The American Race: A Linguistic Classification and Ethnographic Description of the Native Tribes of North and South AmericaBrinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
History
The American Race: A Linguistic Classification and Ethnographic Description of the Native Tribes of North and South America
Brinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Indians; Indians -- Languages
The _Tonicas_ are frequently mentioned in the early French accounts of
the colony of Louisiana. They lived in what is now Avoyelles parish, and
were staunch friends of the European immigrants. Their language is an
independent stock, and has some unusual features in American tongues,
such as a masculine and a feminine gender of nouns and a dual in three
pronouns.
The _Adaize_ or Atai were a small tribe who once lived between Saline
river and Natchitoche, La. They spoke a vocalic language, differing from
any other, though including a number of Caddo words, which was owing to
their having been a member of the Caddo confederacy.
The _Atakapas_ had their hunting grounds about Vermilion river and the
adjacent Gulf coast. Their name in Choctaw means “man-eaters,” both they
and their neighbors along the Texan coast having an ugly reputation
as cannibals, differing in this from the Muskokis and their neighbors
east of the Mississippi, among whom we have no record of anthropophagy,
even of a ritual character. The later generations of Atakapas have been
peaceful and industrious. Their language, though in the main quite alone,
presents a limited number of words evidently from the same roots as their
correspondents in the Uto-Aztecan family.
The coast of Texas, between the mouths of the Colorado and Nueces rivers,
was the home of the _Carankaways_. The Spaniards gave them a very black
character as merciless cannibals, impossible to reduce or convert;
but the French and English settlers speak of them in better terms. In
appearance they were tall and strong, with low foreheads, hooked noses,
prominent cheek bones, tattooed skins, and wore their black hair long
and tangled. The older writers affirm that they spoke Atakapa, and were
a branch of that tribe; but the scanty material of their idiom which we
possess seems to place them in a stock by themselves.
The _Tonkaways_ are a small tribe who lived in northwest Texas, speaking
a tongue without known relationship. A curious feature of their mythology
is the deification of the wolf. They speak of this animal as their common
ancestor, and at certain seasons hold wolf dances in his honor, at which
they dress themselves in wolf skins and howl and run in imitation of
their mythical ancestor and patron. A branch of them, the Arrenamuses, is
said to have dwelt considerably to the south of the main body, near the
mouth of the San Antonio river.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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