wickiup

[Fox wiikiyaapi, wigwam.]

When roughing it was still nearly every American's way of life, at least in the West, the Fox Indians knew how to make the best of it with a wickiup. On a convenient spot of level ground they would draw a circle perhaps eight feet in diameter and dig a trench beside it. In the trench they would put the ends of poles made from young trees or branches. If the poles were long and flexible enough, they would bend them into arches; otherwise they would tie them together in the middle to make a dome five or six feet high. Covered with small branches and grass everywhere except the doorway, this would make a snug hut. In cold weather they would leave an opening in the roof for smoke from a central fireplace.

There was nothing to buy, no housing to carry from place to place. Each time they arrived at a new place, they could build the whole thing in a few hours from locally available materials. "They," of course, were women; the men would be busy hunting.

In English, wickiups have been mentioned at least since 1852, when the Portland Oregonian told about Indians who "left their Wick-ey-ups at the Ogden [River] and came and camped right by the side of us." In 1903, in her novel The Land of Little Rain, Mary Hunter Austin celebrated the life of the Shoshones of the southwestern desert: "Next to spring, the best time to visit Shoshone Land is when the deer-star hangs low and white like a torch over the morning hills. Go up past Winnedumah and down Saline and up again to the rim of Mesquite Valley. Take no tent, but if you will, have an Indian build you a wickiup, willows planted in a circle, drawn over to an arch, and bound cunningly with withes, all the leaves on, and chinks to count the stars through."

Austin could be characterized as one of the earliest ecofeminists. She was also one of the first residents of the artists' colony of Carmel, California, and did her writing in a treehouse which she called her wickiup.

Though wickiups were built by many different tribes, the word apparently comes from wiikiyaapi meaning "lodge" or "house" in the Sac and Fox or Mesquakie language. Sac and Fox, two dialects of the same language, belong to the Algonquian language family. Nowadays the language is spoken by about seven hundred members of the tribe in Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: a lodge used by nomadic American indians in the SW US