Miami Erotic

The Miami call themselves Myaamia. What holds them together as a people today is less a single territory than a shared name, a shared history of being pried off their land, and a stubborn effort to get their language back. Their towns once lined the upper Wabash and Maumee rivers in what is now Indiana and western Ohio, reaching into southwest Michigan. The center was Kiihkayonki, better known in English as Kekionga, at the head of the Maumee where Fort Wayne now stands, a short portage from the Wabash. Whoever controlled that portage controlled a route between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, which made the Miami worth courting and worth fighting.

Their language, Miami-Illinois, is Algonquian and was shared with the Peoria and other Illinois peoples to the west. The Wea and Piankashaw of the lower Wabash spoke it too. They were long counted as Miami divisions before they joined the Peoria in Kansas. The Potawatomi, Shawnee and Delaware nearby spoke related but separate Algonquian languages. The last fluent speakers of Miami-Illinois died in the 1960s. Since then the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, working with Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, has rebuilt the language from missionary dictionaries and nineteenth-century word lists, and some families now raise their children speaking it.

The late eighteenth century was their loudest moment. Under the war leader Little Turtle, Miami fighters and their allies routed Josiah Harmar's expedition in 1790 and destroyed Arthur St. Clair's army in 1791, one of the worst defeats the US Army has ever suffered at Native hands. Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the Treaty of Greenville a year later reversed that, and a long run of land cessions followed. In 1846 the government put Miami families on canal boats and sent them west to Kansas, and most were later moved again to Indian Territory. Families exempted by treaty stayed in Indiana. That split still shapes the people: the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma is federally recognized, while the Indiana Miami lost recognition in 1897 and have not won it back.

Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, has been part of Miami life for generations, and for many families it sits alongside older practice. Traditional stories are told only in winter, once snow is on the ground. Winter is also the season for the moccasin game, a contest of hiding and guessing played to singing and drumming. Miami ribbonwork, silk ribbon cut and layered into sharp geometric appliqué, is among the most admired in the Great Lakes region and still shows up on skirts, shirts and blankets at tribal gatherings.