"Omaha Sacred Legend" and Oneota (Re: MVS 'eight')

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> Would this still be an objection if the early I-O speakers were
> originally located further to the east themselves? The sacred Legend
> recorded in Fletcher and La Flesche specifies that the Iowa were with
> the Omaha (Dhegihans?) when the latter made their luckless migration
> across the Mississippi after moving down the Ohio.

I suspect that this legend developed specifically among the mid-1800s
Omaha through the process of elaboration and weaving together of certain
ingredients into a canonical pseudo-historical legend:

- stories made up to explain such etymologies as UmaN'haN 'Omaha' =
'Upstream', Uga'xpa 'Quapaw' = 'Dowstream'

- stories made up to explain certain folk etymologies such as 'Ohio' =
Uha=i=u 'they followed it' or HuttaNga 'Winnebago' = 'big voice' taken as
'original voice' (not impossible, but less likely than 'big camp circle')

- knowledge of the similarity of clan systems between Dhegiha groups

- knowledge of the similarity of languages among the Dhegiha group[s,
Ioway-Otoe-Missouria, and Winnebago (for some reason the Dakota,
though recognized as similar in language, don't usually enter into this)

- other ingredients like the Winnebago Moogas^uuc^ lengend

The version of this story in Fletcher & LaFlesche is not the oldest
version of this story, and some variation occurs between versions in terms
of degrees of elaboration.  Unfortunately, I've let various versions of
the story go by me without making notes on when, where, and what!
Etymological stories are a common human phenomenon, and various Siouan
examples are familiar to everyone.  The tendency to weave bits and pieces
together into a combined story is also a centerpiece of human intellectual
effort.  The problem in this case comes from elevating the result into an
oral chronicle of great age recording the early history of the Omaha and
other Siouan groups instead of seeing it as a more recent model or
hypothesis built to accomodate various simpler bits of information, some
of them spurious.

> Do we know who was living in the Indiana-Illinois area prior to the
> spread of the Miami-Illinois southwest from Lake Erie and the Maumee
> river region?  I think we need to establish that these were not early
> Chiwere speakers before we rule out John's suggestion on geographical
> grounds.

In general, the northern Illinois and northwestern Indiana areas are
associated with a fairly recent influx of Oneota settlements in the early
contact period (starting several centuries previous).  The area was
earlier occupied at least in part by Cahokia outlier communities and I
think it is also considered that certain wares and sites are "Woodland."
Like "Mississippian" (applied to Cahokia or Oneota) "Woodland" is a very
generic term without much real potential ethnic significance compared
with, say, a difference between two kinds of Oneota (or any two phases of
anything).

Oneota presumably represents Mississippi Valley Siouan but probably also
some Algonquian, and the mappings between the archaeologists
classifications of Oneota phases (local varieties) and modern groups are
subject to a fair amount of debate.  Oneota starts in northern Iowa,
southern Minnesota and souther Wisconsin c. 1000 AD and spreads generally
southward (and westward and eastward) up through the contact period,
ultimately spreading into eastern South Dakota, eastern Nebraska, eastern
Kansas, northern Missouri, a lot of Illinois (including the Cahokia site)
and parts of Indiana.

The Psinomani (intended for psiN-omaNniN by people who did't understand
that some of the n's represented vowel nasalization) Culture now
constructed to serve hold the various phases likely to represent Dakotan
is a set of rather diverse "Woodland" like phases with some Oneota-like
pottery wares.  In theory Oneota pottery clay is tempered with burnt,
crushed shell and the globular pots are decorated with certain families of
patterns varying with the locality but often including an abstract pattern
of chevrons, lines, and dots that is thought to represent a falcon's tail,
in practice some of the pottery is tempered with other stuff more
conveniently available in a given spot and a lot of it is undecorated.

Oneota subsistence was a lot like historical Dhegiha or Miami-Illinois
subsistence, involving seasonal round between villages and wandering and a
mixture of horticulture and hunting and gathering.  Oneota people liked to
put their villages on the border between two ecological zones near soil
easily farmed with digging sticks.  They moved their villages fairly
frequently and so didn't build up large middens except where sites were
occupied repeatedly over time.  Since different groups might occupy the
same site together or successively it can be very difficult to sort
out group variants of their rather similar ceramic wares.