Shawnee
The Shawnee are a Native American people of the Northeastern Woodlands. Their language, Shawnee, is an Algonquian language.
The Shawnee precontact homeland was likely centered in southern Ohio. In the 17th century, they dispersed throughout Ohio, Illinois, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. In the early 18th century, they were primarily concentrated in eastern Pennsylvania but later that century dispersed again across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, with a small group joining the Muscogee people in Alabama. In the 19th century, the U.S. federal government forcibly removed them under the 1830 Indian Removal Act to areas west of the Mississippi River; these lands would later become the states of Missouri, Kansas, and Texas. They were subsequently removed to Indian Territory, which became the state of Oklahoma in the early 20th century.
Today, Shawnee people are enrolled in three federally recognized tribes: the Absentee-Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, and Shawnee Tribe, all headquartered in Oklahoma.
Etymology
Shawnee has also been written as Shaawana and Shawanese. Individuals and singular Shawnee tribes may be referred to as šaawanwa, while the collective Shawnee people may be referred to as šaawanwaki or šaawanooki.Algonquian languages include words similar to the archaic shawano, meaning "south". However, the stem šawa- does not mean "south" in Shawnee, but rather "moderate, warm ": See Charles F. Voegelin, "šawa Moderate, Warm. Cp. šawani 'it is moderating...". In one Shawnee tale, "Sawage" is the deity of the south wind. Jeremiah Curtin translates Sawage as 'it thaws', referring to the warm weather of the south. In an account and a song collected by C. F. Voegelin, šaawaki is attested as the spirit of the South, or the South Wind.
Language
The Shawnee language is known as saawanwaatoweewe. In 2002, the Shawnee language, a part of the Algonquian family, was in decline but was still spoken by approximately 200 people. These included more than 100 Absentee Shawnee and 12 Shawnee Tribe speakers. By 2017, Shawnee language advocates, including tribal member George Blanchard, estimated that there were fewer than 100 speakers. Most fluent Shawnee speakers are over the age of 50.The language is written in the Latin script, but attempts to create a unified spelling system have been unsuccessful. The Shawnee language has a dictionary, and portions of the Bible have been translated into Shawnee.
History
Precontact history
Some scholars have proposed that the Shawnee descend from the precontact Fort Ancient culture of the Ohio region, although this interpretation is not universally accepted. Other scholars suggest that the Shawnee entered the region at a later period and subsequently occupied Fort Ancient sites.Fort Ancient culture flourished from c. 1000 to c. 1650 CE among populations that predominantly inhabited lands along both sides of the Ohio River in areas corresponding to present-day southern Ohio, northern Kentucky, and western West Virginia. Like contemporaneous Mississippian culture societies, Fort Ancient peoples constructed earthwork mounds as integral components of their religious, social, and political systems. Fort Ancient culture was once interpreted as a regional manifestation of Mississippian cultural influence; however, scholars now generally conclude that Fort Ancient culture developed primarily from the earlier Hopewell culture. The Hopewell peoples likewise constructed mounds as central elements of their social, political, and religious organization. Among their most prominent monuments are large earthwork effigy mounds, including Serpent Mound in present-day Ohio.
The ultimate fate of the Fort Ancient peoples remains uncertain. It is widely thought that their society, like that of Mississippian cultures farther south, was profoundly disrupted by successive waves of epidemic disease introduced through early contact with Spanish explorers during the 16th century. Archaeological evidence from the period after 1525 at the Madisonville site, the type site, indicates that village house sizes became smaller and less numerous. Additional findings suggest a departure from a previously "horticulture-centered, sedentary way of life".
A gap exists in the archaeological record between the most recent Fort Ancient sites and the earliest sites associated with the historic Shawnee. The latter were documented by European archaeologists as occupying the region at the time of sustained contact. Scholars generally accept that similarities in material culture, artistic traditions, mythology, and Shawnee oral histories linking them to Fort Ancient peoples support the possibility of a cultural and historical connection between Fort Ancient society and the historical Shawnee. At the same time, evidence and oral traditions also associate Siouan-speaking nations with the Ohio Valley, reflecting the region's complex and multiethnic history.
