Nat. Am. linguistic anthropologist specializing in Native Am languages: PhDs in linguistics & anthropology, but most proud of my 57.5 second 400m
Pecos, NM
- Tweets 229,400
- Following 5,189
- Followers 48,330
- Likes 841,637
Now that fall has arrived, I thought I’d share something I wrote about how and why what we now call the first “Thanksgiving” came about.
The “first Thanksgiving” was not a national holiday, not a church service, and not a cozy turkey dinner between two equal families. It was a three day harvest gathering at Plymouth in the fall of 1621. The only firsthand account is a short passage by Edward Winslow. He never called it Thanksgiving.
Who the English were. About 100 people sailed on the Mayflower in 1620. Some were Separatists who had lived in Leiden. Others were hired settlers and servants. They meant to land near the Hudson. Storms put them on Cape Cod in November 1620, then at an empty village the Wampanoag (WAHM-puh-nog) called Patuxet (puh-TUK-sit). They renamed it Plymouth. They arrived too late to plant.
How they were holding up. The first winter wrecked them. Roughly half died, mostly in January and February 1621, from scurvy, pneumonia, and exposure. Bradford wrote that two or three sometimes died in a day. At the worst point only six or seven people were well enough to nurse the rest. Only four married women survived. By harvest time about 53 English were left.
Who the Native people were. This was not one nameless tribe. It was Wampanoag country. Wampanoag means People of the First Light, a confederation of related villages across what is now southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island. They had lived there for thousands of years. The English sources usually name only a few of them, and even those names get mixed up.
The man later generations call Massasoit (MASS-uh-soyt) was not named Massasoit. That word was a title, like “chief.” His name was Ousamequin (oo-SAH-muh-kwin). He was sachem (SAY-chum), meaning political and military leader, of the Pokanoket (poh-kuh-NO-kit). The Pokanoket were the leading Wampanoag band that made the alliance with Plymouth. Their main seat was inland at Mount Hope, in what is now Rhode Island.
Tisquantum (tiss-KWON-tum), the man most people know as Squanto, was from Patuxet. Patuxet was the Wampanoag village that stood on the exact ground the English later called Plymouth. By 1620 that village was empty.
Hobbamock (HOB-uh-mock) was another Wampanoag man sent to live near the English and deal with them.
Samoset (SAM-uh-set) was not Wampanoag. He was an Abenaki (ab-uh-NAH-kee) leader from the Maine coast. He happened to be visiting Ousamequin when he walked into Plymouth and spoke the first English greeting.
The land was not empty by accident. From about 1616 to 1619 an epidemic, likely brought by earlier European fishermen and traders, tore through coastal New England. Many Wampanoag villages lost most of their people. Patuxet was abandoned. Bones still lay above ground when the English arrived. The surviving Wampanoag were weaker than their rivals to the west, the Narragansett (nair-uh-GAN-set), who had been extracting tribute after the die off. The Narragansett were not at the 1621 feast. They were the political problem behind it.
First contact was not a handshake on a beach. Europeans had been fishing, trading, and kidnapping along this coast for decades. In 1614 Captain Thomas Hunt seized about 20 Patuxet men, including Tisquantum, and several Nauset (NAW-set) men, and sold them. The Nauset were a Wampanoag related people on Cape Cod. Tisquantum reached England, then returned in 1619 to find Patuxet gone. That history sat under every later meeting.
The Mayflower party’s first acts on Cape Cod were not diplomatic. Exploring parties dug up buried seed corn and opened graves in Nauset territory. On December 8, 1620, at what is now First Encounter Beach in Eastham, Nauset men attacked the shore party at dawn. Arrows and musket fire were exchanged. No one was recorded killed. The English named the spot and moved on. The Nauset had reason. Stores had been taken. Graves had been disturbed.
All winter the two sides watched each other. The English saw figures at a distance and feared an attack they were too weak to survive. The Wampanoag watched a sick, armed group occupy dead Patuxet and decide whether these newcomers were useful, dangerous, or both. Formal talk did not start until spring.
March 16, 1621: Samoset walked into Plymouth and greeted them in English. “Welcome, Englishmen.” He had learned the language from fishermen in Maine. He spent the night, came back with others, and then brought Tisquantum, who spoke better English. Tisquantum showed them how to plant maize with fish as fertilizer and where to take herring. That help was real. So was his own agenda. He was a Patuxet survivor with no village left, useful to both sides and trusted by neither for long.
March 22, 1621: Ousamequin arrived with about 60 Pokanoket men. Both sides exchanged hostages before the leaders met. They agreed to a mutual defense pact. No one would harm the other. Offenders would be turned over. Stolen tools would be returned. Each would aid the other if attacked. Visitors would leave weapons behind. King James would regard Ousamequin as a friend and ally. It was politics, not friendship poetry.
Why Ousamequin signed. He needed guns and a counterweight against the Narragansett. Why the English signed. They were few, hungry, and isolated. Both sides were wary. The English often read Native caution as a threat. The Wampanoag already knew Englishmen could kidnap and cheat. Respect here meant useful caution, not affection.
The fall gathering. After a decent maize harvest Bradford sent four men fowling. They killed enough birds for nearly a week. The English also fired their muskets for sport. That noise brought Ousamequin and about 90 Wampanoag men, mostly Pokanoket warriors. They may have thought the place was under attack. They may already have been on post harvest diplomatic rounds. Winslow does not say they were invited in advance.
They stayed three days. The Wampanoag brought five deer. The English had fowl, fish, eels, shellfish, and maize. No potatoes. No pies. No long table of smiling families. About 53 English, including many children. About 90 Wampanoag men. They ate outdoors, ran races, and showed weapons. It was a harvest feast plus a treaty inspection. The Wampanoag outnumbered the colony.
Nearby but not central to the meal: that same September 1621, Plymouth sent a trading party to the Massachusett (mass-uh-CHOO-sit) people around Boston Harbor, with Tisquantum as guide. They were another related nation, not the guests at the three day feast.
