Sunday 3 October 2021

MA-KA-TAI-ME-SHE-KIA-KIAK (BLACK HAWK), THE SAUK

Today, The Grandma has been reading about one of her greatest passions, the American Native Nations.

She has been searching information about Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak aka Black Hawk, the Sauk leader and warrior, who died on a day like today in 1838.

Black Hawk, born Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak (1767-October 3, 1838), was a Sauk leader and warrior who lived in what is now the Midwestern United States. Although he had inherited an important historic sacred bundle from his father, he was not a hereditary civil chief. Black Hawk earned his status as a war chief or captain by his actions: leading raiding and war parties as a young man and then a band of Sauk warriors during the Black Hawk War of 1832.

During the War of 1812, Black Hawk fought on the side of the British against the US in the hope of pushing white American settlers away from Sauk territory. Later, he led a band of Sauk and Fox warriors, known as the British Band, against white settlers in Illinois and present-day Wisconsin during the 1832 Black Hawk War.

After the war, he was captured by US forces and taken to the Eastern US, where he and other war leaders were taken on a tour of several cities.

Shortly before being released from custody, Black Hawk told his story to an interpreter. Aided also by a newspaper reporter, he published Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of his Nation... in 1833 in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The first Native American autobiography to be published in the US, his book became an immediate bestseller and has gone through several editions.

Black Hawk died in 1838, at age 70 or 71, in what is now southeastern Iowa. He has been honoured by an enduring legacy: his book, many eponyms, and other tributes.

More information: The Atlantic

Black Hawk, or Black Sparrow Hawk, Sauk Ma-kat-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, be a large black hawk, was born in 1767 in the village of Saukenuk on the Rock River (present-day Rock Island, Illinois).

Black Hawk's father Pyesa was the tribal medicine man of the Sauk people. The Sauk used the village year around. They built log homes, fenced in their fields, and hunted in Illinois and across the Mississippi River in Iowa.

Little is known about Black Hawk's youth. He was said to be a descendant of Nanamakee (Thunder), a Sauk chief who, according to tradition, met an early French explorer, possibly Samuel de Champlain. At age 15, Black Hawk accompanied his father Pyesa on a raid against the Osage. He won approval by killing and scalping his first enemy. The young Black Hawk tried to establish himself as a war captain by leading other raids.

He had limited success until, at age 19, he led 200 men in a battle against the Osage, in which he personally killed five men and one woman. Soon after, he joined his father in a raid against Cherokee along the Meramec River in Missouri. After Pyesa died from wounds received in the battle, Black Hawk inherited the Sauk medicine bundle which his father had carried, giving him an important role in the tribe.

After an extended period of mourning for his father, Black Hawk resumed leading raiding parties over the next years, usually targeting the traditional enemy, the Osage. Black Hawk did not belong to a clan that provided the Sauk with hereditary civil leaders, or chiefs. He achieved status through his exploits as a warrior and by leading successful raiding parties.

Men like Black Hawk are sometimes called war chiefs, but historian Patrick Jung writes, It is more accurate to call them 'war leaders' since the nature of their office and the power that it wielded was much different from that of a civil chief. Twenty-first-century historians such as John W. Hall have suggested the term war captain for this role.

During the War of 1812, Black Hawk, now 45, served as a war leader of a Sauk band at their village of Saukenuk, which fielded about 200 warriors. He supported the invalidity of Quashquame's Treaty of St. Louis (1804) between the Sauk and Fox nations and then-Governor William Henry Harrison of the Indiana Territory that ceded territory, including Saukenuk, to the United States.

The Sauk and Fox are consensus-based decision makers and those representatives sent to the meeting with the US government did not have the power to cede tribal territory, although Quashquame did. The lack of the consensus aspect by each of the Sauk and Fox councils meant that the treaty could never be considered valid by Black Hawk and other traditionalists.

Black Hawk took part in skirmishes against US forces at the newly constructed Fort Madison in the disputed land; this was the first time he fought directly against the U.S. Army.

