The Quapaw (/ˈkwɔːpɔː/ KWAW-paw; or Arkansas and Ugahxpa) people are a tribe of Native Americans that coalesced in what is known as the Midwest and Ohio Valley of the present-day United States. The Dhegiha Siouan-speaking tribe historically migrated from the Ohio Valley area to the west side of the Mississippi River in what is now the state of Arkansas; their name for themselves (or autonym) refers to this migration and to traveling downriver. The Quapaw are federally recognized as the Quapaw Nation. The U.S. federal government forcibly removed them to Indian Territory in 1834, and their tribal base has been in present-day Ottawa County in northeastern Oklahoma. The number of members enrolled in the tribe was 3,240 in 2011. Algonquian-speaking people originallly referred to the Quapaw people as Akansa, an Illini word for “People of the South Wind”. French explorers and colonists learned this term from Algonquians and adapted it in French as Arcansas. The French named the Arkansas River and the territory of Arkansas for them. Once they migrated down the Mississippi River into Arkansas, they were called the Ogáxpa (Quapaw), which means the “downstream people.”
Quapaw, also called Akansaor Arkansas, North American Indian people of the Dhegiha branch of the Siouan language stock. With the other members of this subgroup (including the Osage, Ponca, Kansa, and Omaha), the Quapaw migrated westward from the Atlantic coast. They settled for a time on the prairies of what is now western Missouri and later relocated at or near the mouth of the Arkansas River. They were a sedentary, agricultural people who lived in fortified villages of communal bark-covered lodges built on mounds. They were also skillful artisans noted for their red-on-white pottery. In 1673 the Quapaw were contacted by the explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet, who reported that the tribe did not hunt buffalo for fear of the peoples to the north and west, wore few clothes, and pierced their ears and noses. In 1818 the Quapaw ceded their lands, except for a tract on the southern side of the Arkansas River, to the United States. A few years later this land was opened to emigrant settlers, and most of the tribe relocated to the Red River in present Louisiana. When floods drove them out of this region, they began an unsuccessful campaign for the return of their original lands. In the mid-19th century they settled on their own reservation in Indian Territory (present Oklahoma), but during the American Civil War their land was so overrun by forces from both sides that tribal members fled en masse to Kansas to the reservation of the Ottawa. Most of the Quapaw later returned to their Oklahoma land, which was allotted among them by themselves.
The Quapaw were probably residing in the Lower Mississippi Valley region by the late seventeenth century. The first recorded contact between Quapaws and Europeans occurred on July 16, 1673, when French explorers and missionaries Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet made their way down the Mississippi River and arrived at Quapaw villages along its banks about twenty miles north of the Arkansas. Villages were composed of clusters of bark-covered longhouses, in which several families resided. Each village had a leader advised by a council of male elders who independently managed their affairs. Life was ordered by various ceremonies, and family served as the basic unit of social organization. Ancestry was traced through the father, and children adopted their father’s clan, a social unit associated with and named after a respected animal, celestial body, or weather phenomenon. Each clan had specific ceremonial responsibilities and was divided into two groups, the Earth People and the Sky People. The Earth People generally tended to administrative affairs and the Sky People to spiritual matters.
The Quapaw people are a Siouan tribe, closely related to the Kanza, Omaha, Osage, and Ponca. Their name translates to “Downstream People,” so-called from a tradition that they went down the Missouri River while the rest of the Sioux went upriver. The Quapaw people historically resided in four villages on the west side of the Mississippi River in what is now the state of Arkansas. They are identical to the Arkansa Nation. When they were encountered by the DeSoto expedition (1539-43), they were living in a fortified, walled city. Later they were contacted by French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet in 1673. In the larger villages, well-crafted lodges were seen with most people living in longhouses with domed roofs covered in bark. Each longhouse held several families. The houses were arranged around an open area or plaza that included a roofed structure with open walls and a platform where public ceremonies were held and guests were received.
The Quapaw are members of the Dhegiha Siouan language group, which also includes the Osage, the Omaha, the Ponca, and the Kansa. They first appeared in historical accounts in 1673 when they encountered the first French explorers in the Mississippi River Valley, led by Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet. The French called the Quapaw the “Arkansas,” the Illini word for “People of the South Wind” and so named the river and the countryside after them. At that time, the Quapaw lived in four villages along the Mississippi River. They established one village, Kappa, on the east bank of the Mississippi. Two others, Tongigua and Tourima, were located on the west bank and a fourth, Osotouy, at the mouth of the Arkansas River. The last three were most likely located in present-day Desha County. The tribe was divided into two large moieties (divisions)—Earth and Sky—and into twenty-one clans. Each moiety and all clans had members in all four villages, so that each individual had close ties to people in every community. The two moieties shared responsibility for the calumet, the sacred pipe that connected the people to Wakondah, the powerful, sacred force that blessed all things with life. The calumet was also shared with strangers and visitors. Smoking the calumet and the accompanying rituals converted strangers into kin with reciprocal obligations. French explorers were some of the first to witness and participate in the calumet rituals. Individuals and clans also had their guardian spirit beings.
