Talk:Black Hawk (Sauk leader)

Comment on tour
Come on, editors! How can this be in the article? "After the war he was captured and taken to the eastern U.S. where he and other British Band leaders toured several cities." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.188.77.110 (talk) 14:50, 20 November 2008 (UTC)


 * That's actually the truth of it, he and the others were received by large crowds and pretty much paraded about like zoo animals, pathetic really. In places like Detroit though, close to the area where the fighting during the Black Hawk War occurred they were not so well received. If you have a suggestion for a better way to word it, please feel free to add it here or just directly to the article. --IvoShandor (talk) 15:25, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Name of article
The article was recently moved from Black Hawk (chief) to its current title, Black Hawk (Sauk leader), without (current) discussion. I thought (chief) was fine. But in the interest of compromise, and since I think it should be the least controversial, I would suggest that instead we move the article to Black Hawk and move the disambiguation page there to Black Hawk (disambiguation). HeLmiT (talk) 03:45, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I support your suggested move of this article to simply Black Hawk. "Chief" is not the best disambiguator because Black Hawk wasn't exactly a chief. Whites often called war captains like Black Hawk "chiefs" or "war chiefs", but historians often avoid doing this, since it confuses more than it clarifies. —Kevin Myers 04:15, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I think just "Black Hawk" is fine. But if that does not work, consider "Black Hawk (war chief)". -fnlayson (talk) 04:23, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * "Chief" is the word in the disambiguation that we probably should avoid, since not all reliable sources agree that it is accurate. If we do disambiguate this, the current one (Sauk leader) is better than anything with "chief". —Kevin Myers 23:35, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree that Black Hawk should lead to this article about the Sauk leader, with a link to a BH disambig page. I also agree that changing the name of an important article should be done only after discussion, "Sauk leader" might be better than "Chief" but there are a bajillion pages that link to the old name... (I'm still retired, just doing a check on my watchlist) Bill Whittaker (talk) 16:30, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Actually, there aren't very many article pages that actually link here; most appear to link through a template, which only needs changing once. Whatever the final page name, the article redirects could be repointed in less than 5 minutes, so we can afford to get the name right and fix the links later. —Kevin Myers 23:35, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * A Google search for the exact URL using (chief) returns 130 places it is linked, most of them external to Wikipedia. BillHart93 (talk) 01:54, 21 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Then it's a good thing we fix the misleading "chief" terminology sooner than later, and let the rest of the Internet take care of itself! —Kevin Myers 02:06, 21 December 2010 (UTC)


 * By the way, I added some text in the article about why modern scholars don't call Black Hawk a "chief" very often. Without this information, I now realize, some people reading this discussion might wonder what the hell I am talking about. I have the four most recent academic works about the Black Hawk War on my desk right now, and I don't think any of them ever call Black Hawk a "chief". That's not a slight against Black Hawk; his role as a band leader made him more influential than a civil chief or ordinary war captain. —Kevin Myers 02:06, 21 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Oppose - No evidence presented that the Sauk leader is the primary topic for Black Hawk, and it doesn't appear to be either. - BilCat (talk) 17:07, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Name origin
Name origin/translation Long ago the true translation of this storied Sack/Fox tribe warrior could very well have been misinterpreted. The natural Native range of American Black Hawk raptor species is found much farther South of Illinois! While the Midwestern Prairie's native bird species is "American Crow". CHICAGOCONCERTMAN (talk) 09:47, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Discuss
 * The "Black Sparrow Hawk" species home range is only within Africa. The American kestrel known as a "Sparrow Hawk" does not fit source description of large black hawk type bird either. Even in modern times like present, most people mistakenly call Northern Illinois native American Crow, a "Black Hawk" or Big blackbird. Can anyone supply link to oldest references involving this subject? The answer may not lie in origin of how the storied native American received his name, but the unique bird species traditional definitions credited to local tribes. Were the early French explorers aware of differences and individual ranges between American Black Hawks and Crows? Ponder this fact, the National hockey league team Blackhawks were loosely named after local legend. Correcting one small but important footnote in history might be better left conveniently, in error.CHICAGOCONCERTMAN (talk) 00:33, 1 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Interesting question. A Sauk dictionary online says that "hawk" is kêhkêhkwa while "crow" is kâkâkiwa. Perhaps Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak should have been originally translated as "Black Crow" instead of "Black Hawk." It would nice if someone knowledgeable about the language and the sources examined this. —Kevin Myers 07:49, 1 June 2015 (UTC)


 * A tribal language educator assures me that the name in the original language means big black hawk; and I stumbled onto an article that, with reference to Harlan's hawk, says the following: "In 'Birds of Indiana', A. M. Butler, in the Report of the State Geologist for 1897, p. 784, says, 'accidental visitor. Mr. R. B. Williams, Lebanon, Indiana, has a fine specimen of this hawk, shot in September, 1887, in Boone County, Indiana. This is the first record of the black hawk from Indiana. The well-known Indian chief, Black Hawk, was probably named after this bird.'" Richard Dieterle suggests that the neighbouring Siouan people (the Ho-Chunk) associated the term "black hawk" with the American swallow-tailed kite.  But the more I read about Harlan's hawk, the more likely it seems to me that Black Hawk was named for one of them. There is a debate about whether Harlan's hawk should continue to be classified as a subspecies of the extremely common red-tailed hawk or be a distinct species onto itself. That would help explain why nobody seems to know what species of bird Black Hawk was named for.  However, I am still looking into the matter and do not feel ready to introduce these observations into the article text. WhichBird (talk) 02:55, 17 March 2021 (UTC)


 * According to George Catlin, the painter of one of the portraits of Black Hawk in the article: “When I painted this chief, he was dressed in a plain suit of buckskin, with strings of wampum in his ears and on his neck, and held in his hand, his medicine-bag, which was the skin of a black hawk, from which he had taken his name, and the tail of which made him a fan, which he was almost constantly using.” (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 56, 1841; reprint 1973) The fan seems to be made of tail feathers from a broad-winged hawk, as in this example. WhichBird (talk) 19:45, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Chief → leader
I recently changed occurrences of "chief" to "leader", but was reverted. There are many good arguments that "chief" is not the best word to use as it's a European word that basically means leader. I will note that our only featured article about a Native American leader is Irataba, where we used leader instead of chief. I know OSE is sometimes a weak argument, but the issue came up at FAC and the consensus was to avoid "chief" in favor of "leader". , what's your reasoning to leave it chief. RO (talk) 17:33, 14 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Sauk concepts of leadership are unlike western concepts; they had parallel systems of hereditary clan leadership and situational leaders could also occur, leading a war party or trading party. Neither "chief" or "leader" reflect this complexity, and therefore I am not too horribly worried about using one or the other, both are imperfect translations. Edgar Vekilnik, Jr. (talk) 23:20, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

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