Saturday, December 14, 2019

[Off-Topic] Giant Squid and Other Cryptids


A long time ago, around the year 2000, I watched a stand-up comedy special on Comedy Central where the comedian joked about watching a giant squid documentary.  I can't the clip online, and don't know which comedian it was: I thought it was Jim Gaffigan, but he has a similar bit about manatee documentaries which I was mixing up.  Anyway, nameless comedian talked about how the documentary narrator said that no one alive had ever seen a giant squid alive.  The comedian was very excited to be among the first people to finally see one, when they reveal the footage at the end of the show, but of course there was no such footage.

I've never known how much these comedian "stories" are made-up, but that one was very believable to me at the time because I had also seen giant squid documentaries, and they indeed did talk about how no giant squid had ever been photographed alive (not "seen" alive—it had been seen by the odd sailor here and there, allegedly).  The giant squid was almost mythical for its unphotographability.  Instead, documentaries had to rely on artist's renditions, and photos of dead specimens that had washed up on shore. 



The lack of giant squid footage had existed since the days of black-and-white photography, but that situation started to change shortly after the airing of that comedy special.  In 2002 I watched a documentary called Chasing Giants: On the Trail of the Giant Squid.  This documentary, unlike all of its predecessors, finally delivered on what the comedian and the rest of us had always wanted: real footage of an actual, living giant squid.  The catch was that it was just a baby: a tiny paralarva about the size of a cricket.  Marine biologist Steve O'Shea had captured it along with several others, and after testing one of the little squirts was determined to belong to the species Architeuthis dux: the giant squid.

Giant squid paralarva (from Dr. O'Shea's website).  Inne cute?

There it was, the giant squid photographed at last, just like we wanted... only not really.  Other photos of tiny little squids already existed: who cared if that one was technically Architeuthis, we wanted to see a giant squid.  Luckily we got to two years later: in 2004, a Japanese research team led by Tsunemi Kubodera released the first ever photographs of a real, living, fully-grown giant squid.  They were taken by an underwater camera which was attached to a bait held on the end of a line.  This was what everyone had really wanted, and me and my friends were pretty excited by it.



Another two years, and there was another development.  In 2006 another team led by Dr. Kubodera managed to catch a giant squid on a hook and haul it up to the surface where it was filmed before dying shortly thereafter.  For some reason, I recall this got less press coverage than the 2004 photographs... and to be honest, it was a bit of a bummer that the squid in the video was in such a pathetic condition: hooked and dying on the end of a line, rather than lurking free in its abyssal home.  But still, it was the first video footage of an adult giant squid ever recorded.

Still frame from the video.

Then in 2013, finally, we got the good stuff—the really good stuff.  The previous year, a team led by the aforementioned Drs. O'Shea and Kubodera along with Dr. Edith Widder, sent a submersible underwater to observe a piece of bait they had hoped would attract a giant squid.  It did.  The team observed and filmed a giant squid feeding on the bait for (as I recall) about 15 minutes.  A few minutes of the footage they shot was aired as part of the documentary, Monster Squid: The Giant is Real—the rest of the footage I've never found online, though it may have come with the DVD release.  The portion from the documentary can be viewed on Youtube, which I recommend you do, because not too long ago a video like that would have been miraculous.

Still frame from the video (Wikipedia).  The squid is missing its 2 long feeding tentacles.

I was a bit out of the loop on this one, and didn't hear about it until about a year after the documentary was aired.  At the time, people didn't care about it much: they were more interested in talking about mermaids.  Animal Planet and Discovery had aired two documentaries at around the same time as the giant squid doc: Mermaids: The Body Found and Mermaids: The New Evidence.  These were fake documentaries.  I don't mean they had dubious subject matter or that the researchers were crackpots: they were literally fiction, with actors playing the parts of the researchers and the mermaid footage generated with CGI.  The documentaries had a tiny disclaimer buried in the credits about how they were fiction, but otherwise presented themselves as real.  Stay classy, Discovery.  People argued about the whole thing on the internet; doubters were told to be more open-minded.

These were the developments that I personally remembered seeing.  Wikipedia lists several other photographed sightings that happened during this time and since.  The most up-close and high quality footage was taken by divers when a giant squid unexpectedly swam into Toyama Bay harbor in 2015 and just hung around in the shallows for several hours.  Then there was the time when one swam up to a South African paddleboarder with a GoPro and wrapped its tentacles around his board.  This has gotten a lot easier than spending millions of dollars on professional oceanographic equipment in order to capture a couple murky photographs.

And all of that is just to say that this is why I don't believe in bigfoot.

In case anyone is reading this who does believe in bigfoot, let me protest that I'm not just some poo-pooer.  I've entertained the idea of bigfoot off-and-on in the past.  I may not believe in anything cryptozoological or paranormal, but I hate it when people are kneejerk-snarky at such things, and I find attitudes of most "debunkers" to be sneering and annoying.  For instance, I admit that some sasquatch stories (such as Survivorman Les Stroud's) can be pretty damn compelling.  When I listen to recordings of bigfoot calls, I am deeply creeped out, and I don't just think "that's just an [animal]"—even though it probably is.  I appreciate the point that it is extremely difficult to find dead bodies in the woods: about how outdoorsman who have spent tens of thousands of hours deep in the wild have never found a bear carcass, despite there being a million bears in North America.  And I understand that the forests of the Pacific Northwest are dauntingly vast and hard to explore, with very low visibility in the denser areas.

But there's only so much that I can take.  The deep woods are hard to explore and see in, but you know what else has those properties?  The bottom of the ocean.  And there's a big difference between few bodies, and no bodies. Les Stroud maybe has never found a dead bear in the woods, but plenty of other people have.  Just Google "bear carcass".  It happens all the time.

It used to always be said that the advent of cameraphones being carried around all the time by everyone would either prove or disprove the existence of: bigfoot, ghosts, aliens, etc.  The reason for this post (because really, who needs to know what I think about bigfoot?) is that I've never seen anyone point out how the unveiling of the giant squid has proven those people correct.  Giant squids went from something no one—not even researchers or the military—had photographed, to something that paddleboarders film on their GoPros, in less than twenty years.  Documentaries used to have to (and be able to) engage viewers for a full hour using only dead photos and artistic paintings of giant squids—now they can show the real thing.  It's exactly what they said would happen with sasquatch if it were real, yet where sits the status of sasquatch photography?  The same place it's sat since 1967.



Another thing that bigfoot supporters say is that Native American legends of the sasquatch (Halkomelem: sɛ́sq̓əc) are accurate records of the creature: memories from a time when sasquatches were more numerous and frequently encountered than they are now.  The Natives, they say, do or did consider the sasquatch not to be a mythical being, but a breathing animal or a strange tribe of wildmen.  Apparently, English-speaking Karuks a century ago would call their tribe's version of the bigfoot a "gorilla", which is certainly interesting (Buckley 1980).

Two things to say about this.  Point number one: as Wayne Suttles writes, there are many creatures in the Northwest Indian bestiary, and some of them are from our perspective clearly non-existent, e.g. the sƛ̓ɛ́ləqəm, described thusly:

"Once years ago I was eliciting ethnozoological information from an aged Lummi friend, Julius Charles.  I had gone through Dalquest's Mammals of Washington, asking about everything from shrews to elk, and when I had finished Julius said something like: 'There's another animal you haven't got there.  They used to be around here but they've become pretty scarce and the white people have never caught one and put it in a zoo.  It had a big body in the middle and two heads, one at each side.  It lived in swamps where it swam about.  But it could turn into a couple of mallards and fly away.  It had three kinds of noises—one was like the laugh of a loon, one like the hoot of a hound, and one like the hissing of a mallard drake.  It was a great thing to get so you'd become an Indian doctor.'" (Suttles pp75-6).

