Kiwigapawa

The Kiwigapawa are the Kickapoo, an Algonquian-speaking people of the Great Lakes; Kickapoo is a French rendering of their word Kiwigapawa, meaning he who moves about, a name fitting their long migrations. French missionaries first met them in southern Wisconsin in 1667, after the Beaver Wars dispersed the lower Great Lakes peoples, and the Kickapoo encountered La Salle's expedition in the Illinois country in 1682.

They later settled along the Wabash and in southern Illinois as members of the Wabash Confederacy, and signed the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. Among the firmest allies of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, they fought at Tippecanoe in 1811.

The 1819 Treaty of Edwardsville forced the cession of nearly half of Illinois, and under the prophet Kennekuk part of the nation held out before an 1832 land exchange moved the main band from Missouri to Kansas.