Common errors. They colonists were not “Pilgrims” in their own speech. That label came later. They did not land on Plymouth Rock as a ceremony. Tisquantum did not single handedly save them out of simple kindness. The Native people were not a generic backdrop. They were Wampanoag, specifically Pokanoket diplomats on emptied Patuxet land, after a first clash with the Nauset, under pressure from the Narragansett. The meal was not the first thanksgiving on this continent. Native nations already held harvest feasts. Plymouth’s first recorded religious day of thanksgiving came in 1623 after a drought broke.
What followed. The 1621 peace lasted more than 50 years, which is longer than most people think. It did not last forever. English numbers grew. Land pressure grew. Missionary pressure grew. In 1675 Ousamequin’s son Metacom (MET-uh-kom), called King Philip by the English, went to war. That war was savage on all sides and ended Wampanoag independence in the region. The 1621 meal does not erase that. It also does not become a cartoon of doomed innocence.
The clean version. Two battered groups made a temporary bargain. The English needed food and safety. The Pokanoket Wampanoag needed allies and weapons after a demographic collapse. They ate together for three days on Patuxet ground. Then history kept moving. That is the record. The rest is later paint.
The image with this post is Jennie Augusta Brownscombe’s oil painting The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1914, now at Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It is the picture most Americans were taught. It is also a Colonial Revival romance.
What she got wrong: a long formal table and chairs the colony barely had; a log cabin Plymouth never built; Wampanoag men in Plains style eagle feather headdresses they did not wear; Native guests off to the side while an English elder leads a churchlike prayer; roughly even numbers, when about 90 Wampanoag men outnumbered about 53 English, many of them children.
19
13
119
1,444
For some reason I have a lot of new followers so I’ll repost this on what my primary academic work was. I’m still doing some of it and funding others to do more.
Languages don’t die the way people think they do.
When a Native language is labeled “extinct,” what that usually means is that the last first language speakers have passed and no children are acquiring it at home. The language itself is not gone. It is sleeping, held in wax cylinder recordings, missionary translations, land deeds, field notebooks, place names, songs half remembered by grandchildren, and in related languages that still have speakers. Reclamation is the work of waking it.
Although I left the university, I did not leave the work. Over the years, in academic settings and after I stepped away from them, I have made and collected thousands of hours of recordings and tens of thousands of documents: conversations, word lists, texts, maps, field notes, copies of archival materials, and the everyday paperwork that keeps a language project alive. That pile is not a trophy. It is raw material communities use when they decide a language should be spoken again.
A lot of it was gathered the slow way. I have spent months at a time traveling and living with Native speakers across the Western Hemisphere, in kitchens, pickup trucks, ceremony grounds, and ordinary afternoons when the real language comes out because you are still there after the formal interview ends. Some of those speakers were in their eighties and nineties. You do not learn how a language lives from a campus office. You learn it by being a guest long enough to stop being a visitor.
The public version of this work often gets flattened into “linguists save languages.” That is not how it happens. The people who own the language decide the goals. Linguists, archivists, and teachers are tools the community uses, or they are not invited back.
There are two overlapping situations, and they require different starting points.
When a language is endangered but still has fluent or semi fluent elders, the first job is documentation and transmission while those speakers are here. That means hours of recorded conversation, not just word lists. It means asking how you say the ordinary things: how you tease a child, how you talk about weather that is about to change, how you refuse something politely. It means recording the language in use, not only the language as a specimen. I have sat in those rooms with a recorder running because once an elder is gone, you cannot go back and ask the follow up question.
At the same time, communities start master apprentice pairs, one elder with one committed adult learner, and as much daily life as possible conducted in the language. They start language nests, preschool immersion with fluent speakers, and later full immersion schools. Other communities have already shown what that path can look like. Hawaiian and Māori revitalization, which I did not work on, made the point in public. If children hear the language all day from the time they can walk, a language can move from a handful of very old first speakers to children who correct their parents’ grammar. That is not magic. It is time, money, political will, and adults willing to sound like beginners in front of their own kids.
When a language has no living first language speakers, what we now more often call a sleeping language, the work begins in the archive. This is the part that sounds like detective work because it is.
You gather every scrap: 17th century Bibles and legal documents, 19th century vocabularies, 20th century tapes and wax cylinders, unpublished field notes sitting in a museum drawer. John Peabody Harrington’s notes alone run to more than a million pages across dozens of California and Southwest languages. You digitize, you index, you search for the same morpheme across manuscripts. You compare the sleeping language with its living relatives. Sounds change in regular ways. If you know how Algonquian languages treat certain consonants, you can make a conservative, evidence based guess about how a Wôpanâak word was pronounced even if no one has said it aloud since the 1830s. That is the comparative method, stripped of the textbook. Align cognates. Find the regular sound correspondences. Reconstruct the most plausible earlier form. Stay honest about what you cannot know.
A lot of my own collecting has been this kind of work, pulling scattered recordings and paper into one place so speakers, teachers, and families can use them. Living with speakers and living in archives are two halves of the same job. Archives do not wake a language by themselves. People do, once the materials are findable and the community is ready.
Jessie Little Doe Baird did this for Wôpanâak. There were no speakers. There was the Eliot Bible, deeds, letters, and sister languages. She learned linguistics so she could read the documents on their own terms. The community then built classes, materials, and eventually an immersion school. Children are now growing up hearing Wôpanâak as a first language again. The Miami language, myaamia, followed a similar path after the last speakers died in the 1960s. David Costa reconstructed it from written sources. A tribal program then turned that documentation into living speech. Neither language is a museum replica of 1700. Both are being spoken by people who have a right to them.
Once you have enough of the language reconstructed or documented to teach, the work becomes pedagogical and social.
You decide what “enough” means for your community. Some nations want everyday conversational fluency first. Some want ceremonial register restored with extreme care. Some want both. You write dictionaries that people will actually use. You make storybooks, apps, radio, social media stickers, board games. You train teachers, often the first generation of second language speakers teaching the next.
Methods vary: total immersion, master apprentice, gesture based systems that keep English out of the room, picture based accelerated acquisition. None of them work if the language never leaves the classroom. So you expand domains: homes, workplaces, tribal government, sports, texting. A language that is only spoken on Tuesday nights in a community center will stay fragile. A language that is used to argue about whose turn it is to do the dishes has a future.
There are limits, and it is better to say them out loud.