Dr. Suttles is one of the few legit linguists or anthropologists to publish on Native sasquatch lore.  In contrast, most discussion you see on the Native American sasquatch comes from people who, let's say, probably don't know what the letter ƛ in "sƛ̓ɛ́ləqəm" means.

Mr. Julius Charles spoke of the sƛ̓ɛ́ləqəm as though it were just an animal, albeit a rare one, yet the description he gave is clearly fantastical.  So unless we're to believe that chimeras inhabit the Pacific Northwest along with bigfoot, we need to apply some restraint in assuming that something attested to by Indian tradition actually exists.  Which brings me to point number two: there's nothing particularly special about Native American folklore.  There are chimeras in European mythology, too: they're called "chimeras".  I don't know how many traditionally-minded Salishan people believe in sɛ́sq̓əc these days, but I do know that there are traditionally-minded people in Scandinavia who still believe in trolls.  Julius Charles may have believed in sƛ̓ɛ́ləqəm, but Robert Hunt in his book on Cornish folklore (1865) wrote that a "gentleman, well known in the literary world of London" told him he had seen fairies.  Fairies!

One of the Cottingley fairies.

Perhaps sasquatches do exist.  But if the folktales and traditions of the local people are evidence for that, then they must also be evidence for fairies and trolls.  Whatever approach you take to the traditions of people of the Old and the New World, let them at least be consistent.  Alas, they not often are.  (Want to know what Kent Hovind and Vine Deloria have in common?)

I've written previously that I don't think indigenous monster myths encode real historical events.  I've also written that I don't think they preserve memories of Pleistocene megafauna (and yes, that also applies to Australia).  So let me round that out by saying that I also don't think they relate information about real, actual monsters.  Instead, I think people tell stories about monsters... just because they like to tell stories about monsters.  It "fulfills a psychological need" as some put it, which sounds less tautological than my version though it really isn't.

By the way, if there is any cryptid that I think has a chance at actually existing, it would have to be the Mongolian death-worm.  The name evokes images of gigantic graboids, but supposedly it's only about the size of a smallish snake—like some varieties of giant earthworm, which do exist and can be very hard to find.





Thomas Buckley. "Monsters and the Quest for Balance in Native Northwest California". In Manlike Monsters on Trial ed. Halpin & Ames. 1980.
Wayne Suttles. "On the Cultural Track of the Sasquatch".  In Coast Salish Essays. 1987.



Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Early Contact between the Ofo and the Sioux

So a while back I was reading through some of the archives of the Siouan Mailing List, which is/was one of the best things on the internet, but has since (apparently?) died off because I guess now people use Facebook or something.  But while it lasted it was great, because it was like being a fly on the wall during conversations between all of the big names in Americanist linguistics: people like Ives Goddard and Marianne Mithun, as well as a few people who are no longer around: Wallace Chafe, Blair Rudes, Robert Rankin.  We shall not see their like again.

But something caught my eye when I saw a post that included the following table, showing the reflexes of two similar but distinct roots in the Siouan languages:

(The same table was published in Oliverio & Rankin 2003.  I've overwritten the Biloxi entry and replaced it with the orthography given in Kaufman 2011.)

What you see in these words is a conflation of the concepts "holy" and "snake", with a little bit of "water monster" along the lines of the Ojibwe Mishi Bizhiw.  This conflation was an areal feature of the Ohio Valley district where Proto-Siouan was once spoken, and it affected the neighboring Algonquian languages as well (Siouan Mailing List 2013).  The people who lived there apparently worshipped snakes.  Jean-Bernard Bossu saw the Quapaw (originally from the Ohio River) worshipping snake idols in the 1600's.  There might also be some connection with Serpent Mound in Ohio.

But what caught my eye was the entry for Ofo: o̢ktéfi.  According to Oliverio and Rankin, the "dêêsi" in ądêêsi and the "ktefi" in o̢ktéfi is the root for "striped" or "spotted"; "ą" and "o̢" are the original roots, descended from Proto-Ohio-Valley-Siouan *mu̢kaO̢ktéfi thus has a perfectly ordinary etymology in Ofo.

Which makes it curious how much the word resembles "uŋktéȟi" (variants: uŋȟčeǧi, uŋkteȟila, etc.), the name of the legendary water monster in Lakota mythology.

Also apparently a "Rank A Elite Mark" in Final Fantasy XIV.  Killing it rewards the player with up to 40 Allied Seals, 20 Centurio Seals, 30 Allagan tomestones of Poetics, and 10 Allagan Tomestones of Mendacity!

This can't just be down to Ofo and Lakota both being Siouan languages, descended from a common parent.  The similarity is too close, and besides that, the proper cognate of o̢ktéfi in Lakota would be something like wakȟáŋ gléška—not anything like uŋktéȟi.¹  This word has to have been borrowed.

Furthermore, it must have been borrowed from Ofo or Biloxi specifically, since the Lakota form begins with a nasalized vowel, whereas the ancestral roots begin with *w and *m.  Word-initial m and w are regularly lost in Ofo and Biloxi, in a sound change peculiar to those two languages alone (Larson: 80, Rankin et al. 2015:11,143).  Moreover, it was more likely borrowed from Ofo rather than Biloxi (unless it was some other, unattested Mosopelean language).  The value of the initial nasal vowel and of the "kt" consonant sequence matches near-exactly between Lakota and Ofo, while the Biloxi form doesn't match nearly as well.

And, importantly, it looks like the Sioux borrowed the word directly from Ofo, not via an intermediary language, because I can't find a word in any Siouan language that could have been an intermediary.  Ioway has Ischéxi for the Horned Water Panther, which is clearly related, but that doesn't resemble either the Ofo or Dakotan as much as they do each other (Goodtracks).  And I don't think Dakotan can have borrowed it via an Algonquian language, since those don't have phonemic nasal vowels (and afaik wouldn't allophonically nasalize a vowel in that position).

I can't be the only person who's noticed this, although I've never seen anyone discuss specific interactions between the Sioux and the Ofo.  Within the Siouan family, the two are mostly treated as pretty far-flung.  But there seems to have been contact and borrowing at least for this term: the question is when and where?  The similarity to the Ofo and not the Biloxi form means it must have occurred after the Ofo and the Biloxi separated from each other.  Robert Rankin dated the Ofo-Biloxi split to between 600 and 1100 A.D. (Rankin 1996, Kaufman 2014:12).

Source: Robert Rankin (2007)

Furthermore, it looks to me like it was borrowed after Ofo underwent the distinctive s → f sound change, which may have still been active in the 17th century (Siouan Mailing List 2007).  The Old Ofo form *o̢ktesi would have been borrowed into Dakotan as "uŋktesi".  The ȟ in uŋktéȟi may be the result of Dakotan-speakers attempting to approximate the "f" of o̢ktéfi, since that consonant is not ordinarily found in Siouan languages other than Ofo.  A second possibility is that it was originally borrowed as "uŋktesi" but was later modified to uŋktéȟi via Siouan sound-symbolic fricative gradation (s < š < ȟ).  The first option seems more plausible to me.²  This suggests a time window of about 1000 to 1700 A.D.

*   *   *

Why is that noteworthy?  Because according to the standard model, the Ofo-Biloxi and the Sioux were not particularly close to each other at that time.  The Sioux are usually located in eastern Minnesota at the time of first contact, ca. the 1630's.  According to Guy Gibbon's summary of Dakotan prehistory, they had been within the Minnesota area separate from the Central Siouans by 700 A.D. (Gibbon: 36).  The Lakotas' subsequent expansion into the Dakotas [the states] was largely an event of the 18th century.

