The Prairie Nations Page
Abstract: Culture and language of Prairie Algonquian and other Indian nations indigenous to the tall grass prairie peninsula region encompassing Illinois, western Indiana, and eastern Iowa and Missouri and the Darby Plains region of Ohio.  Also information about the role of traditional Native American culture in shaping contemporary American society.
HYPERLIST OF CONTENTS
  • New! Introducing the book The Tall Grass Prairie Peninsula: Its Role in Shaping American Culture, by Jim Fay, with Andrew C. Fortier.
  • Suggestions for an International Boulevard garden of plants that are popular as garden flowers Europe and elsewhere in the world, but may beconsidered "just wildflowers" -- if not weeds -- here.
  • Instructions, notes, and a plant list for an archaeobotanical "living time line" exhibit of 12,000 years of prairie plants-- a 12K garden.
  • Instructions for a printing, cutting and assembling small 3¾×5½ pocket booklets of "drive-by archaeobotany" ("botbooks") and a 28 paged Common Prairie Artifacts.
  • The Poster Project.  Free, downloadable color 11 by 15 posters in PDF format.
  • Entries from Hodge's Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico:
  • The tribes of the  Illinois confederacy: the Peoria, the Kaskaskia, the Cahokia , the Michigamea;
  • The other half of the Miami-Illinois entity:  the Miami;
  • Other indigenous nations: Potawatomi, the Shawnee, the Kickapoo, the Chippewa;
  • Selected individuals: Black Hawk, Crispus Attucks
  • Miscellaneous topics: Caucus, Squaw, Chiefs, Race names.
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  • Entries from Stephen Peter Du Ponceau's "Comparative Vocabulary" of Algonquian terms:
  • Algonquian words for God, for man, for woman, and for girl.
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  • Researching Native American ancestry.
  • Document information.
    •  THE POSTER PROJECT
    These posters are designed for large format color inkjet or laser printers, but they are also effective on regular letter size paper and in black and white. Also, copy shops will often print an 11 by 15 color poster for about $1.50.  The PDF software can be downloaded free of charge. Some posters include supporting documents.

    GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT
    HODGE'S HANDBOOK
    In 1910 the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology published a milestone two thousand page, two-volume Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, edited by Frederick Webb Hodge (Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 30. GPO: 1910) .  The encyclopedic work went through numerous re-printing, many of which did not list any publication date on the title page.  The work has become virtually the bible for historical information about Indian culture, but copies of the work are becoming less and less accessible, especially outside the special collections of large research libraries.

    Due to the nature of the publication, a given library copy is often in relatively good shape except for the two or three entries of particular local interest.  Those pages may be so tattered as to be virtually unusable, or they may be missing altogether.  Or the volume with the information of most local interest may have become so damaged it had to be discarded, leaving only the other volume of less interest.

    One of the purposes of the Prairie Nations Page is to make this information of local interest conveniently available to the general public while at the same time alleviating wear and tear on the already battered library holdings.

    The transcriptions from the Handbook and other B.A.E. resources are offered as accurately as possible.  The transcribers have not added, ommitted, edited or 'corrected' any information, with three exceptions.  First, no effort has been made to maintain the stylistic device of 'small caps.'    In the transcriptions, small capitals are rendered merely as capitals.  Second, pictures included in the original have not been included in the transcriptions.  And finally, the transcribers have added notes in brackets to explain orthography, as described below.

    A NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY
    Ethnologists have used an extremely wide variety of techniques to document the sounds of the various native languages and dialects.  This orthography includes, but is not limited to, all kinds of punctuation marks, subscript and superscript characters, markings (including numbers) over letters, strikeouts through characters and characters printed upside-down.  No browser could begin to handle all these challenges.

    With that in mind the following simplified policy has been observed.  Any stylistic device (such as subscript or superscript) or diacritical notation (such umlauts, circumflexes, etc.) rendered by Netscape, Explorer or Lynx have been maintained in the transcript.  Any diacritical mark inserted between letters is transcribed merely as an apostrophe ( ' ).  The accent mark indicating which syllable is to be stressed is rendered by a small superscript slash ( / ).  All other orthographic markings (numbers over letters or long and short vowels, for example) are explained in a bracketed transcriber's note immediately after the Indian expression in which the marking is used.

