paduka identity

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005 mmccaffe at indiana.edu wrote:
> There were people with this name as a last name at Kaskaskia, e.g.,
> <Maria Pad8ca>, a person on one of the 18th-century Detroit Jesuit
> missionary Pierre Potier's rosters of people living at Detroit whose
> name was <Patoka>, and, according to a hear-say I'm still tracking,
> there was a Wabash Valley Kickapoo leader known by this name. One or
> none of these may be connected to "Patoka River," a relatively good
> sized eastern tributary of the southern Wabash, the name for which
> appears to be unattested in the French sources.

There are similar references to Padouca as a surname in the various
collections of papers on Spanish Missouri.

There are nearly cognate, but probably borrowed, forms of *hpatohka ~
*hpatuNhka (or *hpataNhka ?) in Mississippi Valley Siouan (sans Dakota).
In some cases the ethnic gloss is fairly vague.  Comanche is the usual
specific modern gloss and the ethnohistorical consensus seems to be that
it earlier referred to the Plains Apache.  The Comanche replaced the
Plains Apache over their western plains range in the 1700s, and by the
1800s indigenous recollections of the Apache per se had disappeared, while
the nature of the references in the early literature are sometimes vexed.
However, the Spanish evidence makes it clear that various varieties of
Apaches and perhaps others (including the Kiowa, one assumes) were
replaced in the Texas Panhandle to eastern Colorado stretch in the 1700s
by the Comanche.  Essentially the term means 'foreigners from the western
plains and those who have similar cultures' just as variants on *hpariN ~
*hpaRariN "Pawnee" means 'foreigners from the southern plains and those
who have similar cultures'.  There might well be some underlying
linguistic appreciation of both terms, though clearly the Padouca shift
from Athabascan Apaches and other to Numic (Uto-Aztecan) Comanches.  I
think Pani-terms are sometimes found applied to some of the Caddo as well
as to the Northern Caddoan groups.

It is tempting to identify the first element in these names as *hpa
'head', and the *doNhka variant of the second part of Padouca may mean
'stubby, rounded', while the *riN ~ *RariN second part of Pawnee resembles
terms for tobacco.  However, I'd have to say that we don't really
understand the etymology or even the propagation process for either term.
The similarity of the initials may be spurious, and the variants for
Padouca suggest folk etymology at work busily making sense of the
senseless.

I've run into people who claim Padouca is from English "paddock," but I
don't believe it myself!  There is also a proposal that Pani as "slave" is
at least partly derived from Saponey which seems much more potentially
interesting, though I'm not sure the evidence is there.  In that case
"Pani" as an ethnonym might even be from Saponey, though it might still be
a case of accidental honophony.  (I can look up the names of the
individuals in question if desired.)

History has a certain number of cases of ethnic names developing into
terms for "slave" or acquiring other low prestige significations and the
reverse (barbaros > Berber?).  I think "slave" may actually be an example
of this, if it's from S(k)lavos "Slav," though I'm not sure I'm current on
that debate.  I suspect in this particular case Padouca is being confused
with Pani as a term for "slave."  I think by the time the spelling Pawnee
was current this association was a thing of the past.  The early trade
(pre 1800?) in native North Americans as slaves tends to be overlooked, I
think.  I don't know how extensive it was, but I keep running into passing
references to it.