Omaha Clan Names

Derived from Fletcher and La Flesche, The Omaha Tribe, 1911.

Welcome! The following list of Omaha clan names was derived from the work of Fletcher and La Flesche in The Omaha Tribe, published in 1911 by the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C. as the 27^th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. The Omaha Tribe has been reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in a two-volume format.

Omaha clan membership is validated by the ownership of personal clan names, the performance of particular duties, and the observance of taboos. Knowledge of one's clan membership and clan duties remains a strongly held value in the modern Omaha community.

Omaha clan membership is viewed ideally as a patrilineal descent system. However, a more fundamental, underlying desire to include all Omaha in the tribal circle often results in the naming of children of non-Omaha fathers into the mother's clan, or clan's of either grandparent on the mother's line.

The following list of clan names resulted as a by-product of another project. In 2003-2004, Omaha language student Michael Hammons was challenged to create a computer text file of the 1882 Omaha Land Allotment Register. The hand written document prepared by Alice Fletcher records all of the Omaha allottees in 1882. The original document is housed in the collections of the Center for Great Plains Studies on the University of Nebraska–Lincoln campus. It notes the name of each allottee, often including the Omaha clan name in Fletcher's distinctive spelling system. The Section, Township, and Range coordinates, along with the amount of land broken to the plow and type of dwelling are recorded. Allottees are listed in family groups, providing insights into 19 th century Omaha family structure.

Michael Hammons was charged with annotating the computer version of the original by providing the modern Omaha spelling of the Omaha name, and indicating in which clan the name could be found. His primary reference was Fletcher and La Flesche's The Omaha Tribe, and a list of English surnames associated with the Omaha clans prepared by Wilson Wolf for the Macy school in the 1970s.

To aid in this work, Hammons decided to enter all of the names listed in The Omaha Tribe in a separate data base. It is through his initiative that we can now access the clan names. This work was supported in part by funding from the UNL UCARE program—Undergraduate Creative Activities and Research Experiences. The computer text file was reworked by Omaha language student Samuel Herley in 2006. The work was funded by the UNL ITLE program—Initiative for Teaching and Learning Excellence.