— Beginning of week Four —

As the new week starts to unfold, life itself around me has been nothing more than a blessing. The weather outside is starting to change for all Texans, but although the early mornings have a nipping chill rolling around and the evening’s end with a cool autumnal breeze, the afternoons are still hotter than one would expect. I spent a good amount of time this weekend catching up and reviewing class notes and material as well as explore WordPress. I’m finally comfortable with the mechanics and quirks that come along with this platform, and think that my site is as aesthetically pleasing for my liking as it can be.

Completely unrelated to the subject, I send all my love and support to those affected by Hurricane Harvey and Irma, and literally every other natural disaster that has happened since then and encourage you to do the same; whether it be in Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean Islands, and now the state of Florida, we are all a part of this Earth and hope compassion and humanity is shown when dealing with these inevitably heartbreaking situations. Here is a political cartoon that I found quite comical about climate change:

Anyway, this week will be somewhat difficult for me in regards to this project since I have been doing a lot of the work on my own since early last week. For now the workload is mostly reading and searching for material that will help develop our project. Finding information about Native American groups in the state of Texas is not as difficult as it is to find clear and concise information about them in Wichita Falls. But with good time management I know I will be able to get most of what I wanted to accomplish for this week done.

Today I would like to take the time to dive into a specific article to share later on this week on Tuesday’s class session (Sept. 12). As the semester progresses, our reading reactions and posts relating to that matter will be more centralized on our specific topic for the project. For now I have decided to read in full an article found in the Handbook of Texas – Online by Earl H. Elam called: “Wichita Indians.”

The main thesis of this article is to help define and explain who the Wichita or the Kitikiti’sh (meaning raccoon eye) were.

In this article I learned that a lot of what we know today in landmarks, cities, rivers, and landscapes is essentially named after this group due to their involvement and existence in parts of Northern Texas, Oklahoma and even Kansas. I think that it is especially important to note that the Wichita did in fact rely on agriculture to survive, which can be a factor for migration on any part. Additionally, it’s necessary to recognize that several of their subgroups and parts of their villages were destroyed by U.S. military; this helps explain how smaller groups of Native Americans later on joined and began to migrate with the larger populations such as the Wichita during the Civil War for example when they all fled to what is now known as Wichita, Kansas. The Wichita were also a group of Native Americans that stood apart from the rest due to the elaborate tattoos that could be found around their bodies.

I think that the information presented in this article and supporting articles can help begin to explain why they are no longer here in Wichita Falls; if it is true that our river, city, and even places found within the county as a whole were named after them due to their influence on the town, it should be of importance to begin understanding why.

I am very excited to see what else I uncover in the next few days to come. For now I will leave it at this, and if there is more information I discover that I find helpful to this project I will add it to the annotated bibliography that can be found at the bottom of this post.

Until next time, Maria.

Annotated Bibliography – work in progress.