The Indians of Iowa

IOWAY

IOWAY Name means: “Sleepy Ones,” derived from Sioux Other names: Iowa, Baxoje, Bah-Kho-Je They call themselves: Baxoje, “Gray Heads” or “Gray Snow”; Chikiwere, “People of This Place” Language spoken/language family: Ioway/Chiwere Siouan Residence in Iowa: Prehistory to 1837 Location today: Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska near White Cloud, Kansas; Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma near Perkins, Oklahoma    The Ioway are best known today as the tribe for whom the state of Iowa was named. They are often called the Ioway to help distinguish themfromthestateofIowa.TribalmembersusebothIowaandIoway, although the legal names of both tribes today use “Iowa.” The Ioway language belongs to the Siouan family and is closely related to Otoe, Missouria, and Winnebago and more distantly related to Omaha and Dakota. The Ioway and Otoe-Missouria languages are called Chiwere by linguists, after Jiwere, the Otoe name for themselves. By the time white settlers first entered Iowa in the mid 1800s, the Ioway had moved their villages into northern Missouri, due to pressure and incessant warfare in Iowa between the Sioux in the northern and western parts of the state and the Sauk and Meskwaki in the southern and eastern parts of the state. Archaeologists call the sites of the ancestral Ioway Oneota, after one of the names for the Upper Iowa River, where such sites were first located. Other closely related tribes such as the Otoe, Missouri, Winnebago, and Omaha also participated in the Oneota culture. This connection is supported by tribal traditions and linguistic studies, Ioway 7 which assert that all those tribes were once one people. The Oneota are most identified with certain types of pottery but also with the use of pipestone, copper, and small, triangular arrowheads. They were guardians of the pipestone quarry in Minnesota until about 1700. Many of the sites currently well established as ancestral Ioway sites are in northeast Iowa. Other Ioway villages were located at Blood Run in northwestern Iowa, Iowaville near Selma, and Council Bluffs. The most important villages were located along Iowa’s major river systems—the Mississippi, the Upper Iowa River, the Iowa River, the Missouri, the Big Sioux, the Grand River, and the Des Moines River— and around Okoboji Lake and Spirit Lake. The Ioway were closely related by language and culture to their Sioux kin, but conflict over territory in northern Iowa and southern Minnesota began in the 1600s as a domino effect of the Beaver Wars, conflicts over the fur trade in the east. The Ioway accommodated settlement in eastern Iowa by the Meskwaki by 1730, after that tribe’s disastrous wars with the French. Then the Meskwaki-Sauk alliance against the Sioux pulled the Ioway into intense intertribal wars from 1720 to 1845. During the series of treaties made between 1804 and 1838, in order to defend their claims against those of other tribes like the Sauk, Meskwaki, and Sioux, the Ioway showed maps they had made that located ancestral villages in Iowa. The most famous of these maps was presented by Chief No Heart in connection with the treaty of 1837. Although No Heart’s map showed clearly the antiquity of Ioway villages along most of Iowa’s major rivers, the United States decided in favor of the claims of the more numerous and powerful Sioux, Sauk, and Meskwaki. During the early 1800s, the Ioway continued to hunt in the intertribal hunting grounds in western Iowa, along with the Sioux, Omaha, Otoe, Pawnee, and others. Successive treaties made the Ioway and the others surrender title to those western Iowa lands. In 1836 the Ioway signed a treaty that moved them by 1837 to a new reservation in Kansas and Nebraska. Successive treaties shrank 8 Ioway that reservation, and by 1880 part of the tribe began moving to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Today there are two groups of Ioway people, the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma, although members are scattered across the nation. Some still speak a little of the language and attend powwows and other clan functions such as funerals. Traditional Culture Ioway society was based on clan membership, passed on to both sons and daughters through the father. Clans included the Bear, the Buffalo , the Wolf, the Thunder-Eagle, the Pigeon, the Elk, the Beaver, and the Snake. Each clan had its own special responsibilities, such as the Thunder clan’s leadership in warfare. Each clan also had its own medicine pipe bundle. The Ioway had many religious societies, including the Bear...