Kickapoo Erotic

The Kickapoo are the Great Lakes people who kept moving. A Central Algonquian nation first recorded by the French in the Fox River country of southern Wisconsin, they spent two centuries drifting south and west: into the Illinois and Indiana prairies along the Wabash and Vermilion rivers, then across the Mississippi, and finally, for one band, across the Rio Grande. Today they live in four places at once. There are reservation lands near Horton in northeast Kansas, tribal lands around McLoud in central Oklahoma, a small reservation at Eagle Pass on the Texas border, and the village of El Nacimiento in the mountains of Coahuila, Mexico. The Texas and Coahuila communities are in practice one people who spent most of the twentieth century moving seasonally between the two, and they hold a rare legal right to cross the border freely.

Kickapoo belongs to the Algonquian family and sits so close to Sauk and Meskwaki that linguists treat the three as dialects of one language. English dominates in Kansas and Oklahoma and Spanish is an everyday language in Coahuila, but Kickapoo is still spoken with real vitality in the southern communities, where children grow up hearing it. The Coahuila Kickapoo also developed a whistled form of the language, documented in the 1950s, that young men used to call to women across the village after dark. Religion is where the Kickapoo reputation for conservatism shows most clearly. For generations they turned away missionaries and government schools more consistently than almost any neighboring nation, and the traditional ceremonial cycle, built around clan bundles and the spring rebuilding of the mat-and-bark house called the wiikiaapi, remains the center of life in Texas and Mexico. In Illinois in the early 1800s a prophet named Kenekuk preached a faith blending Kickapoo and Christian elements, and his followers' descendants form the core of the Kansas community. The historical record is hard. Kickapoo warriors fought with Tecumseh, and the nation was pushed out of Illinois after the treaties of 1819. In 1850 Mexico granted the southern band land at El Nacimiento in exchange for guarding the frontier against Comanche and Apache raiders, a bargain shared with the Black Seminole Mascogos who remain their neighbors. In 1873 the US cavalry crossed the border without permission, burned the Kickapoo camp at Remolino, and held captured women and children as leverage until several hundred people agreed to relocate to Indian Territory, which is how the Oklahoma tribe came to be. The Texas tribe won federal recognition only in 1983, after decades in which families lived in traditional houses beneath the international bridge at Eagle Pass.