Ioway-Otoe-Missouria Dialects (Re: Historical questions)

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003, Rory M Larson wrote:
> 5.  How long have the Iowa and Oto been separate tribes?

For a long time the Ioway have been identified with the Orr Focus of
Oneota.  This identification was made with the "direct historical"
approach by the late Mildred Mott Wedel in a paper published in 1938 when
she was still just Mildred Mott.  For Oneota bibliography see
http://www.uiowa.edu/~anthro/oneota/mar10.htm and
http://www.uwlax.edu/mvac/PastCultures/Oneota/Continunitypg/contbibliography.htm.

I think that the the original focuses of Oneota have been so thoroughly
reworked in the last decade or so that it is risky to use the older focus
names, but I believe Mott thought of Orr in terms of a limited set of
sites in NE Iowa.

More recently Clark Dobbs (dissertation, 1984) has suggested that the
Correctionville-Blue Earth Phase might be Otoe.  Unfortunately, CBE is
like Orr in that it was originally conceived in terms of localized
materials (actually two localities, Correctionville and the Blue Earth
Valley), and then snowballed to include materials from all across the
Midwest.  I think that Orr and CBE are both ripe for reanalysis, and may
have been divided up extensively since I last had some grasp of the
literature on Oneota.

The site of the Misouria settlement on the Missouri is well known and the
archeology of that general area has been assigned to the Chariton River
Group Continuity (Dale Henning 1970), if I recall the details correctly.
This term was motivated by the circumstance that Oneota materials in this
area are unusually mixed, or at least seemed to be given the state of
analysis in 1970.  The Little Osage were in the same area at the same
time, of course, and we have numerous historical instances of multiethnic
settlements in the Midwest.

If these associations all have merit, then the Ioway, Otoe, and Missouria
have been ethnically distinct for 700 years plus.  Of course, there are
scenarioes whereby this could be coupled with a degree of linguistic
uniformity, but suspect that we simply are far from understanding how to
connect the various attested "Chiwere" groups to their archeological
roots.

What does seem to be clear is that the three groups were quite distinct at
contact, with no ethnohistorical reports that I am aware of regarding
earlier unity, except those that refer to other Siouan groups, too.
They're also rather widely distributed across Iowa/Missouri/Nebraska.

>     As I understand, the two languages are hardly more
>     than dialects of each other.

The evidence on this has not yet been thoroughly assessed, unfortunately.
Jimm Good Tracks knows more about it than anyone else.  Almost all of the
information collected on IOM a/k/a Chiwere, has been collected since the
historical mergers of the three groups began, and most of that since the
three were effectively a single community, which must have had some degree
of leveling influence.  Subject to that observation Chiwere is apparently
less diverse than Dakotan or Dhegiha, but has much more internal variation
than Winnebago.  The main differences people have pointed out are lexical
- including some male/female particles.  Jimm has mentioned these.
Particles, including male/female "modal" particles and conjunctions, often
vary rather saliently between different dialects of Siouan languages.
This is notably the case in Dakotan and Dhegiha.  The well known Chiwere
shift of s/s^/x to <th>/s/x is a complicating factor.  It's been going on
since before contact, and is still not complete.  It seems to crosscut the
three communities, but may have proceded at different rates in each.

>     Some Omaha traditions
>     seem to hold that they were together with both of
>     them, and the Winnebago as well, when they were
>     living on the Big Sioux.  When the Omaha moved west
>     to the mouth of the White River on the Missouri, the
>     Iowa and Oto were still with them, though the
>     Winnebago were no longer heard from.  After moving
>     back down the Missouri to northeastern Nebraska, the
>     Iowa were still near the Omaha, living at Aowa Creek
>     while the Omaha were at Bow Creek.  But the Oto were
>     already living down by Omaha (city) and the lower
>     Platte by 1718 (according to a French map), and joined
>     with the Pawnee in the massacre of the Villasur
>     expedition in 1720.  The Iowa moved down to join the
>     Oto on the other side of the Missouri at Council Bluffs
>     sometime prior to 1758, when the French Governor
>     Kerlerec described the tribes of the Missouri.  They
>     later moved east to the mouth of the Des Moines
>     between 1765 and 1768 at the invitation of the traders
>     of St. Louis to meet them there.  How does this all
>     compare to the Iowa and Oto traditions of their early
>     history?  And how about the Winnebago?  Is there any
>     reason to believe they were west of the Mississippi
>     prior to 1700?

I think the various folk accounts of the early Dhegiha movements,
sometimes grafted onto other stories to produce general accounts of MVS
history (sans the Dakota) are simply myth making based on mixtures of
linguistic and place name analysis.  I think most elements in the stories
emerged in the 1800s.  Apart from that I've noticed that Ioway
ethnohistory of their movements accords rather well with early historical
accounts, though there's a tendency to consider the ethnohistory to refer
to a much greater time depth.  Over the same period the Otoe and Missouria
were more or less immobile, barring the Missouria's misfortunes and their
fusion with the Otoe.  The Winnebago seem to be in Wisconsin from contact
until the US began its efforts to move them west, efforts notoriously only
partially successful.

It does seem clear that the Omaha and Ponca split from a single entity,
perhaps even within the period of nominal contact, and that the
Omaha(-Ponca?) moved into Nebraska from NW Iowa within that period, in
other words, just before 1700 or so.

I'm sorry if these remarks are so fuzzy as to be useless!  Not all of the
fuzziness comes from mostly putting them together from memory.  The
archaeologists and ethnohistorians are fairly confused and uncertain
themselves.

I certainly recommend pouring over the Northeastern and Plains volumes of
HNAI.

JEK