You cannot recover every word that was never written down. Pronunciation will have uncertainties. New speakers will have an accent and will invent ways to talk about cell phones and federal regulations. That is normal. Every living language does this. Thousands of hours of tape and tens of thousands of pages still leave holes. Months in a community still leave holes. The measure of success is not whether a 19th century speaker would recognize every sentence. The measure is whether the community can use the language for the things that matter to them, and whether children can grow up inside it.
The work is also political. Boarding schools, allotment, missionization, and English only schooling were designed to break intergenerational transmission. Reclamation is one of the ways nations refuse that outcome. It is tied to sovereignty, to land, to the knowledge that lives in place names and kinship terms and ecological vocabulary that English does not carry. People often say they started because of a dream, a grandparent’s last words, or the simple fact that they were tired of introducing themselves in a language that was not theirs.
It takes a generation to create new adult speakers and another generation to create children who are native speakers again. Funding is uneven. Elders get tired. Linguists come and go. Internal disagreement about spelling, dialects, and who is allowed to teach is common and sometimes necessary. Persistence matters more than any single method. Documentation is only the first long mile.
That is the process. It is slow, collective, and unfinished on purpose. A sleeping language is not a dead language. It is waiting for the people who still know its name.
Image: Grok.
12
16
170
2,201
WindTalker retweeted
Who were the first people in the Americas? This may be my most asked single question:
For decades the answer was Clovis. Those distinctive fluted points show up around 13,000 years ago and seem to spread across the continent almost overnight. The story was simple: people walked across the Bering land bridge, waited for an ice-free corridor to open between the two great ice sheets, and then moved south. Clean. Logical. And wrong.
The land bridge part is solid. During the last glacial maximum, sea levels dropped and Siberia connected to Alaska in a broad, cold, but livable region called Beringia. People lived there for a long time. Genetic work shows a population that got cut off from Asia somewhere after about 23,000 years ago. Those people are the ancestors of everyone who later lived in the Americas.
The problem was the ice. The Laurentide and Cordilleran sheets locked together for thousands of years and blocked any practical overland route south. The corridor that finally opened between them only became usable around 13,000–12,500 years ago. That’s too late. We already have people much farther south by then.
So the coastal idea started looking better. Along the North Pacific, kelp forests and rich nearshore waters could have fed people moving by boat, even while the interior was still locked in ice. A lot of that old shoreline is underwater now, which is frustrating, but the logic holds up.
Then the sites started piling up. White Sands in New Mexico has human footprints in old lake beds dated between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago. Multiple methods—seeds, pollen, sediment dating—keep landing in the same range. Some people still argue about it, but the evidence is hard to wave away. People were already in the Southwest during the height of the ice age.
In Idaho, Cooper’s Ferry has stemmed points and clear occupation layers going back to about 16,000 years ago. That’s before the inland corridor was open. In Texas, the Friedkin site on Buttermilk Creek has thousands of artifacts sitting under a Clovis layer, dated between roughly 15,500 and 13,200 years ago. And Monte Verde in Chile has been solid at around 14,500 years for a long time now, way too far south and too early for the old model.
There are claims of even older sites, some pushing past 26,000 or 30,000 years. Most of those still need better proof. The genetics also fit more cleanly with people entering after the worst of the glacial maximum rather than long before it.
So the first people weren’t Clovis hunters waiting for the ice to melt. They were the descendants of that Beringian population who found ways south, mostly along the coast, maybe through temporary openings, thousands of years earlier. By the time Clovis points show up, people had already been living all over the Americas for a good long while.
The details will keep shifting as new sites turn up and old ones get re-examined. But the big change has already happened. People got here earlier than we used to think, and they didn’t wait for the ice to melt.
120
99
1,056
43,350
The Honor of Counting Coup
The bravest thing a Plains warrior could do was touch a living enemy and leave him standing.
That act is what outsiders later called counting coup. The word is French. Fur traders and voyageurs on the northern Plains used coup, meaning a blow or strike, as a rough translation of a phrase already common among the tribes: to strike the enemy. Among the Oceti Sakowin (oh-CHAY-tee shah-KOH-ween) the honor was Tȟóka Kté (TOH-kah k’TAY). The stick used to deliver it was Čhaŋwápaha (chahn-WAH-pah-hah). Reciting the deed afterward was WaktóglakA (wahk-TOH-glah-kah). Other nations had their own words for the same family of acts. The French label stuck because it was short and travelers needed a single term. The practice itself was older than the word they gave it.
It grew on the Great Plains as a precise language of honor and reached its classic form after horses arrived and raids became fast, personal, and fiercely competitive. Pedestrian warriors already prized the dangerous close approach. Late prehistoric rock art shows shield-bearing men striking or touching opponents who lack comparable arms. Oral traditions place the honor of striking an enemy deep in the time before these peoples lived as equestrian societies. The horse changed the scale and the theater. A man could close at a gallop, touch a living enemy with hand, bow, quirt, or slender stick, and peel away. The first touch on an uninjured opponent usually ranked highest. Second and third touches on the same man still counted. Stealing a horse picketed beside an enemy lodge often stood near the top as well. Killing mattered, but in many rankings it sat below the touch because the touch required you to put your body inside the enemy’s reach and come back.
Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Blackfeet, Arapaho, Assiniboine (uh-SIN-uh-boin), Comanche, and Kiowa made this system central. A warrior’s standing, his right to speak, his place in a society, even his path toward leadership, rested on deeds the camp could hear recited and see marked: notches on a stick, eagle feathers worn at particular angles, painted shirts, later ledger drawings. The Crow who chased defeated Oglala and struck them with sticks instead of finishing them were not being merciful. They were announcing that those men were not worth the powder. Wooden Leg at the Little Bighorn counted coup with a whip on a fleeing soldier and took his carbine, then left him, because after the touch the kill felt cheap.
The same measure of honor outlived the open Plains. Joseph Medicine Crow, a Crow scout with the U.S. Army in Europe during the Second World War, completed the four traditional Crow war deeds: he led a successful war party, took an enemy’s weapon, stole enemy horses, and touched a living German soldier without killing him. When he returned home, Crow elders recognized him as a war chief. The battlefield had changed. The standard had not.