    The bracketed transcriber's notes immediately following an Indian expression are the only changes made in the text by the transcriber.

    GENERAL INFORMATION ON
    DU PONCEAU'S COMPARATIVE VOCABULARY
    Peter Stephen Du Ponceau was a true renaissance man, writing in both English and French.  Among his works were a dissertation on Chinese grammar and a Dissertation on the Grammatical System of the Languages of Some Indians of North America (Memoire sur le Systeme Grammatical de Langues de Quelques Nations Indiennes de L'Amerique du Nord) Paris, 1838.  The latter work had two appendices, a comparative lexicon of Algonquian and Iroquois and the work addressed here, "Comparative Vocabulary and Discussion of Languages of the Algonquian Family" ("Vocabulare Comparatif et Raisonne des Langes de la FamilleAlgonquine").

    Some two dozen Algonquian languages are surveyed.  Many of the languages are artifacts from Algonquian cultures of which nothing is known but the name.  In many other instances, some intrepretation is required to associate Du Ponceau's nineteenth century French tribal names with a name that has some meaning to modern readers.  In most cases, we have followed the nomenclature and spelling used by Lee Sultzman in his Compact Histories of First Nations found at <http://www.dickshovel.com/Compacts.html>

    Entries for four words which shed some light on Algonquian culture and on contemporary issues have been selected for discussion.  The first term discussed in the vocabulary, "God," was one of the four terms chosen because it sheds some light on the Algonquian concept of "manitou."  The word and concept of "manitou" was and is an important part of many Algonquian cultures and appears frequently in the literature and place names.

    The term "man" is an interesting case study because the Algonquians appeared to have the same ambiguity about "man" as in "a male" and "man" as in "humankind."  The fact that the word for "the common man" was used in the names of tribes or nations such as "Illinois," "Innu," and "Lenni Lenape" illustrates the common tendency for all peoples to think of themselves as something like "the real people."

    The irony is that in most cases the names by which we know the various Algonquian peoples are usually not those used by the people themselves but are rather the names by which the explorers and anthropologists first heard their neighbors (and often enemies) refer to them.  These names tend usually to be at least mildly disparaging; many are very much so.  It is easy to understand why many of these peoples prefer their traditional Algonquian names based on the etymology outlined by Du Ponceau.  Many of the people commonly referred to as "Eskimos" often prefer to think of themselves as "Innu," and the people we know as the "Delaware Indians" often prefer the name "Lenni" or "Lenape" or even "Lenni Lenape." Incidently, the Innu (plural Innuat) and the Inuit are two separate peoples, a confusion made even more problematical by a campaign to replace the word "Eskimo" with the name "Inuit."  See a commentary.

    The terms "woman" and "girl" are particularly pertinent, given the current controversy about the propriety of the word "squaw."  Admittedly, this heated controversy seems to have moved beyond the point where the actual etymology of the word "squaw" seems to be at all relevant.  However, for the record, linguists from the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas to those of the Smithsonian Institution agree with the Du Ponceau material presented here that the term is Algonquian for "woman" or "young woman" and is in no way related to any Mohawk slang for female anatomy.  The word "squaw" is used today to denote "woman" or "young woman" in the Algonquian languages in both the neutral sense and in terms of honor.  See a commentary on the controversy .

    RESEARCHING NATIVE AMERICAN ANCESTRY
    One good introduction to the challenge of researching Native American ancestry is Curt B. Witcher's Introduction to Chapter 14 of The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy, edited by Loretto Dennis Szucs and Sandra Hargreaves Luebking. (Copyright ©1997 by Ancestry Incorporated.) It is reprinted with permission at www.prairienet.org/prairienations/genintro.htm

    DOCUMENT INFORMATION
    This document: http://www.prairienet.org/prairienations/index.htm
    It is a home page document.
    Author:  Jim Fay, Ph.D.
    Comments to: jfay@prairienet.org
    Last Update: 6/7/02
    The Prairie Nations website and exhibits are by Meredith and Jim Fay, who are solely responsible for the content.  No other affiliation is expressed or implied.

    Special thanks to http://www.prairienet.org/ and the University of Illinois School of Library and Information Sciences for giving the Prairienations Page a home.

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