Caddo mythology includes the following Native American peoples: Caddo, Hasinais, Cadodaquious, Natchitoche The Caddos are a nation, or group of tribes, of Amerindians who, in the XVIe century, occupied much of what became eastern Texas, western Louisiana, and parts of southern Arkansas and Oklahoma. The Caddos historically consisted of three confederations of at least 25 different tribes and spoke a variety of dialects of the Caddan languages. The Caddos tribes were divided into three confederations, which were linked by a common language: the Hasinese, the Cadodaquious and the Natchitoches. The Hasinese and Kadohadachos occupied eastern Texas and the Natchitoches in northwestern Louisiana. The Haisinese lived on an area stretching from Nacogdoches, Texas, which was originally a caddo settlement, to the Neches River. The Kadohadachos had settled on the area between Lake Caddo and the Red River. The Nachitoches lived around Natchitoches, Louisiana, which was originally a caddo settlement, and in the Cane River valley.
http://www.indigenouspeople.net/caddo.htm
Caddo Legends and Traditional Stories
The Caddo Nation is a confederacy of several Native American tribes who historically inhabited much of what is now East Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. They were descendants of the Caddoan Mississippian culture that constructed huge earthwork mounds at several sites in this territory. Their name derives from a French truncation of kadohadacho, meaning “real chief” in Caddo. The Caddoan language family is linguistically related to the Pawnee, Arikara, Wichita, and Kichai languages. Though each band of the Caddo had a distinct dialect, these dialects could generally be understood by all speakers of the Caddo language.
CADDO INDIAN FOLKLORE
Traditions of the Caddo:
Online collection of 78 Caddo legends and folktales.
When the Storm God Rides: Tejas and other Indian Legends:
Stories from the Alabama, Comanche and Caddo tribes.
Caddo Sun Myths:
An overview of traditional Caddo mythology.
The Brothers Who Became Lightning And Thunder:
Caddo legends about the mythical twin heros, Thunder and Lightning.
Coyote and the Origin of Death:
How Death Became Eternal:
The Caddo story of how death came to the world.
The Voice, the Flood and the Turtle:
Caddo myth about the flooding of the earth.
Buffalo Woman:
Caddo legend about a man who won a buffalo wife.
Coyote The Hungry:
Caddo tales of the trickster Coyote and his humorous attempts to catch turkeys.
Why Coyote Stopped Imitating His Friends:
When Coyote Imitated Woodpecker:
More humorous Coyote stories, about the trickster trying to mimic other animals’ powers.
The Lazy Boys Who Became The Pleiades:
Caddo legend about the origin of the Pleiades stars.
Sacred Medicine Water:
Caddo legend about the creation of a sacred spring.
Kadohadacho
Hainai
Anadarko
Nabedache
Nacogdoches
Natchitoches
Yatasi
Adai
Eyeish
Nakanawan
Imaha, a small band of Kwapa
Yowani, a band of Choctaw
Caddo Literature
Other tribes, probably now extinct, who belonged to the Caddo confederacy:
Doustionis
Nacaniche
Nanatsoho
Nasoni
IMPORTANT CADDO MYTHOLOGICAL FIGURES
Caddi Ayo
(or Ayo-Caddi-Aymay.)
This means “Sky Chief” or “Chief Above” in the Caddo language, and is the Caddo name for the Creator (God.) Sometimes the Plains Indian term “Great Spirit” is also used. Caddi Ayo is a divine spirit and is not generally personified in Caddo folklore.
Village Boy and Wild Boy
These mythical twins whose mother was killed by a monster are common to the folklore of many Midwestern and Plains tribes. In Caddo mythology, the twins (called Coninisí) are associated with thunder and lightning.
Coyote is the trickster figure of the Caddo tribe. As in other Plains Indian mythology, Coyote is sometimes anthropomorphized into human form and other times depicted in the shape of a coyote (sometimes both within a single story.) Caddo coyote stories range from light-hearted tales of mischief and buffoonery, to more serious legends about the nature of the world, to ribald jokes.
A sort of man-eating ogre, similar to the Two-Face and Sharp-Elbow monsters of the northern Plains tribes. In some legends the Caddaja is portrayed as a horned serpent, more like the Cherokee Uktena.
Ghostly little people of Caddo folklore, who steal away people who become lost in the woods.