That exact combination of rules was uncommon beyond the Plains. The touch on a living enemy as the highest honor, the graded first-second-third claims on the same man, the coup stick, the public recitation, and the feather tallies formed one tightly fitted system. Pueblo nations fought from villages and in organized campaigns. Eastern Woodlands peoples valued captives, revenge, and different war honors. Northwest Coast, California, and Arctic societies measured prestige by other means. Analogues exist elsewhere in the world, because many warrior cultures reward the man who accepts more risk than the job strictly requires. Medieval knights sought first blood or the capture of a notable opponent. Some African and Pacific societies staged regulated fights that displayed courage without always aiming at slaughter. Samurai codes prized open approach over stealth. None of those systems is counting coup. They share a family resemblance: honor attached to proximity, self-command, and public witness rather than to body count alone.
The practice was theirs, shaped by grass, horse, and the need to turn individual daring into social rank. It was brilliant, narrow, and local. That is why it still startles people who expect every Native nation to have lived by the same rules of war.
Image: Charles M. Russell, Counting Coup (Medicine Whip), 1902, oil on canvas. Sid Richardson Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. The painting shows a running fight between Blood (Kainai) and Lakota warriors and was based on a story told to Russell by a Blood veteran. It is a later artist’s reconstruction of the honor, not a Native ledger drawing.
The post is in response to request by @D_Rives_B
36
59
372
6,993
I attached the wrong photo. It’s actually Charles M. Russell’s When Blackfeet and Sioux Meet, 1908, oil on canvas. The attached photo is Charles M. Russell, Counting Coup (Medicine Whip), 1902. Oil on canvas, 18.125 × 30.125 in Sid Richardson Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Here is Counting Coup (Medicine Whip), 1902
1
2
31
348
The French named it “coup” but the honor was older than the word.
Also, the photo description is incorrect. It’s actually Charles M. Russell’s When Blackfeet and Sioux Meet, 1908, oil on canvas. The attached photo is Charles M. Russell, Counting Coup (Medicine Whip), 1902. Oil on canvas, 18.125 × 30.125 in Sid Richardson Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Here is Counting Coup (Medicine Whip), 1902
The Honor of Counting Coup
The bravest thing a Plains warrior could do was touch a living enemy and leave him standing.
That act is what outsiders later called counting coup. The word is French. Fur traders and voyageurs on the northern Plains used coup, meaning a blow or strike, as a rough translation of a phrase already common among the tribes: to strike the enemy. Among the Oceti Sakowin (oh-CHAY-tee shah-KOH-ween) the honor was Tȟóka Kté (TOH-kah k’TAY). The stick used to deliver it was Čhaŋwápaha (chahn-WAH-pah-hah). Reciting the deed afterward was WaktóglakA (wahk-TOH-glah-kah). Other nations had their own words for the same family of acts. The French label stuck because it was short and travelers needed a single term. The practice itself was older than the word they gave it.
It grew on the Great Plains as a precise language of honor and reached its classic form after horses arrived and raids became fast, personal, and fiercely competitive. Pedestrian warriors already prized the dangerous close approach. Late prehistoric rock art shows shield-bearing men striking or touching opponents who lack comparable arms. Oral traditions place the honor of striking an enemy deep in the time before these peoples lived as equestrian societies. The horse changed the scale and the theater. A man could close at a gallop, touch a living enemy with hand, bow, quirt, or slender stick, and peel away. The first touch on an uninjured opponent usually ranked highest. Second and third touches on the same man still counted. Stealing a horse picketed beside an enemy lodge often stood near the top as well. Killing mattered, but in many rankings it sat below the touch because the touch required you to put your body inside the enemy’s reach and come back.
Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Blackfeet, Arapaho, Assiniboine (uh-SIN-uh-boin), Comanche, and Kiowa made this system central. A warrior’s standing, his right to speak, his place in a society, even his path toward leadership, rested on deeds the camp could hear recited and see marked: notches on a stick, eagle feathers worn at particular angles, painted shirts, later ledger drawings. The Crow who chased defeated Oglala and struck them with sticks instead of finishing them were not being merciful. They were announcing that those men were not worth the powder. Wooden Leg at the Little Bighorn counted coup with a whip on a fleeing soldier and took his carbine, then left him, because after the touch the kill felt cheap.
The same measure of honor outlived the open Plains. Joseph Medicine Crow, a Crow scout with the U.S. Army in Europe during the Second World War, completed the four traditional Crow war deeds: he led a successful war party, took an enemy’s weapon, stole enemy horses, and touched a living German soldier without killing him. When he returned home, Crow elders recognized him as a war chief. The battlefield had changed. The standard had not.
That exact combination of rules was uncommon beyond the Plains. The touch on a living enemy as the highest honor, the graded first-second-third claims on the same man, the coup stick, the public recitation, and the feather tallies formed one tightly fitted system. Pueblo nations fought from villages and in organized campaigns. Eastern Woodlands peoples valued captives, revenge, and different war honors. Northwest Coast, California, and Arctic societies measured prestige by other means. Analogues exist elsewhere in the world, because many warrior cultures reward the man who accepts more risk than the job strictly requires. Medieval knights sought first blood or the capture of a notable opponent. Some African and Pacific societies staged regulated fights that displayed courage without always aiming at slaughter. Samurai codes prized open approach over stealth. None of those systems is counting coup. They share a family resemblance: honor attached to proximity, self-command, and public witness rather than to body count alone.
The practice was theirs, shaped by grass, horse, and the need to turn individual daring into social rank. It was brilliant, narrow, and local. That is why it still startles people who expect every Native nation to have lived by the same rules of war.
Image: Charles M. Russell, Counting Coup (Medicine Whip), 1902, oil on canvas. Sid Richardson Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. The painting shows a running fight between Blood (Kainai) and Lakota warriors and was based on a story told to Russell by a Blood veteran. It is a later artist’s reconstruction of the honor, not a Native ledger drawing.
The post is in response to request by @D_Rives_B
9
114
1,766
WindTalker retweeted
This is the same story for every taxpayer funded project in Gavin Newsom‘s money laundering California.
From the high speed rail to his wife’s grifting diaper program, President Trump must audit every aspect of the Newsom administration.
