Commanche
The Comanche (), or Nʉmʉnʉʉ (Comanche: Nʉmʉnʉʉ, 'the people'), are a Native American tribe from the Southern Plains of the present-day United States. Comanche people today 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.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Spanish and later Mexico colonists called the Comanche domain Comanchería. Some historians have called it an empire. The Comanche lived in present-day northwestern Texas and adjacent areas in eastern New Mexico, southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, and western Oklahoma. They Comanche practiced a nomadic horse culture and hunted, particularly bison. They traded with neighboring Native American peoples, and Spanish, French, and American colonists and settlers. At their peak, the Comanche language was the lingua franca of the southern Great Plains region. Estimates of their numbers range from 10,000 to 30,000.
The Comanche waged war and raided Hispanic and Anglo-American settlements as well as those of neighboring Native American tribes. 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 Spanish and (later) to Mexican settlers, or adopting them into their tribe. Thousands of captives from raids, including a few Anglos, were assimilated into Comanche society.
Epidemics of diseases, destruction of the buffalo herds, and defeat by the U.S. army forced the Comanche onto reservations in Indian Territory in the mid 1870s.
In the 21st century, the Comanche Nation has 17,000 enrolled citizens, around 7,000 of whom 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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