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A couple of sentences of personal testimony (thoroughfare readers not happy on byways may proceed to the next chapter): I’ve carried one name for all of my life and another one for twelve years less than that, and I’ve come to see that while the two names attach to the same man from the epidermis out, on the inward side—the soupy side, my physician grandfather called it—the names point to men of different inclinations, dissimilar alignments, fellows of unlike silks whose souls are as chalk to cheese. One is a kind of dreamer who often darkly transmutes and even undoes the work of the more orderly man, the one who always squeezes the tube from the bottom, always wipes his shoes before entering. Actually, I believe there are more than this pair: when the Populist congressman “Sockless” Simpson of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, misspelled his hometown while running for office, he said, I wouldn’t give a tinker’s durn for a man who can’t spell a word more than one way. I think I’m like that about interior selves.
Many tribal Americans believe that a person turns into his name, partakes of its nature in such a way that it is a mold the possessor comes to fill. When names lose their first meaning, as they have to most Americans of European descent, that mold becomes only a handle for others to move us around with. I think places also take on aspects of their names, at least if they touch something genuine to begin with. If you’ve never visited the twin towns of Chase County, I could give you a quick tour of each and then ask you to say which is which, and you would not call Cottonwood Falls Strong City or vice versa. They have filled out their names, become them. A decade ago, before the big feedlot at Strong closed, that town filled out its name in an additional, olfactory way.
Imagine: I set before you two bouquets of prairie flowers, both pinky white. One dangles elegant blossoms like little trumpets while the other has only small, tightly clustered blooms that you must look at twice to notice. I ask you to guess which one is larkspur and which bastard toadflax. The names, appearances, and your responses converge: larkspur is the one of obvious beauty. But what if we go beyond appearances and I ask you to eat the fruit of one, to take of its essence, and I tell you that one is poisonous but the other used to be an Indian dessert? You must choose, and, while you do, read on.
Another question: in a word, freely associating, speak your response to the name Kansas. Now, what if the state carried one of the other labels linked with it: Quivira, Osage, Shawnee, Arapaho? Years back, someone proposed the territory be called Cherokee. Do these labels fit your response? On maps, Kansas has been Terra Incognita, Nuevo Mexico, Louisiana, Missouri Territory, Oregon Territory, Nebraska Territory, Indian Territory, Platte Country, and the Great American Desert, and its epithets have been Bleeding and Drouthy, and it’s been the Grasshopper State and the New Garden of Eden. There’s some historical accuracy in all of these but little in this one—Kansas—and the confusion from the misnomer shows even today when the people here insist on calling the Kansas River the Kaw while pronouncing the Arkansas River “Our Kansas.” Ethnographers call the eponymous Indians the Kansa, and the native people now call themselves the Kaw.
For years my grandfather practiced medicine in Kansas City, Kansas, in the lower Kaw Valley—never the Kansas Valley—and he missed no chance to correct anyone who dropped a syllable and pronounced his town “Can City” (he also insisted that the double s in Missouri was a sibilant, as in Mississippi); but there is precedent for calling the city, state, river, and tribe Can. There’s also precedent for calling them Camps, Ka-Anjou, Kamse, Kay, Konzo, Quans. Had history bent in a slightly different course, the professional football team on the Missouri side of the Big Muddy could have been the Chanchez City Chiefs. The possibilities increase when you include names whites have confused with the word Kansa: Accances, Arkansaw, Excanjaque, Okanis, Ukasa. To have adopted any of these dozen versions would have changed more things here than just maps and phone directories, because never can the image belonging to Karsa be the same as that of Kathagi or even Kunza.
In this territory, Coronado sought out the Guas (probably the Kaws), La Harpe visited the Canci, Bourgmont met the Ecanze, George Sibley traveled among the Konsee, and the Lewis and Clark expedition encountered the Kanzus (the most accurate spelling for our pronunciation) but they and their men spelled the word eleven other ways. That eminence of historical thought, Francis Parkman, on his map of the area identified the natives as Kanisse. None of these men spoke the language of the Kansa, a Siouan dialect, and today we are not sure any of the earliest explorers asked the people what they then called themselves, a different question from asking other tribes or whites what they called the Kansa.