LATEST: LAX’s long-delayed People Mover has been pushed back again — now expected to open January 2027 at the earliest.
It was originally supposed to open in 2023. The project is now more than $1 BILLION over budget.
36
126
416
8,031
WindTalker retweeted
The people pulling the strings of Deb Haaland’s campaign know she’s incompetent and incapable of handling a debate, much less being Governor. But that’s why they chose her, so she can be controlled.
Her hiding surprises exactly no one.
kob.com/new-mexico/deb-haala…
18
75
209
2,912
The Ojibwe: the people who walked until food grew on the water
Ojibwe (oh JIB way) oral history says they left the Atlantic coast because a prophecy told them to keep moving west until they found a place where food grew on the water. That food was wild rice, manoomin (muh NOH min). They call themselves Anishinaabe (ah nish ih NAH bay), the original people. Chippewa is not another nation. It is the usual American form of the same name, taken from older French spellings such as Otchipwe. Saulteaux (SO toh) later named the western bands around Lake Winnipeg and onto the Plains. Mississauga (miss ih SAW guh) names some of the southern Ontario communities. Oji-Cree (OH jee Cree) names communities where Ojibwe and Cree speech and kinship mixed.
Ethnically they are Algonquian speaking Anishinaabe. Their closest relatives are the Odawa (oh DAH wah) and the Potawatomi (pot uh WAH tuh mee). The three form the Council of Three Fires. Tradition says they were once one people who divided at Michilimackinac (mish ih lih MACK ih naw). The Ojibwe became the Older Brother and Keepers of the Faith. The Odawa kept trade. The Potawatomi kept the fire. Other close Central Algonquian peoples include the Cree, Menominee (muh NAH muh nee), Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo, Shawnee, and Miami.
Genetically, living Ojibwe belong to the main founding Native American lineage of the continent. The ancestors of nearly all Native nations south of the Arctic came from Siberian peoples who entered the Americas by the Bering land region and then moved south and east. Ojibwe ancestry is the same stock as other woodland peoples of the Northeast and Great Lakes. They are not a separate race from those neighbors. They are not Na Dene (NAH deh neh). Athabaskan peoples such as Navajo, Apache, and northern Dene carry extra ancestry from a later northern stream. Ojibwe do not. Some families show later European admixture from the fur trade country. That is recent family history, not the origin of the people.
That does not mean there were no earlier arrivals to the Americas. Evidence such as the White Sands footprints in New Mexico suggests people were already in the interior 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, during the last glacial maximum, likely by other routes than the old ice free corridor story. That earlier presence may belong to the same founding population arriving sooner, or to a group that left tracks and little ancestry in nations alive today. The genomes do not show a separate surviving origin for the Ojibwe.
Three origin accounts should be kept apart. The Seven Fires teaching starts the people on the Atlantic and walks them west to the rice. Historical linguistics usually runs the other way. Proto Algonquian is reconstructed west of the Great Lakes and spreading east, with Ojibwe and Potawatomi as a later Great Lakes branch. Eastern Algonquian on the Atlantic is not the source of Ojibwe speech. Archaeology does not show a labeled march from the ocean. The people first appear by name in the Jesuit Relations of 1640, still near the St. Marys River and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. From there the record follows their spread around Superior, into Wisconsin and Minnesota, and onto the Plains. Older woodland sites in that country may belong to ancestral Algonquian speaking populations. They are not a proven Ojibwe trail from the salt water.
The origin of the prophecy is lost to time, but the teaching says seven prophets came to the Anishinaabe on the northeastern salt water. Each spoke of a coming era, called a fire. The first told them to follow the sacred miigis (MEE gis) shell of the Midewiwin (mih DAY wih win) west through seven stopping places to the land where food grew on the water, and warned that staying would mean destruction. Later fires told of losing the way and finding it again, of light skinned strangers judged by the face they wore, of broken teachings, and of a seventh fire in which new people would retrace the trail and ask the elders for what had been left behind. The teachings were kept in the Midewiwin. The version most often quoted in English is the one Edward Benton-Banai recorded from elders in The Mishomis Book. Some tellings say the first prophet was also heard by eastern nations such as the Mi’kmaq (MEEG mah).
In that telling the stopping places included the St. Lawrence, Niagara, the Detroit country, Manitoulin Island, Sault Ste. Marie, and finally Madeline Island in the Apostle Islands of Lake Superior. The Ojibwe name for that island is Mooningwanekaaning (moo ning wah neh KAH ning), often rendered as the place of the golden breasted woodpecker. It became a principal town and a spiritual center for the Lake Superior bands. There the rice stood in the shallows and the walking ended.
Manoomin was not a side dish. It was the sign they had arrived, a winter staple when meat and fish ran thin, and a gift used in ceremony and feast. Whole communities timed late summer around the beds. Families held rights in particular lakes. A good year meant stores. A ruined bed meant hunger. That is why the rice is treated as a relative and a responsibility, not as a crop a person owns outright.
It is an annual grass that grows in clear, shallow lakes and slow rivers. The ripe seed hangs over the water. Harvest is done from a canoe. One person poles. The other bends the stalks over the gunwale with one stick and knocks the ripe grain in with the other. Green heads are left for seed. On shore the grain is dried, parched, threshed, and winnowed. Lake rice is what the treaties and the teachings mean. Commercial paddy rice is a different crop.
The canoe that opened that country was an elegant machine. A birchbark hull was stretched over cedar ribs and planks, sewn with split spruce root, and sealed with pitch mixed with fat and charcoal. The skin was thin. The frame was springy. The whole boat could weigh under a hundred pounds and still carry a family, a rice harvest, or a load of furs. One person could lift it and walk a portage. It drew almost nothing, so it slipped through rice beds and over beaver dams. The high ends shed Superior chop. A tear could be patched in camp with bark, root, and heated pitch. French traders copied the design because nothing they brought from Europe did the same work as well.
From the 1640 country they spread with the fur trade, new hunting ground, and pressure from the east. They allied early with the French and moved goods by canoe from Montreal to the far end of Superior. By the 1700s and 1800s some bands had moved south of Lake Superior and displaced Dakota communities in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. Other bands kept going west and became the Plains Ojibwe or Saulteaux.
