Description
The Iowa, also known as Ioway, and the Bah-Kho-Je or Báxoje are a Native American Siouan people. Today, they are enrolled in either of two federally recognized tribes, the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma and the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. The Iowa, Missouria, and Otoe tribes were all once part of the Ho-Chunk people. They left their ancestral homelands in Southern Wisconsin for Eastern Iowa, a state that bears their name. In 1837, the Iowa were moved from Iowa to reservations in Brown County, Kansas, and Richardson County, Nebraska. Bands of Iowa moved to Indian Territory in the late 19th century and settled south of Perkins, Oklahoma, to become the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma. The Ioway tribe is also known as the Báxoje tribe. Their name has been said to come from the Sioux ayuhwa ("sleepy ones.").
Language
Chiwere (also called Iowa-Otoe-Missouria or Baxoje-Jiwere-Nyut?achi) is a Siouan language originally spoken by the Missouria, Otoe, and Iowa peoples
Culture
The Iowa have had customs similar to those of the other Siouan-speaking tribes of the Great Plains, such as the Omaha, Ponca and Osage. They were a semi-nomadic people who had adopted horses for hunting, but they also had an agricultural lifestyle similar to the tribes inhabiting the Eastern woodlands. They planted maize and manufactured alum pipes, which they traded along with furs with the French colonizers. Historically, their houses included bark lodges, tipis, and at times, earth lodges—oven-shaped buildings covered with earth for protection from extremes of temperature and oriented to a cardinal direction. A smoke hole enabled ventilation from a central hearth. During the hunting season or in warfare, they used the portable tipi. Like the Osage or Kansa, Iowa men traditionally shaved their heads and decorated them with deer hide. Like Great Plains tribes, they valued three feats during a battle.