The Ofo are considerably harder to locate, however it is mostly accepted that they first appear in the records under the name "Mosopelea".³  Some version of that name must have been what the Ofo (and possibly the Biloxi as well) once called themselves long ago, and it must also have been their name in some other, probably-Algonquian language.  Later, the "Moso" part was worn down to "Ofo" via the regular #m Ø and s f sound changes that I already mentioned.  But the Algonquians continued to call them by their old name "Mosopelea", and it was these Algonquians who relayed it to the French.

Variants of the name "Mosopelea" appearing in historical documents (Rankin 2007).

The Mosopelea are said to have first been met by white men when Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet explored down the Mississippi River in 1673.  Marquette wrote in his journal of meeting a certain tribe somewhere along the Mississippi north of the Akansa (Quapaw) and Michigamea settlements.  He doesn't give this tribe a name, and provides no useful information in his journal at all other than that they didn't speak Huron.  But Marquette's map from 1674 apparently calls them "Monsȣpelea" (<ȣ> is an old way of writing <ou>), and locates them around western Tennessee:


Other maps, based on that of Louis Jolliet⁴, place them either south of the Quapaw nearer to the Gulf of Mexico, as on the following "Anonymous" map (Delanglez: 69):

Does that say "Aganatchi" up there in the corner?  As in "Akenatzy", as in the Occaneechi?  What on earth are they doing on the Mississippi River?

Or they split the difference and place the Mosopelea in both locations, as on the Thevenot-Liebaux map of 1681:

"Monȣperea" in Mississippi and "Monsȣperia" in/near Tennessee.

Carl J. Weber has claimed that the Marquette and Anonymous map are both fakes (see here and here), but I haven't yet seen him say the same of the Thevenot-Liebaux.  Even if all these maps are fake, though, the existence of Mosopeleas on the east side of the lower Mississippi is supported by the written accounts of Henri Tonti and Anastasius Douay.  It's probably safe to say that Jolliet and Marquette did indeed run into the Mosopelea in 1673, somewhere on the Mississippi River.

My reading of the Marquette journal suggests to me that the more southerly location is the correct one: the Quapaw told the French that the tribe they had seen north of the Michigamea were a tribe whose permanent residence was south of the Quapaw and who barred all access to the lower Mississippi River trade (Thwaites: 155).  This is also close to where the historic Ofos were located.

However, an earlier location for the Mosopeleas is hinted at by another map, drafted by the cartographer Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin in 1684.  On it the Ohio River is aliased the "Mosopeleacipi" (sipi being the Algonquian word for "river"), and along the northwestern side of that river there's a legend which reads "Mosapelea, 8 vil. detruits"—Mosapelea, 8 villages destroyed.


Franquelin got his information for this map from La Salle (who got his information from the Shawnee).  What La Salle knew can be gleaned from a letter he wrote in 1681, in which he lists a series of Indian tribes who had been ousted from the Ohio Valley province by the ravages of the expanding Iroquois nation... one of these conquered tribes he identifies as the "Mosopelea" (Hanna: 97).  According to Charles Hanna, this conquest occurred sometime between 1654 and 1672.

Franquelin's map is difficult to interpret, because it's based on half-accurate information on the Ohio river system, and because names like "Ohio river" and "Wabash river" didn't quite mean in those days what they mean today.  Charles Hanna interpreted the Mosopelea portion of the map to be within "the Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami valleys" of southern Ohio (Hanna: 95).

Drainage area of the Miami, Scioto, and Muskingum river systems. (Based on maps by Wikipedia user Kmusser)

Furthermore, the Shawnee called the Ohio River the Msipelewa, and the Illini called it the Pileewa Siipiiwi—both evidently referencing the (Moso)pelea (McCafferty: 49, Voegelin).  These names have been analyzed as "Big Turkey" or "Turkey River"—as indeed they may be—but I think a connection with the Mosopelea is extremely likely.  Folk etymology may also be at play here, as it later was for the name "Ofo".⁵

Thus, the original home of the Ofo/Mosopelea—or at least, their home before 1673 when they lived in Mississippi—was on the north side of the Ohio river, possibly in the modern state of Ohio.

One might think that the Illini and Shawnee calling the Ohio river the "Turkey River" might have nothing to do with the Mosopelea of Mississippi—that it's just a chance resemblance—but for the fact that linguistically Ofo is within the eastern division of the Siouan languages.  Its closest documented relatives are Tutelo (from Virginia) and Biloxi.  So where were the Biloxi?

As far as I know the first time the Biloxi are reported under that name is when Pierre LeMoyne d'Iberville encountered a group of "Bylocchy" in southern Mississippi in 1699.⁶  And for a long time, that was all there was to say.  But more recently researchers have been finding early traces of the Biloxi farther to the east.  In a recent article, David Kaufman, an expert on the Biloxi language, looked at a series of person and place names from old English and Spanish documents, and found evidence that the Biloxi ("Tomahitans") were in Kentucky and Tennessee, in the Cumberland Plateau and Mountains district—in 1540, 1566-8, 1585, and 1673 (Kaufman 2018).  Their subsequent migration to Louisiana was presumably triggered by the same one-two-punch of Iroquoian conquerors and Carolinan slavehunters that made everyone else vacate the Woodlands interior in the late 1600's.

So, following Hanna and Kaufman, one can give a maximal interpretation for Ofo and Biloxi territory circa the early 1600's like so:

Emphasis on "maximal": it's unlikely their territories were this big.

Not everyone agrees with this hypothesis.  A common alternate position is that the Cumberlands belonged to the Cherokee and/or the Yuchi—and for all I know maybe all three tribes lived in that area.  Many people also say that the Tomahitans were the Cherokee.  And to be fair, I don't accept all of Kaufman's proposal's either.⁷  So I don't know for sure what's true... but until I look into this matter further, I'm going to proceed as if Kaufman is correct (I'm biased in favor of linguistics-based theories anyway).  In any case, one can assume that the ancestral Ofo and Biloxi had been living within the same general area since the division of the Proto-Ofo-Biloxi language ca. 600-1100 A.D.  Both languages are also closely related to Tutelo, formerly spoken in Virginia.  So Cumberland or not, the early Biloxi were certainly not too far from that general region.

*   *   *

If I'm right about uŋktéȟi being loaned from o̢ktéfi, then the Sioux must have been in close contact with the Ofo—either before the latter moved from the mid-reaches of the Ohio River, or after they had migrated to Mississippi.  Since the Sioux were established in Minnesota by 700 A.D. according to the archaeological evidence, then if this contact was pre-Ofo migration it would imply that the Sioux were still ranging southeastward into the Ohio valley.

The sound change in Ofo that shifted /s/ to /f/ can be dated to within a certain time window.  The name for the Ofos in the language of the Tunicas (then in Arkansas) was Úšpi, borrowed from a form of (M)osope(lea) that was caught in between the two Ofo sound changes I mentioned above.  So at least some Ofos were still speaking their language with an "s" by the time they moved into the lower Mississippi Valley and came into contact with Tunicas—after the exodus of 1654~1672.⁸  And by 1699, at least some were speaking with effs, as the tribe is recorded as "Opocoula" in the journal of Pierre LeMoyne d'Iberville.

If Dakotan borrowed the word uŋktéȟi directly from Ofo o̢ktéfi, then it had to have been after 1672, along nearly the entire length of the mighty Mississip.  That would make for a curious example of cultural diffusion.  On purely phonetic grounds I think that this is more likely, which raises my eyebrows as to how and why the Sioux were importing mythic tropes from Mississippi.  On the other hand, if it was borrowed from Old Ofo o̢ktési (with the ȟ produced by sound symbolic fricative gradation), then it is still curious to note as a relic of long-gone neighborly relations between two far-flung members of the Siouan family.

