Originally from southern Ohio, Kentucky, and western Pennsylvania the shawnee indians have a sorrowful past. During the Beaver Wars of the 17th century they were easily dominated by the Iroquois Leauge, who either forced them into subjugation, or forced them to flee for new homelands. Those new homelands were in the southern American States, and towards the Illinois region. Their name Shawnee, is probably derived from the Ojibwa language. In Ojibwa the word for southener is Shawani or, shaw-a-ni. It is likely that the whites dropped the a vowel and pronounced it as shaw-nee.
The Shawnee participated in the wars which occurred between the Ohio Indians who were controlled by the powerful Three Fires Confederation (the Anishinabek), and the English, then Americans, which occurred between 1755-1815. Those wars were the French and Indian War, Pontiac's War, Lord Dumore's War, The American Revolutionary War, the Northwest Indian War and the War of 1812. After the Three Fires Confederation defeated the Iroquois League in the Beaver Wars in 1700, they allowed their Shanee kin to return to their original homelands. The long 1755-1815 Ohio War brought much ruin to the Ohio regions native Indian population, including the Shawnee Indians.
After the United States defeated the powerful Three Fires Confederation in the long Ohio War in 1815, they eventualy forced most of the Ohio regions Indians to relocate west of the Mississippi river, including the Shawnee. The Shawnee Indians ended up living in Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. They were repeatedly stabbed in the back by the Americans. With each new act of greed by the Americans, the Shawnee were forced to cede more land to the United States and get up and relocate to a new location, only to get stabbed in the back again by the Americans. Today, Shawnee Indians are widely scattered across much of the United States, including in Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas and probably other locations.