The Caddos believe that a very long time ago, men and animals were brothers and lived together below the ground. But at last their leader, a man named Neesh (Moon), discovered the entrance to a cave leading up to the earth’s surface. Neesh told everyone they would have to follow him to the new land. The people divided into groups, each with a leader and a drum. Neesh told the people to sing and beat their drums as they moved along, and he warned them never to look back they way they had come. Soon they reached the opening. First an old man climbed out, carrying fire and a pipe in one hand and a drum in the other. Next came his wife, bringing corn and pumpkin seeds. Then came the rest of the people and animals. But when Wolf climbed out he turned around and looked back. The opening closed, shutting the rest of the people and animals under the ground, where they still remain. Those who had come out into the world of light sat down and cried for their friends left below in the world of darkness. Because their ancestors came out of the ground the Caddos call the Middle World ina’—Mother—and return to it when they die.
The Caddo Nation is a confederacy of several Southeastern Native American tribes. Their ancestors traditionally inhabited much of what is now East Texas, northern Louisiana and portions of southern Arkansas and Oklahoma. Today the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma is a federally recognized tribe with its capital at Binger, Oklahoma. Descendants of the historic Caddo tribes can all be enrolled as members in the Caddo Nation, with documentation of at least 1/16th ancestry. The several Caddo languages have converged into a single language.
Caddo oral history of their creation story says the tribe emerged from an underground cave, called Chahkanina or “the place of crying,” located at the confluence of the Red and Mississippi rivers in northern Louisiana. Their leader, named Moon, instructed the people not to look back. An old Caddo man carried with him a drum, a pipe, and fire, all of which continued to be important religious items to the people. His wife carried corn and pumpkin seeds. As people and accompanying animals emerged, the wolf looked back, and the exit closed to the remaining people and animals.
The Caddo first encountered Europeans in 1541 when the Hernando de Soto Expedition came through their lands. De Soto’s force had a violent clash with one band of Caddo Indians, the Tula, near Caddo Gap, Arkansas. This event is marked by a monument that stands in the small town today. The Caddo are thought to be an extension of Woodland period peoples, the Fourche Maline culture and Mossy Grove cultures who were living in the area of Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas between 200 BCE to 800 CE. The Wichita and Pawnee are related to the Caddo, as shown by their speaking Caddoan languages.
STORIES
Buffalo Woman, A Story of Magic
Girl Who Climbed to the Sky
Why Coyote Stopped Imitating His Friends
Why Dogs Have Long Tongues
A long time ago when the animals were like people, most dogs were great talkers and liked to tell everything they knew. In those days there were not as many dogs as now, but almost every family kept a few hounds to take with them on hunts. A Caddo named Flying Hawk did not have a dog because he hated to have someone always tattling on him and telling everything he did. But he was a good hunter, and knew that he could bring back much more meat for his family if he had a trustworthy dog to help him find wild game. One day a friend offered Flying Hawk his choice of a small puppy from a litter, and he decided to take one and try to teach it not to talk so much. He took the puppy home, and every day he spent several hours trying to teach it not to be a tattler like other dogs. The puppy soon grew big enough to be taught to hunt, and Flying Hawk began taking it out to track rabbits and other small game.
Every time that Flying Hawk killed any game, however, the dog would sneak back to the Caddo village on Red River and tell everybody about it. Then he would return to Flying Hawk in a roundabout way and come up to him from behind as though he had been there hunting all the time. Flying Hawk soon discovered that the dog was deceiving him, and he punished and scolded the animal. After each punishment the dog would stop running off and tattling for a little while, but soon he would begin again. After a while the dog was big enough to go far away into the high timber to hunt with his master. One day Flying Hawk packed a supply of food and told the dog they were going to the Ouachita Mountains to hunt for several days. He loaded his horses with provisions and started out, with the dog his only companion. Three days of travelling brought them to the mountains and there they made camp. “We are a long distance from our village,” Flying Hawk said to his dog. “But if you go back there ahead of me and tell everything about this hunt, I will pull out your tongue.” They hunted for several days and killed many game animals. As soon as the horses were packed with all the meat they could carry, Flying Hawk and his dog broke camp and started home. During the first day’s journey the dog disappeared. Flying Hawk called and searched for hours and at last decided to return to the camp-site, thinking that the dog might have lost its way and gone back there. He could not find it anywhere, however, and after another day of searching gave up the dog for lost and again started home.
