Oral traditions indicate that the Kanza, Kaáⁿze níkashiⁿga in their own language, made their home in the Tallgrass region of the Great Plains since before European colonization. The Kanza were successful farmers, hunters, and traders. They planted crops in their hometowns and conducted lengthy hunting expeditions following bison migrations. The territory supporting Kanza lifeways, including their spiritual practices, spans what today constitutes most of the state of Kansas as well as parts of present-day Nebraska and Missouri. In the eighteenth century, Kanza towns were located on the Missouri River north and west of modern-day Kansas City. By the early nineteenth century, the Kanza were living in towns along the Kansas River between what would become Lawrence and Fort Riley and hunting on the central and western plains.1
One of the best-known early villages, Blue Earth, which the Kanza called Níto, was located “along the lower reach of the Big Blue River,” east of present-day Manhattan.2
The United States government, which had only been in existence some forty-nine years at the time of the Treaty of 1825, held a very different perspective on land and land-use that arose from nineteenth-century beliefs known as “Manifest Destiny.” These beliefs, as the treaty annotations explain, existed well before Europeans began to colonize the western hemisphere. Even before they arrived on the shores of North America, non-Indigenous peoples imagined the land as either empty of inhabitants or as inhabited by people who they believed were inherently lesser than Europeans. When encountered, Indigenous people were most often depicted in early letters, journals, and military accounts as naive, savage, and/or primitive. Difference was labeled deficit. For example, different cultural beliefs, such as Indigenous cultures of exchange in which gifts are shared between groups to forge relationship and mark political alliance, were depicted as childlike (see, for example, Christopher Columbus’s letters about the Taino). At the same time, the sophistication of Indigenous knowledges went unseen and unacknowledged. On the tallgrass prairies, Indigenous practices of controlled burns offer one instance; to return to Columbus’s letters, the remarkable technology needed for the massive canoes and outriggers he described are another. These radical misconceptions held by the vast majority of non-Native people were used to rationalize the violent treatment of Indigenous peoples and the exploration, colonization, and eventual conquest of Indigenous lands.3
Legally, European empires - and later, the United States - used the Doctrine of Discovery to justify their acquisition of Indigenous land. This doctrine, first defined in the 1493 Papal Bull “Inter Caetera” issued by Pope Alexander VI, was a way of using Christian ideologies to rationalize Spanish and later other European imperialism. “Inter Caetera” was specifically issued to authorize Columbus’s incursion into Indigenous nations’ territories and to give Spain rights over the already occupied lands that Europeans called the “New World.” In the early nineteenth century, the U.S. Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Marshall, extended this tradition and invoked the Doctrine of Discovery as a way to legally authorize U.S. authority over the Indigenous nations that the U.S. Constitution recognized as sovereign (politically independent). The Doctrine of Discovery was among a number of power imbalances codified into law through three U.S. Supreme Court cases - Johnson v M’Intosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v Georgia (1831), and Worcester v Georgia (1831) - subsequently referred to as the “Marshall Trilogy.” The first of these cases, Johnson v M’Intosh, held that Indigenous nations could not sell their land to anyone but the U.S. government (instead of to individuals, companies, or state governments). The two other cases defined Indigenous nations as “domestic dependent nations,” under federal authority, but outside of states' authority. Notably, the Marshall Trilogy remains the basis of federal Indian case law today.4
A firm belief in cultural and moral superiority informed European, and later U.S., colonization. Spanish, French, and British invaders, claimed their seizure of Indigenous lands and resources was divinely ordained. Once the United States was founded, Americans adapted this rationalization. They viewed colonization as a duty to spread their system of government - republican democracy - across the continent. This belief, known as Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth-century, contended that North America was destined, by a Protestant Christian god, to be a settler possession. Because this worldview cast conquest and land seizure as a divinely ordained right rather than as invasion, colonial settlers viewed Kanza sovereignty - their inherent political rights and long-standing land claims - simply as a temporary roadblock to westward expansion. Thus, even while settlers were invading Kanza homelands and were themselves strangers with no established relationship to those same lands, the non-Native squatters who settled illegally on Kanza land portrayed the Kanza as intruders whose removal was “inevitable."5