The Shawnee regarded the Lenape of the Mid-Atlantic region along the East Coast as their "grandfathers," reflecting a perceived ancestral relationship. Other Algonquian nations—particularly those in present-day Canada extending inland along the St. Lawrence River and around the Great Lakes—considered the Shawnee to represent their southernmost branch. Along the Atlantic seaboard, Algonquian-speaking tribes were historically concentrated primarily in coastal regions, extending from present-day Quebec southward to the Carolinas.
17th century
Europeans reported encountering the Shawnee across a wide geographic area. One of the earliest possible references to the Shawnee appears on a 1614 Dutch map depicting a group identified as Sawwanew located just east of the Delaware River. Later 17th-century Dutch sources also place them in this general region. Accounts by French explorers from the same century more commonly situated the Shawnee along the Ohio River, where they were encountered during French expeditions originating from eastern Canada and the Illinois Country.Based on historical accounts and later archaeological evidence, John E. Kleber describes Shawnee towns as follows:
"A Shawnee town might have from forty to one hundred bark-covered houses similar in construction to Iroquois longhouses. Each village usually had a meeting house or council house, perhaps sixty to ninety feet long, where public deliberations took place."
According to English colonial legend, some Shawnee were believed to descend from a party sent by Chief Opechancanough, ruler of the Powhatan Confederacy from 1618 to 1644, to settle in the Shenandoah Valley. This party was reportedly led by his son, Sheewa-a-nee. Edward Bland, an explorer who accompanied Abraham Wood's expedition in 1650, wrote that during Opechancanough's lifetime there had been a conflict between a Chawan chief and a weroance of the Powhatan, who was also a relative of Opechancanough's family. Bland stated that the latter had murdered the former. The Shawnee were later "driven from Kentucky in the 1670s by the Iroquois of Pennsylvania and New York, who claimed the Ohio valley as hunting ground to supply its fur trade. In 1671, the colonists Batts and Fallam reported that the Shawnee were contesting control of the Shenandoah Valley with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and were losing that contest.
Sometime prior to 1670, a group of Shawnee migrated to the Savannah River region. These Shawnee made contact with English colonists based in Charles Town, South Carolina, in 1674, and the two groups formed a long-lasting alliance. The Savannah River Shawnee became known to the Carolina English as the "Savannah Indians." At roughly the same time, other Shawnee groups migrated to Florida, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and additional regions south and east of the Ohio country. Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, founder of New Orleans and the French colony of La Louisiane, wrote in his journal in 1699 that the Shawnee were "the single nation to fear, being spread out over Carolina and Virginia in the direction of the Mississippi."
Historian Alan Gallay has suggested that Shawnee migrations during the mid-to-late 17th century were likely driven by the Beaver Wars, which began in the 1640s. During this period, nations of the Iroquois Confederacy advanced westward to secure the Ohio Valley as hunting territory. The Shawnee became known for their extensive network of settlements, which stretched from Pennsylvania to Illinois and southward to Georgia. Among their documented villages were Eskippakithiki in Kentucky; Sonnionto in Ohio; Chalakagay near present-day Sylacauga, Alabama, Chalahgawtha at the site of modern Chillicothe, Ohio; Old Shawneetown, Illinois; and Suwanee, Georgia. Their language became a lingua franca for trade among numerous tribes, and the Shawnee emerged as influential leaders, initiating and sustaining intertribal resistance to European and Euro-American expansion.
18th century
Some Shawnee occupied areas of central Pennsylvania. Having long been without a recognized chief, they requested in 1714 that Carondawana, an Oneida war chief, represent them before the Pennsylvania provincial council. Around 1727, Carondawana and his wife, a prominent interpreter known as Madame Montour, settled at Otstonwakin, located on the west bank at the confluence of Loyalsock Creek and the West Branch Susquehanna River.By 1730, European American settlers had begun to arrive in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where the Shawnee predominated in the northern portion of the valley. They were claimed as tributaries by the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations of the Iroquois, to the north. The Iroquois assisted some of the Tuscarora people from North Carolina—who were also Iroquoian speakers and distant relations—in resettling near what is now Martinsburg, West Virginia. Most of the Tuscarora migrated to New York and settled near the Oneida, becoming the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy; they declared their migration complete in 1722. During this same period, Seneca and Lenape war parties from the north frequently fought pitched battles with pursuing bands of Catawba from Virginia, who overtook them in Shawnee-inhabited regions of the valley.
