The Pawnee tribe, one of the most powerful Native American tribes, lived in fixed villages and farmed along the Platte River. They were reduced in number due to disease, warfare, and relocation. Today, the Pawnee Nation is located in Oklahoma and owns several casinos, a college, and a development corporation.
The Pawnee tribe are a Native American people native to the areas that are now the US states of Nebraska and northern Kansas. The Pawnee people have hunted and farmed along the Platte River and other tributaries of the Missouri River for hundreds of years. They lived in fixed villages, growing corn, squash, sunflowers, beans, and other crops, and hunted buffalo seasonally. They were one of the most powerful Native American tribes in the area. At their peak, the Pawnee tribe, which consisted of four bands – Chawi, Kitkahahki, Pitahauerat and Skidi – numbered more than 10,000 people.
The Pawnee language belongs to the Caddoan family, which is the family that contains the languages of the Great Plains Indians. Traditional Pawnee religion, based on the tribe’s connection to the natural world and its understanding of astronomy, involved sacrificing corn and other crops to gods and spirits. One of the Pawnee gangs, the Skidi, also sacrificed people. The band took part in an annual ceremony where a teenage girl was sacrificed to the “morning star”.
As with other Native American tribes, the advent of white explorers and settlers into their territory spelled the beginning of the end of the traditional Pawnee way of life. In the mid-1800s, the Pawnee lived on a reservation in Nebraska. In 1870, the Pawnee tribe was relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma. During the 1800s, Pawnee’s population was greatly reduced by disease brought in by settlers, warfare with other Plains Indians, such as the Sioux and Cherokee, and finally the poor condition of reservations. The Pawnee nation at its lowest point, around the turn of the 19th century, had only about 600 people.
The headquarters of the Pawnee Nation is located in Oklahoma. The nation is run by an elected president and a governing council. As of 2010, the Pawnee tribe numbered a few thousand people, most of whom lived in Pawnee County, Oklahoma.
The Pawnee Nation owns several casinos; Pawnee Nation College, which provides American Indian studies as one of its major graduate areas; and the Pawnee Tribal Development Corporation, which seeks to create economic opportunity for tribal members. In 2009, a prominent member of the Pawnee tribe, Larry EchoHawk, became the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, part of the US Department of the Interior. He was nominated for the post by US President Barack Obama.
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