Osage

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 18 Jan 2002 rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu wrote:
> 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.

The LaFlesche dictionary (of Osage), gives uskoNska 'directly in the
center of', 'in the middle of' for 'middle' as in 'middle of a lake',
'middle of the heaven (zenith)', and one possibility for mid in
'midnight'.  There are some other 'middle' terms, too.  I suspect uKonska
is a rendition of uskoNska, though skV => hkV sounds more like Ioway-Otoe.

> 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.)

I've always thought that this account, which is sometimes patched onto the
Winnebago 'Redbanks' story, sounded like the sort of story that people
develop over the years by a sort of deductive process to explain various
patterns they notice and gradually come to believe and then to pass on as
history.  I don't know if there's a term for this process or any
literature on it.  You could call it a folk etiology or a folk provenance.
As an example of the sort of process by which this thing develops, I think
whoever it was who wrote Wars of the Iroquois adds its bit by asserting
that the cause of the crossing was an Iroquois campaign.

In essence a story like this is a model, offered to explain various facts
known to the model builders, like the similarity of the languages and
cultures of the tribes included in the account, or the coincidental
similarity of the English name Ohio /ohaio/ to OP /uhai (h)au/ 'they
followed it', the names of the tribes Omaha 'upstream' and Quapaw
'downstream', etc.  Of course, model building is fine, as long as the
model remains firmly labeled a model and doesn't slip from that to being a
historical narrative ex post facto.  If something is still a model, then
it can be subjected to verification.  But the difficulty of keeping models
as models in the hands of humans, especially when they are not original
written documents, accounts for the historians' insistence on careful
attribution and analysis of sources and, in effect, of their practice of
handling everything as if it might be a folk etiology anyway.

There are difficulties here for a modern student.  For example, why are
all these tribes together, though already differentiated?  There are ways
that this might happen, but perhaps it represents a literary encoding of
the recognition that they are lingusitically related, coupled with a lack
of realization that such a relationship normally arises due to
differentiation from a common source language.

There are also some etymological problems.  For example, Ohio actually
comes from something like Seneca ohi:o?  'Beautiful River' (the
Allegheny), probably via French, because the English pronunciation acts
like a spelling pronunciation of a fairly accurate rendition of the Seneca
name in French orthography.  If it did come from a name used by this
wandering collection of Siouan tribes, what process would explain its
transmission into English?  For that matter, if a suitable process exists,
why wouldn't it transmit the Osage equivalent Opha=p=a instead?

While we might be inherently suspicious of an attempt to explain Omaha
'upstream' and Quapaw (Okaxpa) 'downstream' in such simple terms, we might
be even more suspicious if we knew that the Quapaw name is just one of
five Quapaw village names, another of which is IMaha(n) (imaNhaN), also
meaning 'upstream'.  The Imahan villagers later joined the Caddo,
interestingly enough.  It's not even clear, though it may be true, that
the name Okaxpa ~ Quapaw originally applied to all the Quapaw people, as
opposed to just the residents of Okaxpa village proper.  It certainly did
after the remaining three villages merged with the Quapaw village proper.

This story is repeated quite a bit in ethnohistorical accounts, especially
various tribal histories prepared in the last century. (Hey!  That was fun
to say!)  While there are schools of archaeological thought that accept
it, they are usually careful to buttress it with references from early
historical sources to a Kansa River south of the Ohio, or perhaps the
mouth of the Ohio?  The real difficulty is showing any archaeological
connections between the various Dhegiha groups and the lower Ohio.  There
are some unassociated local cultures that last through the very early
contact period, but I think nothing to tie any of the existing Dhegiha
groups to them.

Unfortunately, the Dhegiha groups seem to be very chameleon-like.  They
look pretty much like their contemporary neighbors, to the extent that
their early villages have been securely identified.  Some of them, at
least the Osage for certain, maybe the Omaha (with the Ponca) and Kaw seem
to be Oneota associated, but the connections are tenuous, and the overlap
of territory with the more securely Oneota-affiliated Ioway, Otoe, and
Missouria makes it difficult to be sure which village sites belonged to
whom.

It's probably fair to say that archaeologists are more or less split
between adopting the Ohio Valley analysis, origin in situ, and some sort
of Oneota connection.  Origin in situ only makes sense if the similarities
in language and details of social organization are assumed to be due to a
separate group that merged with a set of unconnected in situ populations.
Naturally, this is more or less always true, but we can safely apply the
term Dhegiha to the former, and neglect the in situ populations.  Beyond
that it should be noted that Oneota and Ohio Valley explanations are not
entirely incompatible, though the Ohio Valley explanations do not usually
appeal to Oneota manifestations in Illinois (and I think they tend to be
more northerly).

Personally, my model is Oneota, but with a more northerly source, maybe
southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa.  This would make the Omaha
and Ponca relative stay-at-homes, and the Kansa, Osage, and Quapaw
progressively more ambitious parts of the diaspora.  Presumably the Kansa
name in the south is actually a generic reference to Dhegiha speakers
presence there at some point in this diaspora, perhaps the Quapaw.

> ...  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'.

In spite of my comments on the risks of trying to connect Omaha and
Okaxpa, the existence of the Osage name might actually support such a
scheme.  Of course, it would only establish relative locations at some
unspecified point in time, perhaps not the situation at contact, and it
wouldn't support one point of origin over another.  Now if the Kaw were
'the people of the original water', that would certainly help!

> 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.

On the other hand, 'watermonsters' are standard fare in southeastern and
adjacent mythology and are generally taken to represent alligators.

> 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.

On the other hand, this is a relatively simple change, and in other ways
Omaha-Ponca and Quapaw are not very much alike.  For example, Quapaw has
k? and x? for *k? and *x?, while Osage and Kaw have k? for both, and Omaha
has ? for both.  I think the first three also have the *niNke 'round'
article where OP has dhaN.  But then OP agrees with IO and Wi in having h
for *ph in 'I say'.  I think Quapaw does, too, but Osage and Kaw have ph -
[ps^] in Osage.  In general, I think we're not yet sure how or if we can
subgroup Dhegiha, apart from Omaha + Ponca and Osage + Kaw.

> More generally, it would tend to imply that Dhegihan must have been an
> unusually cosmopolitan language.

Certainly true, since there are loans in and out of at least Algonquian
and Muskogean, but perhaps not exceptionally so for a Siouan 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.

I'm not sure if I agree with this concept of breakdown, though of course
there would be traces of the contact.  Maybe you're thinking of
pidginization?

> 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.

I don't consider any of the Dhegiha languages to be notably chaotic.  I
admit to having trouble understanding all kinds of things, but I think
it is just me and my neophyte status with the language.

> Comparing Omaha-Ponca to the (originally) more insular Dakotan
> languages ...

Dakota is also at an interesting crossroads, geopolitically speaking, and,
personally, over the years I've come to think that it looks like someone
who wasn't familiar with some of the finer nuances of proper Siouan
morphology has been at work simplifying it.  It's not as devoid of
irregular inflection as Mandan, but they've been working on it. And what's
with those second datives and reflexives!

JEK