*   *   *

There's an old Sioux legend that speaks of the uŋktéȟi ("Umketehi") guiding the Sioux into Minnesota from their ancestral home in the east (Gibbon: 18); that almost sounds like it could be related to this, somehow.  The same story, as it descended to the Ponca, spoke of the Poncas moving west across Nebraska and encountering a monster called the "Wak-kon-da-gee" (cf. Omaha wakką́dagi) (Mason: 161).  This Ponca version of the tale was later reinterpreted (by the whites or the Poncas, I do not know) as being a first-hand account of an encounter with a live mammoth.  I also know that it's the opinion of some that the Lakota story of uŋktéȟi is a memory of North American mastodons and mammoths, carefully passed down to the descendants of those who once hunted them during the Ice Age.

It's entirely possible that the uŋktéȟi ~ wakką́dagi ~ ischéxi ~ o̢ktéfi ~ mishibizhiw is a representation of a mammoth, but not because it's a story surviving from the Pleistocene—but because it's an interpretation of mammoth fossils.  Siberian mythology (from which we get the word "mammoth") is rather explicit on this point, from what I hear.  And then there's the theory that the Greek cyclops is an interpretation of extinct elephant skulls, which look like they have a single eyesocket in their forehead.  French and English people used to wonder whether the old "elephant" bones they found in America meant that there was a species that lived further into the interior.  I can't imagine just walking along and coming across the skull of a mammoth, but I guess it used to be easier to find these sorts of things back when the whole planet hadn't yet been scoured by paleontologists and ivory smugglers.

Elephant skull. Note the cyclopean fossa on the forehead.

But people don't need fossils to tell stories about monsters, and I suspect the uŋktéȟi is... probably... not a mammoth.  The beast has all the hallmarks of its eastern origin as the Horned Panther—including an association with bodies of water—not of a hulking hairy herd animal.  If the Plains folk ever made it one, that's probaly just because there were more buffalo and fewer lakes there than in the Woodlands.  Siouan myth in general is something of a mixture of eastern and western memeplexes, e.g. the story of Creation is sometimes that of the underground Emergence (a Plains trope), sometimes that of the descent of Sky Woman (an Eastern trope, most well-known in the Iroquois edition).  And of course, the fact that o̢ktéfi and its Chiwere-Winnebago cognates came to mean "snake" shows that not all interpretations of the creature have been mammalian.

That aside, the existence of the Lakota uŋktéȟi myth (and especially the word "uŋktéȟi" itself) is evidence of something pertaining to early North American history, though I'm not really equipped to say exactly what.  But it appears that the name of the Water Panther was borrowed from Ofo into Dakotan... somewhere, somewhen, possibly after 1672 along the Mississippi River corridor.  It was then borrowed from Dakotan into Ioway, despite the Ioways being located in between the Ofos and the Sioux.  Strange indeed.  But I don't have much to say beyond that.  If you want to know more about the legend of the Water Panther, I recommend reading Mii Dash Geget's essay.



Notes

1 – Wakȟáŋ gléška is what was suggested to me, but that uses the modern Lakota word which derives from the other Proto-Siouan root, *wahką́.  I don't know historical Siouan phonology but I'm guessing a true cognate, if it existed, would be maybe "máŋkȟa gléška".  The point remains.
2 – Siouan sound symbolism seems to usually operate in words whose meanings are... subjective?  Experiential?  Impressionistic?  Ideophonic?  I don't know how to describe it, but some examples of words that have sound symbolism in their Siouan translations are "jingle", "rattle", "slick", "smooth", "black", "dirty", "pink", "red", "firm", and "humpbacked".  "Snake" doesn't really fit in  here, although I could certainly be wrong.
3 – Michael McCafferty doubts the identity of the Mosopelea and the Ofo, and apparently thinks the former were a division of the Shawnee.  Pace eī, I think the linguistic connection and the geographical proximity of the latter-day Mosopelea to the historic Ofo are simply too compelling to dismiss.
4 – The original Louis Jolliet map—assuming that it is the "Map of the Griffons" as Campeau supposes (McCafferty 2008:182)—doesn't appear to include the Mosopeleas.
5 – The Choctaws' name for the Ofos, Ofogoula (literally "Ofo people") was reinterpreted as meaning "Dog People", from ofi the Choctaw word for "dog".
6 – In an early ethnography of the Biloxi, James Owen Dorsey wrote that "in 1669, according to Drake, the Biloxi had their village on Biloxi Bay, Mississippi, near the Gulf of Mexico" (Dorsey: 268).  However, he gives no further citation for this information, and I can't figure out who "Drake" even is (Wikipedia lists no other famous Drake who was active in 1669; Sir Francis had been dead for 73 years).
7 – E.g. Kaufman cautiously proposes that the "Chawanocks" of North Carolina may have a Biloxi connection because it "contains the ending –ks, as in the Biloxi autonym Tanêks".  I can't speak for whether ­–ks is a Siouan gentilic suffix or not, but the ending of "Chawanocks" looks more like a pleonastic plural made of Algonquian –ak and English –s anyway.
8 – According to Mary Haas, Tunica has /f/ as a phoneme occurring in loanwords, though she doesn't specify if those are early loans from e.g. Choctaw or late loans from e.g. English and French.  Also according to Haas, Biloxi has /f/ as an allophone of /x/, but not of /s/.  Ofo is also not totally bereft of the consonant /s/, it being the Ofo reflex of Proto-Ohio-Valley-Siouan *x.  These facts when put together, I think, support the hypothesis that Tunica Úšpi was borrowed from Old Ofo *Osope rather than from *Ofope, or even Ofo(pe) being a borrowing from Úšpi.



Sources

Jean Delanglez, "The Jolliet Lost Map of the Mississippi".  In Mid-America: An Historical Review, New Series Vol. 17 no. 2 (1946).
James Owen Dorsey, "Address of Vice President, James Owen Dorsey: The Biloxi Indians of Louisiana".  In Proceedings of The American Association for the Advancement of Science for the Forty-Second Meeting (1894).
Guy Gibbon, The Sioux: The Dakota and Lakota Nations (2002).
Jimm Goodtracks, Ioway-Otoe-Missouria Dictionary (1992, rev. 2007).
Mary R. Haas, "A Grammatical Sketch of Tunica."  In Linguistic Structures of North America, ed. Harry Hoijer (1946).
— "The Last Words of Biloxi."  In International Journal of American Linguistics Vol. 34 no. 2 (1968).
Charles A. Hanna, The Wilderness Trail Vol. 2 (1911).
David V. Kaufman, Tanêks-Tąyosą Kadakathi: Biloxi-English Dictionary with English-Biloxi Index (2011).
The Lower Mississippi Valley as a Language Area.  PhD diss. (2014).
— "Biloxi Origins".  In Native South Vol. 11 (2018).
Rory Larson, "Regular sound shifts in the history of Siouan."  In Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics, ed. Catherine Rudin & Bryan J. Gordon (2016).
Ronald J. Mason, Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North American Indian Oral Traditions (2006).
Michael McCafferty, Native American Place-Names of Indiana (2008).
Giulia R. Oliverio & Robert L. Rankin, "On the Sub-grouping of the Virginia Siouan Languages" (2003).
Robert L. Rankin, "On Siouan Chronology" (1996).
— "Siouan Tribes of the Ohio Valley: 'Where did all those Indians come from?'" (2007).
Robert L. Rankin et al., Comparative Siouan Dictionary (2015).
Siouan Mailing List Archive for March 2007, "Autonym of Mosopeleas-Ouesperies-Ofos".
Siouan Mailing List Archive for November 2013, "The two meanings of wakan".
Reuben Gold Thwaites ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents Vol. LIX (1900).
Erminie W. Voegelin, "Indians of Indiana".  In Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science Vol. 50 (1940).

Sunday, February 17, 2019

The Kiowa and the Quiohuan (Part 2 of 2)


[This is part 2 of a 2-part series of posts about the identity of the Quiohuan Indians.  Click here for part 1.]

