Piankeshaw Erotic

The Piankeshaw were a division of the Miami who lived along the Wabash River, in what is now western Indiana and eastern Illinois, when the French reached the region in the 1600s. American settlement pushed them west in the nineteenth century. They merged with related peoples, and their descendants today belong to the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma. In their own language they were Peeyankihšiaki, a name tied to the fact that they lived apart from the main body of the Miami. That separateness is the key to understanding them. They shared the Miami language and customs but kept their own towns, alliances and politics. The Wea upriver were their closest partners, and the Kickapoo lived to the south.

They spoke a dialect of Miami-Illinois, an Algonquian language that the Miami, Wea, Peoria and Kaskaskia also spoke with local differences. A Piankeshaw could deal with Illinois towns to the west and Wea allies upstream without an interpreter. Life followed the river bottoms and the prairie: villages with fields of corn, beans and squash, and seasonal hunts for deer and bison across the tallgrass. In the 1730s the French founded a post at Vincennes beside a Piankeshaw town. It pulled them deep into the fur trade and brought Jesuit priests to the Wabash.

Two episodes put the Piankeshaw at the center of larger events. In the late 1740s the chief Memeskia, called La Demoiselle by the French and Old Briton by the English, led followers east to Pickawillany on the Great Miami River and opened trade with Pennsylvania merchants. A French-allied war party destroyed the town in 1752 and killed him, one of the clashes that led to the war for the Ohio Country. Then in 1775, Piankeshaw leaders at Vincennes sold enormous tracts of land to speculators. That sale never stood. In Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823) the Supreme Court ruled that private buyers could not get title to land directly from Native nations, a decision that still anchors federal Indian law.

Settlers kept squeezing them out. Some had crossed into Missouri by the end of the 1700s, and treaties in the early 1800s signed away the Wabash country. By the 1830s the remaining Piankeshaw and Wea held a reservation in eastern Kansas. There, in 1854, they formally joined the Peoria and Kaskaskia, and after the Civil War the combined tribes were moved to northeastern Indian Territory. The Piankeshaw no longer exist as a separate tribe, but their family lines run through the Peoria today. The Miami-Illinois language went unspoken for decades and is now being brought back from colonial-era dictionaries and tribal records.