Fwd:...(Re: Quappa)

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005 mmccaffe at indiana.edu wrote:
> John, Marquette locates "AKANSEA" opposite the mouth of the Arkansas River.
>
> Then, to the west going up the Arkansas--but not necessarily on the river
> itself-- in order, are the following. I've arranged them as they appear on the map:
>
> ATOTCHASi                                      METCHiGAMEA
>
>           MATORA                                            |  |
>                 AKOROA
>                       PAPiKAHA                              |  |
>                                8MAM8ETA
>                                         TANiK8A ------------|  | AKANSEA
>
>
>                           PANIASSA         AiAiCHi

Oh, of course.  This is the list Bob Rankin discusses in identifying the
De Soto Expedition's Pakaha/Capaka as Papikaha and thus probably as
Tunica.  I'll have to go back and look at the LaSalle 1686 list, because I
don't recall them mentioning any of these places, which I think are mostly
identified as Tunican.  And this makes it seem that there was only one
Akansea village in 1673.

>  Remember that Marquette has both <AKANSEA> (Quapaw) and KANSA (Kaw) on his
>  map. KANSA, however, is located up in the western Missouri River watershed
>  group of ethnonyms on his map.

Yep, so the Kansa and Arkansas [Akansea] a/k/a Quapaw [Okaxpa] are as
distinct in 1673 as in 1873 or 1973, whatever the etymological connection
between the names.

> You don't suppose these [up and downstream names] could be Ohio valley
> names?

One can't tell what stream is relevant from the names.

> After leaving the Miami-Mascouten town on the upper Fox River, Marquette
> and Co. visited only two **Miami-Illinois-speaking** villages--Peoria,
> on the Des Moines River north of Wayland in Clark County, Missouri, on
> the outbound trip and the Kaskaskia on the upper Illinois River on the
> return trip. That was it. Apparently "METCHiGAMEA" was not
> Miami-Illinois-speaking.

> La Salle met *a* Mosopelea at some point in his excursions. I can find that
> citation, John, if you would like.

Sure, if it's easy.

> My question about the Metchagamia is how come, even though by around
> 1700 there are terms identified by the Jesuits as coming from the
> Metchagamia dialect of Miami-Illinois that are quite Algonquian, we have
> a village called "METCHIGAMEA" in the July of 1673 where only one person
> speaks Miami-Illinois.

This split personality situation is a mystery to me, and one reason I am
leery of the Bossu materials.  It is also the reason I got to wondering
suddenly last week if there were two different "Big Water" peoples,
especially as I had just thought of the Moniton in this connection, too.
Let's consider the question of whether there is any Michigamea/Moniton
connection as separate.

The initial linguistic issues would make perfect sense if the Marquette
1673/La Salle 1686 period Michigamea were one group, and the group (near
the Kaskaskia?) in 1700 and thereafter were another.  The first, non-MI
group would simply have disappeared.  Their name would be recorded in MI
form because it was obtained from MI speakers (bilinguals, apparently)
living among the Michigamea and Akansea.  The later MI Michigamea would be
a slightly later offshoot of one the early attested Illinois groups or a
homonymous Illinois group extant earlier not reported earlier.

Unfortunately, that awkward Bossu data comes from the latter group, I
think, and there is a clear continuity between the 1700 (1708?) village
the early Jesuits knew and the 1750s village Bossu spent time in.  It's
certainly tempting to think of the Bossu data as explaining Marquette's
experience.

To fit the three bits together we could assume that sometime not long
after 1686 the Michigamea became allied with the Illinois - perhaps due to
a military defeat or an epidemic - and began a rapid process of
assimilation to them.  We would have to assume that as a result, some 20
years later fluent MI speakers were easy to find among the Michigamea,
which is not too hard to believe.  That's a span of about a generation.

What is a bit hard to believe is that that 70 years after LaSalle (50
years - two more generations - after fluent MI speakers became common) you
could still find speakers comfortable enough with the original Michigamea
language that they would teach it to visitors in preference to MI.  We
would also have to assume that the Jesuits on the one hand, and Bossu on
the other, simply failed to notice - or at least mention - this
bilinguality, and that Bossu went to so far as to put Michigamea into the
mouths of the Peoria.  Or perhaps some Peoria actually knew the language
and used it in his presence, which seems less likely.

Unfortunately, it seems more likely that Bossu made up his examples for
some reason.  In other words, there were two "Big Water" groups, or, if
only one, its assimilation to the Illinois was most likely completed early
on, before Bossu came on the scene, so that Bossu would have had no
exposure to the original Michigamea language.