Flying Hawk was so sure that he had broken the dog of sneaking home and telling everything, that he did not even consider the possibility that it might have gone on ahead of him to the Caddo village. But a few days later when he brought his laden horses home he found the dog sitting there under a tree telling tall tales about the large number of bears, mountain lions, deer and coyotes that it had tracked for Flying Hawk in the high timber. At the sight of his prattling dog, Flying Hawk became angrier than he ever had before. “I warned you,” he shouted, “that if you ran home ahead of me and told everything you know, that I would pull out your tongue!” He caught the dog and gave it a sound whipping. Being still very angry, he grabbed hold of the dog’s tongue, pulled it out as far as he could, and then ran a stick across its mouth. Ever since then dogs have had long tongues and big mouths.
LEGENDS
Today the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma has some 4,000 members on its official tribal roll. The tribal headquarters is in Binger, Oklahoma, about 45 miles west of Oklahoma City. It was here, in and around the towns of Anadarko, Binger, and Fort Cobb, that the Caddo settled during and after the Civil War. This final relocation was preceded by over a century of turmoil during which Caddo groups were forced to give up their home territories in northeast Texas, northwest Louisiana, southwest Arkansas, and southeast Oklahoma. Today’s Caddo are the descendants of many distinct communities of people who shared much of a common culture. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, Spanish and French chroniclers familiar with the Caddo homeland recorded the names of at least 25 separate groups who spoke dialects of the language known today as Caddo. Beyond speaking the same basic language, these groups were linked by many shared customs, a similar way of life, and by intermarriage.
When Europeans first arrived, the Caddo were settled, farming people who grew corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and other crops and lived in farmsteads, hamlets, and villages dispersed along streams and rivers that mainly flow to the east and south through their homeland. Within this area the forested Eastern Woodlands met the grasslands and savannas that fringed the Great Plains farther to the west. Culturally, the Caddo were the westernmost of the Indian societies of the Southeastern United States, but their closest linguistic and blood relatives were the Caddoan-speaking tribes of the Southern and Central Plains: the Wichita, Kitsai, Pawnee, and Arikara.
During the period from about 340 to 1000 years ago (A.D. 1000-1680), the Caddo, like other Southeastern cultures, had “ranked” societies with at least two social classes topped by the kin of the hereditary religious and political leaders. Ethnologists sometimes call such societies “theocratic chiefdoms” and recognize that politics and religion were not separate domains but interwoven parts of an intricate way of life. Although most Caddo communities were scattered, and stretched out along river and stream valleys, their most important leaders usually lived in or near the larger villages and ritual centers where towering temples built of poles and grass thatch stood atop earthen mounds (see Teran map on left). At sacred and festive times such as First Harvest and in times of crisis, the scattered Caddo gathered where their society’s leaders lived.
The Caddo were also known as traders, famed for their marvelous bows made of the wood of a tree the French named bois d’arc (“bow wood,” Osage orange) and, their trade in salt. This trading was an important part of Caddo life in the historic era, as well as hundreds of years before European contact. The Caddo role as traders and, as information brokers, was partly a consequence of the strategic position of their territory between the Plains and the lower Mississippi Valley. In the 17th century, the Spanish in northern Mexico learned of the populous and prosperous Tejas Nation from the Jumano Indians decades before Spanish expeditions reached the Caddo homeland from the west in the 1680s. In the early 18th century French traders were reportedly living in each of the major Caddo villages along the Red River to take advantage of the Caddos’ strategic position and reputation as traders and middlemen. Soon large quantities of deer and buffalo hides, horses and Apache slaves from the Caddo and their trading partners to the west were being exchanged for French guns and trade goods.
The name “Caddo” comes from Cadohadacho, the name of one of the largest and most powerful groups in early historic times, a people who lived mainly along the Red River near its Great Bend. The Cadohadacho and their direct ancestors had probably been living in the Red River valley for a thousand years or more. “Cadohadacho” is often said to mean “true chiefs” with the implication being that these were the original Caddo, but this is a mistaken notion. (According to linguist Wallace Chafe, the Caddo word, kaduhdááachu, is a proper name whose full meaning and origin is lost; the compound word contains a form of the adjective hadááchu, meaning “sharp.”) Other major Caddo groups have equally long and distinguished histories, especially the Hasinai groups who lived to the south in the Neches and Angelina rivers basins in what is today east Texas. In fact, the Caddo groups only became one people called the Caddo, after the mid-1800s, when remnants of the many named groups united to save their shared identity. Even today many Caddo people trace their ancestry to one branch of the tribe or another. The Hasinai Society is an organization that works to preserve traditional Caddo culture and pass these traditions on to future generations. We focus on music and dance, language, and traditional crafts. Our main programs are an annual summer youth camp, weekly classes that emphasize instruction by tribal elders and community members, and a youth color guard. We regularly travel across the state of Oklahoma, as well as to Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas to participate in dances and cultural activities.
