Kiowa Erotic

The Kiowa are a Southern Plains people whose own name, Ka'igwu, is usually glossed as "principal people," and whose history reads as a long walk south. Their traditions begin on the upper Yellowstone in what is now Montana, pass through the Black Hills in company with the Crow, and end on the grasslands of southwestern Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle and western Kansas by the early 1800s. What marks them out on the Plains is their language. Kiowa belongs to the Kiowa-Tanoan family, and its only relatives are spoken in the Pueblo villages of the Southwest. No one else on the buffalo range spoke anything like it.

Around 1790 the Kiowa made peace with the Comanche, and the two nations, with the Plains Apache riding as a band inside the Kiowa camp circle, held the southern buffalo country and the raiding trails into Texas and Mexico for most of a century. Society ran on bands and ranked warrior societies, the most exclusive being the Koitsenko, ten men sworn to stake their sashes to the ground in a fight. Religious life turned on the Sun Dance and its sacred figure, the Taime, and on ten medicine bundles that still have keepers today. The Kiowa also kept time. Painted calendars marked each summer and winter with a single image, and the oldest of them reaches back to the meteor storm of 1833, "the winter the stars fell." That visual habit carried into ledger drawings by prisoners at Fort Marion in the 1870s and, two generations on, into the Kiowa Six, the 1920s painters who set the template for modern Native American painting.

The Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 confined the tribe to a reservation shared with the Comanche and Apache, and the Red River War of 1874 and 1875 ended free life on the plains. Satanta, Satank and Lone Wolf became the names of that resistance, and a later Lone Wolf took the government to the Supreme Court over allotment and lost, in a 1903 ruling that still shapes federal Indian law. The Kiowa Tribe is now headquartered in Carnegie, Oklahoma. Christianity took root through Baptist and Methodist missions in the 1890s, and the Native American Church, which the Kiowa helped carry across Oklahoma, sits alongside it, often in the same families. Hymns sung in Kiowa are a tradition in their own right. The Gourd Dance, revived in the 1950s and now danced at powwows nationwide, and the Black Leggings society, which honors Kiowa veterans, are the public face of that continuity. The language is critically endangered and is being taught back through tribal programs and at the University of Oklahoma. The late N. Scott Momaday, whose memoir The Way to Rainy Mountain retraced the migration, remains the tribe's best known voice.