KARANKAWA

The Karankawa, a coastal people, lived along the Gulf of Mexico in present-day southern Texas. They occupied territory to the northeast of the COAHUILTEC and, like them, are classified among SOUTHWEST INDIANS, their homelands similarly arid. The TONKAWA living to the north of the Karankawa are generally classified as PLAINS INDIANS because they eventually adopted a horse culture. The ATAKAPA living to the northeast are discussed as SOUTH EAST INDIANS, with the bands extending into the swampy country of present-day Louisiana and having a greater dependency on inland waterways. (Such classifications are of course somewhat arbitrary, with Indians of this proximity sharing cultural traits.) The name Karankawa, pronounced kuh-run-KAH-wah, perhaps means “people walking in the water” and was originally applied to one band living near Matagorda Bay; it came to include linguistically related bands between Galveston Bay and Padre Island. The language of the Karankawa, considered an isolate with undetermined phylum affiliation, is associated with Coahuiltecan by some scholars.

The Karankawa, nomadic hunter-gatherers, built small villages of one or several families and traveled

When necessary to acquire food. They sometimes packed up their small wood and brush dwellings to relocate. Shellfish, wild fowl, and turtles supplemented by wild plant foods provided sustenance. The men occasionally hunted for small game and, when lucky, managed to kill a bear, deer, or even a buffalo. Tribal members carved dugout canoes for travel in coastal or interior waters. The Karankawa and other tribes of the region are said to have practiced cannibalism for survival, but this is unconfirmed. Their men were recognizable in war by the painted designs on their faces—half-red and half-black. Unmarried women painted a single stripe down the middle of their face, while married women painted designs, such as animals or flowers. Both men and women adorned themselves with tattoos. Head-flattening, that is, the reshaping of heads during infancy, was also practiced.

The earliest known contact between Karankawa and non-Indians occurred in 1528, when Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and a number of other Spaniards, part of the Panfilo de Narvaez expedition of 1528, were shipwrecked in the region near both Atakapa and Karankawa bands. A large party of Karankawa reportedly accompanied the Spanish on their journey back to Mexico in 1536. In 1684, a French expedition under Rene-Robert Cavelier de La Salle in search of the mouth of the Mississippi River landed at Matagorda Bay by mistake, where La Salle founded Fort St. Louis and had contact with Karankawa. In the following years, the Spanish began to set up missions in the region, although without great success among the Karankawa. Karankawa numbers steadily declined, however, as they succumbed to disease or died in warfare with the Spanish or Texans. Some of them are said to have fought skirmishes with the pirates of Jean Lafitte, who used Galveston Island as a base after the War of 1812 through 1821. The last Karankawa are thought to have died out or have settled among other tribes in Mexico by the 1860s.