The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 11, July 1907 - April, 1908 Page: 251

                                
The Native Tribes About the East Texas Missions.         251
with its native meaning, to the Medina River, and then gradually
to all of the territory included within the present State of Texas.
While the name Texas, as used by the tribes in the eastern por-
tion of the State, was thus evidently a broad and indefinite term
applied to many and unrelated tribes occupying a wide area, it is
clear that the native group name for most of the tribes about
the missions in the Neches and Angelina valleys was Hasinai, or
Asinai.' Today the term Hasinai is used by the Caddoans on the
reservations to include not only the survivors of these Neches-
Angelina tribes, but also the survivors of the tribes of the Sabine
and Red River country. It seems from the sources, however, that
in the early days the term was more properly limited to the former
group. In strictest usage, indeed, the earliest writers did not in-
clude all of these. A study of contemporary evidence shows that
at the first contact of Europeans with these tribes and for a long
time thereafter writers quite generally made a distinction between
the Hasinai (Asinai, Cenis, etc.) and the Kadohadacho2 (Cad-
dodacho) group; these confederacies, for such they were in the
Indian sense of the term, were separated by a wide stretch of unin-
habited territory extending between the upper Angelina and the
Red River in the neighborhood of Texarkana; their separateness
of organization was positively affirmed, and the details of the inner
constitution of both groups were more or less fully described;
while in their relations with the Europeans they were for nearly
a century dealt with as separate units. Nevertheless, because of
the present native use of the term and some early testimony that
can not be disregarded, I would not at present assert unreservedly
that the term formerly was applied by the natives only to the
Neches-Angelina group. If, as seems highly probable, this was
the case, in order to preserve the native usage we should call these
tribes the Hasinai; if not, then the Southern Hasinai.
The name Hasinai, like Texas, was sometimes narrowed in its
application to one tribe, usually the Hainai. But occasionally the
notion appears that there was an Hasinai tribe distinct from the
'The 'Spaniards ordinarily spelled this name Asinai or Asinay, and the
French writers Cenis. Mooney, the ethnologist, who knows intimately the
survivors of these people living on the reservations, writes the name by
which they now call themselves Hasinai, or Hasini, preferably the former.
His spelling has been adopted as the standard one by the Bureau of
American Ethnology. See the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau
of American Ethnology, 1092 (1896).
2I use here also the spelling adopted by the Bureau of American Eth-
nology.