Culture
The Wichita spoke a Caddoan language. They formed a loose confederation of related peoples on the Southern Plains, including such bands or sub-tribes as Panis Piques, Taovayas, Guichitas, Tawakonis, Iscani, and Wacos. They were related by language and culture to the Pawnee with whom they enjoyed close relations.
The Wichita lived in fixed villages notable for their large, domed-shaped, grass-covered dwellings, sometimes up to 30 feet in diameter. The Wichita were successful hunters and farmers, skillful traders and negotiators. They ranged from San Antonio, Texas in the south to as far north as Great Bend, Kansas. A semi-sedentary people, they occupied northern Texas in the early 18th century. They traded with other Southern Plains Indians on both sides of the Red River and as far south as Waco. For much of the year, the Wichita lived in huts made of forked cedar poles covered by dry grasses. In the winter, they followed American Bison in a seasonal hunt and left their villages behind. All parts of the bison were used for clothing, food and cooking fat, winter shelter, leather supplies, and medicine. They returned in the spring to their villages for another season of cultivating crops.
The Wichita were known to tattoo their faces and bodies with solid and dotted lines and circles. They called themselves "raccoon-eyed people" (Wichita Kitikiti'sh) because of the tattooed marks around their eyes. They wore clothes made of tanned hides, which the women prepared and sewed. They often decorated their dresses in elk teeth.
Read more about this topic: Wichita People
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“The fact remains that the human being in early childhood learns to consider one or the other aspect of bodily function as evil, shameful, or unsafe. There is not a culture which does not use a combination of these devils to develop, by way of counterpoint, its own style of faith, pride, certainty, and initiative.”
—Erik H. Erikson (1904–1994)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)