They are still there. In the United States the main country is Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Dakota, with related communities in Montana. Minnesota bands include Red Lake, White Earth, Leech Lake, Mille Lacs (mill LACKS), Fond du Lac, Grand Portage, and Bois Forte (bwah FORT). Wisconsin and Michigan hold Lake Superior Chippewa communities such as Bad River, Red Cliff, Lac Courte Oreilles (lah KOORT oh RAY), Lac du Flambeau (lah duh flam BO), Sokaogon (so KAH gun), St. Croix, Bay Mills, Sault Ste. Marie, and Keweenaw Bay (KEE wuh naw). In North Dakota the Turtle Mountain Band is the large Plains Chippewa community. Many more people live off reservation in Minneapolis, Duluth, Milwaukee, Detroit, and other cities.
In Canada they are the second largest First Nations population after the Cree. The country runs from western Quebec across Ontario and Manitoba into Saskatchewan and eastern Alberta. Manitoba and Saskatchewan are the heart of the Saulteaux country.
The clan system, the doodem (DOH dem), tied distant villages together. A person belonged to the father’s clan and could not marry inside it. Birchbark covered the canoe, the wigwam, and the containers. The Midewiwin kept teaching on birchbark scrolls marked with figures and signs that helped a trained person remember ceremony, songs, and origin stories. They were not an alphabet. A stranger could not sound the bark out like a printed page. The name Ojibwe is commonly explained two ways: the puckered seam on their moccasins, or the practice of marking figures on bark. The language is Anishinaabemowin (ah nish ih NAH bay moh win). The Seven Grandfather Teachings still name the measure of a person: wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility, and truth.
Treaties in 1837, 1842, and 1854, including the Treaty of La Pointe signed near Madeline Island, ceded millions of acres but reserved the right to hunt, fish, and gather, including rice, on the ceded lands. Those rights have been upheld in court. They are many bands and First Nations, not one capital. What they share is the lakes, the rice, the bark, and the story of why they stopped walking.
Photos: A birchbark canoe in the shallows of a northern lake, high ends and sewn hull on clear water. Manoomin standing in a lake bed, seed heads leaning over the water. Photo: Peter M. Dziuk, Minnesota Wildflowers.
24
40
245
2,647
Modern names do not belong on old rock. Across the Southwest, dates, spray paint, and scratched initials land on panels pecked or painted centuries and millennia ago. Taking that graffiti off without destroying the older work is slow, technical, and often incomplete.
National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management conservators handle many federal sites. Tribal historic preservation offices and cultural resource programs do the same on reservation and tribal land. At Bandelier, a Kewa Pueblo conservator working under the Park Service Vanishing Treasures program spent years lifting modern names out of cavates with small tools and mud fills. The Gila River Indian Community built its own petroglyph conservation program because vandalism, not weather, is the damage they see most. City and tribal staff have done similar work at Tempe Butte with Salt River Pima-Maricopa oversight. Volunteer groups help at places such as Red Rock Canyon and Sedona, usually under an archaeologist, and they stop when a mark sits on top of a glyph.
The method is conservative on purpose. Crews start dry: soft brushes, wooden or plastic tools, no grinding. Water comes next, then the mildest solvent that will move paint without bleeding into the rock varnish. Lasers are used at some parks because they avoid chemicals. Pressure washers and harsh strippers are a last resort or are refused. Federal practice often leaves graffiti older than fifty years if it has become part of the site’s later history. Fresh paint that covers a pecked figure may be left alone if removal would take the figure with it.
The work matters for two reasons that are easy to confuse. Archaeologists need the original surface if the panel is ever to be recorded or dated with any honesty. Descendant communities, including Pueblo, Paiute, O’odham, and others, often treat the same panels as living places. A name carved last year is not just graffiti to them. It is a wound on a site that still has ceremonial and family meaning. Cleaning is not nostalgia. It is an attempt to keep the older mark readable and the place usable.
The limitation is as important as the success. Some vandalism cannot be undone. Training, permission from the land manager and from descendant communities, and the discipline to stop are what separate preservation from a second round of damage.
92
108
820
6,786
As a Native American, I’m sad to see that too many of you don’t grasp how this turns out for you.
WOAH 🚨 1,000 Muslims per day are being registered to vote in Houston, Texas
Yes, this is real
The Islamic Society of Greater Houston confirms they are registering roughly 1,000 voters a week at mosques across the city of Houston
The Muslim leaders say they will defeat Republicans and mobilize their voters for Democrats:
“I can guarantee you, if you all go out and vote this time, Muslims’ vote will make a difference in Houston and Harris County” - President Emran Gazi
This is the Islamic Takeover of America. Muslims will use the Democrat Party to take over our country and
83
223
1,337
17,604
The empire that was Comancheria
The Comanche were not a small raiding tribe on the edge of American history. For a century they were the dominant power between the Arkansas and the Rio Grande. They pushed the Apache off the buffalo range, made New Mexican towns buy peace at seasonal trade fairs, rode deep into Mexico, and compelled Spain, Mexico, Texas, and the United States to treat Comancheria as a rival power on the southern plains.
They call themselves Nʉmʉnʉʉ (nuh-muh-NOO), the People. Their language is Nʉmʉ Tekwapʉ, the speech of the People. English “Comanche” comes from a Ute word, kɨmantsi, meaning enemy or stranger. That is what neighbors called them. It is not what they called themselves. Nʉmʉnʉʉ remained their own name.
The language belongs to the Numic branch of Uto-Aztecan. Its closest living relative is Shoshoni. Timbisha sits in the same Central Numic cluster. Farther out on the family tree is Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica. The kinship is old, not conversational. A Comanche speaker and a Nahuatl speaker cannot talk to each other. They do share a deep grammatical ancestry that reached the Great Basin long before either people met a Spaniard.
Until the late seventeenth century the people who became Comanche were Eastern Shoshone of the mountains and basins of what is now Wyoming and the northern Rockies. They hunted on foot, used dogs as pack animals, and lived at the edge of the plains rather than in their center. Then the horse arrived. After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 drove Spain out of New Mexico, captured Spanish stock moved north and west in trade. Ute allies already knew mounted hunting. Shoshone bands moving southeast borrowed that system and remade themselves in a generation.
