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:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“Our culture has become something that is completely and utterly in love with its parent. It’s become a notion of boredom that is bought and sold, where nothing will happen except that people will become more and more terrified of tomorrow, because the new continues to look old, and the old will always look cute.”
—Malcolm McLaren (b. 1946)