k 



NO. 6 CADDOAN LINGUISTIC STOCK— LESSER AND WELTFISH 5 



referred to. tsihiksti' ', "he's a man", "he's really a human being'', 

 impHes the ide^ that a man's ways are civiUzed -^^ -mannered 

 eentle A wild, ill-mannered, mean man would be called tsahiks- 

 kaki"' "he's not a human being". Thus tsahikstt^ahiks is applied 

 by the Pawnees not alone to themselves but also to other Indian 

 groups of their acquaintance whom they considered civilized, such 

 as the Poncas and Omahas. In a^general way it was also used for 

 Indians as opposed to white men.^ 



The name Pawnee is one which was first applied to the Pawnees 

 bv white men. It seems unlikely for linguistic reasons that its use 

 came from parf-ku', "horns", as suggested in the Handbook. Ou 

 informants claimed that it derived from pan's" , hunter (Skin 

 dialect) They said that the first Pawnees to meet white men were 

 on the hunt, and that when the white men asked, "Who are you? 

 an Indian answered, "pari'su"', -'a hunter". In the light of this 

 possible derivation, it is interesting to note that the spelling o 

 Pawnee on the early maps is "panis", and also that in more recent 

 years several recorders have written Pawnee "r s as n s because 

 of the peculiar phonetic character of the Pawnee r . LlearK 

 from "les panis" a derived singular would be pani or Pawnee.^' 



The Skiri derive their name from the word for the wolf. In 

 present day usage this is tskcr.xk- (adding the diminutive) but i 

 may well have been the shorter form earlier (tskiri). The Skin 

 were known to themselves and to other tribes as wolves . 1 heir 

 war whoop was the cry of the wolf, and for deception on the warpath 

 and in scouting they dressed as wolves, and signalled each other 

 vocally with wolf cries.^ In war dances where combat is dramatized 

 the warriors act like wolves. A mythological background for this 



' This usage is also quoted from Hayden, Handbook, pt. 2, p. 216. 



3 "et ago'iames'R. Murie suggested to F. W. Hodge , a... as the origin 

 of PawneZ and told the same story about it. See Amer. Anth-P --. vol. 17, 

 on 215-216 1915. Apparently the story is a general Pawnee tradition, 

 "^"^^ Dunbar J in Mag Amer. Hist., vol. 4, p. 259, 1880, offers as explana ion o 

 the name Ski the association of this group of Pawnees with the Loup (Wolf) 

 River which in turn was so called because of the abundance of wo ves along the 

 stream. Pawnees of today still recall that wolves were abundant along the Loup 

 R ver in early days. It seems reasonable to believe that such a wo f-teeming 

 habitarhad an important influence on Skiri Pawnee cultural forms, and thus was 



indirectly responsible for the name. hpreafter as 



^•Grinnell G. B., Pawnee hero stories and folk tales (cited hereafter as 

 Grinnell) pp. 245-248, 1890, describes these methods of deception in some detail. 

 ?he statements made herein are based on information from present-day infor- 

 mants. 



