Hasinai Erotic

The Hasinai were an alliance of Caddo-speaking farming communities in the pine-covered valleys of the Neches and Angelina rivers in East Texas. They held that country from before European contact until the mid-1800s, when they were removed to Indian Territory. Their descendants belong to the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma. The Hasinai were one of three Caddo alliances, along with the Kadohadacho on the Red River and the Natchitoches in Louisiana, and they gave Texas its name. When Spanish expeditions arrived in the late 1600s, the Hasinai greeted them with táysha, meaning friend or ally. The Spanish took it for the name of a tribe and wrote it as Tejas, and the name stayed on the land long after the Hasinai lost it.

The alliance joined several related groups, among them the Hainai, Nabedache, Neches, Nacogdoche, Nasoni and Nadaco. Each group was led by a caddi, and the Hainai usually ranked first. The Hasinai did not live in compact towns. Families lived on scattered farms in tall, domed houses built on pole frames and covered in grass thatch. They grew maize, beans and squash and came together at ceremonial grounds for feasts and councils. Above the chiefs stood the xinesi, a high priest who kept a sacred fire in a temple and spoke for the people to the supreme being, Ayo-Caddi-Aymay. They spoke a dialect of Caddo. It belongs to the Caddoan family with Wichita, Pawnee and Arikara, and it was unrelated to the languages of most of their close neighbors.

Contact with Europeans went badly, and slowly. Men from La Salle's doomed French colony reached Hasinai villages in the 1680s, and Spain answered by building missions. The first, San Francisco de los Tejas, was founded among the Nabedache in 1690 and abandoned in 1693. A second group of missions followed in 1716. The Hasinai valued the trade goods and the alliance, but most refused baptism, and they came to link it with the epidemics that followed the priests. Caught between Spanish Texas and French Louisiana, they traded with both. American settlement in the 1800s pushed the survivors onto the Brazos Reserve. In 1859, under threat from armed settlers, they were forced north to the Washita River in what is now Oklahoma.

Their names still mark the map: the city of Nacogdoches, the Neches River, and Anadarko, Oklahoma, which is named for the Nadaco. The Angelina River is named for a Hainai woman remembered for learning Spanish and interpreting for early travelers. Near Alto, Texas, the earthen mounds of a Caddo ceremonial center stand in the middle of their old country. The mounds were built centuries before the Hasinai met Europeans. Today the Caddo Nation, based in Binger, Oklahoma, still performs Caddo songs and dances.