Kickapoo

KICKAPOO

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KICKAPOO. The exact origins of the Kickapoo re-main uncertain, though tribal tradition tells of their separating from the Shawnee after a dispute over a bear's foot. Equally unknown is the meaning of "kiikaapoa," the name Kickapoo call themselves. The Kickapoo have maintained a marked independence from outside influences. To this day, they remain an exceptionally conservative people, as evidenced by their reluctance to marry outside the tribe. In addition to the Shawnee, the Kickapoo are strongly related to the Miami, Sauk, Fox, and especially the Mascouten.

The Kickapoo reckoned kinship patrilineally, and were organized into clans bearing the names of animals. They also had a Berry clan and a Tree clan, though clans named after plants were unusual in most tribes. Leaders from the clans formed a council, which governed along with a hereditary chief, usually from the Eagle clan. Women sometimes acted as chiefs, although in a religious, not political, role. By the 1950s, traditional organization became largely ceremonial, and matrilineal chiefs were acceptable. Kickapoo religion centers on relations with several important deities, including Creator, the four winds, the sky, moon, sun, stars, and earth.

Kickapoo women provided much of the tribe's food through agriculture and gathering. Men hunted and fished. Hunting and gathering are still important to a band of Kickapoo who settled in Mexico. Women also constructed the rectangular, bark-over-pole lodges in Kickapoo villages, and made clothing.

The Kickapoo migrated frequently both before and after encountering Europeans. They first met the French in the mid-seventeenth century when they lived in southern Wisconsin, and initially resisted any attempted control by France. Kickapoo hostility against the French increased in the 1680s, as they blamed French influence for Iroquois and Siouan invasions. The Kickapoo also fought France's Illinois allies, though their longest standing enemies were the Chickasaw and the Osage.

Kickapoo-French relations improved considerably in 1729, and they joined France for a time in the war against the Fox. The Kickapoo remained allied to France, and also the Spanish, even after France's surrender to England in 1763. They joined Pontiac's war against the English in 1763–1764. In the late 1760s they, along with the Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa, drove the Illinois tribes from the Illinois River, and the Kickapoo moved into central Illinois. During the American Revolution (1775–1783) the Kickapoo were largely neutral or even pro-American, until American land hunger led them to side with Britain. They joined the Miami's confederacy against the Americans in the 1790s, and for years after the Treaty of Greenville (1795) refused to even pick up their annuities from the United States.

Never a huge tribe, the Kickapoo combined with the Mascouten (whom they gradually absorbed) to number only about 2,250 people in 1700, and 1,500 by 1750. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Kickapoo divided into two principal bands, about equal in size. The Prairie Kickapoo lived in central Illinois, while the Vermilion Kickapoo inhabited the western fringes of the Wabash River Basin, between modern Danville, Illinois, and Lafayette, Indiana. After 1800, small groups also migrated west of the Mississippi River. The Vermilion Kickapoo became fierce adherents to Tenskwatawa (the Shawnee Prophet) and Tecumseh. The Prairie Kickapoo joined the Vermilion Band against the United States during the War of 1812 (1812–1815). Even after 1815, some Kickapoo resisted further American settlement. By 1819, however, both bands ceded their lands in Illinois and Indiana, and were ordered west in 1832. The last holdouts went west in 1834. By the twentieth century, the Kickapoo had three main bands in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Mexico, numbering 185,247, and approximately 400, respectively.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gibson, A. M. The Kickapoo: Lords of the Middle Border. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963.

Trigger, Bruce G., ed. Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15 Northeast. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978.

Robert M. Owens