The Lost Tribe of the Unktoka

Last year I took the opportunity to look at the papers of one James W. Lynd.  You probably don't recognize the name—he's not among the more famous people in American frontier history, though perhaps he should be as he casts a very long shadow.  Born in Baltimore in 1830, James Lynd moved to Minnesota in 1853 in order to study the language, culture, and history of the Dakota Indians.  His intention had been to write a book about their history, a project he was never quite able to bring to fruition.  Somehow along the way he served a term as a Minnesota state senator—everyone was a senator in those days, after all—but this isn't why he didn't finish his book, nor why he casts a long shadow.  Because James William Lynd was also the very first person killed in the infamous Dakota Uprising of 1862.

 

James W. Lynd

 

On the morning of 18 August 1862, the dawn of the massacre, it so happened that Lynd was at the Nathan Myrick & Company trading post of the Lower Agency at Redwood, Minnesota.  At the fateful minute, Lynd was standing at the doorway to the post, sipping from his morning cup of coffee, when suddenly a Dakota man named Thawásuota ("Plenty Hail") rushed toward him and announced that "Now I will kill the dog who would not give me credit."  He then shot Lynd dead through the torso.  Thus began the massacre: what one historian calls "the most violent ethnic conflict in American history".

 

The sad irony for Lynd is that, in all likelihood, Thawásuota didn't even want to kill him.  His intended target—the person who had denied him his credit—was the notorious Andrew Myrick, brother of Nathan Myrick who ran the store.  Andrew Myrick has gone down in history as having once dared the starving Indians of Minnesota to "eat grass" but it's doubtful if he actually said such a thing, as is the story of his body being found with his mouth stuffed with grass.  Nevertheless he was known to have been "peculiarly obnoxious" according to one contemporary.  He was killed only minutes after Lynd.

 

If Thawásuota or one of the other Dakotas had recognized James Lynd, it's perhaps possible that they might have spared his life.  Lynd had married two Dakota women à la façon du pays and had sired by them three children.  He spoke the Dakota language fluently, and they in turn had given him the name Wičháwanap'iŋ or "Raccoon Collar".  Many such white Minnesotans were saved from the massacre by their Dakota friends or in-laws.  But, then again . . . many weren't.

 

Thawásuota
(from Winchell, "Aborigines")

 

Over 600 settlers would eventually die in the ensuing massacre.  In response to this giant bloodfeast, a punitive military expedition was dispatched into Dakota Territory, whilst back in Minnesota thirty-eight Indians were hanged on the gallows in the largest single-day execution in United States history.  But more than that, one could argue that the tensions first strung in Minnesota later snapped at the Sand Creek Massacre, the effects of which ignited half a dozen Indian Wars between 1864 and 1869.  By decade's end over a thousand soldiers, settlers, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa were dead.  Could it all have been avoided without the killings in Minnesota?  Who knows.

 

The manuscript for James Lynd's book only narrowly escaped from all this.  The papers were being kept at Nathan Myrick's trading post, and after killing Lynd, the Dakotas tossed the trunk containing them into a nearby ravine where they languished for several months.  The next Spring in 1863, the trunk was recovered by a company of soldiers, but unfortunately the privates—who may have been no more literate than the Indians—took to tearing away scraps and using them as gun wadding.  Much of the manuscript was lost in this way, until the troop captain recognized its value and ordered his men to stop.  From here the papers found their way to the Minnesota Historical Society where they remain still. [1]

 

James Lynd's tombstone
(from Find-a-Grave)

 

Aside from the saga of the physical pages themselves, the Lynd manuscript is interesting for being among the first "secondary source"-type monographs written specifically about the history of the Sioux tribe.  In fact it may be the very first such work, at least that I know of—everything older are things like fur trader and missionary journals, government reports, or studies on Dakota religion.  Despite this, Lynd and his work has mostly been ignored in favor of his more prolific contemporaries like Stephen Riggs, T. H. Williamson, or the Pond brother—all of them missionaries.

 

One reason for the neglect is that, actually, his book isn't very good.  James Lynd shared your typical suite of 19th century neuroses concerning Native American ethnography: page after page is spent debating whether Indians descend from either the Japhetic or the Shemitic races of mankind; there is a chapter titled "Early History" which is actually mostly-empty speculation on whether the Sioux preserve some ancient memory of the Bering Land Bridge migration (they don't); and very little is recorded of what the Sioux of Lynd's time still remembered from more recent eras.

 

But there's another reason.  After surviving Indians, elements, and Army privates, the Lynd papers were put in the hands of the Reverend Stephen R. Riggs, noted 19th century Dakota-ologist.  Riggs would go on to publish one chapter of the Lynd manuscript that survived intact (the chapter on "Religion") in the journal Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society (vol 2).  Along with this chapter, Riggs included a brief summary of the other Lynd chapters, some of which weren't in a condition to be published.  Unfortunately, this one chapter was published under the title:

 

"History of the Dakotas; by Hon. James W. Lynd; with introductory note by Rev. S. R. Riggs"

 

This was also published separately as a booklet, which you can find on archive.org.

 

Riggs is clear in his summary that another of Lynd's chapters (titled "Dakota Tribes of the N. West") also survived intact and in publishable condition, as well as major portions of several others.  However, the misleading title of the one chapter he did publish has apparently led others to assume—or misremember—that this amounts to the entirety of the surviving Lynd materials.  It does not.

 

I have been told by honest individuals that the full Lynd papers were all published "somewhere" by the Minnesota Historical Society . . . but after going through their entire catalog on the Internet Archive, I have found nothing except for the aforementioned chapter edited by Riggs.  If the rest of the manuscript was ever published, anywhere, then I have no idea where.  But I think it's telling that whenever I have seen a scholar cite James Lynd's writings, their citation has always been to the Riggs-edited chapter and never anything else.  (The one exception is Albert Goodrich, in an article for the 1915 issue of CMHS.)  From all this I can only conclude that people generally aren't aware that the unpublished portions of the manuscript even exist.

 

So what does it say?  Well as I said: not a whole lot really.  Lynd's book may be the first of its kind, but I doubt he ever got to know the Dakotas personally as well as the missionaries did.  But the reason I'm mentioning it here is because Lynd is the only writer to ever refer to a particular "lost tribe" whom he calls the Unktoka.  He mentions the Unktoka in two places:

 

"The Unktoka occupied the country south of the Saint Croix river, east of the Mississippi.  The meaning of the word is "Our enemies".  They were totally destroyed by the Iowas and Isanyati Sioux, before the commencement of the present century."

(James Lynd, manuscript, chapter titled "Dakota Tribes of the N. West")

 

"From the time that the Sioux first occupied the head waters of Lake Superior to the year 1640, it is impossible to say much of the Dakota tribes.  The Sioux gradually moved south and west, pressing upon the Iowas, Winnebagoes, and a tribe of Indians called Unktoka of Dakota extraction, which last named tribe was afterward annihilated by the joint warfare of Sioux and Iowas.  This migratory movement must have been very gradual, however; for the distance from Mille Lac to lake Superior is but fifty miles in a straight line—a very moderate days journey for a Dakota under any pressing circumstances.  It is probable that the Sioux, for many years after their removal to Mille Lac, were in the habit of hunting in the lands immediately west of lake Superior; for they were seen there in numbers by Father Alloüez in 1665 at the mouth of St. Louis river, and subsequently by the French traders."

(James Lynd, manuscript, chapter titled "Migration and Treaties") [2]

 

There are a great number of rare, antique, and obscure tribal names in the annals of frontier history, but "Unktoka" is of the very rarest kind.  Aside from Lynd (and Riggs, who mentions them in his summary) I can find no other writer whatsoever—no missionary, fur trader, linguist, or historian—who has ever so much as written their name.  And there is nothing online.  Partly this is no doubt due to the aforementioned neglect of the Lynd manuscripts, but it's still a rare day that you find such a naked hapax legomenon of a tribonym like this.  So I'm here to ask the question: did the Unktoka exist, and if so, who were they?

