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Káma-Kapúska! Making Marks in Indian Country, 1833–34

ka-ka (keeper) note 1

The term derives from kae (to have) and the suffix –‍ka, which marks an action as continuous or habitual; see Mauricio Mixco, Mandan (Munich: Lincom Europa, 1997). Mixco’s work was done with Nú'eta speakers Clyde Baker, Jacob Bird, William Bell, Edwin Benson, Louella Benson Young Bear, Ernest Medicine Stone, and Carl Whitman.

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ka-ka (keeper) 3 numak'aki theme plain 2021-04-30T06:08:09-07:00
Among twentieth-century Numak'aki peoples, ka-ka is the term for a keeper of sacred objects.‍[1] Translated literally, the word means “to have continuously.” Those who keep sacred objects or rights in a community—whether the rights for hunting, building earth lodges, sacred bundles, or specific objects associated with a community’s óhate (societies)—also keep the histories and knowledge associated with those objects and rights. To have or hold these things continuously suggests that a ka-ka inhabits this associated knowledge all the time; like being a village leader, such as a miti ko-mne-ka (“one who is the village door”), or being a kapúska, or “mark maker” and part of the name given to Karl Bodmer by a Numak'aki warrior, being a ka-ka is not a role that one takes on and off, fulfilling one’s duties only as needed, but rather it is a continuous state of being.
In possessing the rights to something, a ka-ka makes the decisions as to when and to whom those rights are shared or revealed. Because of this strict community rule, we know that those Numak'aki men who shared knowledge with Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied about their own tribe’s histories, practices, objects, and language were ka-ka. We also know that at times they protected that knowledge. Mató-Tópe, for instance, shared the objects that he was ka-ka over: his various societies’ drum, lance, and eagle feather bonnet. Yet, when he spent evenings by the Europeans’ fire, he gave Wied-Neuwied knowledge about other tribes and languages—either because he was not a ka-ka over those realms of Numak'aki knowledge, or as a way to give knowledge to outsiders without divulging particulars about Numak'aki peoples.

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