Despite long-held colonial beliefs about manifest destiny, the United States (and before them the British and French) had always acknowledged Indigenous nations as sovereigns to be engaged via formal diplomacy. As a result, the U.S. government forged treaties, or nation-to-nation compacts, with Indigenous nations, including the Kanza. However, as the young country continued to gain territory, status, and citizens, land treaties reflected a clear imbalance of power. The treaties with the Kanza in 1825, 1846, 1859, and 1862, together with a May 8, 1872 act of Congress, were tools by which the U.S. government intentionally disrupted Kanza social structures, foodways, spiritual practices, and livelihoods and eventually forced the Kanza from their homelands to what is now known as Oklahoma. In the space of less than fifty years, the Kanza, and other tribes like them, were transformed from thriving independent nations to refugees.6
Land cessions did not happen overnight. They were a part of a broader pattern of United States colonialism that included refugee migrations, settler invasions, confinement to smaller territories, and eventual elimination and/or expulsion from homelands. This pattern repeated across the continent, expanded federal government influence, and opened up resources for some U.S. citizens and companies as Indigenous lands were redistributed to the largely white beneficiaries of empire. Colleges and universities were such beneficiaries, receiving celebrated “gifts” of land authorized by the 1862 Morrill Land Grant Act. The land that Kansas State University stands on, as well as lands that Congress allocated to Kansas State and many other public universities to re-sell (monies that became seed funds for university endowments) was Indigenous land, and in this case, Kanza land.7 Recognizing that reality is at the heart of the Chapman Center for Rural Studies Treaty Project.
Visit our Historical Timeline page for a summarized timeline of Kanza History.
1. Lauren W. Ritterbush, “Visit to Blue Earth Village,” Kansas History 38, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 14–16; William E. Unrau, The Kansa Indians: A History of the Wind People, 1673–1873 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 6, 36–39, 79; Ronald A. Parks, The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homelands, 1846–1873 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 40–41.
2. Ritterbush, “Visit to Blue Earth Village,” 6. Blue Earth, which included at least 120 dwellings, was abandoned by the Kanza by 1831, when, following encroachments by neighboring tribes and tensions from treaty signings, those living in Blue Earth split into three villages: Hard Chief’s, American Chief’s, and Fool’s Chief’s. Ritterbush, “Visit to Blue Earth,” 6, 21.
3. Robert J. Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers, 2006), 3–4; John E. Kicza, Resilient Cultures: America’s Native Peoples Confront European Colonization, 1500–1800 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003), 69; Colin G. Calloway, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History, 5th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016), 73–76.
4. Miller, Native America, 1–3, 9–58; Leo E. Oliva, “The Santa Fe Trail and National Expansion: Commerce, Conquest, and Commemoration,” Kansas History 44, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 4; Margaret Huettl, “Nation to Nation: Understanding Treaties and Sovereignty,” in Understanding and Teaching Native American History, ed. Kristofer Ray and Brady DeSanti (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), 131–32.
5. Miller, Native America, 10, 28; Parks, Darkest Period, 34, 64–65, 119, 144; Craig Miner and William E. Unrau, The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural Revolution, 1854–1871 (1978; repr., Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 1–18.
6. Miller, Native America, 47–48; Edwards, Osage Women and Empire, 64; Parks, Darkest Period, 233.
7. Robert Lee, et al., “Land Grab Universities: A High Country News Investigation,” High Country News, accessed July 28, 2022, https://www.landgrabu.org/; K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Kelly Mcdonough, Jean M. O'Brien, and Robert Warrior, eds., “Intervention: Indigenous Studies Reflections on The Land-Grab Universities Project,” NAIS: Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 8, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 89-175; Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387-409; Tai S. Edwards, Osage Women and Empire: Gender and Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018), 61-63; Robert Lee, et al., “Land Grab Universities”; Margaret A. Nash, ”Entangled Pasts: Land-Grant Colleges and American Indian Dispossession,” History of Education Quarterly 59, no. 4 (November 2019): 437-467; Sharon Stein, ”A Colonial History of the Higher Education Present: Rethinking Land-grant Institutions through Processes of Accumulation and Relations of Conquest,” Critical Studies in Education 61, no. 2 (2020): 212-228.
Partial funding for this program is provided by Humanities Kansas, a nonprofit cultural organization connecting communities with history, traditions, and ideas to strengthen civic life, as well as the College of Arts and Sciences at Kansas State University and the Kansas Studies Institute at the Johnson County Community College.
The findings, conclusions, etc., are not necessarily those of HK or the National Endowment for the Humanities.
