wiiyaakiteeheelo weehki-kihkatwe ‘Happy (Gregorian) New Year!’

In the next few days, we’ll be celebrating the Gregorian New Year! While this is the most commonly celebrated calendar new year around the world, it is also not the only one. For Myaamiaki, our year is based on the lunar calendar which reflects the cycles of the moon. This puts our lunar new year…

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Ciinkwia Minohsaya ‘Painted Thunderbird Robe’ Series

We have partnered with a team of scholars to bring you a new series of interpretations of this Ciinkwia Minohsaya ‘Painted Thunderbird Robe.’ In this short discussion, our team explores a series of key questions as they seek to contextualize this beautiful work of art in time and place, as well as within the culture…

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Four Versions of a Little Turtle Speech at Greenville, 1795

Four Versions of a Little Turtle Speech at Greenville, 1795 *and a conversation about them The following four primary sources all reveal aspects of a critical message delivered by the Myaamia leader Mihšihkinaahkwa ‘Little Turtle’ during the summer of 1795 at negotiations in Greenville in the Ohio territory. For the context, see our previous two…

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ciinkwia waahpyaaci ‘Thunder has Arrived’

ciinkwia awiiwahi neehineeciki neehi-hsa ciinkwia noontaakweeci ‘The spring peepers have been singing and thunder has sounded.’ It’s happened at different times over the last three weeks, but we can say with certainty that following the first thunderstorm of the year, peepoonki ‘winter’ has come to an end and neepinwiki ‘summer’ has begun. For many Myaamiaki…

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Making Myaamia Mahkisina

My first mahkisina ‘moccasins’ were given to me by one of my distantly related cousins. Odds are that she also got them as a hand-me-down. I was young enough that I don’t remember much about them because they only fit for a short period of time. Replacing them was never a priority since I did…

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Treaty of 1838

This audio file is a reading of the post that follows. In the previous post, we saw that after years of refusing to sell additional land, exhausted Myaamia leaders agreed to sign the Treaty of 1834. As soon as we ratified the 1834 Treaty in 1837, the federal government came back to us with pressure to…

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waawaahsinaakwahki ‘It Shimmers’

peepankišaapiikahkia eehkwaatamenki ‘Myaamia ribbonwork’ is an artform in which an artist layers, cuts, folds, and sews ribbons onto textiles to create intricate geometric patterns. The artform reached an initial peak of beauty and complexity in the mid-1800s, but by the early 1900s the practice of ribbonwork was in steep decline. In the 1990s, Myaamia people…

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