Cognacy of the Omaha and Ponca (was Re: local reactions ...)

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 12 Jun 2007, Tom Leonard wrote:
> Ponca people have long held that they are "related" to the Omaha ("they're 
> our relatives") but that they have always been a separate entity - the two 
> tribes living together at one time but always distinct from one another. I've 
> heard Omaha people describe the relationship in a similar manner.

This sense of connection is probably behind LaFlesche's term 'cognate 
tribes', extending to all the Dhegiha peoples.  He probably doesn't have 
the current linguistic sense in mind as such and I also doubt he means 
'speaking languages full of cognate words'.  I'm not sure if 'agnate' 
might not be the proper term for what he has in mind, for that matter. 
My attempt to make sense of his term is to assume that he refers not to 
common descent, lingusitic or otherwise, but to parallel institutions and 
organizations, or perhaps to something of what Tom reports as a sense of 
being connected, but always extant.

Notice that Tom reports the Ponca and Omaha as seeing themselves more like 
separated siblings (without explicit parents) than as children 
(descendents) of a single parent entity.  This is analogous to Americans 
and Canadians thinking of themselves and the English as all formerly 
living together in England before, for some reason, the Americans and 
(Anglo-)Canadians all moved to North America, leaving the English behind. 
In fact, I believe we tend to think of ourselves as children of England.

The concept that all present branches of a group have always been 
logically separate, though not perhaps originally physically separate, is 
one that reappears in Dhegiha accounts, and I think it is is common in 
similar situations in the Plains area.  The other Dhegiha example occurs 
in the "Ohio Origin" legend in which the five tribes are conceived of as 
moving down the Ohio together and then splitting off from the main body at 
various points.   The specifically Omaha and Ponca versions of this 
continue the process in dividing the Omaha and Ponca.

>>From a linguistic and ethnographic perspective, even if we try to escape 
the folk modelling of the process, it makes perfect sense to see the Omaha 
and Ponca as offshoots or a single earlier entity.  Apart from the obvious 
and particular similarities of the two languages, the clan structure of 
the Omaha and Ponca is more or less complementary, when compared with that 
of other Dhegiha groups like the Osage or Kaw.  In other words, you have 
to add the Omaha and Ponca clan sets to come up with something like the 
set exhibited among the Osage or Kaw.  There are some overlaps, but it 
certainly looks like some event fissioned the original combined system.

I don't know that we have to assume anything unusual for this event. 
Both groups were internally divided into villages (Omaha) or bands (Ponca) 
when encountered.  I assume the Omaha vs. Ponca fission was simply an 
earlier, but fairly recent fissioning that persisted.

Incidentally, the complex and rather well-developed interior structuring 
of the Omaha "Left Hands Side" clan - also its large size compared with 
other clans - suggests to me that it represents the reverse process, i.e., 
it is an absorbed entity that was originally more independent.  This 
absorption is well advanced, if this is the case, and it may have occurred 
before the Omaha-Ponca split.  An analogy here might be the 
Cheyenne-Suhtai merger or the association of the Kiowa and the "Kiowa 
Apache."  Or consider the widespread fusions in the Caddoan groups.  (The 
Caddo "proper" even incorporate one of the original Quapaw villages, the 
ImaNhaN, demonstrating again that lingusitically dissimilar elements can 
be absorbed fairly quickly.)

So, while the traditions of both ethnographees and ethnographers tends to 
assume constancy of language, we have to keep in mind that there is no 
reason why all elements in the mix were always Dhegiha speaking.  It does 
seem likely that any entity that divided into the linguistically similar 
Omaha and Ponca must have been primarily speaking an earlier version of 
Omaha-Ponca, but the Left Hand Side people, if originally separate, need 
not have been Omaha-Ponca, or even Dhegiha speakers.

I tend to keep the idea that languages can change in mind when trying to 
explain the several Dakota bands north of the Omaha-Ponca area named 
Waz^az^a.  Compare Dhegiha waz^az^e 'Osage', the name of one of the 
"standard" Dhegiha clans.  And of course, examples like this, and 
certainly like Imaha, warn us not to be too agressive in explaining names 
of clans or tribes in terms of their current language.  Maybe we're 
puzzled by the etymology of words like Kansa and Ponca, etc., because 
they're not Siouan words, or at least not Dhegiha words.

Turning from that point back to Bryan's apology for looking at still more 
Algonquian data, I'd say don't apologize.  I don't think we whould 
degenerate to looking always at all languages, but if we are consistent in 
applying such glances to Siouan problems, I think we are OK.

I like to see us looking at other languages, especially nearby ones, in 
connection with Siouan, because I think we can only profit from knowing 
more, collectively, about the wider linguistic context of Siouan.  Not 
just vocabulary elements, of course, but also grammatical issues like 
obviation in Algonquian, or clause syntax, etc.

For example, I think Bob Rankin's usage "conjunctive (marker)" for the 
Omaha-Ponca =e=gaN 'having ...' marker in clauses, borrowing from 
Algonquian descriptive models, has been very helpful to me.  Maybe my 
scheme of calling certain things in Dhegiha "obviative," wasn't quite as 
helpful, though it has attracted people to thinking about what is actually 
going on.

A couple of debts need to be acknowledged. One is that I think that it was 
actually Bob Rankin who suggested I should look at whether the OP "plural 
singulars" etc. might be marking something like the proximate/obviative. 
This is a case where in acknowledging the debt I need to observe that he 
suggested looking at this would be interesting.  He didn't recommend that 
I take over the terms.  So, while he deserved the credit for pointing us 
in that direction, he's innocent of any terminological gaffes.  The other 
debt is owed to Boas, who send Frida Hahn to Oklahoma to discoved, among 
other things, what that -bi- was at the end of Omaha-Ponca verbs (or stuck 
on the front of things like biama 'they say').  Even before that, of 
course, Dorsey experimented with endless approaches to explaining the 
particle coglomerations at the end of Omaha-Ponca sentences, and also 
meticulously recorded his consultants observations on the implications of 
using one kind of article vs. another, or of including a "plural marker in 
a singular form or not.   In the end it was a very good thing that Dorsey 
and other consultants managed to produce quite a few sentences with mixed 
structures that later consultants seized upon as ungrammatical.