Commanche
The Comanche (), or Nʉmʉnʉʉ (Comanche: Nʉmʉnʉʉ, 'the people'), are a Native American people from the Southern Plains of the present-day United States. Comanche people today primarily belong to the federally recognized Comanche Nation, headquartered in Lawton, Oklahoma.
The Comanche language is a Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family. Originally, it was a Shoshoni dialect, but diverged and became a separate language. The Comanche were once part of the Shoshone people of the Great Basin, diverging linguistically and culturally after adopting a nomadic horse culture in the early 18th century.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Comanche became renowned as some of the finest cavalry in history, utilising mobility and bison hunting to build a vast sovereign territory across present-day northwestern Texas, eastern New Mexico, southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, and western Oklahoma - an empire known to colonists as Comanchería. Rather than a single centralized state, Comanche society operated through politically autonomous divisions linked by kinship. At their peak, the Comanche language was the lingua franca of the southern Great Plains region.
The Comanche commanded a complex web of diplomacy, trade, and conflict with neighboring Native American nations, European powers, and American settlers. Especially noteworthy were their large-scale raids in the 1840s and 1850s, which penetrated hundreds of miles into Mexico to capture livestock they mostly sold to Anglo-Americans in Texas. They also took many captives, using them as slaves, selling them to the Spanish and (later) to Mexican settlers, or adopting them into their tribe. Thousands of captives from raids, as well as entire Native American groups were assimilated into Comanche society. Epidemics of diseases, destruction of the bison herds, and warfare and massacres by the U.S. army forced the Comanche onto reservations in Indian Territory in the mid-1870s.
Alongside their vast artistic culture they maintain an influential legacy, exemplified by figures like the 19th-century war chief Quanah Parker, as well as contributions from World War I and II code talkers. In the 21st century, around 7,000 Comanche reside in tribal jurisdictional areas around Lawton, Fort Sill, and the surrounding areas of southwestern Oklahoma. The Comanche Homecoming Annual Dance takes place in mid-July in Walters, Oklahoma.
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