Osage

[rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu]

John wrote:
> For what it's worth 'middle water' could be a stream or river name,
though
> I don't recall such a stream.

Can anyone can come up with the actual word in
Osage?  In OP, there are actually several words
we can gloss as 'middle' in English, varying
according to whether we are talking about being in
the middle of a crowd, the center of a village, or
the middle of a lake, etc.

I'm wondering if 'People of the Middle Water'
might not be an ancient name for the Dhegihans
before they broke up into separate tribes, with
only the Osage retaining the original name.

According to the 'Sacred Legend', recounted in
Fletcher and La Flesche, the original home of
the Omaha was in the Ohio River Valley.  On one
particular day, they made a poorly planned and
probably urgent crossing of the Mississippi.
Some got across, while others were swept
downstream.  Those who went downstream eventually
made it across into Arkansas, where they became
the Quapaw.  Those that made it across in the
first attempt became the Omaha (including the
Ponca, who had not yet split off).  The two
groups apparently made no serious effort to get
back together, and the Omaha wandered northwest
across Iowa.  (The Ioway themselves had been with
the Dhegihans at the time, and were among those
who crossed successfully.)

This event must have been crucial in Omaha history.
Prior to the crossing, the Sacred Legend consists
mainly of culture history mythology.  After the
crossing, the Legend seems to be a fairly solid
account of their wanderings and adventures.

The Osage and Kaw are not mentioned in this story.
I've read in some popular English accounts that
they share this tradition, but I don't know the
details.  If we suppose that they were part of
this event, then we have a reasonable explanation
of the term: the UmaNhaN were the 'Upstream People',
the Ugaxpa were the 'Downstream People', and the
Osage, who stayed in the middle, were the 'People
of the Middle Water'.

If the Osage and Kaw were not part of the crossing,
however, as the Omaha Sacred Legend seems to imply,
then a more interesting possibility becomes obvious.
In that case, they were presumably already on the
west side of the Mississippi before the Omahas and
Quapaws came across, and likely settled in the
lower Missouri valley where they were found later
on.  If so, then Dhegihan territory prior to the
crossing would have included both the lower Ohio
valley and the lower Missouri valley, together with
the stretch of the Mississippi that connects the
mouths of these two rivers.  At this point, one has
only to look at a map of North America to appreciate
the implication of the name 'People of the Middle
Waters'.  In an era when waterways were the easiest
avenues of transportation, these people were living
at the very crossroads of the continent.

In this view, the Dhegihans must have been very
much centered on the big rivers, which might explain
how a 'water-monster' would come to be so important
in their mythology.  In fact, this 'water-monster'
might very well represent the River itself, seen
both as a crawling snake and as the central god of
their daily existence.

There are some advantages to this hypothesis
linguistically as well.  For one thing, it would
give us good grounds for a dialect difference
between 'West Dhegihan'-- Osage and Kaw-- and
'East Dhegihan'-- Omaha, Ponca and Quapaw.  The
latter are distinguished by the complete collapse
of MVS *u into *i.  More generally, it would tend
to imply that Dhegihan must have been an unusually
cosmopolitan language.  As a rule, languages that
have a high interface with speakers of foreign
languages tend to break down phonologically and
grammatically, becoming more word centered and
syntactically chaotic.  This seems to be what we
are seeing in our respective Dhegihan languages,
and probably accounts for why we are having so
much trouble making sense of them.  Comparing
Omaha-Ponca to the (originally) more insular
Dakotan languages in MVS reminds me of nothing
so much as comparing modern English with
Icelandic in the Germanic languages.


Rory