They Were Called Indians

Aboriginal, the term most familiarly used for the first people in Australia, literally refers to the initial inhabitants of a place. That term is generally applied to peoples already in a place to contrast them with incoming peoples, such as the European settlers arriving in Virginia. The term aborigine, however, was never used for the original human inhabitants of the United States. 

The term Indian is an import from European languages, originating in North America in the 15th century. It is commonly understood that when Christopher Columbus sailed west from Europe, he was attempting to land on the Asian continent of India. Consequently, when Columbus landed in the Caribbean, he assumed it was “…Islands of India beyond the Ganges”. Hence, Columbus and the Portuguese colonists called the indigenous inhabitants “indeos” – Portuguese for what we call in English “Indians.”

The term American Indian is not something that they called themselves but it’s now the accepted term used by the United States Government, and by the National Museum of the American Indian. American Indians have as many different terms for themselves as there are tribes. The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) states that there are “574 federally recognized Indian Nations (variously called tribes, nations, bands, pueblos, communities and native villages) in the United States. Approximately 229 of these ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse nations are located in Alaska; the other federally recognized tribes are located in 35 other states.”

Discovery in Process

While researching the Indians previously inhabiting Grandma’s farm, several things that had happened were interesting. For one, having done some online exploration about Indians, something happened akin to online shopping for Weejuns or robotic vacuum cleaners. If you window shop for something online, the next time you go to Facebook, the ads you see may be about what you looked for, Weejuns and vacuum cleaners.

As I researched Indians, pictures of Native Americans began to regularly appear on my Facebook timeline. Two years later, they still do.  Indian pictures showing up on my Facebook timeline might excite my paranoia if I took the time to think about it, but however right or wrong it might be, it’s a fact of modern electronic life. 

The Facebook pictures I see are widely varied, of Chiefs, of Medicine men and women, of regular women, of children, and of both women and children. Currently it’s often pictures of attractive young Indian women in stylish, supposedly traditional, dress. They aren’t consistently from one tribe, but generally from the Plains Indians. Unrealistically, to the ordinary lay-person Indians have always been considered to be all alike. Indians were Indians, and they all attacked wagon trains in the movies, albeit portrayed by white men dressed as Indians. 

Indian pictures by Europeans were mostly taken from 1890 to 1930, 75 to 90 years later than when Indians had occupied Northwest Missouri before the Platte Purchase. The photographed pictures of Indians during this forty-year period usually showed them in stylish and ceremonial dress. 

While some pictures had been taken in the mid-nineteen century’s earliest photography, Indian pictures and portraits were most fashionable during the 40 years as the 19th century become the 20ieth. Painter George Catlin made hundreds of portraits of the disappearing Indians, in the rapidly changing American West. The result was a romanticized view of a culture that had been systematically banished, unwillingly sharing their land with the westward European settlement.

The Indian photos at the turn of the century had samenesses. They were proud ceremonial pictures, the subjects dressed in other than regular everyday wear. The costumes were usually quite beautiful, stylized and the finest they could muster.

Indian photography of the period tried to make them look regal with a European touch. Sometimes the men wore pieces of white man’s clothing, and a jacket to a European suit or a hat might accompany their native ceremonial finery.

An observable irony was that these proud pictures of Indians were taken not at the height of their civilization but after the genocide of their race was largely completed. The subjects were not proud masters of the plains but residents of newly created government controlled reservations.

While the photos were and are of genuine interest they exhibited only some aspects of Indian lore, reflecting how the white men saw them, and attempting to show ways that Europeans had improved their traditional lives.

These pictures didn’t shed light on Indians of Northwest Missouri, but were indicative of what most remaining American Indians had become. The tribes and customs they depicted were much more colorful than the lives and customs of the Otoe-Missouria Indians who had lived on Grandma’s farm before the Platte Purchase.

The Otoe-Missouria Indians of NW Missouri had left behind more than their stone implements and weapons. In addition to the name Missouri (the State and the River), the state name for Iowa was borrowed from the Indians, and the same was true for the nearby state of Nebraska. 

The name “Nebraska” is based on an Otoe Indian word Nebrathka meaning “flat water” (referring to the Platte River, the official symbol of Nebraska, and sometimes so still and shallow that it seemed flat). Some communities in Nebraska that are also names of native American Indian tribes includes seven counties and eight cities. The name Omaha has Otoe Indian origins, as does Keya Paha county, where wife Judy has a hunting and recreational cabin.

Modern Missourians often ask, or are asked by others, “How do you pronounce the word Missouri? What does it mean? Do you say Missouruh, Missoura, or Missouree?” Missouri had been pronounced ‘mih-zoo-ree’ by the Indians and that was continued by most white Europeans. The Indian meaning for Missouri was “big canoe people”as Indians were the early traders of NW Missouri.

Missouri Indians In Summary

Because of the Indian removal acts of the early 1800s, culminating with the Platte Purchase of 1837, almost no Indians live in Missouri today. Missouri may be an Indian name but there are no federally recognized Indian tribes in the Show Me state. The tribes themselves aren’t extinct, but they live elsewhere. Excepting a small number of individual descendants of Indians who escaped the systematic governmental removal after 1800 that we’ve described, Indians don’t live in Missouri anymore.

The native American Indians who lived in what is now Northwest Missouri led a Stone Age lifestyle, having only stone tools and weapons. They had never used horses before Europeans came and they had no knowledge of the wheel. 

They were semi-nomads, which meant that part of the year they lived in bark huts and farmed, but during buffalo hunting season they traveled and lived in tents. As previously mentioned, the Indians of NW Missouri were not the Plains Indians depicted in cowboy movies. They weren’t warlike and didn’t dress flashily. A white man’s dress comparison might be between the overalls of a Midwestern farmer and the pinstripe suit of a Wall Street lawyer.

By the time of the Platte purchase in 1837 the Otoe-Missouria Indians were gone from NW Missouri, leaving nothing behind but artifacts of living made from stone, like arrow heads and axe heads. When Uncle Jack said, “Indians used to live here,” he was right. 

 What didn’t correctly translate into my young boy mind was that the pastures hadn’t teemed with Indians. The Indian population had been small, but places and traces showed where they had actually lived. Similarly, when Grandma (or any one of us) leave farms or lands many artifacts are left behind to show that we have been there.

Uncle Jack was right, and grandmas’s family seemed proud to recover some small part of Indian heritage. Indian relics and having Indian ancestors may now seem a badge of honor but the actual history of the Indians has not been honorable for those of us with European ancestors. 

Hopefully, Uncle Dick’s collection of arrowheads is with one of us siblings. It was told that I had it, but I don’t recall having seen it since I was 5/6 years old in Uncle Dick’s bedroom. Uncle Dick left a plastic tub full of memorabilia but the arrowheads were not in that tub. Similarly, with Grandma’s axe head, it would be a shame if it were not somewhere among us.

Coming from that area over 100 years after ‘Indians lived there’, finding who NW Missouri Indians were, and what their history was, has satisfied some of my curiosity. Partial knowledge of these people that Uncle Jack referred to has brought some satisfaction to me. I hope it has to you.