The Sauks call themselves asa-ki-waki, meaning "people of the outlet" in their Algonquian language. "The outlet" refers to the Saginaw River of Michigan, and denotes the area where they first gathered together as a people and from which they were driven by the Iroquois in the early seventeenth century. French missionaries found the Sauks near Green Bay in the 1660s. They remained in what is now Wisconsin until 1733, when they incurred French enmity for sheltering Fox refugees from the Fox-French war. The Sauks and their neighbors the Foxes fled to Iowa, but after 1737 they moved their villages back across the Mississippi to the lower Rock and Wisconsin Valleys. Early nineteenth-century U.S. settlers encroached upon Sauk and Fox lands, and the tribes shifted to Iowa, but in 1832 Black Hawk, a Sauk war chief and the leader of a pro-British band within the tribes, led a Sauk minority back to Saukenak, near Rock Island, Illinois. Federal and Illinois territorial officials launched an armed expedition against Black Hawk. The Black Hawk War ended at the mouth of the Bad Axe River, where 150 of the chief's followers were slaughtered, followed shortly by the killing of more people by Sioux warriors. Keokuk, the leader of the pro-American party within the tribe, and Fox chiefs negotiated a series of cession treaties for the tribes' Iowa land, after which they were assigned a reservation in Kansas. In 1869 all but Mokohoko's band moved to Oklahoma. That band finally moved to Oklahoma in 1886, sharing a reservation until 1891, when what was officially called the Sac and Fox Tribe of Oklahoma was placed on 160-acre allotments. In 1902 new federal legislation permitted many tribal members to sell their trust land; in 1951 the Oklahoma Sauks and Foxes retained only 30 percent of their allotted land.
Early Sauk population figures are only estimates and vary from six hundred in 1734 to four thousand in 1822. Since Sauk and Fox people intermarried very frequently, the joint Sauk-Fox population is easier to approximate. The numbers of Sauks and Foxes are given as sixty-four hundred in 1825, twenty-two hundred in 1845, nine hundred seventy-five in 1909, eighteen hundred in 1950, and thirty-five hundred in 1990. The latter two numbers include those people, predominantly Foxes, who resettled and purchased land near Tama, Iowa.
A horticultural and hunting people, the Sauks traditionally lived in a spring and summer village when not dispersed for fall and winter hunting. Villages often consisted of groups of extended families and were usually identified by outsiders as the collective residences of a "band." Summer shelter consisted of substantial pole-and-bark longhouses, while hunting-camp shelters were portable pole-and-reed mat lodges. Corn was the principal food crop, supplemented by squash, beans, wild rice, and meat, including buffalo. In the nineteenth century Sauk women were reported to have produced about eight thousand bushels of corn, selling some to traders. Men hunted for pelts and hides, trading them for blankets, guns, ammunition, knives, and camp equipment. When living in northwestern Illinois, the Sauks engaged in surface lead mining, smelting some ore but selling most of it to traders. On their Oklahoma reservation, the Sauks resisted government efforts to transform them into farmers, preferring small-scale ranches and subsistence gardens. Their reluctance to farm is demonstrated by the rapid sale of their allotted land. The development of the Cushing oil field after 1912 brought wealth to a few Sauk families.
Descent among the Sauks was patrilineal, and their clans were exogamous. Two divisions or moieties existed: a
kaa (black) and ki
koha (white). Early on, these divisions likely referred to warrior organizations, but by the mid-nineteenth century parents assigned their first child to the akaa and the second to the kikoha, alternating later children among the divisions. At dances and ceremonies, division members assembled together and competed during games. Naming or clan bundles were primarily used well into the twentieth century at children's naming ceremonies, when an elderly man of the father's clan conferred a name and announced to which division the child belonged. Males retained the given name until acquiring another after a memorable war exploit.
The political organization of the Sauks was complex. The Sturgeon clan traditionally supplied a principal chief, but other clans also had chiefs assisted by criers or runners; all of these offices were hereditary. People also gathered about band chiefs such as Keokuk, Black Hawk, Grey Eyes, and Mokohoko. There was in addition a war chief for each of the divisions. One war chief, Keokuk, was able to overshadow the hereditary chiefs, acquiring support from government officials and American Fur Company agents. He incurred the hostility of the other chiefs, especially when federal officials entrusted him with the distribution of annuities and recognized him as tribal chief. After Keokuk's death in 1848, Moses, his son, succeeded him, serving as tribal chief until his death in 1903.
Traditional leadership was abolished in 1885 by a constitution that provided for a multiple executive, a representative assembly, and court and police systems. Never thoroughly accepted, the executive was replaced in 1891 by two chiefs and eight councilmen, who in turn were dismissed in 1909. For about ten years a three-man business committee was appointed by the Sac and Fox Agency superintendent. Finally, in 1937 the Sac and Fox Tribe of Oklahoma adopted a constitution, as provided for by the 1936 Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, that incorporated the tribe and created an elected business committee and principal chief.
Contemporary Sauk society little resembles the old way of life. Gone are the medicine dances, naming ceremonies, and war and medicine bundles. Christianity began replacing the veneration of spirits after 1876, when Moses Keokuk converted to Christianity. Early in the twentieth century the peyote ceremony was practiced simultaneously with Christian observance; today only a few peyotists remain among Sauk people. Tribal members intermarried extensively with members of other tribes and with non-Indians. Many are not unlike the "world's greatest athlete," Jim Thorpe, who could claim descent from Black Hawk but whose father was half Sauk and half Irish and whose mother was of Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and white descent. Education, the experience of living and working in non-Indian communities, and an inherent ability to adapt speeded acculturation so that many tribal members are now indistinguishable from their white neighbors. A diminishing minority of the tribe live within the boundaries of their former Oklahoma reservation, but many assemble for the annual Sac and Fox Powwow, held near Shawnee, Oklahoma, on tribal land.
See also
Fox/Mesquakie.
William T. Hagan, The Sac and Fox Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958); Alanson Skinner, Observations on the Ethnology of the Sauk Indians (1923-25; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970).
Donald J. Berthrong
Lafayette, Indiana