 

*     *     *

 

Lynd tells us four basic facts about the Unktoka:

            - They were Siouan.

            - Their name means "Our Enemies" in Dakota.

            - They were located south of the St Croix river.

            - They were destroyed in the early 19th century.

 

At least three of these claims can be seriously questioned.

 

FIRSTLY, that they were Siouan — Lynd lists the Unktokas as one of 19 Siouan-speaking tribes (or "Dakota" in his nomenclature).  The other 18 are listed as:

 

Sioux, or Dakota

Assinaboines

Mandans

Apsarokas or Crows

Winnebagoes

Osages or Washashas

Kansas

Kappaws [Quapaw]

Ottoes

Missourias

Iowas

Omahas

Poncas

Arickarees [Arikara]

Minntarees or Gros-Ventres [Hidatsa]

Arkansas [Quapaw]

Pawnees

Ahahaways [Hidatsa]

 

If Lynd is correct that the Unktokas were a Siouan-speaking tribe and were distinct from the others on this list, then they must have been a tribe unknown to modern science, because there isn't any other Siouan tribe "missing" from this list (except for the Ohio Valley Siouans whom you wouldn't expect anyway).  As you may have noticed, though, we can't just accept Lynd at his word here.  The list is overstuffed.  The Quapaw are listed twice as both the "Kappaws" and the "Arkansas", and the Pawnee and Arikara are erroneously listed as if they are Siouan tribes (they are in fact Caddoan).  Lynd does seem to be aware that the name "Gros Ventres" can refer to two distinct tribes, however he still mistakenly believes that both tribes are Siouan—in reality only one is (the Hidatsa, or "Gros Ventres of the Missouri"), while the other (the Atsina, Aaniiih, or "Gros Ventres of the Prairie") are Algonquians.

 

"Minnetarees or Gros-Ventres : This nation includes both the Minnetarees or Gros Ventres proper and the Gros Ventres of the Prairie.  The former number about 900, and occupy the country adjoining the Mandans; the latter are wanderers between the head waters of the Missouri and Saskatchewan rivers, and number about 2000."

(James Lynd, manuscript, chapter titled "Dakota Tribes of the N. West")

 

A tribe called the "Ahahaways" are listed, whom Lynd refers to as another "lost tribe" like the Unktoka.  In reality these people were also Hidatsas . . . kinda . . . actually they were one of the three originally-independent villages who later formed the tribe now known as the Hidatsa. [3]  Based on the information that Lynd gives, his source for the Ahahaway must have been Henry Schoolcraft, and Schoolcraft's source was William Clark the explorer.  Clark lists the Ahahaway in his 1804 Fort Mandan Miscellany as if they were an entirely separate tribe, which at the time they may have been.  But all of this shows that James Lynd was working from multiple printed sources for his book—some of which he didn't entirely understand.  In other words, not everything he writes was necessarily an unfiltered record of Dakota oral tradition as told to him directly.

 

SECONDLY, that the name Unktoka (Uŋkthóka) means literally "Our Enemies" in Dakota.  The construction of this word seems a little strange to me.  In fact I'm not even sure if it's grammatically correct, though I can't say with certainty.  Nouns that are marked for possession like this usually have a tha- element prefixed (as in the name of Crazy Horse: Tȟa-šúŋke Witkó, "His-Horse-Is-Crazy").  There is a class of nouns referring to family members and body parts which can be marked for possession without the tha-, but I can find no indication in any of my Lakota and Dakota references that thóka "enemy" is such a word.  Furthermore, even if you were to allow that, then phonologically the full uŋk- prefix isn't typically used before a consonant-initial stem: in those cases it's shortened to uŋ- or sometimes lengthened to uŋkí-.

 

But I don't really know a lot about Dakhóta grammar.  For what it's worth, Stephen Riggs seemed unconcerned by the name, and he is supposed to have spoken excellent Dakota—in fact his grammar and dictionary are still the works usually cited for the Mdewakanton dialect of Santee Dakota.  So maybe this is fine...?

 

A name meaning literally "Our Enemies" may sound a little vague to be the name of just one, particular group of enemies, but that's actually not a problem.  In Assiniboine, the sister language of D/Lakota, the same root tóga is used to mean both "enemy" in general and "Gros Ventre" specifically.  In the Stoney language (the redheaded stepchild of the Dakotan family, and I mean that with love) the Blood tribe of the Blackfeet are called the Togabi. [4]

 

And THIRDLY, that the Unktoka were destroyed at the beginning of the 19th century, or half a century prior to when Lynd was writing — It's a little unbelievable that an entire Native American group would have existed in Iowa/Minnesota so recently without anyone noticing.  If you push the date back to the 17th or early 18th century then the idea is more plausible, but how can someone be so wrong about something from only fifty years prior?  I don't know, but it can happen—and it happened in the case of the Assiniboine.  There is a persistent tradition which states the Assiniboine split away from the Sioux at some point in the past.  Usually it's supposed to have been the Yanktonai band from whom they broke off: this particular detail isn't supported by the linguistics, but the two tribes are nonetheless related.

 

As for when the schism happened, that's another matter.  The historian Arthur J. Ray in Indians in the Fur Trade makes the point that writers kept saying it was "fifty years ago" for the entire duration of the 1700s.  In other words, for a century nobody ever bothered to update the tally (and I'm sure I once found an example Ray missed from the 1800s, too).  And in fact they were wrong even in 1700: a tribe called the "Assinipour" was first noted by the French in 1640.  Whenever the Sioux-Assiniboine split happened (linguists estimate 1000 A.D. give or take a century or two), it was much earlier than when people were saying, and maybe the same is true for the destruction of the Unktoka.

 

*     *     *

 

Suffice it to say then that James Lynd was a lil' sloppy in what information he gave about the Unktoka.  We probably can't trust all of it; maybe we can't trust any of it.  A person might still wonder, though, who were they . . . were they even anybody at all?  There are a couple of possibilities, if we assume for argument's sake that most of what James Lynd told us about them is vaguely correct.

 

 

One candidate is a group of Hurons (or maybe Petuns) and Odawas who refuged on Isle Pelée for a few years during the 1650s.  Isle Pelée or "Bald Island" (so called because it was bare of trees), also known as Prairie Island, is a large eyot in the midst of the Mississippi River about ten miles downstream from the St Croix River embouchure.  These people were part of the great diaspora of former-Michigander tribes who were fleeing beyond Lake Michigan to escape the ravages of the Iroquois raids.  The incident was described by Nicholas Perrot:

 

"The Outaoüas finally decided to select the island called Pelée as the place of their settlement; and they spent several years there in peace, often receiving visits from the Scioux.  But on one occasion it happened that a hunting-party of Hurons encountered and slew some Scioux.  The Scioux, missing their people, did not know what had become of them; but after a few days they found their corpses, from which the heads had been severed.  Hastily returning to their village, to carry this sad news, they met on the way some Hurons, whom they made prisoners; but when they reached home the chiefs liberated the captives and sent them back to their own people.  The Hurons, so rash as to imagine that the Scioux were incapable of resisting them without iron weapons and firearms, conspired with the Outaoüas to undertake a war against them, purposing to drive the Scioux from their own country in order that they themselves might thus secure a greater territory in which to seek their living.  The Outaoüas and Hurons accordingly united their forces and marched against the Scioux.  They believed that as soon as they appeared the latter would flee, but they were greatly deceived, for the Scioux sustained their attack, and even repulsed them; and, if they had not retreated, they would have been utterly routed by the great number of men who came from other villages to the aid of their allies.  The Outaoüas were pursued even to their settlement, where they were obliged to erect a wretched fort; this, however, was sufficient to compel the Scioux to retire, as they did not dare to attack it."