Spanish officers in New Mexico noticed them on the northeastern frontier by 1706. They were no longer a mountain people trying out livestock. They were becoming a plains people who measured wealth in herds. By the 1730s most of the nation could ride. That threshold changed everything. A mounted hunter could kill bison at a pace no pedestrian culture could match. A mounted war party could strike a valley two hundred miles away and be gone before a mission bell finished ringing.
The land they took had been Apache country. Jicarilla, Lipan, and other Apache groups farmed river bottoms and hunted the surrounding grass. Those farms needed the same water and winter shelter that horse herds needed. Comanche and Ute pressure, then Comanche pressure alone, drove Apache bands off the open southern plains toward the mountains and the Texas brush. By the mid eighteenth century the old Apacheria of the high plains was Comancheria, a belt of grass and canyon from the Arkansas River south toward the Balcones Escarpment, west into New Mexico, and east toward the Cross Timbers.
It was not a state with a capital and a tax office. It was an empire of movement. Independent divisions, later named by outsiders as Penateka, Nokoni, Kotsoteka, Yamparika, and Quahadi among others, shared language, kinship, and a common claim to the buffalo and the horse trade. They did not take orders from a single chief. They did coordinate war, markets, and marriage across a territory that at its height covered hundreds of thousands of square miles.
Spain learned the cost. Missions meant to shield Lipan Apache, including San Sabá in 1758, were smashed. New Mexican towns bought peace at seasonal fairs, especially at Taos and Pecos, where Comanche parties brought horses, hides, and captives and took metal tools, cloth, corn, and more stock in return. Those markets were diplomacy as much as commerce. A fair that opened meant a truce. A fair that failed meant another season of raids.
Mexico inherited the same frontier and could not close it. Comanche campaigns reached far south of the Rio Grande. Ranchos emptied. Herds vanished. Mexican officials signed papers that admitted what the raids had already decided.
When the United States and Mexico later drew their border along the Rio Grande, the maps showed two republics. On the ground the Comanche still controlled the plains between them, raided both sides, and had to be bargained with or fought as a separate power.
Texas was the hardest neighbor. Anglo colonies sat on the edge of the horse pasture and the war trail. Treaties were made and broken on both sides. The 1836 attack on Parker’s Fort took Cynthia Ann Parker into Comanche life, where she became Naduah and the mother of Quanah. The Council House fight in San Antonio in 1840 killed visiting Penateka leaders during a hostage negotiation and brought a retaliatory raid that reached the Gulf. Disease and the thinning of the herds hurt the Penateka first. Other divisions stayed out on the Staked Plains, the Llano Estacado, and kept the old economy alive into the 1860s and early 1870s.
When the Civil War pulled federal troops off the Texas posts, Comanche and Kiowa raids surged. Settlers abandoned a wide strip west of a line from Gainesville to Fredericksburg. Men in those counties often refused to leave for Confederate armies because leaving meant opening their families to the next raid. Texas had to raise local militia and a Frontier Regiment to keep men on the line at home, and that home defense drained recruits who would otherwise have gone east.
The United States arrived with a different tempo. After the Civil War, hide hunters finished the southern buffalo. Army columns learned to hunt winter camps rather than chase summer war parties. In September 1874 Ranald Mackenzie found a great encampment of Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne in Palo Duro Canyon and destroyed the horse herd. Few people died in that fight. The nation could not live the old way without those animals. In 1875 Quanah Parker led the last free Quahadi, the Antelope band still living off the reservation, into Fort Sill. That surrender closed the mounted age.
The Comanche Nation is still there. Headquarters sit at Lawton. Enrollment in recent tribal statements runs near eighteen thousand citizens. That is a people, not a memory. Powwow, fair, tribal government, and family law continue on land that is a fragment of Comancheria and still Comanche ground.
The language is in worse condition than the nation. First language speakers of Nʉmʉ Tekwapʉ number in the single digits, almost all elders. The sound system drifted from Shoshoni after the split, enough that the two tongues are no longer easy sisters. Comanche Nation language programs, classes, and periodic reunions with Shoshone relatives try to keep the speech in living mouths. Whether that produces new home speakers will be decided in this generation, not in the last one.
Culture did not freeze in 1875. Horse knowledge, family bands, and a reputation for hard riding outlasted the open range. Christianity, the peyote church Quanah helped establish, military service, and Oklahoma civic life sit beside older forms. Quanah’s generation already lived in that overlap. Their descendants still do.
Stand on the Caprock Escarpment, the cliff line that drops off the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado, and the story is not a footnote to Texas or a romance of painted ponies. It is the record of a Numic people who left the mountains, took to the horse faster than their rivals, evicted the Apache from the best grass, and made neighboring governments pay attention. Spain wanted a quiet frontier. Mexico wanted a border. Texas wanted farms. The United States wanted the plains empty of independent nations. For a long century the Nʉmʉnʉʉ made all four of those wishes expensive. That is the empire. The reservation is what remained when the buffalo and the herds were gone. The nation is what refused to go with them.
The photograph below is Quanah Parker, standing, braids wrapped, hair-pipe breastplate, blanket, and fan. He was the son of the Nokoni leader Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, and the Quahadi leader who brought the last free band into Fort Sill in 1875. The image shows the man who closed the mounted age and then rebuilt Comanche political life on the reservation.
74
86
767
33,480
Few people know that Texas was forced to keep men home from Confederate armies because of Comanche raids.
7
2
134
2,121
WindTalker retweeted
For you Appalachian lovers that drive past and read the Historical Markers along the way. Here’s a deeper dive from a woman I follow.
The Cherokee story begins with a small beetle diving into an endless sea, and it has not ended. The people who call themselves Aniyvwiya (ah-nee-yun-WEE-yah), the Principal People, still live in two homelands at once: the southern Appalachians around the mother town of Kituwah, and northeastern Oklahoma, where survivors of a forced march rebuilt a nation.
