The Pawnees say they migrated from the south or southwest to their central Great Plains homes long before living memory, and that some came from a dark northern country, where they remained inanimate until the supreme being, Tirawahut, awoke them with lightning and thunder.
Archaeological evidence indicates that the Pawnees resided in the Central Plains region for several centuries before the historical period. Beginning in the late seventeenth century Pawnees occupied elevated river terraces and bluff sites along a fifty-mile stretch of the Loup and Platte Rivers. They lived in large earth-lodge band villages, gathered wild foods, grew corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, and other crops, and hunted the buffalo in semiannual hunts.
In 1541 the Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado discovered Wichita villages near the Great Bend of the Arkansas River. There he met a chief, said to be a Pawnee from Harahey, a place located north of Kansas or Nebraska. Pawnee hunters first saw horses in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. The hunters raced back to camp, eager to describe the tall, bizarre "man-beasts" they had seen—creatures with four legs, long tails, hairy faces, and clothing that gleamed like sun on the water.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Spain, France, and England endeavored to enlarge their North American land possessions and aggrandize their influence through gifts and trade with the native inhabitants, including the Pawnees in present-day Kansas and Nebraska. Eighteenth-century maps and colonial records report the presence of four Pawnee bands as well as their varying names, locations, number of warriors, subsistence type, and amount of peltries produced. The bands—or tribes, as they called themselves—established loyalties to the different colonial powers according to each band's best interest. In September 1804, after the Louisiana Purchase, Pedro Vial journeyed from Santa Fe to a Pawnee village on the Chato (Platte) River. The village chiefs told him that they had refused American medals and patents and remained true friends of Spain.
A tribal delegation that included two Pawnees visited President Thomas Jefferson in Washington, D.C., in January 1806. Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, Major G. C. Sibley, Major S. H. Long, and other U.S. explorers and representatives soon visited Pawnee villages to begin a long series of councils, treaties, and agreements (1818, 1825, 1833, 1848, 1857, and 1892) that, while proclaiming friendship, eventually ended in Pawnee land cessions and the placement of Pawnees on reservations in Nebraska (1857) and Indian Territory (1875). Such occurrences disrupted Pawnee social, economic, and political life, introducing and forcing change as the U.S. government attempted to enforce its so-called civilization policy on Indian societies. To escape reservation life and maintain status, Pawnee warriors joined the U.S. Army Pawnee Scouts and saw action in the 1860s and 1870s in campaigns against their enemies, chiefly the Sioux and Cheyennes.
The four autonomous Pawnee bands—the Chauis, Pitahawiratas, Kitkahahkis, and Skiris (Skidis)—lived in present-day Nebraska and Kansas in band villages until 1857, when reservation residence forced band propinquity and tribal unity. Each village's socially elite class consisted of a hereditary head chief, subchiefs, leading warriors, and religious leaders who discussed and determined tribal matters concerning the hunt, warfare, important ceremony times, farm-plot assignments, solutions to interpersonal conflicts, intertribal visits, and foreign relations. Traditionally, marriage occurred between village members, and men then lived in their wife's household.
In spite of governmental control, the reservation Pawnees endeavored to maintain their tribal structure and traditions. In the early nineteenth century population estimates ranged from ten thousand to twelve thousand. By 1900, disease, warfare, and devastating reservation conditions had reduced their number to approximately six hundred. Continuous losses generated several cultural changes in leadership structure, residence patterns, and religious practices.
The complexity of Pawnee ceremonial life attracted the attention of many early scholars. Religious beliefs permeated most aspects of life. Ceremonies in warrior, curing, hunting, and other societies reinforced certain aspects of religious beliefs and practices. Sacred Bundles were paramount in a series of annual ceremonies that maintained life's balance and the tribe's relationship with the Sacred Beings dwelling in heavenly bodies and the sacred creatures and plants of Mother Earth. To continue essential rituals, and to compensate for members' deaths, various bands' religious societies joined together to fill vacant positions in their organizations. By this means, the Buffalo, Deer, Bear, Pipe (Adoption or Haku), and Doctor Dances, in which feats of magic and curing procedures astounded the observers, continued into the early twentieth century. Today, only the Young Dog Dance and the Kitkahahki War Dance are performed, intermittently, as are hand games, and Memorial Day, Christmas, and family-sponsored dances utilizing traditional clothing, rituals, and songs.
The Pawnees unsuccessfully resisted government reservation-land allotment in 1887 and the surplus reservation-land sale in 1892. Frustrated and demoralized, the Pawnees accepted the Ghost Dance and the sacramental use of peyote in the ongoing Native American Church. In the twentieth century, Christianity became accepted as older traditions disappeared. Today, two significant Pawnee events are the annual summer visits between the tribe and the Wichitas, their Caddoan linguistic kinsmen, and the four-day July Pawnee Homecoming, sponsored by the respected Pawnee Veterans' Association. Pawnees from many states return to Pawnee, Oklahoma, to visit relatives, camp, and take part in craft shows and evening powwows. The home-coming is a focal point for continuing tribal interaction and identity.
Institutionalized education began with the arrival of Christian missionaries among the Pawnees in the 1830s. Later, reservation school policy often forced children to leave their homes for long periods to attend schools where they lost their native language when they were prevented from speaking it. With this loss, the culture and oral history expressed in stories, songs, and ritual began to slowly disappear. Today, only a few elderly people speak Pawnee fluently.
Tribal membership currently stands at approximately twenty-five hundred, with about four hundred members living in the Pawnee, Oklahoma, area. The tribe includes teachers, artists, accountants, attorneys, and one doctor—Charles Knife Chief, M.D.
In 1936 the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act established the Pawnee Business Council, the Nasharo (Chiefs) Council, and a tribal constitution, bylaws, and charter. In 1964, an Indian court-of-claims judgment awarded the tribe $7,316,096.55—compensation for undervalued ceded land. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, as well as other legislation, has assisted in improving Pawnee life. Government grants support tribal-government costs as well as health, housing, elder-care and education programs. Bingo and a tribal gas station-convenience store provide some tribal income and employment.
Bureau of Indian Affairs policies and tribal factionalism often impede tribal progress and cohesiveness. The American Indian Movement found Pawnee adherents and detractors. Today, Pawnee and other Oklahoma tribal leaders work to protect tribal sovereignty against state and federal challenges. Recently, some museum-held Pawnee remains were successfully repatriated and reburied, due largely to efforts on the part of the tribe and the Native American Rights Fund, an advocacy group whose executive director, John Echo Hawk, is a Pawnee.
Martha Royce Blaine, Pawnee Passage 1870-1875 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990); Martha Royce Blaine, The Pawnees: A Critical Bibliography Newberry Library, Bibliographical Series (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); George Hyde, Pawnee Indians (Denver: University of Denver Press, 1951; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973).
Martha Royce Blaine
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