So... why do I not think that the "Quiohuan", who show up in several documents from 1687 to 1719 as a tribe living in or near eastern Texas, were the same people as the Kiowa?  If you've read part 1 (please do so before reading this) you might think it's because, according to James Mooney's telling of Kiowa history, the Kiowa were located too far to the north prior to 1775 or so.  And you would be right, that is an important reason.  As historian William Newcomb put it:

"Mooney (1907, Volume I:701) identifies them [the Quiohuan] as Kiowas, an improbable speculation since the migration of Kiowas into the Southern Plains did not occur until almost a century later." (Newcomb 1993)

But the truth is, it's more complicated than that.  Mooney's Calendar History is not exactly an obscure text in this field: of course the scholars who support the Quiohuan=Kiowa hypothesis are already well aware of it.  It's no secret to them that the Kiowa formerly resided in the Northern Plains and the Kiowa Mountains.  They already know.  I mean, look at that Newcomb quotation again: who is it he says first identified the Quiohuan as the Kiowa?  James Mooney.  Mooney may have been wrong—about many things—but one thing you can't accuse him of is being unaware of his own prior research.

So why do scholars [most that I've seen, at any rate...] think that the Quiohuan were the Kiowa regardless?  Well, to be honest I'm not entirely sure, because I don't often see them explicitly argue the point: usually they just... assert it, and move on.  But I can think of a few possible arguments one could make in defense of the Quiohuan=Kiowa hypothesis.

Argument #1:  The Kiowa actually do originate in the Southern Plains, despite all that stuff I wrote in Part 1.  There have been scholars who have questioned the accuracy of Mooney's version of Kiowa protohistory.  Robert Lowie, an expert on the Crow Indians, specifically attacked the idea that the Kiowa had once enjoyed a long and close relationship with the Crow:

"Since Mooney's thesis rests on tradition, I ought to premise that while the briefest of stays with the Kiowa sufficed to corroborate that the story is indeed part of their folklore, I never once heard the Crow refer to the Kiowa in this connection, though I spent seven or eight field sessions with them[...]  As for the Kiowa, they play so slight a figure in Crow thought that though constant mention is made of the Hidatsa, the Dakota, the Cheyenne, the Shoshone, and the Piegan, references to the Kiowa hardly ever occurred during my visits." (Lowie 1953)

That is a very interesting point—enough indeed to throw doubt on the accuracy of Mooney's narrative—and I take it very seriously.  However, as Lowie also notes:

"Two questions must be distinguished here—the [Kiowas'] earlier residence in the north and the specific affinity with the Crow." (Lowie 1953)

Indeed.

"As for the former, what is involved is of course not whether the ancestors of the Kiowa, along with other Indians, came from the north ten thousand or five thousand years ago; the question is whether in, say 1500 AD, they had their home in western Montana or, as has been alleged, even in the neighborhood of the Sarsi; whether their occupancy of the southern Plains falls into a very recent past.  On this point, I have no new observation to offer: I merely accept whole-heartedly the suggestions made by Wissler and Kroeber, viz. that the tribe has been in the region of the Canadian and Arkansas Rivers for a considerable period; that their presence in the north 'may have been due to their periodic wanderings' (Wissler); that after a temporary sojourn in the north they returned to their southern habitat, 'legend retaining only the last of the events' (Kroeber)." (Lowie 1953)

I like the Mooney narrative because it's thorough and precise and it has a lot of dates.  But it's true that precision and accuracy aren't the same thing, and I don't really have the scholarly toolset to evaluate how reliable it is: all I can do is rely on what the experts say.  And while it's interesting to learn that Clark Wissler and Alfred Kroeber both believed the Kiowas' northern residence to be a temporary interruption of a more permanent residence in the south... it is my distinct impression that modern experts have come to agree with the Mooney narrative, at least in broad terms.  Wissler and Kroeber were working during a time when the Kiowas' northern origin was still an anomaly, when archaeologists thought that the Fremont culture represented the early Apache.  Scott Ortman makes (what seems to me, at least) a strong case for the Proto-Kiowa being in the Fremont area... or, if not there, then at least at the northern end of a Kiowa-Tanoan dialect chain extending north from the Colorado Plateau.  From that point, it's a matter of simple geometry to explain how they ended up in Montana.

Argument #2:  The Kiowa were found in the east Texas region in 1687-1719, but they didn't live there—they were just visiting ("visiting") from the north.  There's a lot to be said for this argument.  It is true that the Kiowa in historic days were incredibly mobile.  Mildred Mayhall says that Kiowa raiding parties could range as far and wide as the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of California, and Canada.  One raiding party allegedly went as far as Belize (British Honduras), which I find a little incredible...

Furthermore, it's a matter of record that Kiowas did occasionally wander as far south as New Mexico in the early 18th century.  Spanish records from the 1730's onward report groups of "Caiguas" (etc.) pillaging New Mexico settlements alongside Ute, Comanche, and Apache raiders.  And David Brugge even found references to a Kiowa burial as early as 1727 in the church records of New Mexico (Brugge 1965).  This fact alone would seem to belie the notion that the Kiowas were too far away to have been the "Quiohuans": if they could travel to New Mexico in the 1720's, what's to stop them from traveling to the east end of Texas as well?

Two responses to that.  Firstly, the Kiowa as they appear in the 18th century New Mexico records all share an important dissimilarity to the Quiohuan, but I'll get back to that later.  Secondly—and I could be wrong here—but it's probably safe to assume that the Kiowas' globetrotting habits of later eras were enabled by the acquisition of the horse.  Presumably they didn't walk to Belize... and I suspect they didn't walk to Texas, either.  Much has been written about how the acquisition of the horse upturned Plains Indian culture in just about every conceivable way.  Mooney expressed it rather picturesquely:

"It is unnecessary to dilate on the revolution made in the life of the Indian by the possession of the horse.  Without it he was a half-starved skulker in the timber, creeping up on foot toward the unwary deer or building a brush corral with infinite labor to surround a herd of antelope, and seldom venturing more than a few days' journey from home.  With the horse he was transformed into the daring buffalo hunter, able to procure in a single day enough food to supply his family for a year, leaving him free then to sweep the plains with his war parties along a range of a thousand miles." (Mooney 1898:161)

I know of no references to the Quiohuan from before 1687 (see below).  That seems rather early, to me, for a tribe of southern Montana to have already acquired and mastered horsecraft.  It's not impossible—the Rocky Mountain Shoshone and Flatheads had horses by about 1700 (Hämäläinen 2003)—but I find it unlikely.  The Kiowa told James Mooney that they didn't acquire horses until after they moved east of the Crow and settled in the Black Hills, which Mooney estimated was after 1700.  And, without the use of horses, I think it's also unlikely that the Kiowas could have performed long-distance raids as far south as Texas back in the 1680's.  It's also worth pointing out that the first definite reference to the Kiowa in the New Mexico records postdates the last reference to the Quiohuan by nearly a decade.

Argument #3:  It is true the Quiohuan were not in east-central Texas in 1687-1719, nor even in Oklahoma, but then again no one ever claimed they were.  This argument also has merit.  Older maps appear to show the "Quiohouhahan" etc. somewhere in Texas or maybe Oklahoma (or maaaybe Arkansas), but the geometry of those maps is very confused.  For example, they also tend to show the source of the Rio Grande as just a short distance due west of Minnesota.  I don't know what Delisle's sources of information were for the upper course of the Red River, Trinity River, etc... he may have just been guessing, for all I know.

A better way to interpret the early maps is as just saying the Quiohuan were some undefined distance inland.  And the contemporary documents which mention the Quiohuan may have only been reporting rumors of a tribe located much farther into the interior than the authors themselves ever ventured... maybe even as far as MT/WY/SD?  Is that possible?

