12 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 87 



men.^ Actually there seems no Wichita name for the tribe as a 

 whole. 



Meanings have not been obtained for all the band names of the 

 Wichita, and the full understanding of these must avv'ait thorough 

 analysis of the Wichita language. 



tsi's means "awls", and was used for this group of the people 

 because of their skill in the use of awls. 



akwi"ts is "dull teeth", said to refer to the fact that the old people 

 of the band had dull teeth. 



tawakgrii"'' "neck of land in the water" refers to the character 

 of the place where these people lived. 



ktriktri's "coon eyes", "raccoon eyes", is understood by the 

 Pawnee proper as ktrikuruks "bear eyes". 



weku' is said by informants to be derived from wehiko, which 

 latter is evidently the Wichita rendition of Mexico as pronounced 

 by the Spanish; it was used for the people of this band because, 

 according to tradition, they were always fighting with the Mexicans. 

 They are spoken of as "Indians who were always scouting around". 

 They are said to have originally been part of the tawakgru"', with- 

 out a village to themselves, but later to have lived independently. 

 If this origin of the name be correct, it is clearly not an ancient 

 Wichita or Caddoan name, which may explain why it does not 

 appear unmistakably in historical records until after 1820.- 



The Wichita refer to the Pawnee as awa'hi; apparently this is the 

 same designation as the awahu of the Arikara. There is no evidence 

 that use of awa'hi is recent; but the significance of this identity of 

 Wichita and Arikara names for the Pawnee, in view of the tradi- 

 tional explanation of its meaning as given by the Arikara, must 

 await further study. 



It seems possible that this awa'hi is what was intended by the 

 "Harahey" and "Arahey" of the Spanish accounts of Coronado's 

 expedition into Wichita and Pawnee country. •'' The country to 

 which Coronado was led has been identified as Wichita country, 

 and there the people told the Spaniards about a land and people to 



' Nevertheless the same kind of misunderstanding occurred in the case of the 

 Pawnee. Grinneil, p. 240, says of the Pawnees, "the southern tribes call them 

 pi-ta'-da". This is evidently pi'tatat which means "man, that's what I am", and 

 phonetically and morphologically is exactly equivalent to the Wichita wits tta. 



' Cf. Handbook, pt. 2, p. 887. 



^ James R. Murie some years ago made this same suggestion to F. W. Hodge. 

 See Amer. Anthrop., n. s., vol. 17, pp. 215-216, 1915. 



