PEANA INDIANS. The name Peana appears in several forms (Mapeana, Mapiana, Peana, Peanna, Piana) in the baptismal, marriage, and burial registers of San Antonio de Valero Mission of San Antonio. At least ten individuals can be identified for the period 1727–43. One of these is said to have been buried at nearby San Juan Capistrano Mission. No clear ethnic identity has yet been established for Peana Indians. They have sometimes been considered the same as the Teanames, but the equation cannot be demonstrated by documentary evidence. Their name is sometimes said to be a variant of the name Teana, which turns out to be the result of misreading Mananteana as two separate names. (Mananteana is now considered to be a variant of the name Menanquen.) Peana is not a truncated form of the name Ervipiame, for Peana and Ervipiame individuals are occasionally identified in the same Valero register entry. It seems most likely that the Peanas of Valero were the same people as the Beans, whose name appears in a document of 1683 written at El Paso. This document records testimony given to Spaniards by Juan Sabeata, a Jumano leader who named various friendly Indian groups with whom the Jumano traded. If the names Bean and Peana are synonymous, it would appear that the Peanas of Valero originally lived somewhere to the west of San Antonio and may have been one of the Indian groups displaced from the southern part of the Edwards Plateau by Apaches in the second half of the eighteenth century. J. R. Swanton thought that the Peanas may have spoken the Coahuilteco language, but this is speculation that has yet to be confirmed by specific evidence.
August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Gesammelte Werke (8 vols., Berlin: Fontane, 1890–94). Charles W. Hackett, ed., Pichardo's Treatise on the Limits of Louisiana and Texas (4 vols., Austin: University of Texas Press, 1931–46). J. R. Swanton, Linguistic Material from the Tribes of Southern Texas and Northeastern Mexico (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1940).
The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this article.Thomas N. Campbell, "PEANA INDIANS," Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/bmp96), accessed May 26, 2015. Uploaded on June 15, 2010. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.