The Kiowa's sign-language name comes from a haircut designed for archery
In the sign language shared across the Great Plains, you say Kiowa by sweeping two fingers from beside your eye back past your ear. The gesture traces an old Kiowa hairstyle, cropped along that line so hair would not tangle in a bowstring. Their spoken language, meanwhile, had only 20 speakers left in 2012.
The Kiowa are a Great Plains nation whose story is one of long travel. They moved south from western Montana into the Colorado Rockies during the 17th and 18th centuries and reached the Southern Plains by the early 1800s. In 1867 they were forced onto a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma, and today the Kiowa Tribe is headquartered in Carnegie, with about 12,000 citizens as of 2011.
Their language puzzled anthropologists, since it is related to the Tanoan tongues of Pueblo farming villages far to the southwest. The link was proposed by the Smithsonian linguist John P. Harrington in 1910 and firmly established by Ken Hale in 1967. One theory, said to fit Kiowa oral tradition, places the speech community in the eastern Fremont region around 450 CE, drifting toward Yellowstone after 1300. Harrington worked with Parker McKenzie, a Kiowa scholar born in 1897 who learned English only at school, and unusually for the era credited him as lead author. An ancient name, Kwu-da, meaning coming out, recalls an origin story in which a creator pulled people from a hollow log until a pregnant woman got stuck. The English word Kiowa comes from the Comanche pronunciation.
Horses transformed their world. Before them, dogs pulled belongings on a travois, a frame made from tipi poles, and hunters crept up on bison on foot, sometimes disguised in wolf or coyote skins. After acquiring horses by raiding south of the Rio Grande and from neighbouring peoples, the Kiowa ranged far wider and became famed as some of the best riders on the Plains. Wealth was counted in horses, and rich men kept herds in the hundreds.
Daily life revolved around bison. Women dried the meat and pounded it with roughly an equal weight of fat, sometimes adding berries, to make pemmican for travel. Before metal pots arrived, food was boiled in hide-lined pits by dropping in rocks heated in a fire.
Source: Kiowa