Maybe.  But I don't think it's probable.  This is probably a good time to discuss the documents themselves.

*   *   *

The first time I'm aware of when "Quiohuan" (etc.) appears in writing is in the journal of Henri Joutel in 1687.  Joutel was among the Caddo at the time, staying in a Kadohadacho ("Cadodaquis") village in what is now the extreme northeast corner of Texas:

"Now the chief often named the nations for me, their enemies as well as their allies, and he named some I had heard formerly from La Salle, and this pleased me.  I took the names of these nations and wrote them down so I could recall them.

These tribes are their enemies:
Cannaha, Nasitti, Houaneiha, Catouinayos, Souanetto, Quiouaha, Taneaho, Canoatinno, Cantey, Caitsodammo, Caiasban, Tahiannihouq, Natsshostanno, Cannahios, Hianogouy, Hiantatsi, Nadaho, Nadeicha, Chaye, Nadatcho, Nardichia, Nacoho, Cadaquis, Nacassa, Tchanhe, Datcho, Aquis, Nahacassi

These tribes are their allies:
Cenis, Nassoni, Natsohos, Cadodaquis, Natchittas, Nadaco, Nacodissy, Haychis, Sacahaye, Nondaco, Cahaynohoua, Tanico, Cappa, Catcho, Daquio, Daquinatinno, Nadamin, Nouista, Douesdonqua, Dotchetonne, Tanquinno, Cassia, Neihahat, Annaho, Enoqua, Choumay" (Joutel 1998[1684-7]:246)¹

The second time is from a letter written in Spanish by Fray Francisco Casañas in 1691.  Casañas had spent about a year preaching the gospel among the Hasinai and Kadohadacho:

"The enemies of the Province of the Áseney [Hasinai] are the following: Anao, Tanico, Quibaga, Canze, Áyx, Nauydix, Nabiti, Nondacau, Quitxix, Zauanito, Tanquaay, Canabatinu, Quiguaya*, Diujuan, Sadammo." (Casañas 1927[1691])

(* - In one of the printed editions, this name is spelled "Quiguayua".)

Then by 1716 (at least), the name begins to appear on French maps of North America.  The mapmaker, Guillaume Delisle, had access to the journal of Henri Joutel (Foster 1998:26), so his maps might not be an independent witness.  However, as far as I know Delisle could not have learned about the Yojuane ("Ionhouannez") from Joutel or anyone else I'm aware of, so he may have had other sources of information.


The next appearance is in 1717, in the "Declaration" of Louis Juchereau de St. Denis.  St. Denis was a French trader and explorer who had spent time among the Natchitoches and the Hasinai.  The document (written in Spanish, and by a third party, which is why St. Denis is referred to as "he") reads:

"To the east of the Tejas [Hasinai] is the Natchitoches nation on the Colorado [=Red] River, which empties into the Mississippi.  Those which are to the north, northwest, and west of the Asinais are the nation Yojuan, the Tancahoe, the Quihuugan, the Guanetjaa, the Nodacao, the Quitzais, Saccahe, Nauittij, Canohatinoo, Conux, Tahoangaraa, Cahineo, and there are others whose names he does not remember.  He [St. Denis] knows of them from what he has heard the Tejas say and by reports which they themselves have heard.  These nations do not have villages nor fixed abodes because of fear of the Apaches." (St. Denis 1923[1717])

The next is from 1719, from the journal of Bénard de La Harpe's exploration of the Arkansas River.  La Harpe had sent his aide, a M. Du Rivage, on a reconnoitering expedition up the Red River:

"...he reported to me that at seventy leagues by land to the westward and from the west a quarter northwest, he had encountered part of the nomadic tribes, which are Quidehais, Naouydiches, Joyvan, Huanchané, Huané, Tancaoye, by whom he had been very well received. [...] These nations are allied with that of the Quiohuan, situated at two leagues from the Red River, on the left, in going up to the environs of the place where M. Du Rivage had found these nomadic nations." (La Harpe 1958[1718-20])

Daniel Prikryl (2001) locates Du Rivage's encounter in the area around Lake Texoma, Texas.

The next time the name appears is in an anonymous document entitled Mémoire sur les Natchitoches (in Margry V6:228).  The text is undated, but according to Gunnerson & Gunnerson (1971) was written shortly after 1718:

"The nations which are near [the Red River], or which are established on its course, from its mouth to the places known to us, are the Aouayeilles, the Innatchas, the Quiouahans, the Touacanna or Paniouassas; these are near the River of the Otouys." (in Margry 1886 (Vol 6):228) [via Google Translate]

The last time the name appears is in a work by Baudry des Lozières: Voyage a la Louisiane, et sur le Continent de l'Amérique Septentrionale, written from 1794 to 1798.  This one can probably be discounted; I explain why in footnote 2.

Those are all the examples I could find of the Quiohuan being named in the historical documents.  There may be more examples—real-life historians who work with physical manuscripts might be able to find some—but for right now, that's all I got.

These documents all name the Quiohuan as either enemies or neighbors of the Caddo, or as allies or neighbors of the Wichita.  The Caddo and Wichita often fought each other, so the politics are consistent, one anomaly being the "Naouydiches" (etc.) who are called by a Caddo name (Nawidish - "Salt Place") even by Du Rivage's informants who, presumably, spoke Wichita.  Among the other tribes named that can be identified, most are either Caddo groups or groups reasonably close to the Caddo, such as Natchezan or Wichitan tribes.  The most distant outliers (again: that can be identified) are the Kansa (eastern Kansas) and the Tonkawa (northern Oklahoma, at most).

Any tribe from the north of Kansas—much less the plains west of the Black Hills—would be a very distant, oddball outlier on these lists.  That makes it unlikely that the "Quiohuan" were a tribe situated that far north, who were only known about second-hand.  In combination with the La Harpe account and the anonymous Mémoire³—which locate them in north-central Texas and northwest Louisiana—it also makes it unlikely that the Quiohuan were a northern tribe who only made seasonal raiding appearances in the south.  That eliminates Arguments #2 and #3.  Since almost all the other tribes named in the primary sources are southern tribes, it's reasonable to assume that the Quiohuan were a southern tribe as well.  Which means that they were not Kiowa.

However, that's not even my main reason for doubting the Quiohuan=Kiowa hypothesis.  My main reason is the simple observation that "Kiowa" and "Quiohuan" don't even look like they are the same name... not after you take English's unusual vowel spelling into account.  The name "Kiowa" is pronounced in English more or less like [kaiowa] or [kaiawa].  The various times that the Kiowa are mentioned in Spanish colonial documents from New Mexico:

Cahiaguas, Cahiguas, Caihuas, Cargua [supposedly a misprint for *Caigua], Cayouas, Caigua, Caygua, Cahihua, Caiua, Cayba, Caiba, Cayga
[source: Mooney (1898) and Brugge (1965)]

...all seem to represent a similar pronunciation: something like [kaiwa].  The English and Spanish forms are relatively straightforward renditions of the name as found in various Native American languages:

Káhiwaʔ (Caddo), Káhiwaʔa (Wichita), Kahíwa (Kitsai), Káʔiwa (Pawnee), KaʔíwA (Arikara), Kaiwa~Kaiwɨ (Comanche), Kkáðowa (Osage), Kkáʔiwa (Kansa and Ponca), "Gaiwa" (Omaha), Kaíwa (Oto), Kaiwah (Shoshone), Gáiwa (Towa)
(other languages use names that are completely unrelated)
[source: Handbook of North American Indians Volume 13(2)]

These are all pretty consistent—usually [kaiwa], [kahiwa], or [kaʔiwa]—making the question of which language English and Spanish borrowed the name from irrelevant.

