Country of the Pawnees

The band the plaque calls Kitkahahakis names itself Kítkehahki in the South Band dialect and Kítkahaahki in Skiri, a name usually given in English as Little Muddy Bottom Village or Little Earth Lodge Village. By the late nineteenth century it had divided into the larger Kitkahahki proper and a small group known as Little Kitkahahki. The band still governs: the Pawnee Nation's Nasharo, or Chiefs' Council, seats two representatives from each of the four bands, Chaui, Kitkahahki, Pitahawirata and Skiri, and reviews the Business Council's acts on citizenship and treaty claims.

What the plaque says

Country of the Pawnees For many centuries this region was the homeland of the Republic band (Kitkahahakis) of Pawnees. A numerous and prosperous people, the Pawnees dominated the north central Plains for hundreds of years. While Pawnee men were hunters, the women were accomplished farmers, tilling the bottomlands of the Republican and along other tributaries. The Pawnees lived in villages, which contained several large earth lodges that housed as many as 50 people. "I cannot live in a white man's house of any kind...I must live there also so that as I sit I can stretch out my hand and lay it upon mother earth." —Tahi'roossawichi, Pawnee priest In the summer and winter the Pawnees left their villages and went west and south for buffalo hunts. You can see the remains of an excavated earth lodge at Pawnee Indian Museum State Historic Site near here. Today the Pawnee tribal lands are in Oklahoma. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pawnee Indian Museum State Historic Site — 8.5 mi
  A Kitkahahki Pawnee village of the late 1700s above the Republican, where a museum shelters a lodge the women built and a family bundle carried out of Massacre Canyon and given back to this place.

More markers nearby

• Pawnee Indian Village Museum — 8.5 mi
• Friedensau — 25 mi
• The Skirmish at Spring Creek — 25 mi