Although he did not meet them on his expedition in 1682, he wrote that they possessed many horses that mat have been acquired from Spanish settlers in Mexico. Seventeenth-century French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle (1643–1687), was the first European to record information about the Kiowa. The ancient Kiowa were wandering hunters who traveled the northwestern Great Plains following the vast herds of buffalo that were their primary food source. They may have lost their reservation, but they have not lost their traditions. Their ferocious resistance to the American settlement of their homeland made them legends. Cheyenne and Sioux drove the Kiowa from the Black Hills into Comanche territory, where, following a war, the Kiowa later made peace with the Comanche.Īlthough they were few in number, the Kiowa were respected across the Great Plains as proud and fierce warriors. The Kiowa mainly traded with the Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa. Some then married Sarci Indians and produced a tribe called the Kiowa Apache.Īfter 1700 the Kiowa were alternately friends and enemies with the Apache, Crow, and Cheyenne. On the way out a pregnant woman became stuck, barring the way so those behind her could not exit this explains why there were so few Kiowa. They say their ancestors came into this world from an underworld by passing through a hollow log. Tribal stories say the Kiowa originated near the sources of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers in western Montana. At that time, 12,398 people claimed to have some Kiowa blood. The 2000 census showed 8,321 Kiowa (7,853 Kiowa and 467 Oklahoma Kiowa). Census, 9,460 people identified themselves as Kiowa (8,936 Kiowa and 524 Oklahoma Kiowa). In the early nineteenth century there were about 1,800 Kiowa.

In the 1990s nearly 6,500 lived in several small cities in southwest Oklahoma near their former reservation, which no longer exists. In 1700 they were living near the Black Hills of South Dakota, but moved to the southern Great Plains in 1785. The Kiowa’s earliest known homeland was in western Montana. Their name for themselves was kwuda, which means “coming out,” a reference to their origin story. It later evolved into the name “Kiowa,” which means “the Principal People” to the tribe. The name Kiowa (pronounced KIE-uh-wuh) comes from the Comanche word “Kaigwa,” meaning “two halves differ,” describing Kiowa warriors who cut their hair on only one side and left the other side long.

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