Now, on the other hand, the various spellings of Quiohuan:

in French:
Quiouaha, Quiohouhahan, Quiohouan, Quichuan [for *Quiohuan], Quiohuan, Quiouahans
in Spanish:
Quiguaya [or maybe *Quiguayua], Quihuugan

...all look like attempts at spelling something like [kiwa] or [kiowa] (or possibly [kiwaą] or [kiowaą]).  I think this is a different name.  There appear to be two separate names here: one, a kai- name, definitely referring to the Kiowa each time it appears; and another, a kio- name, which only ever refers to a tribe in/near east Texas... in what would be an unusual place and time to find the Kiowas.  The visual similarity between the names "Quiohuan" and "Kiowa" is the only reason anyone believes in a Kiowa-Quiohuan connection in the first place (and not in, say, a Kiowa-Canohatino connection).  But if the two names are not in fact the same, then that leaves no more reason to believe that the Quiohuan were the Kiowa.

Is it wise to be this literal in interpreting colonial-era spellings of Indian names phonetically?  Individually: no.  Europeans were barely consistent in spelling their own languages in the 17th-19th centuries, let alone the languages of North America with their glottal stops and lateral fricatives and so on.  Individually: it's more likely that a European, upon hearing a word in an Indian language, would inadvertently distort it in some way (either by mishearing it, misremembering it, or just being sloppy in writing it down).

But we're not dealing with an individual attestation of a name—we're dealing with about twenty.  It's one thing to say that the name was distorted... it's another to say that the name was distorted multiple times in exactly the same way each time.  Furthermore, the difference in orthography corresponds exactly to the difference in geography: all of the kio- names come from the region around east Texas, and all of the kai- names come from outside it.  Mathematically, it's highly unlikely this would happen by chance.  There are only three ways one could wave away this anomaly.

One way is to say that the name [≈kaiwa] wasn't distorted numerous times into [≈kiowa]—rather, it only happened once.  Like a genetic mutation that only has to happen one time and then gets inherited by all of the organism's descendants, maybe there was one initial French writer (Joutel in this case) who rendered the name as "Quiouaha", and then all later writers were just copying him.  On its own merits, this explanation seems unlikely.  Delisle and Beaurain were copying other documents, yes, but I see no reason to conclude that La Harpe, Casañas, and St. Denis were all copying Joutel (or each other)—they seem to all be separate and independent witnesses.

Another possible explanation is that the various spellings of "Quiohuan" are all based on an intermediate Indian language, one in which the original [≈kaiwa] had become [≈kiowa].  Like the previous explanation, this removes the statistical unlikelihood of numerous identical mutations by positing only one mutation instead.  Unfortunately, however, it's an appeal to nonexistent evidence: no such intermediary form is attested in any Indian language that could have been the source of the kio- spellings.  Joutel explicitly says he heard the name from a (Caddo-speaking) Kadohadacho chief, and it's hard to believe any of the other authors got their versions via any language other than Caddo or Wichita.  But the name for the Kiowa in the Caddo and Wichita languages is Káhiwaʔ and Káhiwaʔa, respectively.  Not **Kihowaʔ or whatever you might want for this explanation to work.

Another way to wave away the anomaly, is to say that the "Quio-" spelling or the kio- pronunciation is just a French idiosyncrasy that arises for some reason.  This explanation can be easily dismissed on both sides.  For one, "Quiguaya" and "Quihuugan" both look to be kio- names, yet they both come from Spanish documents.  For another, the first time that the Kiowa are unambiguously named (i.e. in their historically attested location) in a French document, that document uses a kai- spelling: the document in question is by Perrin du Lac in 1802, the location is western South Dakota, and the spelling is "Cayoavvas" (Mayhall 1971:23).  This proves that Frenchmen were entirely capable of accurately writing [≈kaiwa] if they wanted to.  The fact that both they and the Spaniards only wrote [≈kiowa] when referring to a tribe in/near eastern Texas, and never wrote it anywhere else... means that the tribe in/near eastern Texas was not the Kiowa.  The Quiohuan were not the Kiowa.

I'm pretty sure I am not being circular in my argument.  I didn't pre-select all of the kio- names because they were kio- names and then say: Hey! Look! They're all kio- names!  The chronological and geographical separation of the Quiohuan from the Kiowa is real.  So is the consistent way in which one group is called by kio- names, and the other by kai- names.  There is no overlap, and no exception to the pattern, and it cannot be explained away as happenstance.  The evidence points to the existence of two different, unrelated Native American tribes: the Kiowa and the Quiohuan.

Locations associated with the Kiowa and Quiohuan.  K1: Kiowa homeland (pre-1700).  K2: Montana plains (1700-1775).  K3: Black Hills (pre-1775).  K4: Location of Cheyenne, who shared territory with the "Cayoavvas" according to Perrin du Lac (1802).  K5: North Fork of the Platte River, location of the "Kiawas" according to William Clark (1804).  K6: Arkansas River, location of Kiowa-Comanche truce (1806).  Q1: Kadohadacho village visited by Joutel (1687).  Q2: Hasinai villages visited by Casañas and St. Denis (1691-1717).  Q3: Natchitoches village visited by St. Denis, also the location of the "Quiouahans" according to the anonymous Mémoire (1717-1718).  Q4: Location of the "Quiohuan" reported by M. du Rivage (1719).  C: New Mexico, where Spanish documents record the presence of "Caiguas" (1727 and after).  P: Possible location of the "Pioya" or "Piwassa" encountered by La Vérendrye (1742).

I know of only one putative counterexample to the pattern that the Kiowa are never unambiguously called by a kio- name.  I say "putative" because in fact it is not actually a counterexample, as I will explain:

In 1742, François de La Vérendrye departed from the Mandan villages in North Dakota and headed southwest, trying to find any Indian group who might direct him to the Pacific Ocean.  He never reached the Pacific, and had to turn back after coming near to an unidentified mountain range which people have since speculated may have been the Black Hills, the Bighorn Mountains, or the Wind River Range.  All three possibilites would place La Vérendrye's itinerary in or near Kiowa territory.

La Vérendrye's account mentions several Indian groups that his expedition encountered, some of which may have been tribes, others bands within a single tribe.  The tribes or bands are identified using names that are descriptive but not very helpful: the Bow People, the Beautiful Men, the Little Cherry People, etc.  However, one group is named phonetically rather than in translation: the Pioya.  It has been said that these "Pioya" were the Kiowa, and that the name results from somebody miscopying an earlier manuscript in which the name was spelled "Kioya".

Unfortunately, this theory is rendered unlikely by the existence of a summary of La Vérendrye's expedition written by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville in 1757.  Bougainville apparently, somehow, had more information on the Indian tribes encountered by the expedition than La Vérendrye gives in his own account (perhaps he had an inside source), and he gives for each tribe their Cree or Ojibwe appellation in addition to the French.  This makes it easier for modern linguists to identify them.

As for the Pioya, Bougainville calls them the "Piwassa" and says that this name means "Grands-Parleur" or Great Talkers (Parks 2001).  Unfortunately this still doesn't tell us who the Pioya were, since apparently neither Pioya nor Piwassa are recognizable words in any Native American language.  But if the two versions of the name are at all related, then it means that "Pioya" is probably close to the original form—in other words, it is not a misprint for "Kioya".  Also of note: the name "Kiowa" does not mean "Great Talkers"—supposedly, it means "Elks".

That doesn't prove that the Pioya were not the Kiowa, of course.  But it does prove that at least the name "Pioya" has nothing to do with the name "Kiowa".  And that means that what I said before still stands: that the Kiowa are never anywhere referred to using a kio- name.

