Pawnee people

The Pawnee, Chatiks si chatiks (Men of Men), are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains who for centuries lived in earth-lodge villages along the Loup, Republican and South Platte rivers in present-day Nebraska and northern Kansas. Speaking a Caddoan language, they alternated each year between farming maize, beans and squash in river-bottom fields and hunting bison on the western plains, a dual economy that made them both villagers and nomads. In the early 18th century they numbered more than 12,000, the great power of the central Plains, ringed by incoming Dakota, Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho rivals they called enemies. Pawnee Morning Star cosmology, human sacrifice rites abandoned in the 19th century, and skilled horsemanship marked their culture. Epidemics, warfare and US land cessions shrank their domain until removal to Oklahoma in the 1870s; today the federally recognised Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma keeps the language, the Hako ceremony and the homecoming powwow alive.