- Nicholas Perrot

(in: Emma Helen Blair, The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi, pp 163-4)

 

The occupation of Isle Pelée lasted from 1657~8 to 1660, after which the Hurons and Odawas turned back east toward Chequamegon Bay.  Aside from a couple inconsequential details, Nicholas Perrot is our only source for this episode—it makes you wonder how many other such episodes we don't know about.  Some of the details match what Lynd says: the location of Isle Pelée is more or less "south of the Saint Croix river" where the Unktoka were supposed to have lived, and they were driven out by the Sioux.  Perrot tells us nothing about the Ioway being involved, however, nor do the Odawa (Algonquian) or the Huron-Petun (Iroquoian) speak a Siouan language.  And even though the Odawa and the Chippewa are two somewhat distinct groups, I still am not sure if the Dakotas would have forgotten that there were Ojibwes involved in this incident, given how important Dakota-Ojibwe warfare was to their history.

 

*     *     *

 

There's another possibility, which allows the Unktoka to have been a Siouan-speaking tribe, though it also doesn't follow Lynd's criteria exactly (probably nothing does).  And though the Isle Pelée theory might be the more "sober" explanation, I actually favor this second alternative—but explaining what it is and why requires a bit of backtracking.  It involves the history of the Ioway and their relatives: the Oto, Missouria, and Winnebago.

 

On either side of Isle Pelée are the towns of Diamond Bluff, Wisconsin, and Red Wing, Minnesota.  Archaeological remains from both these locations show that from 1000 to 1300 A.D. the culture here was in transition away from the older "Effigy Mound" type and toward the "Oneota" type.  Oneota is the archaeological culture associated with the earliest Chiwere-speaking peoples: the Ioway, Oto, and Missouria.  Much later, other tribes would take to crafting Oneota wares—mainly the Dhegiha—but according to Dale Henning, these other groups didn't arrive until around 1500 A.D. [5]

 

 

To the east in Wisconsin lived the Chiwere's sister tribe, the Winnebago (also called the Ho-Chunk).  When the French first met the Winnebago in the 1600s they had been ravaged and immiserated by warfare with the Illiniwek, but there's reason to believe that they were once a more vast and powerful nation.  They were the ones who most likely built the mound center of Aztalan—which bears some uncertain relationship to Cahokia—and they are the tribe most probably connected to the Effigy Mound culture, which ended in the early 2nd millennium.  I call the Winnebago the "sister" tribe to the Chiwere, but the Chiwere themselves bestow upon them a different metaphorical kinship.  According to old and enduring tradition, the Winnebago are the "grandfathers" from whom the other Chiwere people descend.  This surely is an echo of their medieval moundbuilding civilization.

 

 

Around the year 1300, the settlements at Red Wing and Diamond Bluff were abandoned, and at least some of the emigrants must have moved downstream to the La Crosse Terrace region, where two rivers flow in from the west: the Root River and the Upper Iowa River.  Three centuries later, when Europeans first began probing this area, these tributaries were inhabited by Ioway.  A second bloc of Ioway was located further west in the "Great Lakes" region of Iowa, accessible via the Des Moines River from the east or via the Little Sioux from the west.  They likely also controlled the all-important Pipestone Quarry in southwest Minnesota.  In the 1680s the Ioways abandoned the eastern bloc under pressure from Algonquian tribes (the Ioway were still on good terms with the Sioux at this time) and they concentrated at the western bloc.  But in time, the northern Iowa prairies would all be taken over by the Sioux.

 

(from Betts 2015)

 

The Ioway were a mobile people.  The early Frenchmen encountered temporary Ioway settlements along the Zumbro River and along the Blue Earth tributary of the Minnesota.  Mildred Mott Wedel, whose work is fundamental to early Ioway history, readily ascribed to them a ranging territory that extended to the Minnesota river.  But as far as actual, permanent settlements go, the Ioway are not known to have ever lived further north than this.  At least, not since their ancestors left the Red Wing locality in 1300.

 

 

However, there was another story current among the scholars of the late 1800s.  According to them there had once been Ioway settlements on the north side of the Minnesota River, near where it empties into the Mississippi by the Falls of St Anthony (modern day Minneapolis).  This was based—so they said—on tribal oral histories which claimed that the earthen burial mounds visible near the Falls had been built by ancient Ioways, before they were driven south by the Sioux.  Variants of this story were repeated by several authors including James Lynd, Gideon Pond,  Thomas Williamson, Doane Robinson, and others.  The first example I know of is by Alexander Ramsey in 1849, and the last is by Newton Winchell in 1911. [6]  Gideon Pond's version is the most detailed, and the only one which cites a named Dakota individual as its source:

 

"Takoha, the old war prophet, says that the Iowa Indian never occupied the country around the mouth of the Minnesota River.  He affirms that it once belonged to the Winnebagoes, who were long ago driven from it by the Dakotas—a few others of the Dakotas agree with Takoha.  But Black Tomahawk, who is by some of the most intelligent half-breeds, considered the best Mdewakantonwan traditionalist, says, that in the earliest years of the existence of the Dakotas, they became acquainted with the Iowa Indians, and that they lived in a village at the place which is now called Oak Grove, seven or eight miles from Fort Snelling, on the north side of the Minnesota river.  The numerous little mounds which are to be seen about Oak Grove, he says, are the works of the Iowa Indians. [ . . . ] They were the enemies of the Dakotas, who used occasionally to make a war-path from Mille Lac, where they then resided, down to the Iowa village, and carry off with them scalps, which made glad the hearts of their wives and daughters.  The strife between the two nations eventually became desperate, and the gods, who are always deeply interested in Indian wars, espoused the cause of the Dakotas. [ . . . ] The old man from whom we gather the substance of what has gone before, says that these mounds are the remains of the dwelling houses of the ancient Iowas.  Some say that they are not the remains of the dwellings of the Iowas, but those of some other people with whom tradition does not acquaint them; and others, still say that they are ancient burial places."

 

Already there's some uncertainty here about what exactly was going on.  The war prophet Takoha maintained that the Winnebago, not the Ioway, were the people involved—while other unnamed individuals said it was "some other people with whom tradition does not acquaint them".  A Winnebago presence here seems less likely than an Ioway.  But Pond wasn't the only one who reported... confusion... about what tribes formerly dwelt by the Falls.  Williamson (1856) wrote that besides the Ioway, "the Winnebagoes, Otoes, and Omahas have been named among the nations driven by the ancestors of the Dakotas from the Minnesota valley."  He later (1880) added that the Cheyenne were first on the lower Minnesota river, then the Ioway, and then the Dakota.  Robinson called the people driven from the Minnesota "the Hohas, or Iowas".  This is possibly just a mistaken transcription of Ayúȟwa (Ramsey had called them "Ho-wahs"), but it rather looks like the word Hóhe which is normally the Dakota name for the Assiniboine tribe.  Winchell said that the Ojibwe attributed the mounds not to the Ioway but to the Gros Ventres—by which he probably meant the Hidatsa.

 

Some of the above can perhaps be salvaged: it's plausible that the Oto, Omaha, and Cheyenne once inhabited parts of the Minnesota River valley—or near enough to it, anyway.  But for the most part there doesn't seem much basis anymore for believing in Ioway villages at St Anthony Falls.  Modern archaeology doesn't link any of the mounds there to either the Oneota or the Chiwere, as far as I know.  And the historical/ethnological people no longer repeat the story of the "Minneapolis Ioways".  George Hyde didn't bother mentioning it 26 years after Winchell (he spends literally one sentence on the Dakota-Ioway conflict), nor do Gary Clayton Anderson and Pekka Hämäläinen speak of such a thing.

