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miami-illinois and shawnee Culture-Hero and Trickster Stories Introduction by David J. Costa Miami-Illinois Miami-Illinois is an Algonquian language originally spoken in what is now Indiana and Illinois. In Indiana the groups speaking this language included the Miami tribe proper (myaamiaki, ‘‘downstream people’’), along theWabash, Maumee, Mississinewa , and Eel rivers; the Weas (waayaahtanooki, ‘‘whirlpool people’’), along the middle reaches of the Wabash River; and the Piankashaws (peeyankihšiaki, ‘‘torn ears people’’), in the southwest of the state around present-day Vincennes. The two main groups speaking the Illinois language were the Kaskaskias (kaahkaahkiaki , ‘‘katydids’’) in the southwest of the state near the Mississippi River, and the Peorias (peewaaliaki; etymology unknown) to the north, along the Illinois River. The closest neighbors and linguistic relatives of the Miami-Illinois people were the Kickapoo, Mascouten, Fox, Sauk, Potawatomi, and Shawnee Indians. By 1832 pressure from European settlers and warfare with neighboring tribes had combined to force thevarious Miami-Illinois-speaking groups to abandon the Illinois area. After spending a few decades in eastern Kansas, they were eventually settled in what is now Ottawa County, Oklahoma. The Weas and the Piankashaws were likewise forced out of Indiana in the early nineteenth century, eventually merging with the Peorias and the Kaskaskias as the modern Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma. In 1846 about half of the Miami tribe proper were forced out of Indiana . After a stay in Kansas, they too relocated to Indian Territory, settling next to the Peorias. Their descendants live there to this day, as the modern Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. However, many other Miamis managed to stay behind in Indiana, and to this day their descendants mainly live in the northern portion of that state, as the Miami Nation of Indiana. There are no longer native speakers of Miami-Illinois in either Oklahoma or Indiana, although efforts to revitalize the language are underway in both states. In Oklahoma the last fluent speakers seem to have been born during the tribes’ stay in Kansas and probably passed away in the first half of the twentieth century, though a few speakers with limited fluency lived a few decades past that. In Indiana the language seems to have ceased being passed on to children around the culture-hero and tri ckster stories 293 last decades of the nineteenth century, with the last speakers surviving into the early 1960s. The Miami-Illinois language is documented over a timespan of more than two hundred years. Old Illinois is well attested in at least four major documents surviving from the French missionary period of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including three dictionaries and a prayer book. Extensive documentation of the modern Miami-Illinois language began in the late nineteenth century. From the 1890s through 1916, the speech of the last generation of fluent speakers was documented by Bureau of American Ethnology linguists Albert Gatschet and Truman Michelson and by Jacob Dunn, a lawyer and avocational linguist from Indiana. Although perhaps four dialects of modern Miami-Illinois were documented in this time period—Peoria, Wea, Indiana Miami, and Oklahoma Miami—the different dialects of Miami-Illinois are in fact all extremely similar and fully mutually intelligible, generally showing only very modest lexical differences. The texts presented here were originally elicited in Oklahoma in 1895 by Albert Gatschet from two speakers, George Finley and Elizabeth Vallier. Born in 1858, George Finley was actually a full-blood Piankashaw by birth, but grew up among the Peorias and spoke that dialect. Born in Kansas, by age twelve he had moved to northeast Oklahoma, where he lived the rest of his life. He seems to have grown up in a culturally very conservative family, but as an adult in Oklahoma, he successfully integrated into the white world, traveling as a young man with the Sells Brothers Wild West Show, serving as an interpreter, frequently visiting Washington dc as a representative of the Peorias, converting to the Baptist Church, and eventually even becoming a Master of the Royal Secret of Scottish Rite Masonry in 1917. He was also an excellent speaker of Peoria, with a very large vocabulary and conservative grammar, largely uninfluenced by the syntax and word patterns of English. Perhaps in recognition of his command of his ancestral language as well as his ease in getting along in white society, Finley worked with more linguists than any other speaker of Miami-Illinois: he worked extensively with Albert Gatschet in 1895, Jacob Dunn in 1909...

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