By the late 1730s, increasing pressure from colonial expansion produced repeated conflicts. Shawnee communities were also affected by the expanding fur trade. While access to arms and European goods increased, the trade also introduced rum and brandy, contributing to serious social problems related to alcohol abuse. Several Shawnee communities in the Province of Pennsylvania, led by Peter Chartier, a Métis trader, opposed the sale of alcohol within their settlements. This opposition brought them into conflict with colonial governor Patrick Gordon, who faced pressure from traders to permit the sale of rum and brandy. Lacking effective protection, approximately 400 Shawnee migrated in 1745 from Pennsylvania to Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama, and Illinois in an effort to escape the traders' influence.
Prior to 1754, the Shawnee maintained a headquarters at Shawnee Springs in present-day Cross Junction, Virginia. The father of the later chief Cornstalk held his council there. Several additional Shawnee villages were located throughout the northern Shenandoah Valley, including at Moorefield, West Virginia, along the North River, and on the Potomac at Cumberland, Maryland. In 1753, Shawnee living along the Scioto River in the Ohio Country sent messengers to those remaining in the Shenandoah Valley, urging them to cross the Alleghenies and join their western communities; they did so the following year. The settlement known as Shannoah on the Ohio River grew to approximately 1,200 inhabitants by 1750.
Since the Beaver Wars, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy claimed the Ohio Country as a hunting ground by right of conquest and treated the Shawnee and Lenape who resettled there as dependent tribes. Independent Iroquois bands from various nations also migrated westward and became known in Ohio as the Mingo. These three peoples—the Shawnee, the Delaware, and the Mingo—developed close associations despite linguistic differences: the first two spoke Algonquian languages, while the third spoke an Iroquoian language.
After participating in the opening phase of the French and Indian War as allies of the French, the Shawnee shifted their alliance in 1758 and made formal peace with the British colonies at the Treaty of Easton. This treaty recognized the Allegheny Ridge as a mutual boundary. The peace proved short-lived. In 1763, following Britain's defeat of France and assumption of its North American territories east of the Mississippi River, Pontiac's War erupted. Later that year, the Crown issued the Proclamation of 1763, legally reaffirming the 1758 boundary as the western limit of British settlement and reserving lands beyond it for Native Americans. The Crown, however, struggled to enforce the boundary as Anglo-European settlers continued to move westward.
The Treaty of Fort Stanwix extended the colonial boundary westward, granting British colonists claims to lands in what are now West Virginia and Kentucky. The Shawnee did not consent to this agreement, which had been negotiated between British officials and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, who asserted sovereignty over the territory. Although the Shawnee and other Native American tribes predominated in the region, they also used it as shared hunting grounds. Following the Stanwix treaty, Anglo-American settlement in the Ohio River Valley accelerated, often by boat along the Ohio River. Rising violence between settlers and Native Americans culminated in Lord Dunmore's War in 1774. British diplomats succeeded in isolating the Shawnee during the conflict, as the Iroquois and Lenape remained neutral. The Shawnee confronted the Virginia colony with only limited support from Mingo allies. Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, launched a two-pronged invasion into the Ohio Country. Shawnee chief Cornstalk engaged one wing of the invasion and fought to a draw in the war's only major battle, the Battle of Point Pleasant. Under the Treaty of Camp Charlotte, which ended the war in 1774, Cornstalk and the Shawnee were compelled to recognize the Ohio River as their southern boundary, as previously established by the Fort Stanwix treaty. By this agreement, the Shawnee relinquished claims to hunting grounds in present-day West Virginia and Kentucky south of the Ohio River. Many Shawnee leaders, however, refused to recognize this boundary. Shawnee society, like that of many Native nations, was highly decentralized, and individual bands and towns typically made independent decisions regarding alliances.