 

Nor apparently had the Ioways ever heard of it.  In 1837 a delegation of Ioway chiefs journeyed to Washington D.C. to settle a territorial dispute with the U.S. government.  As part of their case, the chiefs drew a map of the Ioway's ancestral territory, encompassing all the places they had dwelt since an original departure from a homeland near Lake Michigan (a memory of their Effigy Mound ancestry I guess).  The map they drew still exists, and it doesn't show any settlements near Minneapolis, nor is the Minnesota River even depicted.

 

No Heart's Map [7]

 

You could choose to believe the story if you wish.  True, the burial mounds were not made by the Ioway as Black Tomahawk claimed . . . but many folks also believe that Stonehenge was built by the Celts.  The fact that they're wrong doesn't mean there were never Celts living near Stonehenge.  But I think that some of these stories were coming from the same place as James Lynd's tale about the Unktoka.  Here's what Lynd himself said about the Ioway:

 

"The planting grounds of the Ayuḣba or Iowas are said to have been visible as late as 1830 upon the St. Croix lake near Hogan Wanke."

(Lynd, ms, chapter titled "Early History") [8]

 

The [Upper] St Croix lake is about a dozen miles up the St Croix river from its confluence with the Mississippi.  This is a slightly different location than Mendota or the north bank of the Minnesota, which is interesting—but it's also not far from the Red Wing locality and where Lynd places the lost Unktoka tribe.

 

In general though, there seems to have been a vague memory that southeast Minnesota was once inhabited by a tribe who (probably) spoke a Siouan language, only they couldn't agree exactly on who that tribe had been.  Some said that they were Ioways—but in a way which conflicts with the known history of the Ioway tribe.  Others that they were Winnebagoes, or even Hidatsa.  Others said they were a forgotten people "with whom tradition does not acquaint them" and referred to only by the vague and meaningless signifier of Our Enemies.

 

*     *     *

 

This part of the country—Wisconsin, south Minnesota, Iowa, north Illinois, and upper Michigan—endured quite a few changes in the 16-17th centuries.  Most of the tribes famous to this area were relative newcomers: only the Sioux, Winnebago, Menominee, and Chiwere are what you might call the aboriginal inhabitants.  The Fox, Sauk, Kickapoo, Mascouten, and Potawatomi came as refugees in the 1600s fleeing from the aggression of the Iroquois and Neutral confederacies.  Huronians like the Wendat and Petun came as well and, as we've seen, some of them briefly settled along the Mississippi.  The previous century-and-a-half or so had already seen the Wisconsin Ojibwe migrate westward from the Great Lakes nexus point, and the Omahas come up from their ancient home on the Ohio River.  Groups of Miami and Illiniwek also arrived from the east, coming either in the 16th or the 17th centuries.

 

Having a dozen tribes move in over the course of a handful of generations can only have been a massive disruption to the human geography of "Greater Wisconsin".  The status quo ante is very difficult to work out—probably impossible in its details—but we should not be surprised if a tribe or two we don't know about got lost in the scramble.

 

[9]

 

I am not just speaking in hypotheticals.  We already know of one "lost" Siouan language that was spoken not far from here—where exactly is hard to say—which came within a gnat's toe of being lost completely and forever without anybody noticing it ever existed.  I am referring to Michigamea.

 

The Michigamea tribe were one of the subtribes of the Illinois or Illiniwek confederacy, along with the Peoria, Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and others.  The Illiniwek shared a language with the Miami which belongs to the Algonquian family, and so naturally it had always been assumed that the Michigamea were Algonquians as well.  Then in the 1990s, the linguist John Koontz examined the brief and hitherto-inscrutable fragments of Michigamea language that had been recorded by Jean Bernard Bossu in the 1750s, and he concluded that the language was actually Siouan.  More precisely: it belonged to the Mississippi Valley Siouan subfamily (MVS) which also includes Chiwere-Winnebago, Dhegiha, and Dakotan.

 

 

I'm not suggesting that the Unktoka were the Michigamea; that seems unlikely..  But they do show that there were once more Siouans "out there" than the written histories had always said.  What's more interesting is that, according to statements Koontz made ont he now-defunct Siouan Mailing List, not only can Michigamea not be any of the known MVS languages, but it might not even have belonged to the three known MVS subfamilies . . . in other words, it was neither Dakotan nor Chiwerean nor Dhegihan.

 

Unfortunately we can't quite hang all our hats on this rack.  Koontz himself didn't seem fully convinced that Jean Bernard Bossu's data was reliable.  On the Mailing List he raised the possibility that Bossu was misrecollecting various bits and bobs from a few other Siouan languages he could imperfectly speak, and glommed them all together into a frankenstein's monster of Mississippi Valley Siouan—hence Michigamea's apparently eclectic mix of features.  It's also the opinion of some that, actually, the Michigamea were perhaps an Algonquian group turned Siouan, rather than the other way around.  I personally disprefer that hypothesis, but even if it's true it doesn't explain where they picked up their new Siouan language from. [10]

 

*     *     *

 

That's all well and good, but a lot of it's based on older scholarship which tends to get superceded—occasionally even with good reason.  And I still haven't said who I think the Unktoka were.  But there's one more thing, a very interesting article from a few years ago, written by Colin M. Betts in the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology: "Paouté and Aiaouez: A New Perspective on Late Seventeenth-Century Chiwere-Siouan Identity" (2018).  In this article the author makes the argument that, up until the very late 1600s, there had more or less been two different Ioway tribes.

 

The English name for the Ioway tribe—and for the state of Iowa, which used to be pronounced "Ioway" (I'm told my grandfather said it like this)—is ultimately derived from the Sioux word Ayúȟwa.  This was borrowed into the languages of the Algonquian tribes living east of the Ioway and the Sioux, from whom it was then borrowed by the French who spelled it like "Aiaouez".  The French version of the name was probably said with 4 syllables "A-ia-ou-ez", reflecting the syllabification in the Algonquian versions: Miami-Illinois Aayohoowia, Fox A:yohowe:we, Menominee Ayo:ho:wɛ:w, Shawnee Ha:yawʔhowe.  But the name for the Ioway in their own language is entirely different: Báxoje in the practical orthography, or Páxoče in Americanist notation.  This name was also adopted by the French who referred to the Ioways as the "Paouté". [11]

 

Betts argues that these Aiaouez and Paouté from the French writings were originally two different groups living in two different places.  Recall the two Ioway "blocs" I mentioned.  Betts says that the Paouté were those living in northwestern Iowa—on the upper Des Moines and Little Sioux rivers, and near the famous pipestone quarry of Minnesota—while the Aiaouez lived in northeastern Iowa along the Root and Upper Iowa rivers.  At some point prior to 1697 (probably around 1685) the Aiaouez left the La Crosse tributaries and joined their cousins the Paouté in northwestern Iowa.  The two peoples eventually merged into one, and their descendants are the historic and modern Ioway tribe.

 

 

I came across Betts' article while already in the midst of thinking about the Unktoka problem.  Before I read it I was much more inclined to think that James Lynd's "lost tribe" was just a loose strand that probably doesn't reward much tugging: any of a dozen ways he might have misunderstood the Dakota oral traditions, or that those oral traditions could themselves have been wrong.  I probably wouldn't have written this then.  But I think that Betts' thesis gels suspiciously well with what Lynd wrote about the Unktoka: a lost tribe living, more or less, where the Aiaouez had once been, and who were remembered as being kind of maybe Ioways or Winnebagoes but also kind of maybe not.  And of course they weren't exactly destroyed, as the modern Ioways are still their descendants.

