A very quick follow up. FIrst of all, erratum in the previous posting: the year of publication for Thomas Williams' bulletin on millets was 1899, not 1988. Also, whatever the fate of the Mohave 'anki millet, the "ankee" or "ankee millet" name persist. It figures in Elaine Nowick's nice compilation on common names for plants in the Great Plains./7 One also encounters it in various webpages dealing with barnyard millet outside of North America, including one at the Atlas of Living Austraila, that associates the name with E. esculentis./8 Anyway, "ankee" is part of the vocabulary of millets, which I didn't even know until yesterday. Best to all, Don DO, EL, MI, US NAMA Notes (numbering cont'd): 7. Nowick, Elaine, Historical Common Names of Great Plains Plants, Vol 1, ''Common Names'', Zea Books, 2015 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188096594.pdf 8. Atlas of Living Australia, "Ankee millet" (accessed 13 July 2024) bie.ala.org.au/species/https%3A//id.biodiversity.org.au/instance/apni/887000 (NB- the Ohwi 1962 source cited is at https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/bunruichiri/20/1/20_KJ00002992741/_pdf/... but I do not find "ankee" in the text) On Sat, Jul 13, 2024 at 12:36 PM Don Osborn <don@milletsalliance.org> wrote:
The millet-of-the-month calendar features barnyard millet(s) in July. As we know, this is a complex of wild, gathered, and cultivated species in the genus Echinochloa.
While looking up some material, I came across some older discussions of this group in which there was mention of "ankee" or "ankee millet." In particular, three publications, using similar text and the same drawings, from 1899-1901 (at the time of these publications, what we now know as Echinochloa was classified as Panicum),./1/2/3 These evidently concerns an Echinochloa species, likely a variety of E. crus-galli, that is very tall and grown mostly in wetter or inundated soils.
Ankee is, or was until the 1960s, grown by the Mohave / Mojave people, who use(d) the grains for food./4 The name "ankee" is evidently a borrowing from 'anki in their language./5
Further research would fill out some details, including the important matters of how and when ankee came to the area (E. crus-galli is described as a plant from Asia), and its current status.
Together with the so-called Sonoran millet (Panicum hirticaule) - a species native to North America - ankee is another example of a millet being grown by Native Americans in wetland areas bordering rivers in what is now the southwest US and northwest Mexico. One should note also that the Mohave people were subjected to confinement to a reservation somewhat away from their native area (altho some apparently remained in their original home) and were subjected to assimilationist policies after 1890./6 .
As always, any feedback or further information is appreciated.
Don
Don Osborn, PhD (East Lansing, MI, US) North American Millets Alliance
Notes: 1. Williams, Thomas A., "Millets," Farmers' Bulletin No. 101, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1988, pp. 14-15 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Millets_%28IA_CAT8720151... 2. ''Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture'', USGPO, 1899, pp. 277-278 https://archive.org/details/yoa1898/page/277/mode/2up 3. Pammel, L.H., Jules Buel Weems, and Harry Foster Bain, The Grasses of Iowa, Iowa Geological Society, 1901, p. 135 https://archive.org/details/grassesofiowa01pamm/page/135/mode/1up 4. Stewart, Kenneth M. “Mohave Indian Gathering of Wild Plants.” ''Kiva'', vol. 31, no. 1, 1965, pp. 46–53. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30247560 5. Munro, Pamela, Nellie Brown, and Julie G. Crawford, "A Mojave Dictionary," UCLA Occasional Papers in Linguistics, No. 10, 1992. https://linguistics.ucla.edu/publications/opl_10.pdf 6. "Mohave people," Wikipedia (accessed 13 July 2024) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohave_people