ANOTHER NAME

[Rankin, Robert L.]

I have a question for the Omaha and Ponca language specialists.  I may have asked it before, but I don’t remember doing so.  Any help would be appreciated by both me and the Osages, one of whose historians has asked me about it.

In the migration stories of the Dhegiha tribes (apparently all but the Quapaws) there is the name of a village where the ancestors of the Omahas, Poncas, Osages and Kaws all dwelt together before they split up and went their separate ways.  The Kaws seemed to think in Dorsey’s time that it was maybe somewhere back towards eastern Missouri.  But the location isn’t what I’m asking about.  In Kaw the name of the place was Mądaaxpaye.  In Osage it was Mątaaxpaðe.  In Omaha and Ponca that would be Mąnaaxpaðe or Mądaaxpaðe.  To me this name seems to break down into naa-xpaðe which should be a verb meaning roughly ‘to burn down’, i.e., to cause to fall down by action of extreme heat.  And then the noun root mą, which should be the root meaning ‘soil, earth’ that is found in mąðį́kka ‘earth’, mąhe ‘bank, cliff’, mąžą ‘land’, etc.

So the whole name seems to imply something like ‘scorched earth’ or some place that burned to the ground.  The fact that all these subgroups of Dhegiha remembered the same name in Dorsey’s time strongly suggests that there was such a place, but I have no access to anyone who speaks Kaw or Osage any more.  So what does this place name mean exactly in Omaha or Ponca??

Bob
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