Kickapoo

The Kickapoo people (; Kickapoo: Kiikaapoa or Kiikaapoi; Spanish: Kikapú) are an Algonquian-speaking Native American tribe and Indigenous people in Mexico, originating in the region south of the Great Lakes. There are three federally recognized Kickapoo tribes in the United States: the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma, and the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas. The Oklahoma and Texas bands are politically associated with each other. The Kickapoo in Kansas came from a relocation from southern Missouri in 1832 as a land exchange from their reserve there. Around 3,000 people are enrolled tribal members.

Another band, the Tribu Kikapú, resides in Múzquiz Municipality in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, ending up there after disputes between leaders of rival bands in the tribe caused a schism between followers of the "Kickapoo Prophet" Kennekuk and Prairie band Chief Kishko. Smaller bands live in Sonora, to the west, and Durango, to the southwest.

History

Pre-1800s

The Kickapoo are an Algonquian-language people who likely migrated from Northern Ohio, where they were at the time of European contact, to a large territory along the southern Wabash River in the area of modern Terre Haute, Indiana, where they were located at the time of first contact with Europeans in the 1600s. They were confederated with the larger Wabash Confederacy, which included the Piankeshaw and the Wea to their north, and the powerful Miami Tribe, to their east. A subgroup lived in the Upper Iowa River region in what was later known as northeast Iowa and the Root River region in southeast Minnesota in the late 1600s and early 1700s.