Introduction. This short vocabulary of Quapaw was collected in the area around Miami, Oklahoma in 1973 and 1974. At that time I was able to lo- cate and interview only one person who was considered fluent in the lan- guage in the sense of being able to make up new sentences, Hrs. Mary Redeagle. Mrs. Redeagle suffered a serious illness in the Spring of 1974 and I was unable to work with her after that. The Quapaws fall within the Dhegiha subgroup of Siouan tribes. Linguistically they form a separate branch of that subgroup, the other two being Kansa and Osage, on the one hand, and Omaha and Ponca on the other. They call themselves Ok4xPa, and, although they may be the Pacaha mentioned in the Desoto chronicle, the earliest certain recorded refer- ence to them is from the Marquette expedition. In July of 1673 Marquette encountered the Quapaws living in four villages at or near the mouth of the Arkansas River. That all four villages were Quapaw is demonstrated in Dorsey's (1886) analysis of the village names. The tribal name is not used in the earliest accounts, although it occurs in one of the town names, Kappa. The French called the tribe by its Algonquian name, Akansa or Akansea, a term apparently applied to all Dhegiha speaking tribes by the member peoples of the Illinois Confederacy. The history of the Quapaws from the time of their first contact with the French, through their deportation in stages to northeastern Oklahoma, to the present is covered well in Baird (1980). There is a great deal of Quapaw lexical material in the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution. Most of it was collected c. 1883 by the Rev. James Owen Dorsey and is found in the col- lection bearing his name. I hope one day to expand this dictionary and include the Dorsey material, but I intend to wait until I am more famili- ar with the closely related Kansa and Omaha languages before attempting to edit the Dorsey MSS. Dorsey's perception of Quapaw was strongly in- fluenced by his knowledge of Omaha and his transcription is very diffi- cult to interpret without a thorough knowledge of both Quapaw morphology and the phonologies of the other Dhegiha languages.

No comments have been posted yet.

Sign in to leave your comment