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Glite Dictionary
Crow Nation

Crow Nation

1 8.1
A Native American people living in eastern Montana and nearby areas who have their own language and customs
  • proper noun
: Nación Crow
  • The Crow Nation has a rich history that is preserved through storytelling and art.

Examples

  • He joined the Crow Nation to learn more about their traditions and culture.

  • Delia Spotted Bear, a teenage member of the Crow Nation, illustrates family closeness in her poem "My Family" in Rising Voices: Writings of Young Native Americans (Hirschfelder and Singer 1992).

    Academic text (2004)

  • Many members of the Crow Nation participate in powwows to celebrate their heritage.

Surface Forms

Crow Nation main

Morphology

Crow + nation

This is a straightforward compositional name: 'Crow' denotes the people (an ethnonym) and 'nation' denotes a group of people, so together they mean the nation of the Crow people. The pattern Ethnonym + nation is cross-linguistically common and, given knowledge of both constituents and the capitalization signaling a proper name, a B1 learner can readily infer the meaning.

Etymology

Crow Nation comes from the people's own name, 'Apsáalooke', which one popular story says means 'children of the large-beaked bird'. Early French and English visitors called them 'crow people', and that bird image is why we call the group the Crow Nation today.