Kiowa

Kiowa ( KY-ə-wə, -⁠wah) or Ǥáuigú (Kiowa pronunciation: [kɔ́jɡʷú]) people are a Native American tribe and an Indigenous people of the Great Plains of the United States. They migrated southward from western Montana into the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in the 17th and 18th centuries and eventually into the Southern Plains by the early 19th century. In 1867, the Kiowa were forced to a reservation in Southwestern Oklahoma. Anthropologists have debated how an equestrian plains tribe like the Kiowa, having migrated from Montana, shared linguistic ancestry with the Tanoan speaking Pueblo peoples of the southwest. One hypothesis is that before residence in western Montana, they descended from the Jumanos. Another hypothesis, claimed more consistent with Kiowa oral tradition, is that "the Kiowa speech community originated in the Eastern Fremont area around 450 CE, drifted northward to the Yellowstone area after 1300 CE, and then migrated south and east to the Southern Plains during historic times." Today, they are federally recognized as Kiowa Tribe with headquarters in Carnegie, Oklahoma. They were formerly known as the Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma. As of 2011, there were 12,000 Kiowa tribal citizens. The Kiowa language (Ǥáuiđòᵰ꞉gyà), part of the Tanoan language family, is in danger of extinction, with only 20 speakers as of 2012. As of 2024 the Kiowa have a Kiowa Language Department. In the early 18th century, the Plains Apache lived around the upper Missouri River and maintained close connections to the Kiowa. They were ethnically different and spoke different languages. The allied nations communicated using Plains Sign Talk and accompanied one another on their migration into the Southern Plains.