Donald Harris

Ittintanapa' Donald Harris

In the year 100 C. E. the North American Native People called the Adena had evolved into a society that became known as the Hopewell. The Hopewell lived and dominated the Ohio River region for almost five hundred years, but somewhere around the years 630 to 650, they disappeared as a culture. It has been speculated that their disappearance had some sort of relationship to the rise of the Chickasaw Nation, but there's no archaeological proof of this. It's not even known for certain that the Hopewell were a tribe or simply a culture shared by the Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandotte, Ottawa, Seneca, and Miami. All that is known for certain is that there was a vast region that stretched form the Ohio River through the Mississippi River where the Native People established trade routes. All of the tribes had a relationship with each other through trade. These tribes practiced a method of peace-keeping among themselves that was referred to as the Ittintanapa'. We would call it the method of vendetta today. The rules concerning Ittintanapa' were simple. If one tribe attacked and killed one person from another tribe, then two people from the aggressive tribe had to pay with their lives. If two people were attacked and killed, then four people paid the price for the aggression. And so it went. However many were killed, twice that many were killed in retaliation. Ittintanapa' may not have prevented wars, but it did make our ancestors stop and think before they attacked each other. Most of the time that is. Not always. Sometemes, Ittintanapa' got out of hand. This is a story about one of those times that it got out of hand.