CADDO NATION
The Caddo Indian are known as a nation which consists of several different southeastern American tribes. The Caddo tribe lived in what we now know as Northern Louisiana, southern Arkansas, and Oklahoma East Texas. During the 19th century, the Indians were placed forcibly on a reservation in Texas and then once again moved to Indian Territory in 1859. Legend of the Caddo people explains that the Caddo tribe came out of an underground cave they knew as Chahkanina which means the place of crying. This cave is located in what we today know as Louisiana and were the Mississippi River and the Red River meet. In the legend, Moon, their leader expressed to the entire tribe not to look back at the cave. With the tribe were the religious figures such as the drummer, the chief’s wife, and several different animals. One animal, the wolf, did not obey the chief and looked back at the entrance of the cave. At once, the opening of the cave closed trapping all the other animals and people inside.
PO Box 487 Binger, Oklahoma 73009
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Caddo harvest ritual
Books of Native American legend
Native American religious beliefs
Caddoan languages
Indian tribes of Texas
Southeast Indians
Caddo tribe
Native American Indian tribes
The Caddo people comprise the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, a federally recognized tribe headquartered in Binger, Oklahoma. They speak the Caddo language. The Caddo Confederacy was a network of Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands, who historically inhabited much of what is now East Texas, west Louisiana, southwestern Arkansas, and southeastern Oklahoma. Prior to European contact, they were the Caddoan Mississippian culture, who constructed huge earthwork mounds at several sites in this territory, flourishing about 800 to 1400 CE. In the early 19th century, Caddo people were forced to a reservation in Texas. In 1859, they were removed to Indian Territory.
Common Characters in Caddo Legends
Caddi Ayo (or Ayo-Caddi-Aymay.) This means “Sky Chief” or “Chief Above” in the Caddo language, and is the Caddo name for the Creator (God.) Sometimes the Plains Indian term “Great Spirit” is also used. Caddi Ayo is a divine spirit and is not generally personified in Caddo folklore. Village Boy and Wild Boy These mythical twins whose mother was killed by a monster are common to the folklore of many Midwestern and Plains tribes. In Caddo mythology, the twins (called Coninisí) are associated with thunder and lightning. Coyote Coyote is the trickster figure of the Caddo tribe. As in other Plains Indian mythology, Coyote is sometimes anthropomorphized into human form and other times depicted in the shape of a coyote (sometimes both within a single story.) Caddo coyote stories range from light-hearted tales of mischief and buffoonery, to more serious legends about the nature of the world, to ribald jokes. Caddaja A sort of man-eating ogre, similar to the Two-Face and Sharp-Elbow monsters of the northern Plains tribes. In some legends the Caddaja is portrayed as a horned serpent, more like the Cherokee Uktena. Lost Elves Ghostly little people of Caddo folklore, who steal away people who become lost in the woods.
Learning and honoring Caddo traditions helps preserve Caddo history, culture and identity. Revered elders pass down information, tribal customs and legends from one generation to the next. The oral tradition and sacred writings have enabled the Caddo to retain their traditions despite repeated relocation by the U.S. government and European pressure to assimilate. Drum rhythms and songs date back hundreds of years. The symbolic meanings communicated through traditional dance, song and storytelling teach lessons and impart values. The sacred turkey dance, for instance, has been enjoyed for generations. Women and children dance in a circle while male drummers sing songs in an ancient Caddo dialect. Originally, the turkey dance was done in conjunction with a feast to honor returning warriors. Specific songs sung during the traditional turkey dance tell the story of battles with Apache, Choctaw, Osage and Tonkawa tribes. Today, the Caddo hold turkey dances for fun and socialization. The Caddo tradition also extends to pottery and basket weaving. Baskets and pots of the early Caddo were not only beautiful and ornate but also functional for gathering seeds, storing grain and cooking meals over an open fire. Mound people like the Caddo needed sturdy baskets for hauling dirt used in the construction of huge earthen mounds. Basket traps were also devised for catching fish in river streams. For a period of time, the Caddo style of artistry was lost. However, Caddo descendants are working to revive this tradition, such as replicating the intricate engravings on coil clay pots characteristic of the early Caddo period.
Indigenous Peoples Literature 