Pawnee people
It further decreased, because of disease, crop failure, warfare, and government rations policy, to approximately 2,400 by 1873, after which time the Pawnee were forced to move to Indian Territory, which later became Oklahoma.
Many Pawnee warriors enlisted to serve as Indian scouts in the US Army to track and fight their old enemies, the Lakota, Dakota, and Cheyenne on the Great Plains.
In December 2023, the Pawnee Nation and electric vehicle manufacturer Canoo announced an agreement that aims to help the community with workforce skills in the clean technology sector.
A common feature in Pawnee lodges were four painted poles, which represented the four cardinal directions and the four major star gods (not to be confused with the Creator).
A long, low passageway, which helped keep out outside weather, led to an entry room that had an interior buffalo-skin door on a hinge.
The lodge was semi-subterranean, as the Pawnee recessed the base by digging it approximately three feet (one meter) below ground level, thereby insulating the interior from extreme temperatures.
The Pawnee women are skilled horticulturalists and cooks, cultivating and processing ten varieties of corn, seven of pumpkins and squashes, and eight of beans.
With horses providing a greater range, the people traveled in both summer and winter westward to the Great Plains for buffalo hunting.
[12] After successful kills, the women processed the bison meat, skin and bones for various uses: the flesh was sliced into strips and dried on poles over slow fires before being stored.
The Skidi Pawnees in Village Across a Hill[13] practiced human sacrifice, specifically of captive girls, in the "Morning Star ritual".
[8]: 106–118 When the morning star (either the planet Mars, Jupiter, or some times Venus)[14]: 38 [15]: footnote #4, p. 277 rose ringed with red, the priest knew it was the signal for the sacrifice.
At the moment the star appeared above the horizon, the girl was shot with an arrow from a sacred bow,[14]: 107 then the priest cut the skin of her chest to increase bleeding.
Before this, US Indian agents had counseled Pawnee chiefs to suppress the practice, as they warned of how it would upset the American settlers, who were arriving in ever greater number.
[17]: 168 Indian agent John Dougherty and a number of influential Pawnees tried in vain to save the life of a captive Cheyenne girl on 11 April 1827.
[8]: 117 Writing in the 1960s, the historian Gene Weltfish drew from earlier work of Wissler and Spinden to suggest that the sacrificial practice might have been transferred in the early 16th century from the Aztec of present-day Mexico.
[8] More recent historians have disputed the proposed connection to Mesoamerican practice: They believe that the sacrifice ritual originated independently, within ancient, traditional Pawnee culture.
For some decades the Pawnees were the victims of intensive raiding by large bands of mounted Apaches with iron weapons, and also by war parties of Chickasaws and Choctaws from the east who had firearms as well.
The Siouan groups that became Quapaws, Osages, Omahas, Poncas and Kansas also appeared on the Plains about this time, driven west by the expansion of the Iroquois, and they too raided the Pawnees.
The raiders carried off such great numbers of Pawnees into slavery, that in the country on and east of the upper Mississippi the name Pani developed a new meaning: slave.
It was at this period, after the middle of the 17th century, that the name was introduced into New Mexico in the form Panana by bands of mounted Apaches who brought large numbers of Pawnee slaves to trade to the Spaniards and Pueblo Indians."
The Pawnees attacked at dawn, shooting heavy musketry fire and flights of arrows, then charging into combat clad only in paint, headband, moccasins and short leggings.
[9]: 66–69 In 1721, pressure on the Pawnees was increased by the establishment of a colony in Arkansas by John Law's Mississippi Company; this settlement too formed a market for Indian (mostly Caddoan) slaves and a convenient source of weapons for the Osages and their relations.
In 1857, they settled on the Pawnee Reservation along the Loup River in present-day Nance County, Nebraska, but maintained their traditional way of life.
Epidemics of smallpox and cholera, and endemic warfare with the Sioux and Cheyenne[9]: 85–336 caused dramatic mortality losses among the Pawnee.
[14]: 200 [27]: 92 First when a Pawnee shot a very reckless Cheyenne with an arrow in the eye, it was discovered he wore a hidden scale mailed armor under his shirt.
Because the Pawnee people were old enemies of the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa tribes, they served with the army for 14 years between 1864 and 1877, earning a reputation as being a well-trained unit, especially in tracking and reconnaissance.
In 1874, the Pawnee requested relocation to Indian Territory (Oklahoma), but the stress of the move, diseases, and poor conditions on their reservation reduced their numbers even more.
[32] In 1875 most members of the nation moved to Indian Territory, a large area reserved to receive tribes displaced from east of the Mississippi River and elsewhere.
On 23 November 1892, the Pawnee in Oklahoma were forced by the US federal government to sign an agreement with the Cherokee Commission to accept individual allotments of land in a breakup of their communal holding.
The Pawnee continue to practice cultural traditions, meeting twice a year for the intertribal gathering with their kinsmen the Wichita Indians.
