Wichita people
The Wichitas are a self-governance tribe, who operate their own housing authority and issue tribal vehicle tags.
The Wichita made much of their own art, including ceramic pottery that greatly fascinated French and Spanish traders.
[5] To the untrained eye Wichita pottery was "virtually indistinguishable from the Osage and Pawnee", two other neighboring Indigenous groups.
[6] Historically, for much of the year, the Wichita lived in huts made of forked cedar poles covered by dry grasses.
Wichita people relied heavily on bison, using all parts—for clothing, food and cooking fat, winter shelter, leather supplies, sinew, medicine, and even armor.
Increased access to horses in the mid 17th century caused Wichita hunting styles and seasons to become longer and more community-oriented.
The Wichita tribes call themselves Kitikiti'sh or Kirikirish ("raccoon-eyed people"), because of the historical practice of tattooing marks around their eyes.
The Wichita people had a unified language system with minor dialectical differences based on the geography of unique tribes.
These sites are terraced around the Red River in Oklahoma and Texas, and they contain artifacts such as pottery, arrows, knives, clay figurines, and European trade goods.
Extensive excavation of these sites revealed large ritualistic and burial structures common in the territory and culture of the Wichita people.
The women of these 10th-century communities cultivated varieties of maize, beans, and squash (known as the Three Sisters), marsh elder (Iva annua), and tobacco, which was important for religious purposes.
The men hunted deer, rabbits, turkey, and, primarily, bison, and caught fish and harvested mussels from the rivers.
The Panhandle villagers showed signs of adopting cultural characteristics of the Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande Valley, with whom they interacted.
Great Bend aspect sites are generally accepted as ancestral to the Wichita peoples described by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and other early European explorers.
The discovery of limited quantities of European artifacts, such as chain mail and iron axe heads at several Great Bend sites, suggests contact of these people with early Spanish explorers.
[12] Great Bend aspect peoples' subsistence economy included agriculture, hunting, gathering, and fishing.
Several village sites contain the remains of unusual structures called "council circles," located at the center of settlements.
[14] Recent analysis suggests that many non-local artifacts occur exclusively or primarily within council circles, implying the structures were occupied by political and/or ritual leaders of the Great Bend aspect peoples.
[17] In 1541 Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado journeyed east from the Rio Grande Valley in search of a rich land called Quivira.
In Texas, probably in the Blanco River Canyon near Lubbock, Coronado met people he called Teyas who might have been related to the Wichita and the earlier Plains villagers.
Sixty years after Coronado's expedition the founder of New Mexico Juan de Oñate visited Etzanoa, the Wichita city.
Oñate journeyed east from New Mexico, crossing the Great Plains and encountering two large settlements of people he called Escanjaques (possibly Yscani) and Rayados, most certainly Wichita.
The homesteads were dispersed; the houses round, thatched with grass and surrounded by large granaries to store the corn, beans, and squash they grew in their fields.
The dispersed nature of their villages probably indicated that they were not seriously threatened by attack by enemies, although that would change as they would soon be squeezed between the Apache on the West and the powerful Osage on the East.
Archaeologists have located a Wichita village at the Deer Creek Site dating from the 1750s on the Arkansas River east of Newkirk, Oklahoma.
The village at Petersburg was "a lively emporium where Comanches brought Apache slaves, horses and mules to trade for French packs of powder, balls, knives, and textiles and for Taovaya-grown maize, melons, pumpkins, squash, and tobacco.
Afterwards, in response to the destruction by the Norteños of the San Saba Mission the Spanish and their Apache allies undertook an expedition to punish the Indians.
[29] After the United States took over their territory as a result of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the independence of Texas in 1836, all the related tribes were increasingly lumped together and dubbed "Wichita".
French traders were eager to exchange their goods with Wichita settlements as they traveled from Louisiana to Santa Fe.
They appeared to be much reduced by the time of the first French contacts with them in 1719, probably due in large part to epidemics of infectious disease to which they had no immunity.
