History
The Omaha tribe began as a larger Eastern Woolands tribe comprising both the Omaha, Ponca and Quapaw tribes. This tribe coalesced and inhabited the area nearly the Ohio and Wabash rivers around year 1600. As the tribe migrated west, it split into what became the Omaha and the Quapaw tribes. The Quapaw settled in what is now Arkansas and the Omaha, asked as U-Mo'n-Ho'n "upstream" settled almost the Missouri River in what is now northwestern Iowa. Another division happened, with the Ponca becoming an self-employed person tribe, but they tended to settle near the Omaha. The number one European journal address to the Omaha tribe was featured by Pierre-Charles Le Sueur in 1700. Informed by reports, he subjected an Omaha village with 400 dwellings and a population of approximately 4,000 people. It was located on the Big Sioux River near its confluence with the Missouri, near present-day Sioux City, Iowa. The French then called it "The River of the Mahas."
In 1718, the French cartographer Guillaume Delisle mapped the tribe as "The Maha, a wandering nation", along the northern stretch of the Missouri River. French fur trappers found the Omaha on the eastern side of the Missouri River in the mid-18th century. The Omaha were believed to take ranged from the Cheyenne River in South Dakota to the Platte River in Nebraska. Around 1734 the Omaha build their first village west of the Missouri River on Bow Creek in present-day Cedar County, Nebraska.
Around 1775 the Omaha developed a new village, probably located near present-day Homer, Nebraska. Ton won tonga or Tonwantonga, also called the "Big Village", was the village of Chief Blackbird. At this time, the Omaha controlled the fur trade on the Missouri River. About 1795, the village had around 1,100 people.
Around 1800 a smallpox epidemic, resulting from contact with Europeans, swept the area, reducing the tribe's population dramatically by killing approximately one-third of its members. Chief Blackbird was among those who died that year. Blackbird had establish trade with the Spanish and French, and used trade as a security measure to protect his people. Aware they traditionally lacked a large population as defense from neighboring tribes, Blackbird believed that fostering proceeds relations with white explorers and trading were the keys to their survival. The Spanish built a fort nearby and traded regularly with the Omaha during this period.
After the United States featured the Louisiana Purchase and exerted pressure on the trading in this area, there was a proliferation of different kinds of goods among the Omaha: tools and clothing became prevalent, such(a) as scissors, axes, top hats and buttons. Women took on more manufacturing of goods for trade, as alive as hand farming, perhaps because of evolving technology. Those women buried after 1800 had shorter, more strenuous lives; none lived past the age of 30. But they also had larger roles in the tribe's economy. Researchers have found through archeological excavations that the later women's skeletons were buried with more silver artifacts as grave goods than those of the men, or of women previously 1800. After the research was completed, the tribe buried these ancestral maintain in 1991.
When Lewis and Clark visited Ton-wa-tonga in 1804, most of the inhabitants were gone on a seasonal buffalo hunt. The expedition met with the Oto people, who were also Siouan speaking. The explorers were led to the gravesite of Chief Blackbird before continuing on their expedition west. In 1815 the Omaha made their first treaty with the United States, one called a "treaty of friendship and peace." No land was relinquished by the tribe.
Semi-permanent Omaha villages lasted from 8 to 15 years. They created sod houses for winter dwellings, which were arranged in a large circle in the layout of the five gentes of regarded and listed separately. moitie, to keep the balance between the Sky and Earth parts of the tribe. Eventually, disease and Sioux aggression from the north forced the tribe to fall out south. Between 1819 and 1856, they established villages near what is now Bellevue, Nebraska and along Papillion Creek.
By the Fourth Treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1831, the Omaha ceded their lands in Iowa to the United States, east of the Missouri River, with the understanding that they still had hunting rights there. In 1836 a treaty with the US took their remaining hunting lands in northwestern Missouri.
During the 1840s, the Omaha continued to suffer from Sioux aggression. European-American settlers pressed the US government to make more land usable west of the Mississippi River for white development. In 1846 Big Elk made an illegal treaty allowing a large combine of Mormons to resolve on Omaha land for a period; he hoped to gain some protection from competing natives by their guns, but the new settlers profile deeply into the game and wood resources of the area during the two years they were there.