 

Betts bases his argument upon a close tabulation of the earliest French references to the ancestral Ioway: specifically which of the two names are used when to refer to people living where.  He makes no reference to the Lynd writings, and presumably isn't aware of them.

 

 

Betts points out that technically both Aiaouez and Paouté are exonyms: according to James Owen Dorsey, the Ioways' original name for themselves was Chékiwére.  I believe the significance of this is misplaced.  Betts uses this to disprove the idea that Aiaouez and Paouté constitute an exonym-endonym pair for the same tribe, but the names both being exonyms doesn't necessarily mean that they refer to two different groups.  He also cites Mildred Mott Wedel in support of the idea that Báxoje was originally the Otoes' name for the Ioway—and not a name the Ioway used for themselves—but I don't think this is what Wedel says at all.  The question of how and why the Ioways abandoned their self-designation Chékiwére in favor if Báxoje remains, in my opinion, unresolved.  Dorsey's explanation—that people used different names depending on whether they were on home turf—just doesn't seem plausible to me.  In any case though, there seems to be a parallel situation with the Otoes, who call themselves Jiwere but evidently used to call themselves Watótta [12].

 

Putting the Oto issue aside, it would make sense why the Ioways have had two different names for themselves—"Baxoje" and "Chekiwere"—if in fact they descend from two different founder populations.  According to this view, the Báxoje were the "Paouté" of the upper Des Moines river, and the Chékiwére were the "Aiaouez" of the La Crosse tributaries.  After 1685, when the two tribes moved in together, they were thenceforth referred to using either one or the other of their original two names.

 

This would explain the confused nature of the Dakota traditions.  The Dakota had originally known the Aiaouez/Chekiwere as the Ayúȟwa, and after 1685 they continued using this name to refer to the new consolidated Ioway tribe.  Later generations remembered that another tribe had once lived in southeastern Minnesota, but they weren't sure whether that tribe still existed or not.  Some said they were Ioways, others said they were a lost tribe—and they were both kinda right.  Those who remembered the Aiaouez as a lost tribe could hardly have used the original name Ayúȟwa to refer to them, since they still used that name to refer to a different tribe which was still very much alive.  And so the Dakotas coined a new name: Uŋkthóka.  Maybe this name never attained wider currency among the Sioux, but the last few who used it—and who knew whom it referred to—managed to tell one person, and that person managed to write it down, shortly before being shot in the chest by a man who was angry at Andrew Myrick. [13]

 

*     *     *

 

Is that the answer then?  Well, maybe, but who knows.  I should emphasize that I'm making three separate points:

 

1. More attention should be paid to the unpublished James Lynd materials.

2. You should read Colin Betts' article and make up your own mind re the supposed Paouté vs. Aiaouez distinction.

3. Lynd's "Unktoka" were the same as Betts' "Aiaouez".

 

Points #1 and #2 I am absolutely certain of.  #3 not so much.  I wouldn't wager much on this theory, and I really don't know who the Unktoka were at the end of the day—if they even were anybody.  But the idea is intriguing.

 

There is also a third possibility, which occurred to me very late in writing this so I don't have much on it.  But I recently read Mark Walczynski's book Jolliet and Marquette, about the French expedition of discovery to the Mississippi in 1673.  In it Walczynski has this footnote:

 

"Recently, [David] Costa discovered that the Kaw referred to the Ottawa as "Indokah".  [Michael] McCafferty speculates that "Indokah" ~ *inohka might have been a word used by Siouan speakers south of the Great Lakes to refer to the Great Lakes Algonquians in general.  Miami-Illinois had extensive prehistoric contact with Siouan speakers[...]"

(endnote 5:22)

 

The word inohka here (technically ī̆nō̆hka) is the name which the Illiniwek used to refer to themselves.  I can't find anything more about this "Indokah" name that the Kansa used for the Odawa, but in another publication David Costa also mentions a name "Intuka" which the Quapaw used to refer to the Peoria Illiniwek.  McCafferty thinks this name is related to Inohka, and perhaps it is.  But it's hard not to notice that these Dhegiha words also look very similar to Uŋkthóka.

 

Would that require the "Our Enemies" translation to be abandoned?  It might . . . though I'm not sure.  I would note that the thóka meaning "enemy" has no known cognates outside of Dakotan; I would also note that there is no known, recorded word in Dakota that refers to the Illiniwek, though they must have had one, since the two tribes were deadly adversaries in the 17th century.  But by the mid-1800s the Illiniwek had long ceased being major players.  The Sioux at that point might not have remembered much about them anymore, and the word they once used to refer to them—or for "the Great Lakes Algonquians in general"—could have gotten whittled down to something else, a word for any enemy. [14]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTES

 

[1] – My sources for James Lynd's life and death are Dakota Dawn by Gregory Michno (2011), Massacre in Minnesota by Gary Clayton Anderson (2019), Sketches Historical and Descriptive of the Monuments and Tablets erected by the Minnesota Valley Historical Society (1902, no author given), and "Memoir of Hon. Jas. W. Lynd" by Rev. S. R. Riggs (Coll. Minn. Hist. Soc., Vol 3, 1880), as well as the introduction by S. R. Riggs in "History of the Dakotas: James W. Lynd's Manuscripts" (Coll. Minn. Hist. Soc., Vol 2, 1889, originally published 1865).  Riggs is also the one who called Myrick "peculiarly obnoxious".

 

Michno's book discusses the mythology surrounding Andrew Myrick's death.  Anderson's goes along with the popular, maybe-apocryphal version.  Michno also suggests that Thawásuota maybe did in fact recognize and intend to murder Lynd, and that it was Lynd who had made the "eat grass" comment.  I find this unlikely.

 

I don't know exactly what Lynd was doing at Myrick's store, aside from drinking coffee.  Monuments and Tablets says that he was "serving temporarily as a clerk", Dakota Dawn says he was "in charge" there, but S. R. Riggs ("Memoir") merely says that he was "then stopping" there.  The modern books both name Lynd's killer as "Much Hail" and "Tawasuota", but Monuments and Tablets give his name as "Waukon Wasechon Heiyadin" or "One Who Travels Like a Sacred White Man" (i.e. like a preacher).  I don't know if this is a different guy or just another name for the same person . . . the book has a photo of Mr. WWH, and I think it looks like the same guy, but I'm not great with faces.  The exact forensic details of Lynd's murder also aren't agreed upon.  Riggs ("Memoir") says he was shot in the back by "two Indians, with double-barrelled guns" but most sources only name one killer, and two at the same time sounds a little Agatha Christie to me.

 

Riggs gives Lynd's Dakota name as "Raccoon Collar" or "We-cha-ha-na-pin".  Wičháwanap'iŋ is my interpretation of that spelling (wičhá "raccoon" + wanáp'iŋ "necklace, pendant breastplate"), but don't quote me on it.  It's interesting that he writes the name in shitty-English-approximation and not the precise phonetic orthography he uses in his linguistic works.

 

The specific abuses inflicted upon the manuscript by the American soldiers is another matter with no agreement.  Reverend Riggs in "Memoir" says they were used as "gun-wadding", but in his introduction to the published "Religion" chapter he quotes their commanding officer Capt. L. W. Shepherd as saying they were used for "cleaning arms", and in the preface to the Lynd manuscripts themselves (written by J. Fletcher Williams) it's said that the soldiers "used some of the leaves for waste paper, and the rest were kicked about the floor of the apartment, trampled on and stained with tobacco juice".  So yeah... they might have been wiping their asses with it.