So in summary, I do not think that the Quiohuan were the same people as the Kiowa.  I do not know who the Quiohuan were—some tribe of eastern Texas or southern Oklahoma or maybe western Louisiana or Arkansas... often enemies of the Caddo, especially the Hasinai—but they were not the Kiowa.  Maybe they were a small tribe who (like so many in the 18th century) merged with others to form a new corporate tribal entity, losing their previous identity in the process.  Maybe the name "Quiohuan" is synonymous with some other Native American group that usually goes by a different name.  Maybe they were all killed...

... Or maybe they were the Kiowa.  Shit, I dunno.




Postscript:  One group who I have not mentioned is the "Marhout" or "Manrhout", a tribe who according to La Salle lived south of the Wichitas in 1682-3 (Wedel 1973; Hickerson 1996).  La Salle mentions the Manrhout alongside another tribe called the "Gatacka", a name that usually refers to the Kiowa-Apaches (from Pawnee Katahkaaʾ), and it is for this reason people often say that the Manrhout were the Kiowas.   The reason I haven't mentioned them before now is because I see no good reason to think that the Manrhout were the Kiowas, or anyone else in particular.  The name "Manrhout" is not attested anywhere else except in sources based on La Salle.  Furthermore, the word katahkaaʾ in Pawnee refers not only to the Kiowa-Apaches but also to "any tribe west of the Pawnees" (Parks & Pratt 2008), so it's not as useful as some would have you think. )




Notes

1.  Joutel also mentions a "Quouan" tribe earlier in his account.  I don't know if that is related—I haven't seen anyone else mention them when discussing the Kiowa or Quiohuan.
2.  The name "Les quiohohouans" appears in Voyage a la Louisiane, et sur le Continent de l'Amérique Septentrionale by Baudry des Lozières (written 1794-8), evidently the last time any variant of the name Quiohuan appears in a historical document.  The name appears on a list of apparently all the Indian tribes of Spanish Louisiana that B. de Lozières was aware of.  Other than that, nothing is said about them.  Since the list also includes the names of several other obscure tribes which were probably gone by 1794, I assume that Lozières was copying numerous older sources, and that this is also where he heard about the "Quiohohouans".
3.  The Mémoire seems a little odd to me (maybe blame Google Translate).  Sometimes its "Rivière Rouge" seems to be referring to the Red River, sometimes to the Arkansas River.  The "Innatchas" are the Natchez, the "Aouayeilles" are the Avoyel (a Natchezan tribe), and the "Touacanna or Paniouassas" are the Tawakoni Wichitas.  The "River of the Otouys" probably refers to the Osotouy, a Quapaw group who lived near the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, and not to the Otoes who lived way further north.
4.  I'm only considering the modern, standard pronunciation of English "Kiowa".  English spelling is such a trainwreck that any attempt to interpret the intended pronunciations of historical English spellings would just muddy the data.
5.  Not to go into the niceties of Spanish phonology in the main body text...  Historically the phoneme /w/ in Native languages was often rendered <u>, <hu>, or <gu> by Spanish writers.  Spanish itself has no such phoneme, so for monolingual speakers this would probably be more like [kaiɣua] or [kaixua], which are close enough.  Meanwhile, modern Spanish has apparently borrowed "Kiowa" from English in both spelling and pronunciation, at least going off of Spanish Wikipedia and this video.




Sources (primary):

[anonymous], Mémoire sur les Natchitoches [undated, probably written shortly after 1718].  Published in: Pierre Margry (ed.), Découvertes et Établissements des Français dans l'Ouest et dans le Sud de l'Amérique Septentrionale, Vol 6:228.1886.
Louis-Narcisse Baudry des Lozières, Voyage a la Louisiane, et sur le Continent de l'Amérique Septentrionale, fait dans les années 1794 à 1798. 1802.
Jean Chevalier de Beaurain, Journal Historique de l'Établissement des Français a la Louisiane. 1831.  (Allegedly a rewrite of La Harpe, Relation du Voyage.)
Francisco Casañas de Jesús María, Letter and Report of Fray Francisco Casañas de Jesus Maria to the Viceroy of Mexico, Dated August 15, 1691 [1691].  Spanish text in: John Swanton, Source Material on the History and Ethnology of the Caddo Indians. 1942.  English translation in: Descriptions of the Tejas or Asinai Indians, 1691-1722, tr. Mattie Austin Hatcher. 1927.
William Clark, "Fort Mandan Miscellany" [1804-5].  Accessible online.
Jean-Baptiste Bénard de La Harpe, Relation du Voyage de Bénard de La Harpe [1718-20].  French text in: Pierre Margry ed., Découvertes et Établissements des Français dans l'Ouest et dans le Sud de l'Amérique Septentrionale, Vol 6:243. 1886.  English translation in: Account of the Journey of Bénard de la Harpe: Discovery Made by Him of Several Nations Situated in the West, tr. Ralph A. Smith. 1958.
François de La Vérendrye, Journal of the Voyage Made by Chevalier de la Verendrye, with One of His Brothers, in Search of the Western Sea Addressed to the Marquis de Beauharnois [1742-3], tr. Anne H. Blegen. 1925.
Henri Joutel, The La Salle Expedition to Texas: The Journal of Henri Joutel 1684-1687 [1684-7], tr. Johanna S. Warren, ed. & commentary William C. Foster. 1998.
Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, St. Denis's Declaration Concerning Texas in 1717 [1717], tr. Charmion Clair Shelby. 1923.


Sources (secondary):

David M. Brugge, Some Plains Indians in the Church Records of New Mexico. 1965.
William C. Foster, Introduction and commentary in The La Salle Expedition to Texas: The Journal of Henri Joutel 1684-1687. 1988.
Sally T. Greiser, "Late Prehistoric Cultures on the Montana Plains", in Karl H. Schlesier ed. Plains Indians: A.D. 500-1500: The Archaeological Past of Historic Groups. 1994.
James H. Gunnerson & Dolores A. Gunnerson, "Apachean Culture: A Study in Unity and Diversity", in Keith H. Basso & Morris E. Opler ed. Apachean Culture History and Ethnology. 1971.
Pekka Hämäläinen, The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures. 2003.
Kenneth E. Hendrickson, Jr., "Brazos River”, in the Handbook of Texas Online, published online: 2010.
Nancy P. Hickerson, "Ethnogenesis in the South Plains: Jumano to Kiowa?", in Johnathan D. Hill ed. History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992. 1996.
Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795. 1975.
—, An Earlier Chapter of Kiowa History. 1985.
Jerrold E. Levy, "Kiowa". In Handbook of North American Indians Vol 13(2). 2001.
Robert H. Lowie, Alleged Kiowa-Crow Affinities. 1953.
Mildred P. Mayhall, The Kiowas. 1971.
William C. Meadows, New Data on Kiowa Protohistoric Origins. 2016.
James Mooney, Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians. 1898.
John H. Moore, Margot P. Liberty, A. Terry Straus, "Cheyenne". In Handbook of North American Indians Vol 13(2). 2001.
William W. Newcomb, Jr., Historic Indians of Central Texas. 1993.
Morris E. Opler, "The Apachean Culture Pattern and Its Origins". In Handbook of North American Indians Vol 10. 1982.
Scott G. Ortman, Winds from the North: Tewa Origins and Historical Anthropology. 2012.
Scott G. Ortman & Lynda D. McNeil, The Kiowa Odyssey: historical relationships among Pueblo, Fremont, and Northwest Plains peoples. 2017.
Douglas R. Parks, "Enigmatic Groups". In Handbook of North American Indians Vol 13(2). 2001.
Douglas R. Parks & Lula Nora Pratt, A Dictionary of Skiri Pawnee. 2008.
Daniel J. Prikryl, Fiction and Fact about the Titskanwatits, or Tonkawa, of East Central Texas. 2001.
David Leedom Shaul, A Prehistory of Western North America. 2014.
Mildred Mott Wedel, The Identity of La Salle's Pana Slave. 1973.