They speak Tsalagi (jah-LAH-gee), the sole surviving Southern Iroquoian language. English “Cherokee” comes from that word. Some scholars derive it from a Muskogean or Choctaw term for people of a different speech or of the cave country. The Haudenosaunee (hoh-dee-noh-SHAW-nee) once called them inhabitants of the cave country. Spanish writers recorded forms such as Chalaque. Aniyvwiya remained the older inner name.
Oral tradition begins with water. Elders speaking to James Mooney described the earth as an island hanging from a stone sky vault by four cords. When the world grows old the cords will break and everything will be water again. In the beginning the animals lived crowded above the vault in Galunlati. A little water beetle, Dayunisi, Beaver’s Grandchild, dove and brought up mud that spread into earth. The Great Buzzard, flying low while the ground was still soft, struck the land and raised the Cherokee mountains. The sun was later set on a path across the vault.
Kituwah, on the Tuckasegee River in western North Carolina, is remembered as the mother town. The Eastern Band later bought the site back. Other stories tell of towns moving until they reached those mountains, and of an ancient coming from the north. Oral history holds both a spiritual origin in place and a memory of movement.
Specialists place the split between Cherokee and the northern Iroquoian languages, Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Tuscarora, at about thirty five hundred to four thousand years ago. Some argue proto Iroquoian speakers were already adapted to Appalachian mast forest. By Spanish contact an Iroquoian language was being spoken in country otherwise dominated by Muskogean and Siouan tongues. Archaeologists tie historic Cherokee towns to the Pisgah phase, about 1000 to 1500, and then to the Qualla phase, with heavy borrowing from Mississippian and Lamar pottery. Ethnogenesis looks like long mountain residence plus an old Iroquoian inheritance, not a single late invasion, though that debate is not closed.
Historic towns stood along rivers in western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia, northwestern South Carolina, and northeastern Alabama, grouped as Lower, Middle, Valley, Out, and Overhill. Each town had a townhouse, plaza, sacred fire, and its own leaders. There was no king. Descent ran through the mother. The seven clans, Wolf, Deer, Bird, Paint, Blue, Wild Potato, and Long Hair, governed marriage, hospitality, and legal duty across town lines. Women farmed corn, beans, and squash. Men hunted and went to war. That balance is embodied in Selu, Corn Woman, and Kanati, the Lucky Hunter.
Green Corn renewed the year. Old fires went out, offenses were aired, and a new fire was kindled in honor of Selu. Stickball, anetsa, the little brother of war, trained men and sometimes settled disputes. Pottery, river cane basketry, carved masks, and spoken formulas filled daily life. The ethic called tohi asked for right order rather than chaos or rigidity.
De Soto crossed this country in 1540. Disease moved faster than his army. English traders arrived by the late 1600s. Deerskins, captives, guns, and rum remade power.
Cherokee fighters joined the English in the Tuscarora War of 1711 to 1715 and then in the Yamasee War. Raids with Creek, Shawnee, and Catawba neighbors never fully stopped. Alliance with South Carolina collapsed in the Anglo-Cherokee War of 1758 to 1761. Fort Loudoun was starved out. Columns under Montgomery and Grant burned Middle towns and cut the corn.
In the Revolution most Cherokee sided with the British. In 1776 militias under Griffith Rutherford and others smashed Middle, Valley, Out, and Lower towns. Dragging Canoe refused the land cessions that followed and fought on from the Chickamauga towns until 1794. Treaties closed the war and took more ground.
In the Creek War of 1813 to 1814, Cherokee men including Major Ridge and John Ross helped Andrew Jackson break the Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend. Jackson later refused to enforce Worcester v. Georgia.
In 1821 Sequoyah, who was not literate in English, finished a syllabary of eighty five characters. Literacy spread in a few years. The Cherokee Phoenix began printing in 1828. A written constitution and a capital at New Echota followed in 1827. American writers lumped the Cherokee with the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole as the Five Civilized Tribes. The label was never a Cherokee name, and it bought no safety. After gold was found in Georgia, a minority Treaty Party signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 without Principal Chief John Ross. Congress ratified it.
In 1838 the army rounded up some sixteen thousand people and drove them west on Nvna Daula Tsvyi, the Trail Where They Cried. About four thousand died. Some hid in the North Carolina mountains and became the Eastern Band on the Qualla Boundary. Earlier western migrants, the Old Settlers, later shaped the United Keetoowah Band. Survivors rebuilt around Tahlequah. In 1839 assassins killed Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot.
The Civil War split the Nation again. Stand Watie raised Confederate Cherokee cavalry, fought at Pea Ridge, and was the last Confederate general to surrender, in 1865. Pin Indians stayed with the Union or returned to it under John Ross. The 1866 treaty restored a western homeland at a steep price and required citizenship for Freedmen. Oklahoma statehood in 1907 tried to dissolve tribal government. It did not dissolve the people.
Three federally recognized nations exist today. The Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah has near 477,000 citizens, more than 140,000 of them on the fourteen county reservation. The Eastern Band has more than 16,000 citizens on the Qualla Boundary and keeps the Kituwah dialect and the mother town. The United Keetoowah Band, also in Tahlequah, has more than 14,000 citizens and traces itself especially to Old Settlers. All three are sovereign. Self identified Cherokee ancestry in the wider public is not the same as citizenship.
Clans, Green Corn, stickball, basketry, and carving continue. Baptist and Methodist churches that have long preached in Cherokee sit beside older formulas.
Tsalagi is polysynthetic. A single verb can carry subject, object, direction, and evidential shading that English would spread across a clause. Classical Cherokee does not use the English r or several other English consonants. The western dialect dominates in Oklahoma, Kituwah in North Carolina. The old Lower dialect is gone. About fifteen hundred to two thousand first language speakers remain, nearly all elders. The Durbin Feeling Language Act has funded immersion schools, master apprentice training, a language campus, and recordings of more than a thousand fluent speakers. Children in Tahlequah and Cherokee, North Carolina, now spend school days in Tsalagi.
The image that belongs with this history is a painting of Sequoyah, also known as George Gist or George Guess. Charles Bird King painted him around 1828, pointing at a tablet of the characters he invented. King’s original burned in the Smithsonian fire of 1865. What most people know is Henry Inman’s copy. It shows Sequoyah, the man who made Tsalagi a written language.
1
5
262