I’ve come across 140 ways to spell Kansas, and, if you include the confused Ac-, Es-, Ex-, Ok-, Uk- forms at times applied to the tribe, I’ve found 171 variations that employ every letter of the alphabet except b, f, and v. The question comes up, if whites couldn’t get a three- or six-letter name correct, what else couldn’t they get right? The meaning of the word for one thing: Kansa and its forms have been translated as wind, windy, wind people, south wind people, those-who-come-like-wind-across-the-prairie, swift, swift wind, swift river, swift water, smoky water, fire people, plum people, disturbers, troublemakers, filthy, and cowards. Dispense with the freak translations like the last four, and you have a people defined by three of the four ancient elements.
Six full-blood Kansa, all men and all but one over sixty-five, are still living but none of them can speak more than a few words of the old language; they use almost exclusively the word Kaw for the tribe even though they know their parents called themselves Kōn-say (a spelling I’ve never seen except in my own notes); the n comes out almost as a w and the second syllable nearly disappears, so that you can imagine an illiterate French trapper believing he heard “Kaw.” The first uncontested written reference to the tribe appears on Pere Marquette’s 1673 map where the word is Kansa. In nearly all of the 171 variants, one thing remains constant: a voiceless velar usually followed by a nasalized ah. Whatever butchering of this basic sound by whites, the Kansa seem to have accepted it, and one uppity Anglo said the people tolerated the word Kaw because they were so degraded, but I wonder how many Indians he thrashed for mispronouncing his name. Tact is a more plausible explanation for their tolerance.
The six surviving natives, most of whom live across the state line in Oklahoma near the last Kaw reservation, accept “People of the South Wind” or “Wind People” as the meaning of the name, even though that definition derives from a time long ago when the Kansa, with the Osage and several other now separate tribes, belonged to a bigger Siouan group living in the upper Ohio River Valley (some ethnologists believe those people were descendants of the ones who built or later used the great earthen mounds of that region); in the early sixteenth century, this larger tribe moved down the Ohio to the Mississippi and then up the Missouri, fragmenting as they migrated, until the Wind People arrived at the junction of the Kansas River with the Big Muddy.
Even before the great migration, the word Kansa referred to a gens whose totem was the wind; that the Kansa would one day give their name to a state famous for its winds is only a wonderful coincidence, although to me it goes beyond: in the Siouan family of languages, the Four Winds, the Great Mysterious, is commonly Wakan or Wakanda. Yet the everyday Kansa word for wind is quite different: ta-dshe, and the Osage form—the two peoples understand each other as a Kentuckian does a Cockney—is ta-dse. The Osage called the Kansa Kan-the; in my Osage dictionary (for the Kaw there are only a couple of old word lists), the term for swift is kon-tha-gi, plum is kon-dse, horse is ka-wa, and human being, a common translation of many tribes’ names for themselves, is ni-ka-shi-ga-ego (ni means water or river).
I suppose, over the last four centuries, that this place called Kansas has come, like a murky chunk of softened glass, to fill the mold of its name, and I believe that today we see it through that now hardened form descended from unlettered explorers, careless map printers, and travelers and settlers who deemed red people worth no name but heathen. Had any white asked, we might have learned more about the name the Kansa may have once called themselves: Hutanga. We might also understand what it meant to them instead of having to rely on a twentieth-century Osage dictionary: “big fish” or “big water-dweller.” Now, whatever links may have once existed between the word hutanga and the Kansa’s most sacred object in historic times—a conch shell—are lost.
Given the erosions and eradications of history, I incline to Sock-less Simpson’s view: any people who can spell their homeplace only one way probably aren’t worth a tinker’s durn, and I append the 140 variations of the name for the Wind People as homage to their richness:
And the flowers—your answer? If you chose to eat the bastard toadflax, have another helping. If you chose for euphony and ate larkspur, you’re going to need an emetic of pokeweed root. Bastard toadflax by any other name would be sweeter, and so would our perception of it.