Ofo

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Ofo tribal area in the 17th century.

The Ofo (also Ofogoula , Mosopelea ) were a small tribe of North American indigenous people , whose tribal area was in what is now the state of Mississippi in the southeastern United States . Your Language Ofo was an indigenous language from the family of Siouan languages that are closely related to the dialects of Biloxi and tutelo was related. The tribe became known through the fictional retelling of the life of the last speaker of the Ofo dialect.

Tribal name and language

The original origin of the name is unknown, but probably comes from an Algonquin language. The tribe was described by Henri de Tonti in 1690 as Chonque , a name from the Quapaw language. They called themselves Ofo , possibly an abbreviation of the term Ofogoula , the people of Ofo or the term Ofi okla , which means dog clan. Other tribes referred to the Ofo as Ouesperie , Ossipe or Ushpee , names derived from the shortening of the word Mosopelea.

The Ofo language was a dialect from the Sioux language family, which was very closely related to the Biloxi and Tutelo dialects. There was also a relationship to the Dakota language . The language was spoken by individuals within the tunic in Louisiana well into the 20th century and was studied by John Reed Swanton. It died out after 1908 with the last speaker.

history

The tribe lived in the southwest of what is now Ohio before 1673 , but were expelled by the Iroquois and migrated south. They were located in 1699 by Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville on the lower reaches of the Yazoo River in what is now the state of Mississippi, near the tribes of the Yazoo , Koroa , Tunika and Natchez .

The names of their villages are not known. The Ofo joined the tunic on the French side during the Natchez uprising and became part of their tribe during the 18th century. The descendants of the Ofo are tribal members of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana, recognized by the state in 1981, and some of them live on a reservation near Marksville , Louisiana.

Individual evidence

  1. Geary Hobson: The Last of the Ofos . University of Arizona Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8165-1959-5 (English).
  2. ^ John Reed Swanton: Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico . Courier Dover Publications, 1998, ISBN 0-486-40177-4 , pp. 34-38 (English).
  3. ^ John Reed Swanton, James Owen Dorsey: A Dictionary of the Biloxi and Ofo Languages . In: US Bureau of American Ethnology (Ed.): Bulletin US Bureau of American Ethnology . No. 47 , 1918, p. 4 (English).
  4. Settlement area and neighboring tribes as a map under Native American Tribes of Mississippi. Native Languages ​​of the Americas, accessed January 5, 2010 .
  5. ^ Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana. Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana, accessed January 5, 2010 .

Web links