4 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 87 



for the most part, this seems due more to their control of a smat- 

 tering of the other dialect than to any inherent possibilities of 

 intelligibility, which are in fact slight because of the character of 

 the phonetic changes which have taken place. Actually an Arikara 

 was not able to understand a Skiri text, but was at once able to 

 grasp the same text in South Band Pawnee and translate or trans- 

 pose it into Arikara. There is still current among the Pawnee a 

 tradition that the Kawdra"kis group of the Pi'tahawira't" spoke 

 like the Arikara. It is impossible at the present day to check this 

 tradition, and it seems unlikely that it was true. The few sugges- 

 tions of linguistic difference between Kawdra'kts speech and Pawnee 

 proper which can be obtained, point rather to earlier dialectic 

 differences in the speech of the South Bands. Traditions support 

 this view strongly, all South Band Pawnees of the older generations 

 insisting that when the bands lived apart there were differences in 

 their speech, which disappeared after they came to live together. 

 Texts taken from the oldest living representatives of each band 

 failed to show any vestige of such differences remaining today.- 



The Pawnees have no name for themselves which includes as a 

 unity the four bands of Tskiri, Tsawi"'', Pi'tghawira't", and 

 Kttkahaxki''. These bands were known to themselves and to each 

 other by their band names. The absence of a general tribal name 

 reinforces other evidence for the fact that the four bands never 

 formed an integrated tribal unity; in fact, they were in former times 

 independent tribal groups. They often banded together for the 

 buffalo hunt and other collective enterprises. But the Skiri, for 

 example, were no more likely to join the three South Bands for a 

 buffalo hunt in the early nineteenth century, than they were to 

 join the Omahas and Poncas. This fact of the essential political 

 independence of each of the bands is too often overlooked, in part 

 because the United States Government has for long dealt with all 

 the Pawnees as one group. 



The words "chahiksichahiks" (tsahiksttsahiks), often quoted as 

 the name of the Pawnees for themselves', has quite a different use. 

 It is not a word for the Pawnees as distinguished from other Indians, 

 tsahiks — is "person", "human being", the generic word, as distinct 

 from words for "man", "woman". In the combination the con- 

 nective — I — has prepositional value rendered somewhat by the 

 translation "men of men" or "people of people". This combination 

 "men of men" implies "civilization" on the part of the persons 



' Fletcher, A. C, Handbook of American Indians, Bull. 30, Bur. Amer. Ethnol. 

 (cited hereafter as Handbook), pt. 2, p. 214, 1910. 