During the War of 1812, forces of Great Britain and its colonies in present-day Canada were engaged against those of the U.S., with major battles on the Great Lakes and surrounding remote lands. The British depended upon alliances with the Native American population to wage war in this area, since the British were occupied with Napoleon in Europe.

Robert Dickson, a Scottish fur trader, amassed a sizable force of Native Americans at Green Bay to assist the British in operations around the Great Lakes. Most were from the Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, Kickapoo, and Ottawa tribes. Black Hawk and his band of about 200 Sauk warriors were included in this group of allies.

During the war, Black Hawk and Native warriors fought in several engagements alongside Major-General Henry Procter on the borders of Lake Erie.

Black Hawk was at the Battle of Frenchtown, Fort Meigs, and the attack on Fort Stephenson. The United States Army was able to inflict a significant defeat on Tecumseh's Confederacy by killing Tecumseh during the war.

More information: One Illinois

Black Hawk despaired over the many lives lost in the fighting; soon after, he quit the war to return home. Back in Saukenuk, he found that his rival Keokuk had become the tribe's war chief.

Black Hawk rejoined the British effort toward the end of the war, fighting alongside British forces in campaigns along the Mississippi River near the Illinois Territory. At the Battle of Credit Island and by harassing U.S. troops at Fort Johnson, Black Hawk helped the British to push the Americans out of the upper Mississippi River valley.

Black Hawk fought in the Battle of the Sink Hole (May 1815), leading an ambush on a group of Missouri Rangers. Conflicting accounts of the action were given by the Missouri leader John Shaw and by Black Hawk.

After the end of the War of 1812, Black Hawk signed a peace treaty in May 1816 that re-affirmed the treaty of 1804. Later, he said he was not aware of this stipulation.

Following the war, with most of the British Band killed, and the rest captured or disbanded, the defeated Black Hawk was held in captivity at Jefferson Barracks near Saint Louis, Missouri together with Neapope, White Cloud, and eight other leaders.

After eight months, in April 1833 they were taken east, as ordered by U.S. President Andrew Jackson. The men were taken by steamboat, carriage, and railroad, and met with large crowds wherever they went. Jackson wanted them to be impressed with the power of the United States. Once in Washington, D.C., they met with Jackson and Secretary of War Lewis Cass. Afterward, they were delivered to their final destination, prison at Fortress Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. They were held only a few weeks at the prison, during which they posed for portraits by different artists.

More information: What-When-How

On June 5, 1833, the men were sent west by steamboat on a circuitous route that took them through many large cities. Again, the men were a spectacle everywhere they went, and were greeted by huge crowds of people in cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. In the west, closer to the battle sites and history of conflict, the reception was much different. For instance, in Detroit, a crowd burned and hanged effigies of the prisoners.

After his tour of the east, Black Hawk lived with the Sauk along the Iowa River and later the Des Moines River near Iowaville in what is now southeast Iowa. At the end of his life, he tried to reconcile both with American settlers and with his Sauk rivals, including Keokuk.

Black Hawk died on October 3, 1838 after two weeks of illness. He was buried on the farm of his friend James Jordan, on the north bank of the Des Moines River in Davis County.

In July 1839, his remains were stolen by James Turner, who prepared his skeleton for exhibition. Black Hawk's sons Nashashuk and Gamesett went to Governor Robert Lucas of Iowa Territory, who used his influence to bring the bones to security in his offices in Burlington. With the permission of Black Hawk's sons, the remains were held by the Burlington Geological and Historical Society. When the Society's building burned down in 1855, Black Hawk's remains were destroyed.

An alternative account is that Governor Lucas passed Black Hawk's bones to Enos Lowe, a Burlington physician, who was said to have left them to his partner, Dr. McLaurens. After McLaurens moved to California, workers were reported to have found the bones at his house. They buried the remains in a potter's grave in Aspen Grove Cemetery in Burlington.

There is a marker for him in the Iowaville Cemetery on the hill over the river, although it is unknown if any of his remains are there.

More information: Chicago Tribune


 We were becoming like them, hypocrites and liars,
adulterers, lazy drones, all talkers, and no workers.

Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak

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