 

[2] – The state of the manuscript is such that I can only give chapter titles, not numbers.  At some point the chapter "Dakota Tribes of the N. West" was removed by Stephen Riggs so he could make a handwritten copy.  Riggs apparently never returned this chapter to the Lynd collection.  Whoever later bound the manuscript and added a title page, index, page numbers, table of contents, and introduction (J. Fletcher Williams, I assume) didn't include the "Dakota Tribes of the N. West" chapter, and I have no idea where the original is—I couldn't find it with the Lynd papers, but luckily Riggs' copy still exists.  Riggs called the missing chapter "the first chapter" in the introduction to the published "Religion" chapter, but on his handwritten copy it is called "Chapter II".  The table of contents by J. Fletcher Williams has different chapters for both I and II.

 

Also: I lied.  Lynd actually mentions the Unktoka in three places: the first and second are in the two passages quoted.  The third is on a random piece of scrap folder where the Unktoka are labeled "extinct" and the Ahahaway are speculated to be Mandan.

 

[3] – Once upon a time, the Hidatsa-speaking peoples occupied a far greater area than they did in the classical frontier era, and their territory overspilled the western, northern, and possibly also eastern borders of what is now North Dakota.  The western segments later recrystallized as a separate tribe—the Crow—but this reconfiguration might not have happened until the 18th century.  Prior to then, there were at least five groups: the Awaxawi, the Awatixa, the Xiraca (or Hidatsa-proper), and the ancestors of the Mountain Crow and the River Crow.  But to call the first three groups "Hidatsa" may be teleological, since they may not have originally formed a solid group vis-a-vis the two proto-Crow bands.  The Awatixa and Xiraca are said to have been more closely akin to the Crow than to the Awaxawi—more: the Awatixa and the Mountain Crow may have originally been closer to each other than to the Xiraca or River Crow, and likewise for the latter two.  This is why the Awaxawi were named as their own tribe by Clark: because at the time, they were.

 

I find it useful to use the spelling "Xiraca" for the one of the original three villages, and "Hidatsa" for the modern tribe which they made a part of—they are the same word: the x is a guttural fricative, the r is tapped like in Spanish, and the c is a "ts" sound.  I'm not exactly clear on the histories and relationships of the proto-Hidatsa bands.  W. Raymond Wood says that the Awaxawi spoke one dialect and the Xiraca and Awatixa spoke another, but according to oral tradition it was both the Awaxawi and Xiraca who once lived in eastern North Dakota (near the Red River) before they moved west and joined the Awatixas on the Missouri.  In other words it's not clear which of the other two bands the Xiraca were most similar to.  It would help if we knew more about the dialects spoken by these original bands—it might not necessarily be the case that the language we call Hidatsa is even all that similar to what was spoken by the Xiraca.

 

[4] – This is assuming that 19th century Dakota worked the same as 20th/21st century Lakota (and that I'm understanding the latter correctly).  I'm basing this off of the New Lakota Dictionary and the Lakota Grammar Handbook by Jan Ullrich and Ben Black Bear, which are the most thorough analyses of Lakota by far.  No resource for Santee Dakota even comes close, unfortunately.  Sioux words cited in this post are given in the NLD orthography, which differs slightly from the orthography used by the University of Minnesota.  Note in particular that Santee Dakota lacks the "rough aspirate" series of stops (pȟ tȟ kȟ) which so characterize Lakota and Yanktonai.  The Assiniboine form cited tóga is basically identical to the Lakota tȟóka and Dakota thóka once you account for spelling conventions, and the fact that Assiniboine's stops have generally undergone a "softening" no doubt under influence from Plains Cree.  The Stoney name, which ends in the plural suffix –bi, is taken from the Stoney Mobile Dictionary App.

 

I couldn't tell you how common generally it is in Native American languages for a word meaning "enemy" to also mean a particular tribe, but as another example: Clark's The Indian Sign Language mentions that Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara signers used the same sign for both "enemy" and "Sioux".

 

Regarding the questionable grammaticality of *Uŋkthóka: it is hypothetically conceivable that words for "friend" and "enemy" could be considered extensionally as kinship terms for grammatical purposes.  But, again, there is no such indication of this for either thóka "enemy" or kholá "friend" in any source I could find.  I also couldn't tell you why a word like Uŋkthóka, lacking the pi suffix, appears to be possessed by a first person dual inclusive.

 

Stephen Riggs had this to say of Lynd's proficiency in speaking Dakota: "I have heard a great many white men talk Dakota, but I have yet to hear one, in all respects, talk it 'with the fluency and idiomatic intonations of the natives' [as a writer for the Louisville Journal had claimed of Lynd].  Mr. Lynd, previous to his death, spoke the language too well to have made such a claim for himself.  But it is proper for me to say, that he did speak the Dakota language very fluently, and doubtless understood its grammatical construction better than most white men in the country" ("Memoir").  So Lynd could definitely speak the language, but at the same time, Riggs here sounds a bit like he's trying not to speak ill of the dead.

 

[5] - The Dhegiha are also associated with Oneota, but Henning (1998) implies that they didn't show up until the 1500s.  Dhegiha migration legends recorded in the 19th century vaguely agree with this.  There are also a very small number of Oneota sites attributed to the Santee and Miami.  My sources for Oneota archaeology are: Dale R. Henning, "Plains Village Tradition: Eastern Periphery and Oneota Tradition" (in Handbook of North American Indians: Plains, 2001); Dale R. Henning, "The Oneota Tradition" (in Archaeology of the Great Plains, 1998); Thomas D. Thiessen, "Traditional and Historical Summary" (Plains Anthropologist, Vol 49, 2004); Thomas E. Emerson, et al., Late Woodland Societies (2000); and Shirley J. Schermer et al., Oneota Historical Connections (2015).  The Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology I found to not be very helpful at all.

 

Several contributors to Oneota Historical Connections—Eric Hollinger, Robert Hall, John Staeck, Patt Murphy—are either skeptical or agnostic that the Winnebago were the Effigy Mound people.

 

The La Crosse Terrace may have been a dawning of a kind for the Ioway in particular, but my take from the archaeology (particularly Oneota Historical Connections) is that the ancestors of the Oto and Missouria also fanned out to northwestern Iowa and southwestern Iowa/northwestern Missouri at around this same time, ca. 1300 A.D.  Maybe these were all people who had come from Red Wing/Diamond Bluff, I don't know.  The southeastern quadrant of Iowa state also had Oneota that can't positively be identified with a known Chiwere tribe; maybe they too were lost.

 

Mildred Mott Wedel's monograph Peering at the Ioway Indians Through the Mist of Time (1986) is fundamental for 17th century Ioway history, but she is a bit more literalist in her read of the sources than I would be.  According to her, there was only one locale of Ioways at a time during the 1600s: first they were in northeastern Iowa, then they moved to northwestern Iowa and subsequently zigged and zagged a bit.  This differs from Betts' reconstruction, both on the map shown (from Oneota Historical Connections) and in his later article I discuss later.  It was written in the 1680s that the Ioway were accessible from the Mississippi via a certain river, which may have been the Des Moines or the Iowa River.  Betts identifies it as the Des Moines, which leads to northwestern Iowa.  Wedel seems to favor the Iowa River—specifically the Cedar River by way of the Iowa River, whose headwaters are a stone's throw away from the upper Upper [sic] Iowa River in northeastern Iowa.

