Hainai Indians. A tribe of the Caddo confederacy, otherwise known as Inie, or Ioni. After the Spanish occupancy their village was situated 3 leagues west of the mission of Nacogdoches, in east Texas; it contained 80 warriors, the same number assigned to the Hainai by Sibley in 1805, who perhaps obtained his information from the same sources. Sibley places their village 20 miles from Natchitoches, Louisiana. In manners, customs, and social organization the Hainai do not appear to have differed from the other tribes of the Caddo confederacy, whose subsequent fate they have shared. By Sibley and others they are called “Tachies or Texas”, as if that term applied to them particularly. The “great nation called Ayano or Cannohatinno,” according to the narrative of the La Salle expedition in 1687, were not the Hainai, as has been sometimes supposed, or any tribe at all, properly speaking. Ayano, or hayano, is merely the Caddo word for people,’ while Kano-hatino, is the Caddo equivalent for ‘Red river,’ presumably the same stream now so called. The Indians simply informed the explorer that many people lived on Red river, a statement which the French, in their ignorance of the language, construed to contain the definite name and synonym of a powerful tribe.
