The Shawnee Tribe- Pronounced shaw-NEE or SHAW-nee, is derived from the Algonquian word chawunagi, meaning southerners in the Algonquian language, a name resulting from the fact that for most of their history the Shawnee lived south of other ALGONQUIANS. The Shawnee split up into different groups and migrated often. The Cumberland River in what is now Tennessee is given as their original homeland, but perhaps it is more accurate to think of their territory as lying to the west of the Cumberland Mountains of the Appalachian chain, with the Cumberland River at the center. At one time or another, the Shawnee had villages along many other rivers of that region, including the Ohio and the Tennessee, an area now comprising parts of the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio. When non-Indians first crossed the Appalachians, they found very few Indian villages in Kentucky and West Virginia. It is known that early Native Americans spent time there from archaeological evidence. Farmers still plow up spear points and arrowheads, and both amateur and professional archaeologists have found grave sites. Scholars theorize that perhaps this territory of forested mountains, hills, and valleys, plus rolling blueÂgrass prairies, served not so much as a homeland for the Shawnee and other tribes of the region, such as the CHEROKEE, but as sacred hunting grounds. But the Shawnee also ranged far to the north, south, and east of this core area, on both sides of the great Appalachian Divide especially as non-Indians started entering the Indians domain. In the course of their history, in addition to the states mentioned above, the Shawnee had temporary villages in northern parts of present-day South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama; western parts of present-day Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York; and southern parts of present-day Indiana and Illinois. And then in the 1800s, Shawnee bands also lived in present-day Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas, most of them ending up in Oklahoma. As wanderers, the Shawnee had a unique place in Native American history and culture, introducing cultural traits of the northern tribes to the southern tribes and vice versa. The Shawnee are generally classiï¬ed as NORTHEAST INDIANS, since they hunted, gathered, and farmed in ways similar to the more northern Algonquians. But they picked up lifeways of SOUTHEAST INDIANS too. They are sometimes referred to as PRAIRIE INDIANS because they ranged as far west as the prairies of the Mississippi River valley.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 13:26:22 +0000
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