James Lynd and the Unktoka was one of my more quixotic posts. It was fun to research... and I still hope it
encourages any scholars who might happen upon my blog to investigate the
still-unpublished segments of Lynd’s manuscripts... but I was always aware
that the hypotheses I put forth on the identity of Lynd’s mysterious “Unktoka”
tribe were a bit of the throw-anything-and-see-what-sticks variety. I did worry that I’d later come upon some
vital piece of evidence I had somehow overlooked, which would prove all my
speculations to have been entirely pointless.
Unfortunately for me—but fortunately for science—this is what happened. The
other day I was casually browsing through the Pawnee dictionary (as you do)
when I came upon this little entry.
Uktaka [ύk·tə·kə]
N
1. Winnebago, or Hocank, tribe.
2. Winnebago male. <uktaka,
from Winnebago self-designation hoočąk, hoočągra big voice, prob. through an
intermediate Siouan language>
I am almost certain that these are my Unktokas.
Not that everything is wrapped up in a bow just yet. For one it doesn’t explain how or why Lynd
heard of the Dakotas using this name to refer to the Winnebago. The normal Santee Dakota name for that tribe
is Hotháŋke. This is
transparently analyzeable in Dakota as meaning “have a big voice” and so it’s
probably just a calque of the Winnebago self-designation. Perhaps Uktaka~Uŋktoka was an older, obsolete
name which the Sioux used for them? In
any case it does show that the interpretation of “Our Enemies” is a folk
etymology—though whether one made by Lynd or the Dakotas I still don’t know.
I also am not yet completely disabused of the notion of a
connection to the Siouan and Illiniwek names cited in the previous post—Intuka,
Indokah, inohka—though as to the nature of this connection, I’m as in
the dark as ever.
Winnebago changed its inherited *t and *tʰ consonants into the
affricates |ǰ| and |č|, so the Pawnee and older Dakota names more resemble what
it probably sounded like in (let’s call it) Old Winnebago. According to the Comparative Siouan
Dictionary, an expression like “big voice” in Proto-Hoocąk-Chiwere would
have been ho:tʰą́ka. This leaves
unexplained how [tʰ] could have been borrowed as [kt]. That [tʰ] descends from an even earlier
Siouan preaspirated stop [ht] which is a little closer, but yet does not give
us our answer. I’m tempted to think of
how the Yankton dialect of Sioux has [kd] where Santee Dakota has
[hd] but that doesn’t quite help either.
As Douglas Parks said, there must be an unattested language
acting as intermediary between the Chiwerean form of the name and the version
we find in Pawnee and archaic Dakota. In
fact I would say the unsung James Lynd testimony is supporting evidence for the
theory of an intermediary language. One
can almost imagine ho:tʰą́ka being idiosyncratically
changed-in-borrowing to something like u(n)ktaka once. Maybe.
But not twice!
Miami-Illinois might be part of the missing link. The name for the Winnebago in modern
Miami-Illinois (“modern” as in, the variety spoken in the late-19th and
early-20th centuries) is wiinipiikwa—one of several Algonquian names of
that shape whence English “Winnebago”; the name means “people of the dirty
water”. But the Kaskaskia Illiniwek of
the early 1700s called them the oontankia. I would guess that the order of borrowing
went Old Winnebago ho:tʰą́ka → Miami-Illinois oontankia → Old
Dakota uŋktʰóka → Pawnee uktaka.
Depending on how much it was later reanalyzed, the Old Dakota form may
have originally been more like *uŋktáka or something. Later both the Miami-Illinois and the Dakota
started calling the Winnebagoes by different names, leaving the Pawnee as the
only ones still using the old term.
It’s interesting that the Dakotas would have once had a tradition
of driving the Winnebagoes from southeastern Minnesota though. The Winnebago are a bit like the Hidatsa in
that they once were much more widespread and consequential than they were in
the later, historical period. The French
accounts said that the Winnebago had once been a mighty people but had been
decimated by diseases and wars with other tribes. Other Siouan tribes in the area have
traditions of calling the Winnebago their “grandfather” tribe—a laurel which
the Delaware had among the eastern Algonquians and the Catawba had in the
southeast. The Effigy Mound
archaeological tradition of Wisconsin can probably be attributed to the Winnebago, as
can the mound city of Aztalan, which was a kind of northern counterpart to
Cahokia. At least some of them once
lived in the Chicago area before being driven out by the Illiniwek in the early
17th century during the Neutral and Iroquois wars, and according to some people
it was here, and not Green Bay, where in 1634 the explorer Jean Nicolet
encountered the “Puant” nation, the ancestors of the Winnebago.
Sources:
David J. Costa – “Miami-Illinois Tribe Names”, 31st Algonquian
Conference, 2003
Douglas R. Parks & Lula Nora Pratt – A Dictionary of Skiri
Pawnee, 2008
Robert L. Rankin et al – Comparative Siouan Dictionary
Jan Ullrich & Ben Black Bear Jr – New Lakota Dictionary, 1st ed, 2008