Quapaw Indians lived in four villages near the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers when they were first contacted by the French explorers Marquette and Jolliet in 1673. The Quapaws grew corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, gourds, and tobacco in fields near their villages. Fruits, nuts, seeds, and roots were collected. Deer, bear, and buffalo were hunted, and smaller mammals, wild turkeys, waterfowl, and fish were taken seasonally. After contact with Europeans, melons, peaches and chickens were raised. Quapaw women wore deerskin skirts and went topless during the warm seasons. Married women wore their hair loose, but unmarried women wore braids rolled into coils fastened behind each ear and decorated with ornaments. Men went naked or wore loincloths during the warm seasons. Leggings, moccasins, and robes were worn by both sexes during the cold seasons. The family was the basic unit of Quapaw social organization. Groups of families related through the males were joined into clans. Clans were named for animals, heavenly bodies, or natural phenomena like thunder. Clan members believed they were descended from a common ancestor that gave them a strong sense of shared identity and mutual obligation.
The Quapaw Tribe of Oklahoma’s name derives from O-gah-pa, “Downstream People.” The French and the Illini Indians referred to them as “Arkansea,” a name that would eventually be given to Arkansas, where the Quapaw people lived in the 17th century. The Quapaw’s oral history of crossing the Mississippi tells of a rope of twisted grapevine that snapped. Tribes that safely crossed went upstream. The Quapaw went downstream and settled in Arkansas near the confluence of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers. Their territories eventually encompassed most of Arkansas, lower Oklahoma and portions of Louisiana and Mississippi, including the delta. By 1818, the Quapaw were pressured by the U.S. government into signing a treaty that would cede all territories except a reservation in central Arkansas. “The treaty retains and establishes the first reservation, which was vastly smaller, but still a fairly substantial amount of land from around Little Rock, down past Pine Bluff,” said Everett Bandy, tribal historic preservation officer for the Quapaw Tribe.
The Quapaw remained vital to the survival of the French settlers in Arkansas. They were military allies and trade partners. The two nations also socially and sexually intermingled and intermarried. Jean Bernard Bossu, captain in the French navy, affirmed that it was “a pleasure seeing these women who were showing a great affection towards the French, they prefer them to the Spanish.” Sarasin, a Quapaw chief, was of mixed blood, born of a French father, Francois Sarazin, and a Quapaw mother. According to Governor Louis de Kerlerec: “The Arkansas [Quapaw] nation, without doubt the bravest of all those nations, they commenced to be attached to the French as soon as they knew them, and never varied in their attachment.” The military alliance represented another facet of the cohabitation between the two peoples. The Quapaw were present in French campaigns against rival Indian groups who allied with the British. Without their Quapaw and Choctaw allies, the French would have undoubtedly had to abandon the Mississippi during the Natchez attack in 1729, as noted by Governor Etienne De Périer: “[The Quapaw] situation and their attachment to the French kept the English from passing the Mississippi after the Natchez Revolt.”
The Quapaw, under the name of Capaha or Pacaha, were first encountered in 1541 by de Soto, who found their chief town, strongly palisaded and nearly surrounded by a ditch, between the Mississippi and a lake on the Arkansas (west) side, apparently in the present Phillips County, where archæologic remains and local conditions bear out the description. The first encounter, as usual, was hostile, but peace was finally arranged. The town is described as having a population of several thousand, by which we may perhaps understand the whole tribe. They seem to have remained unvisited by white men for more than 130 years thereafter, until in 1673, when the Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette, accompanying the French commander Louis Jolliet, made his famous voyage down the Mississippi, to the villages of the “Akansea” who gave him warm welcome and listened with attention to his exhortations, during the few days that he remained until his return. In 1682 La Salle passed by their villages, then five in number, of which one was on the east bank of the Mississippi. The Recollect, Zenobius Membré, accompanying La Salle, planted a cross and attempted to give them some idea of the Christian’s God, while the commander negotiated a peace with the tribe and took formal possession of the territory for France. Then, as always, the Quapaw were uniformly kind and friendly toward the French. In spite of frequent shiftings the Quapaw villages in this early period were generally four in number, corresponding in name and population to four sub-tribes still existing, viz. Ugahpahti, Uzutiuhi, Tiwadimañ, and Tañwañzhita, or, under their French forms, kappa, Ossoteoue, Touriman, and Tonginga. A tribe now nearly extinct, but formerly one of the most important of the lower Mississippi region, occupying several villages about the mouth of the Arkansas, chiefly on the west (Arkansas) side, with one or two at various periods on the east (Mississippi) side of the Mississippi, and claiming the whole of the Arkansas River region up to the border of the territory held by the Osage in the northwestern part of the state. They are of Siouan linguistic stock, speaking the same language, spoken also with dialectic variants, by the Osage and Kansa (Kaw) in the south and by the Omaha and Ponca in Nebraska. Their name properly Ugakhpa, signifies “down-stream people”, as distinguished from Umahan or Omaha “up-stream people”. To the Illinois and other Algonquian tribes they were known as Akansea, whence their French name of Akensas and Akansas. According to concurrent tradition of the cognate tribes the Quapaw and their kinsmen originally lived far east, possibly beyond the Alleghenies, and, pushing gradually westward, descended the Ohio River — hence called by the Illinois the “river of the Akansea” — to its junction with the Mississippi, whence the Quapaw, then including the Osage and Kansa, descended to the mouth of the Arkansas, while the Omaha, with the Ponca, went up the Missouri.
World Mythology 
