Wichita

The Wichita are a confederation of Caddoan-speaking peoples of the southern plains, whose ancestral lands reached from central Kansas through Oklahoma into Texas. Farmers, hunters and skilled traders who lived in large villages of grass-thatched lodges, they are today federally recognised as the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes (Wichita, Keechi, Waco and Tawakoni), with headquarters in Anadarko, Oklahoma.

Ancestors of the Wichita lived on the eastern Great Plains for at least 2,000 years. Around 900 CE farming villages appeared above the Washita and South Canadian rivers, where women grew maize, beans, squash and tobacco and men hunted bison and deer. Archaeologists call the period from 1250 to 1450 the Washita River Phase, when villages grew more numerous; most were abandoned in the late fifteenth century for reasons that remain unknown. Further north, the "Great Bend aspect" sites of central Kansas, dated by radiocarbon between about 1450 and 1700, are generally accepted as ancestral Wichita. Some contain "council circles", earthworks around a central patio whose purpose, ceremonial, political or defensive, is still debated. One large settlement, Etzanoa, near present-day Arkansas City, flourished in this period.

In 1541 Coronado reached the land he called Quivira, near today's Lyons, Kansas, and found some 25 villages of up to 200 houses but no gold. In 1601 Juan de Oñate described a settlement of the people he called Rayados with more than 1,200 houses. Population estimates for this era vary widely, from tens of thousands to one scholar's figure of 200,000. Epidemics had greatly reduced the Wichita by the time French explorers met them in 1719.

The Wichita call themselves kirikir?i:s, often rendered "raccoon-eyed people", after the tattoos that men and women wore around their eyes; the French knew them as Panis Piqués, "tattooed Pawnee". They are related in language and culture to the Pawnee. For much of the year families lived in domed grass lodges up to 30 feet across, farming, gathering nuts and fruit and making pottery admired by European traders, then followed the bison in winter. A Tawakoni story recorded in 1904 tells how the first woman received an ear of corn as food for every generation to come.

Squeezed between the Apache, their bitterest enemies, and the expanding Osage, the Wichita moved south; by 1757 all appear to have reached the Red River. The Taovaya, the leading band, built twin villages there that became a busy market where the Comanche, allied with the Wichita from 1746, traded horses and captives for French guns and Wichita crops. In 1759 the Wichita and Comanche defeated a Spanish army of about 500 at the Battle of the Twin Villages. An epidemic in 1777–78, probably smallpox, killed about a third of the Taovaya, and around 1790 the Wichita were estimated at about 3,200 people.

After the Louisiana Purchase and Texan independence, the related bands were increasingly grouped together as "Wichita". The United States forced them onto the Brazos reservation in Texas in 1855, and in 1859 they were forced out of the state. They sided with the Union in the Civil War, living for a time at the site of today's Wichita, Kansas, and in 1867 were settled in south-western Indian Territory, where most still live. Allotment followed an agreement of 1891. Numbers fell to 572 by 1868, but enrolment had recovered to 2,953 by 2018. The tribes opened the Wichita Tribal History Center in Anadarko in 2018 and hold an annual dance every August.

Our maps draw an approximate Wichita territory in 1492, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715; the outlines are rough and cannot show the people's gradual move south. Neighbours on the same maps include the Caddo and the Kiowa.