 

Also, a side observation about Dhegihan and Chiwerean history.  Rory Larson analyzed the cognate sets with glottalized consonants in Mississippi Valley Siouan, and he reconstructs Proto-MVS *xʾ to have become *kʾ in Proto-Dhegiha (and then ʔ~Ø in Omaha).  He then reconstructs Proto-MVS *xk to have become kʾ in the Dhegiha languages, and to have become xʾ in Ioway-Oto but NOT in Winnebago (where it became šg).  The implication is that Proto-MVS *xk first became *xʾ in Proto-Dhegiha, which then became *kʾ as per the usual shift.  This would mean that the somewhat unusual sound change xk > xʾ was an areal development that happened in Dhegiha and Chiwere specifically—i.e. in the states of Iowa and Missouri—and that the Chiwere tribes were perhaps "angled" more toward their western and southern neighbors than they were to the Winnebagoes (their "grandfather" tribe).  This would apply to the era after 1500 A.D. when Henning estimates the Dhegiha first entered Oneota territory.  (source: Rory M. Larson (2019) "Glottalized consonants in Mississippi Valley Siouan", in Proceedings of the 38th Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference, ed. Ryan M. Kasak)

 

[6] – The citations are: Alexander Ramsey in the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1849-50; Ramsey, "Our Field of Historical Research" (orig. 1851, reprinted in Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society, Vol 1, 1872); the James W. Lynd manuscripts (1868-62); Gideon H. Pond, "Ancient Mounds and Monuments" (orig. 1853, reprinted in Coll. Minn. Hist. Soc. Vol 1, 1872); T. H. Williamson, "Who were the first men?" (orig. 1856, reprinted in ibid), and "The Sioux or Dakotas, of the Missouri River"(Coll. Minn. Hist. Soc. Vol 3, 1880); Doane Robinson, A History of the Dakota or Sioux Indians (1904); Dorsey & Thomas, "Iowa" article in Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (ed. F. W. Hodge, 1907); Thomas Foster & William Harvey Miner, The Iowa (1911); and Newton Horace Winchell, The Aborigines of Minnesota (Minn. Hist. Soc., 1911).  Not all of these are equally explicit on the point of exactly where the Dakota first met the Ioway—including the first reference, Ramsey 1849/50—but the similarities in language show that they're all repeating the same essential information.  I believe they may all have been based on Pond's information, including Ramsey who maybe had heard it from Pond personally before it was published.

 

[7] – According to G. Malcolm Lewis' analysis the Ioway map does include the Minnesota River, with a sequence of village sites moving westward just north of either the Root, Zumbro, or Cannon River.  This seems to be inferior to the analyses by William Green and Mary Kathryn Whelan, who both say that the moving villages are between the Upper Iowa and Root rivers (more or less as the archaeology and history would agree) and that the Minnesota River is not depicted on the Ioway map (sources: G. Malcolm Lewis, "Indian Maps: Their Place in the History of Plains Cartography" (Great Plains Quarterly, 1983); William Green "Description of the 1837 Ioway Map" (in Atlas of Early Maps of the American Midwest: Part II, 2001); Mary Kathryn Whelan, The 1837 Ioway Indian Map Project (Master's thesis, U. of Redlands, 2003)).

 

This is the Lewis version:

 

 

This is the Green version:

 

 

(Whelan doesn't have any handy diagram like these.)

 

[8] – In a footnote to this passage Lynd writes "Hazen Moors et alia".  At first I thought he was saying that the area of the Ioway planting grounds was known as the "Hazen Moors", but no: Hazen Mooers [sic] was a person (although there is also a "Mooers Lake" not far from Redwing).  Mooers had previously worked at the Lower Sioux Agency at Redwood where Lynd was later murdered, so presumably the two men had met.

 

[9] –The details of these migrations aren't my main point here, but the prior locations of the Potawatomi, Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo, Mascouten, and Miami are discussed in various publications by Timothy Abel and David Stothers and in the analyses of the Huron Novvelle France map by Conrad Heidenreich and John Steckley, among others—I'll probably dig into this in a later post; the relative positions of the Sauk and Fox are sometimes flipped, and the locations of the Miami and Potawatomi are particularly hard to pin down.  The ca. 1500 arrival of the Dhegiha is mentioned by Dale Henning in Archaeology of the Great Plains), and the westward movements of the Miami and Illiniwek are mentioned by Robert Mazrim in Protohistory at the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia (ed. Robert F. Mazrim, 2015) and by Emerson, Emerson, & Esaray in Palos Village (ed. Duane Esarey & Kjersti E. Emerson, 2021); these are also vague as to the prior location of the Miami and even moreso the Illinois.  The color key might be off for the Miami-Illinois migration a bit, as I'm not sure if they came in the 16th or the 17th century.  Also, not indicated on the map, but there may have been something else going on with the Menominee and with another tribe called the Noquet.

 

I tend to like using the name "Illiniwek" rather than "Illinois" because it's easier that way to distinguish from the state.  Despite looking "Indian-y" this is not the tribe's own endonym, it's a respelling of their Old Odawa name.  If you know a little Algonquian then you probably think this means "the people", but appearances are deceiving: the Old Odawa [Ojibwe] form ilinwe:k is a borrowing of Miami-Illinois irenwe:wa which is a verb that means "to speak in the regular way".  (In this sense it's an interesting counterpart to the Algonquian names for Iroquoians and Siouans, which come from *na:towe:wa "to speak in an abnormal way".)  David Costa discusses this in his article "Illinois" for the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (2007), which you can find by googling Michael McCafferty's article "Peoria" on academia.edu.  McCafferty's chapter "Illinois Voices" in Protohistory at the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia also discusses this, but he differs on a few minor details.

 

[10] – Robert Mazrim (in chapter 10 of Protohistory at the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia) comments that some elements of archaeological ware from Kaskaskia have been proposed to have come from the north, around western Michigan.  No comment is made regarding the Michigamea, but there might be a connection.

 

The two sentences of Michigamea provided by Bossu are "indagé ouai panis" translated "je suis indigne de vivre, je ne mérite plus de porter le doux nom de père", and "tikalabé, houé ni gué" translated "nous te croyons, tu as raison"—both obviously overtranslations.  Koontz interprets these as:

 

                "indagé ouai panis"

                įdaǰe wé bnįs

                his-father neg I-am-neg

                "I am not his father"

 

                "tikalabé, houé ni gué"

                htíkdąbe wé nįge(s)

                you-think neg it-lacks(-neg)

                "Your thinking is not lacking."

 

For some absurd reason, the Seymour Feiler translation respells these as "Indagey wai panis" and "Teekalabay, houay nee gai".  Maybe they were already spelled that way in John Reinhold Forster's old 1771 translation, but that's no excuse.

 

Walczynski's book Jolliet and Marquette (p 97) cites Michael McCafferty as saying that "linguistic information" shows the Michigamea to be Dhegiha.  I consider McCafferty to be trustworthy—and I don't know how much behind-closed-doors unpublished research has been done on Michigamea since then—but John Koontz at least was very specific in the 1990s that the language was not Dhegiha.

 

(Sources: John Koontz, "Michigamea: A Siouan Language?" (from his website); John Koontz, "Michigamea As A Siouan Language" (1995, handout for the 25th Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference); the Siouan Mailing List, September 2005; Jean-Bernard Bossu, Travels in the Interior of North America (1962) pp 73, 109.)

 

[11] – The usual etymologists cite the Dakota form Ayúȟba as the word which the Algonquians borrowed, but it's quite obvious that they actually borrowed a form more like Ayúȟwa which currently exists only in the Teton (Lakota) dialect.  It seems less likely that the Algonquians borrowed this name specifically from the plainsgazing Tetons than it is that Ayúȟwa is closer to the original form as once spoken by all seven divisions of the Sioux, and that this "Old Sioux" version was what the Algonquians borrowed.  The Comparative Siouan Dictionary doesn't reconstruct any cognate sets for Lakota ȟw ~ Dakota ȟb, but the similar cluster of Lakota sw ~ Dakota sb is found in words like "comb" and "rattle", where it goes back to Proto-Dakotan *sw.  On the other hand, David Rood said that he did "not know whether [b] or [w] is older" in sets of sw ~ sb. (in: Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics, ed Rudin & Gordon, 2016).

