And the man called Meemaw, son of Quapaw, Cherokee and Comanche, also known as Warm Blood, son of Hot Blood of the Moonlight Battles Where the White Wolf Descended From the Three Weeping Stars and during which many souls were sent to the Lazy River of Oblivion; this man, the one they call Meemaw, accepted the rug of the chieftain, as bequeathed to him by the people -- his father's people -- and they sat down to savor the mulled entrails of a white bull.
--Aboriginal America: An Oral History, Marlana P. DeSoto, trans., ed., 1995

Discovery
In 1982, during a relocation of Pentagon library materials, a file called MEEMAW INCIDENT: A STUDY fell into a package of files delivered to the press liaison of the Undersecretary, a man by the name of Phillip Linkletter, who accidently took it home, where it was discovered by his girlfriend at the time, Lane M. Dernish, a humanities professor at American University. What she found was a collection of papers dating back to 1607 related to an American Indian tribe called the Meemaw (above engraving courtesy Renwick Gallery, Washingon, D.C.: Meemaw Scalps an Emissary, Unknown, 1815), a banished contingent of the Huron who wandered west in the eighteenth century. The file and its contents -- surveyor's notes from 1612, government correspondence, exchanges of reservation land, not to mention graphic sketches and accounts of Meemaw rituals -- were eventually returned to the Pentagon library, but Dernish's subsequent research uncovered not only one of the most brutal and some would say gratuitous American Indian factions in history, but also one of the most insufferably betrayed: exploited for its land and resources by the government and tribal adversaries, and depleted to the point where its population numbered in the mere hundreds by 1965. Ms. Dernish's research trail ended, however, with a 1973 Yurt Living article reporting on an organization of surviving Meemaw who had left their Wyoming reservation in twelve school buses to perform a solstice ritual on sacred land that had long been occupied by a U.S. Government Air Force base. The group of Meemaw, estimated around five hundred, disappeared on their way to a place in Nevada they called The Valley of Never-Ending Spite.

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