User talk:Noelschutz

Generally it is said that the word Shawnee (Shawano, Shawanwa) means south or southerner. I did not address this in my Ph.D. dissertation (Shawnee Myth in and Ethnographic and Ethnohistorical Perspective, Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, 1975), but have posted information on it from my continued research on the Internet and my website (http://www.shawnee-traditions.com). The stem shawa- means moderating or warm (usually with respect to weather) in many Algonquian languages, but in Delaware and Mohegan the word that Shawnee comes from does mean south. In texts that C. F. Voegelin and I (under his direction) collected the native speakers did not know a meaning for the word, but variants of it, such as Shawaki (the personal name of the maneto (Grandfather) of the south, alluding to the warm wind from the South. In the 19th century two fieldworkers, Jeremiha Curtin and Albert Gatschet independently collected a tale of duels between Southwind (Shawaki) and Northwind (Pekonki) and ) was translated by one narrator as Southerner so it has this allusion and I believe the case for Shawanwa being derived from Shawa is strong, and the "n" appears in the word Shawan 'It is moderating (the weather)'. In the Trowbridge documents both the Shawnee Prophet and Black Hoof believed that the name of the tribe derived from a former Shawnee division that was by then (early 1820s) defunct. This would have been the group found in the area of Philadelphia and indicated on Dutch maps (1614-16) and would to me indicate that the tribal name ultimately came from the Delaware (whom the Shawnee call Grandfathers). It is also possible that Chowan remnants joined the Shawnee as they formed the Shawnee Nation in a confederacy in the Cumberland area from the several (five known) southern Algonquian tribes (divisions).

I have discussed the Shawnee confederacy and its impact on clans in the social organization in the Introduction to the book Shawnee Heritage written with Don Greene (in the context of the Shawnee naming system. It is available in eBook form at . The book also contains a couple hundred translations of historic Shawnee names and an account of the naming system. Some of this is also available on the website here: http://www.shawnee-tradions.com.

Shawnee-traditions has a brief description of the Shawnee Language by Kenneth Andrews that might be appropriate to this article and I will add it shortly here.

Noelschutz 11:38, 1 December 2007 (UTC)