 

There is a feature common to most Siouan languages which regularly alternates between final –a and –e on verbs.  I've seen this invoked to say that the Algonquian forms were actually borrowed from something like Ayúȟwe rather than Ayúȟwa, but I'm not sure if this quite works.

 

The Miami-Illinois form is from David Costa, "Miami-Illinois Tribe Names" (31st Algonquian Conf, 2000).  The Fox, Shawnee, and Menominee are from Douglas Parks' synonymy for "Iowa" in the Handbook of North American Indians, Vol 13 (2001).  Mii Dash Geget tells me the details are a bit hard to work out for the Ojibwe name cited by Parks, but the older Ojibwe form may have been Aayo'oowe.

 

[12] – The Dorsey cite is: Rev. J. Owen Dorsey, "On the Comparative Phonology of Four Siouan Languages" (Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1885).  Here is his explanation for the name Chekiwere:

 

"Ȼegiha means, "Belonging to the people of this land," or, "Those dwelling here," i.e., the aborigines or home people.  When an Omaha was challenged in the dark, if on his own territory, he usually replied, "I am a Ȼegiha."  So might a Ponka reply, under similar circumstances, when at home.  A Kansas would say, "I am a Ye-gá-ha," of which the Osage equivalent is, "I am a Ȼe-ʞá-ha."  These answer to the Oto "Ʇɔi-wé-re" and the Iowa "Ʇɔé-ʞi-wé-re."  "To speak the home dialect" is called "Ȼegiha ie" by the Ponkas and Omahas, "Yegaha ie" by the Kansas, "Ʇɔiwere itcʿe" by the Otos, and "Ʇɔeʞiwere itcʿe" by the Iowas.  When an Indian was challenged in the dark, if away from home, he must give his tribal name, saying, "I am an Omaha," "I am a Ponka," etc."

 

The Wedel cite is: Mildred Mott Wedel, "A Synonymy of Names for the Ioway Indians" (The Iowa Archaeological Society, Vol 25, 1978).  The only statement of hers I can see which might be interpreted as saying the word "Baxoje" comes from the Oto dialect and wasn't originally used in Ioway, is this:

 

"There is another Siouan name for the Oto, watóta (Whitman 1937:xi) from which the modern name stems.  It was recorded by Euro-Americans as being used not only by the Oto as a self-designation (e.g. Bradbury 1811 in Thwaites, ed. 1904-07, 5:80) but also by the Ioway-Missouri and Dhegiha speakers in early Euro-American contact situations.  This has continued in the shortened form, Oto, to the present day.  It parallels, in a sense, the possibly descriptive designations for the other Chiwerans, as paxóche for the Ioway and ni-u-t'a-tci (Dorsey NAA 4800:307) for the Missouri.  According to Indian tradition, the three terms all relate to the episodes of separation of these peoples from one another after having formerly existed as a single group, all of whom spoke a proto-"Chiwere" language.  Dorsey was told these were the self-designations used when these people were away from home."

 

In fairness, the issue of which names were used by which group to refer to which other group, and how these may have changed over time, is one which requires very careful and precise description . . . and neither Dorsey nor Wedel were very precise or careful.  Dorsey elides over the difference between "which language are you speaking" and "where are you speaking it"—to be honest he sounds a bit like an alien who only recently learned the concept of there being multiple words for things.  Wedel says that paxóche "parallels" watóta but isn't clear on how: Betts apparently thinks she's saying that they're both words used by the Oto, but I think she's saying they are both endonyms.  I'll add that if the former, then that wouldn't very well explain why the French were using it, since they and the Illiniwek were even further away from the Oto than they were from the Ioway.  I may be misinterpreting something here.

 

"Chékiwére" is the spelling Betts uses in place of Dorsey's "Ʇɔé-ʞi-wé-re".  Since Dorsey's upside-down letters appear to mark tenuis stops, that would be Jegiwere in the Goodtracks orthography, or Čekiwere in Americanist notation.  I'm ignoring Dorsey's accent marks because I don't know whether it makes sense analytically for words in Ioway-Oto to have multiple stresses.  The modern Oto self-designation is given by Goodtracks as both Jiwére and Jíwere so I'm ignoring the accent there as well (Wedel, using Dorsey's notes, also has the "wrong" stress for Báxoje.  Evidently Chiwere accent is difficult).  Wedel's Watóta is given by Goodtracks as Watóhda and by Robert Rankin (in the HNAI) as watótta.

 

[13] – Colin Betts, to be clear, doesn't say in his own words that the Paouté and the Aiaouez were different "tribes".  He prefers terms like "locality" and is apparently of the view that both localities housed people belonging to the same overall Ioway nation.  This might be the case: the evidence isn't exactly conclusive either way.  The Aiaouez may even have been closer to the Winnebago for all we know (though I doubt it).  Part of this is just semantics: what exactly one wishes to use the word "tribe" to refer to.  To what extent the Aiaouez thought of themselves as distinct from the Paouté, you need a time machine to find out.

 

[14] – The Walczynski endnote is on page 255.  David Costa refers to the Intuka in the article "Illinois"—part of the superarticle Three American Placenames—in the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas Newsletter XXV:4, January 2007.  More about Miami-Illinois nomenclature is in Michael McCafferty's article in Protohistory at the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia.  The macron-breves are because we don't know whether the first two vowels are long or short.

 

Both Inohka and Indokah/Intuka are unanalyzable in their respective languages.  I, not being a Siouanist, am trepid about declaring that thoka has no non-Dakotan cognates or that no Dakota name for the Illiniwek is attested—but the Comparative Siouan Dictionary, at least, has no entry for thoka, with one possible cognate in Dhegiha (as part of a compound word meaning "antelope, goat") having a note saying it might be a Dakotan loanword; and neither the Handbook of North American Indians nor the New Lakota Dictionary list any word for the Illinois or its component tribes.

 

One can imagine a scenario where James Lynd was told a name like "Indokah" or "Intuka" and construed it himself as "Unkthóka".  This at least would explain why it looks so grammatically unusual.

 

The uŋ(k)- prefix in L/Dakota and Assiniboine actually has a front vowel in Stoney: į(g)- in Morley dialect and įgi- in Alexis dialect.  And in Chiwere-Winnebago the cognate prefix is hį-.  So one might be tempted to say that in Proto-Dakotan the word for "our enemy" could have been *iŋ^(k)thóka.  That looks like something that could easily have been borrowed to or from the Dhegiha forms, regardless of what those words meant in Dhegiha ("our" in Dhegiha tends to have an ą or ǫ vowel).  If intuka/indokah was borrowed into Sioux then it may have been they, rather than Lynd, who reinterpreted it as a possessed noun (if it even is one at all).

 

Unfortunately, the cognates outside of Mississippi Valley Siouan do make it look like uŋ(k)- is the older form, and it's generally good practice to assume fewer conservatisms in Stoney anyway.  If thóka is in fact a borrowing then it must have happened during the Proto-Dakotan period since the word exists in Stoney and Assiniboine, and so at that time it likely wouldn't have referred to the Illiniwek who probably weren't in contact with the Sioux until at least the 16th century.  It might have referred to another Algonquian tribe, per McCafferty's idea that it referred to the Great Lakes Algonquians in general?  You can see that while "intuka" ~ "unktoka" looks impressionistically promising, it is very hard to make any of the details actually work for this theory.

 

(Morley source: Elias Abdollahnejad, "Verb Conjugation in Stoney Nakoda: Focus on Argument-Marking Affixes" (2018); Alexis source: Corrie Lee Rhyasen Erdman, Stress in Stoney (Master's thesis, U. of Calgary, 1997))