When it comes to not speaking the names of the dead themselves or any words that resemble them the basic explanation is that out of fear the dead might present themselves or return as a ghost.
Among the Kiowa Indians, on someone’s death, all the relatives take on alternative names. Likewise, among the Bahima of Central Africa, when the king dies, his name is abolished from the language and if his name was that of an animal, then a new name had to be found.
Sometimes this taboo on naming persists up until the body has totally decayed, with some communities feeling a need to disguise themselves to prevent being recognized; The Nicobar islanders go as far as shaving their heads.
The Kiowa emerged as a distinct person in their original homeland of the northern Missouri River Basin. Searching for more lands of their own, the Kiowa traveled southeast to the Black Hills in present-day South Dakota and Wyoming around 1650.
In the Black Hills region, the Kiowa lived peacefully alongside the Crow Indians, with whom they long maintained a close friendship, organized themselves into 10 bands, and numbered around 3000.
Pressure from the Ojibwe in the north woods and the edge of the great plains in Minnesota forced the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and later the Sioux westward into Kiowa territory around the Black Hills. The Kiowa were pushed south by the invading Cheyenne who was then pushed westward out of the Black Hills by the Sioux.
Eventually, the Kiowa got a vast territory on the central and southern great plains in western Kansas, eastern Colorado, most of Oklahoma including the panhandle, and the Llano Estacado in the Texas Panhandle and eastern New Mexico.
In their ancient history, the Kiowa traveled with dogs pulling their belongings until they obtained horses through trade and raid with the Spanish and other Indian nations in the southwest.
In the early spring of 1790 at the place that would become Las Vegas, New Mexico, a Kiowa party led by war leader Guikate, made an offer of peace to a Comanche party while both were visiting the home of a mutual friend of both tribes.
This led to a later meeting between Guikate and the head chief of the Nokoni Comanche. The two groups made an alliance to share the same hunting grounds and entered a mutual defense pact and became the dominant inhabitants of the Southern Plains. From that time on, the Comanche and Kiowa hunted, traveled, and made war together.
Besides the Comanche, the Kiowa formed a very close alliance with the Plains Apache (Kiowa-Apache), with the two nations sharing much of the same culture and taking part in each other’s annual council meetings and events.
The powerful alliance of southern plains nations kept the invading Spanish from gaining a strong colonial hold on the southern plains and eventually forced them completely out of the area, pushing them eastward and south past the Rio Grande into present-day Mexico.
