congress as the Shawnee Tribe. In 2008 there were 7,584 enrolled Shawnee, most living in Oklahoma. The language had about 200 speakers in 2002 and fewer than 100 by one 2017 estimate. In 2024 the three tribes joined in opening the Great Council State Park at the site of Old Chillicothe in Ohio. Tribal leaders have spoken out against dozens of unrecognised groups claiming Shawnee identity.

Our maps draw an approximate Shawnee territory in 1492, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715, once labelled "Shawandasse Tula"; for these centuries the outline is rough, as the Shawnee were widely dispersed. Neighbours on the same maps include the Illinois Confederation.