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The Kanza were part of a large network of trade and communication between indigenous peoples, long before European contact. The Blue Earth Village was at the heart of their homeland. It was a large, bustling community, and it would be decades before local white settlements such as Manhattan, Kansas equaled it in population.
The United States government was interested in the west, and what resources and people it could exploit. Because of this, many expeditions -- the most famous of them being Lewis and Clark's expedition to the sea -- were launched into the West.
The Long Expedition began in 1818 under the leadership of Major Stephen H. Long. Their goal was to establish a US presence in the area. The visit to Blue Earth Village was undertaken as a side-mission led by self-taught naturalist Thomas Say. Their visit lasted 4 days. Much information about what it was like in the village comes from this expedition.
Once, it was thought that George Sibley’s expeditionary team visited Blue Earth Village in 1811; however, in recent years, scholars have come to believe they visited a different village along the Kansas River.
Not long after these expeditions, land treaties in 1825, 1846, 1859, and 1863 expelled the Kanza from their historic homeland. To learn more about how land treaties dispossessed indigenous peoples in this area, you can look at the Chapman Center's subsite: Kansas Land Treaties
Today, the Kaw Nation is headquartered in Kaw City, Oklahoma. To learn more about the Kaw Nation's history, you can visit their website and hear it directly from them: https://www.kawnation.gov/kanza-history/
Though the tribe resides in Oklahoma currently, their stamp on Kansas can still be seen. Council Grove was the last place the Kanza lived in Kansas before being forcibly removed in 1873. In Council Grove, there are many historical sites to visit:
To learn more about the 39 federally recognized tribes that live in Oklahoma today, including the Kaw, the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City is an excellent option! https://famok.org/
To learn more about the Kaw Nation from historians and from Kaw tribal citizens, click on each of the descriptions below. They feature brief audio clippings from interviews done with these experts.
Ronald D. Parks, author of The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and their Last Homeland, 1846--1873, discusses the introduction of male-dominated agricultural practices.
James Pepper Henry, Kaw Nation citizen and executive director of the First Americans Museum, discusses how the Kaw Nation came to own land in Kansas again.
C. Huffman, Kaw Nation citizen, talks about Kaw connection to the land and what it means to return home.
These are only a brief preview of the content that the Kansas Land Treaties project site holds. If this topic interests you, make sure to click around the site to learn more!
Lauren W. Ritterbush is Professor of Anthropology at Kansas State University. She is an archaeologist and ethnohistorian who focuses on Great Plains indigenous societies. In this presentation, Dr. Ritterbush shares the history of the Kanza people and their village here in Manhattan, Kansas.
You can also read her article on Blue Earth Village through the link in the bibliography!
The presentation begins with a summary of the history of the Kanza prior to the tribe’s relocation to the Council Grove Reservation in 1847. The presenter, Ronald D. Parks, presented an overview of the impact of the Santa Fe Trail and U.S. government policy on the Kanzas during the tribe’s occupation of the Council Grove Reservation from 1847 until 1873. Themes covered are environmental degradation, schools that imposed Christianity and farming, the impact of the Santa Fe Trail, whiskey trade, and the illegal occupation of the Indians’ land by white squatters. Ron briefly examines the underlying world views of the dominant Euro-American people who imposed their wills on the Kanzas: the sanctity of private property, a Christian contempt for indigenous religions, white racial supremacy, and the imperial ambitions of an expanding nation-state. The consequences for the Kanzas were dire: indebtedness, military inferiority, vanishing game, dependence on government annuity payments, poverty, profound cultural erosion, and the tribe’s diminishing population.
Ronald D. Parks has a BA in English, from Kansas State University, 1972; employed by the Kansas State Historical Society (Historic Sites Division), 1981-2004; author of The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland, 1846-1873. Published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2014, this book won both the 2014 Prairie Heritage Book Award for the best book about the heritage of the Great Plains and the Santa Fe Trail Association’s Louis Barry Writing Award for the best book or major article about the Santa Fe Trail in 2014. The Darkest Period was also listed by the Kansas Library Association as a Kansas Notable Book for 2015.
James, Edwin. Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1819, 1820, Volume 1. Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1905. https://archive.org/details/account02ofexpeditjame
“Historical Events.” Kaw Nation, September 15, 2022. https://www.kawnation.gov/historical-events/
“The Kanza People.” Kaw Nation, September 15, 2022. https://www.kawnation.gov/the-kanza-people/
“Kanza Timeline.” Kaw Nation, September 15, 2022. https://www.kawnation.gov/kanza-timeline/
Parks, Ronald D. The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and their Last Homeland. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.
Ritterbush, Lauren W. “Visit to Blue Earth Village.” Kansas History 38 (2015): 2-21. https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/2015spring_ritterbush.pdf
Unrau, William E. The Kansa Indians: A History of the Wind People, 1673-1873. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986.
"Kansas without the Kanza: Understanding How the Kanza Homeland Became K-State" https://youtu.be/VcS_H75wYWo?si=gh6aK7TFNALY40mu
This drawing from "Sketchbook from the Stephen H. Long Expedition to the Rocky Mountains" depicts a Kanza village. The artist was Titian Ramsay Peale, and he drew this sketch in 1819. Photo courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.
Kanza Blue Earth Village, located between the Kansas and Blue Rivers about four miles east of where Manhattan was founded.
The Kanza or Kaw people, for whom the state of Kansas is named, recognize their early homeland in much of what we know today as Kansas and adjacent parts of present-day Missouri, Nebraska, and Colorado.
European contact with the ancestors of the Kanza began, at least indirectly, in the late 1600s. Soon thereafter, the Kanza were trading pelts and hides with the French along the Missouri River. Later that century, they moved their primary settlement to the Kansas River valley. Also known as the People of the Southwind, they established Blue Earth village in the heart of their homeland in what is now eastern Manhattan.
Blue Earth Village was home to approximately 1,500 people. They lived in about 120 earth lodges. These may have housed 1-2 families or as many as 10 related individuals. The women and men worked in distinct but complementary roles to plant and harvest crops such as corn, beans, pumpkins, and melons and hunt and process bison, deer, and elk for meat and hides.
The tribe then split into different bands in the years following the first land-cession treaty imposed on the Kanza in 1825. Each built a new settlement downriver near the first federal agency established by the federal government. Later treaties in 1846 and 1859 took more land from the Kanza until 1872, when the Kaw Land Bill sold the last of it to non-indigenous settlers. The Kanza, reduced to only several hundred citizens, were expelled from Kansas, and moved into Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) in 1873.
Today, the Kaw Nation is a federally recognized self-governing tribal nation headquartered in Kaw City, Oklahoma. Although the Kanza have endured nearly unbearable hardships, their population has rebounded, and they are revitalizing their cultural lifeways. The Kaw Nation is dedicated to educating the broader public about their cultural and historical legacy in Kansas.
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