Kiowa, the only Kiowa-Tanoan Plains language, is distantly related to Tiwa, spoken at Taos Pueblo, although the Kiowas claim to have originated in the Yellowstone River region of Montana, near their oldest friends, the Crows. In the Kiowa origin myth, Saynday, or Trickster, transformed the underground-dwelling Kiowas into ants, beckoning them to emerge to the earth's surface through a hollow cottonwood log. A pregnant woman blocked further passage of the K'uato, the "Pulling-out" People; that is why the nineteenth-century Kiowas numbered only about one thousand people.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the Kiowas and affiliated Plains Apache people acquired horses and began a southeastward migration. Between 1775 and 1805, they encountered the Lakota Sioux and Cheyennes near the Black Hills and were pushed farther south to the southern plains, where horses were more plentiful. Southern plains intertribal relations were unstable until the Kiowas made peace with the Comanches in 1790, the Osages in 1834, and the Cheyennes in 1840. By that time, the allied Kiowas, Comanches, and Plains Apaches (KCA Indians) hunted buffalo and foraged between the Arkansas and Red Rivers. Coalesced war parties raided west into present-day New Mexico, and south into Texas and Mexico, encountering Navajo, Ute, Mexican, and Texan enemies.
Landholdings of the KCA Indians began to shrink after the 1865 Little Arkansas Treaty, whereby the Kiowas and Comanches agreed to abandon lands in Kansas and New Mexico. Through the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty, the KCA Indians relinquished all lands except a tract in southwestern Oklahoma near the Wichita Mountains. Following the Red River War of 1874-75, the Kiowas remained on the KCA Reservation, where the Indian agents expected them to transform themselves from buffalo hunters and raiders into Christian yeomen farmers and ranchers; with exceptions, such changes did not occur. In 1892, the Cherokee Commission (or Jerome Commission) forced the KCA Indians into the allotment process, and on August 6, 1901, the former KCA Reservation was opened by lottery for homesteading. The Kiowas bitterly fought the opening, taking their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where they were unsuccessful in the case of Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock. They were eventually compelled to take individual 160-acre tracts of land. Today, most Kiowa allotments are north of the Wichita Mountains in Caddo and Kiowa Counties.
Nineteenth-century kinship was similar to the Hawaiian system whereby relatives were distinguished by sex and generation; hence all cousins were classified as "brothers" and "sisters." Extended family groups, or kindreds, led by the oldest of a group of brothers, were the building blocks of Kiowa society, subdivided through a class system into the most prominent families, the ondedw, or "rich"; the ondegup'a, "second best"; the kwwn, "poor"; and the dapom, "worthless." Prior to 1875, there were between ten and twenty prominent Kiowa kindreds coalesced with lesser-ranked kindreds to comprise the larger hunting bands. Each topadoga, or "band," was led by the most respected brother, or topadok'i, "main chief," of the kindred. The bands, not to be confused with the subtribes making up the Sun Dance circle, were divided into northern and southern groups, ranging between southwestern Kansas and the Texas Panhandle. After 1875, the topadok'i were regarded as mere "beef chiefs" by the Indian agents, who desired to disrupt tribalism. During allotment, the bands were further broken up as the Kiowas settled into geographic enclaves on their former reservation.
In Kiowa cosmology, dwdw, "power," a universal spirit force permeating the universe, was present in all natural entities, including the air, earth, mountains, water, plants, and animals. Souls or spirits inhabited these entities as well as natural phenomena such as the four directional winds, thunder, and whirlwinds. All spirits possessed dwdw, but the most powerful spirit forces were, respectively, Sun, Moon, Stars, Spirits in the Air, and Buffalo. From their youth, Kiowa men fasted on mountains and hilltops, where they endured vision quests to obtain dwdw. Few, however, were fortunate enough to receive dwdw. Many came away with nothing, although one could receive power through inheritance or purchase—most dwdw belonged to ondedw men—for men with power could give it to others. Those who received power became either great curers or warriors, and painted their power symbols on shields. Prior to the attenuation of war power that resulted from the cessation of warfare in 1875, there were several shield societies. There are still several Kiowa "Indian doctors."
The talyi-da-i, "boy medicine," or Ten Medicines, consisted of tribal medicine bundles whose ondedw keepers prayed for the well-being of the people and were consulted to settle civil disputes. The taime, or Sun Dance bundle, contained the sacred doll used during the Sun Dance, the tribal ceremony that spiritually and socially united the people. Sun Dances, held in mid-June, but only if sponsored by prominent men, were conducted to renew the bison herds and the Kiowas. Because of government intervention, the Sun Dance was discontinued in 1890, the summer the Kiowas obtained the Ghost Dance ceremony. The short-lived Ghost Dance of 1890-91 gave way to the Ghost Dance movement of 1894-1916, which was eradicated by the Kiowa superintendent in 1916.
The peyote religion had made inroads among the KCA Indians by 1870. Today many Kiowas participate in Native American Church ceremonies, but the majority attend community Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal churches. The Kiowas readily accepted Christianity, claiming that they already knew how to pray when full-time missionaries arrived in 1887. Bundle inheritance has broken down in the twentieth century, but the eleven tribal bundles are still consulted with prayer requests. The Kiowas are very tolerant of religious diversity, for they believe that Dwk'i, "Power Man" or "God," is in everything. Dwdw still exists; it merely assumes different guises.
Many twentieth-century Kiowas have served in the U.S. armed forces. In 1957-58, veterans of World War II and the Korean War helped revive two sodalities: the Kiowa Gourd Clan and the Black Leggings Warrior Society. The Kiowas are very active in southern plains powwows—particularly where the Gourd Dance is performed, for they see its performance as an expression of their tribal identity.
Today there are approximately ten thousand enrolled Kiowas; about four thousand of them live near the Oklahoma towns of Carnegie, Fort Cobb, and Anadarko. Prominent contemporary Kiowas include N. Scott Momaday, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for literature for House Made of Dawn, and Everett Rhoades, former assistant surgeon general of the United States.
Bernard Mishkin, Rank and Warfare among the Plains Indians (1940; reprint, with an introduction by Morris W. Foster, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); James Mooney, Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians (1895-96; reprint, with an introduction by John C. Ewers, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979); Jane Richardson, Law and Status among the Kiowa Indians (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1940).
Benjamin R. Kracht
Northeastern State University
Tahlequah, Oklahoma
