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In striking contrast to the poverty-stricken condition of these Pacific Coast Indians is the wealth of the Osages, a small Siouan tribe occupying a fertile country in Oklahoma, who are said to be the richest people, per capita, in the world.
This combination of more definite totemistic conceptions is not found in any other member of the Siouan stock.
These have already been referred to as the "eneepee," or vapor-bath, and the "chan-du-hu-pah-yu-za-pee," or ceremonial of the pipe. In our Siouan legends and traditions these two are preeminent, as handed down from the most ancient time and persisting to the last.
The Ponca Indians were members of the large Siouan family. They had not always been a separate tribe. In the old days they and the Omahas and the Kansas and the Osages had lived together as Omahas, near the mouth of the Osage River in eastern Nebraska. Soon they divided, and held their clan names of Poncas, Omahas, Kansas and Osages. The Poncas and Omahas clung as allies.
But as the Pierced Noses this nation in the far Northwest was known. They were members of the Sha-hap-ti-an family of North Americans a family not so large as the Algonquian, Siouan, Shoshonean and several other families, yet important. Their home was the valley and river country of western Idaho, and the near sections of Oregon and Washington.
There are traces of it in the Eastern tribes; but it is in its Western form that it is best known it is explicit among the Western Algonkins and the Siouan tribes, and on the Northwest Pacific Coast. The spirit is, as a rule, independent of the clan totem is found, indeed, in nontotemic tribes; it is often identical with the eponymous animal of some religious society.
A single instance of clan action has been found among the East African Baganda the women of the Grasshopper clan undertake to increase the supply of their totem; why this duty is assigned to the women is not clear the custom appears to involve a relaxation of totemistic rules. The economic festivals and "dances" of the Siouan Mandans and Hidatsa are general tribal ceremonies.
A peculiarly interesting type of infixation is found in the Siouan languages, in which certain verbs insert the pronominal elements into the very body of the radical element, e.g., Sioux cheti "to build a fire," chewati "I build a fire"; shuta "to miss," shuunta-pi "we miss." A subsidiary but by no means unimportant grammatical process is that of internal vocalic or consonantal change.
The Crows' name for themselves was Ab-sa-ro-ke Sparrow Hawk People. They were of the Siouan family and cousins of the Minnetarees, the Bird-woman's captors. They had no villages, except where they camped.
The great Siouan race occupied nearly all the upper valley of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and their tributaries. North of them dwelt the Ojibways, an Algonquin tribe with an entirely different language.