People | George
Davis
Direct Quotes from William Least Heat~Moon: PrairyErth p.
120-121.
Framework for thoughts presented by George Davis
at AILDI kick-off.
“Six full-blood Kansa, all men and all
but one over sixty-five, are still living but none of them can speak
more than a few words of the old language; they use almost exclusively
the word Kaw for
the tribe even though they know their parents called themselves Konsay (a
spelling I’ve never seen except in my own notes); the n comes
out almost as a w and the second syllable nearly disappears,
so that you can imagine an illiterate French trapper believing he had
heard ‘Kaw.’
…The six surviving natives…accept ‘People
of the South Wind’ or ‘Wind People’ as
the meaning of the name, even though that definition derives from
a time long ago when the Kansa, with the Osage and several other
now separate tribes, belonged to a bigger Siouan group living in
the upper Ohio River Valley; ….Even before the great migration,
the word Kansa referred to a [nation] whose totem was the
wind; that the Kansa would one day give their name to a state famous
for its winds is only a wonderful coincidence… goes beyond…
I suppose, over the last four centuries, that this place called Kansa has
come, like a murky chunk of softened glass, to fill the mold of its
name, and I believe that today we see it through that now hardened
form descended from unlettered explorers, careless map printers, and
travelers and settlers who deemed red people worth no name but heathen. Had
any white asked, we might have learned more about the name the Kansa
may have once called themselves: Hutanga. We might
also understand what it meant to them instead of having to rely on
a twentieth-century Osage dictionary: ‘big fish’ or ‘big
water-dweller.” Now, whatever links may have once
existed between the word hutanga and the Kansa’s most
sacred object in historic times – a conch shell- are lost.”
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