Shawnee

By: Logan Provencher

===**The Shawnee were believed to be located in Southern Ohio, West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania. In the mid 1600s the Iroguois, drove them from their homes and they were scattered to the Carolina's, Tennessee, Eastern Pennsylvania and Southern Illinois. Just before the mid 1700s, they managed to return to their homelands. The European invaders who were focused on settling on this new land and claiming it as their own.** ===

===**Shawnee comes from the Algonquin word "shawun," meaning "southerner." Shawnee usually call themselves the Shawano or Shawanoe or Shawanese.** ===

===**Currently there are more than 14,000 Shawnee located on reservations in four distinct groups. The absentee Shawnee, The Eastern Shawnee, and the Cherokee Shawnee, with the Cherokee Nation, which are all in Oklahoma. The largest of these groups is called the Loyal Shawnee who were incorporated into the Cherokee in the 1860s. They received the name "Loyal" for having served the union during the Civil War.** === > ===**Food:** **They** **cooked food by drying, baking, boiling, and roasting over a fire. The Shawnee ate deer, bear, bison meat, raccoon, rabbit, squirrel, muskrat, woodchuck, turkey, duck, geese, grouse, partridge, seagulls, snakes, and eels. If they had to, they would also eat pigeon. From farming they would raise maize, beans, squashes, pumpkins, melons, and wild fruit like berries and nuts. Corn meal, corn fritters, and bread were made by grinding corn between two rocks until it turned into flour. They grew sunflower for the seeds, rice, vanilla pods and some Shawnees who lived near the ocean ate lobsters, clams, and oysters.** ===

[[image:http://www.deepcreektimes.com/kids/shawnee.gif width="300" height="205" align="left"]]
===**Clothing: At first, they didn't wear any clothes. Then one of the men wore a loincloth. They had very simple clothing compared to many tribes. Their outfit often changed because of them trading with the whites. The women saved clothes for a special occasion. For shoes, they wore moccasins in the summer, and snowshoes in the winter. Men wore leggings usually down to their knees. Also in the winter they added caps of fur and skins and when really cold, they wore robes. Some wore bandanas, with feathers in them from either a hawk or an owl.** ===

===**Family Life: ** The Shawnee men were hunters and warriors. The women in the family did the domestic labor. They built lodges, dressed the game, cooked, planted and cultivated the gardens, scraped and tinned hides, made clothes and blankets, wove baskets, and made vessels of clay. They also cared for the ailment within the tribe, and extremely skillful and mixing herbs and setting fractured bones. The children grew up like animals, wild and free. Their elders encouraged the boys to engage in sports like running and swimming. They also wanted to practice archery. Young girls busied themselves imitating their mothers. ===

** The Shawnees had three main houses, wigwams, lodges, and Seminoles. **
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