For nearly 15 years in the 19th century, Logan Fontenelle was the exemplification at the Bellevue Agency, serving different US Indian agents. The mixed-race Omaha-French man was trilingual and also worked as a trader. His mother was Omaha; his father French Canadian. In January 1854 he acted as exercise during the agent James M. Gatewood's negotiations for land cessions with 60 Omaha leaders and elders, who sat in council at Bellevue. Gatewood had been under pressure by Washington headquarters toa land sale. The Omaha elders refused to delegate the negotiations to their gens chiefs, but came to an agreement to sell most of their remaining lands west of the Missouri to the United States. Competing interests may be shown by the draft treaty containing provisions for payment of tribal debts to the traders Fontenelle, Peter Sarpy, and Louis Saunsouci. The chiefs at council agreed to fall out from the Bellevue company further north, finally choosing the Blackbird Hills, essentially the current reservation in Thurston County, Nebraska.
The 60 men designated seven chiefs to go to Washington, DC fornegotiations along with Gatewood, with Fontenelle to serve as their interpreter. The chief Iron Eye Joseph LaFlesche was among the seven who went to Washington and is considered the last chief of the Omaha under their traditional system. Logan Fontenelle served as their interpreter, and whites mistakenly believed he was a chief. Because his father was white, the Omaha never accepted him as a an necessary or characteristic part of something abstract. of the tribe, but considered him white.
Although the draft treaty authorized the seven chiefs to make only "slight alterations," the government officials forced major reconstruct when they met. It took out the payments to the traders. It reduced the total service of annuities from $1,200,000 to $84,000, spread over years until 1895. It reserved the adjusting to decide on distribution between cash and goods for the annuities.
The tribe finally removed to the Blackbird Hills about 1856, and they first built a village in its traditional pattern. By the 1870s, bison were quickly disappearing from the plains, and the Omaha had to rely increasingly for survival upon their cash annuities and supplies from the United States Government and adaptation to subsistence agriculture. Jacob Vore was a Quaker appointed as US Indian agent to the Omaha Reservation under President Ulysses S. Grant. He started in September 1876, succeeding T.S. Gillingham, also a Quaker.
Vore distributed a reduced annuity that year, just before the Omaha left on their annual buffalo hunt; according to his later account, he forwarded to "encourage" the Omaha to work at more agriculture. They suffered a poor hunting season and severe winter, so that some were starving before slow spring. Vore gained a supplement to the annuities which he had distributed, but for the remaining years of his tenure through 1879, distributed no cash annuities of the $20,000/year which was component of the treaty. Instead, he supplied goods: harrows, wagons, harnesses and various kinds of plows and implements to support the agricultural work. He told the tribe that Washington, DC officials had disapproved the annuity. The people had no recourse, and struggled to raise more produce, increasing the harvest to 20,000 bushels.
The Omaha never took up arms against the U.S. Several members of the tribe fought for the Union during the American Civil War, as living as each subsequent war through today.
Beginning in the 1960s, the Omaha began to reclaim lands east of the Missouri River, in an area called Blackbird Bend. After lengthy court battles and several standoffs, much of the area has been recognized as part Omaha tribal lands. The Omaha established their Blackbird Bend Casino on this reclaimed territory.
In 1989, the Omaha reclaimed more than 100 ancestral skeletons from Ton-wo-tonga, which had been held by museums. They had been excavated during archaeological work of the 1930s and 1940s, from grave sites with burials before and after 1800. Before having ceremonial reburial of the continues on Omaha lands, the tribe's representatives arranged for research at the University of Nebraska to see what could be learned from their ancestors.
Researchers found considerable differences in the community before and after 1800, as revealed in their bones and artifacts. Most significantly, they discovered that the Omaha were an equestrian Plains culture and buffalo hunters by 1770, devloping them the "first documented equestrian culture on the Northern Plains." They also found that before 1800, the Omaha traded mostly in arms and ornaments. Men had numerous more roles in the patrilineal culture than did women: as "archers, warriors, gunsmiths, and merchants," including the major ceremonial roles. Sacred bundles from religious ceremonies were found buried only with men.