It is worth noting that the Treaty of 1825’s preamble contends the Kanza treaty signatories are “duly authorized and empowered by said Nation” to cede land to the United States. Historians and contemporary Kaw citizens dispute this claim. It was often the case that treaties were signed and ratified with individuals or Indigenous groups who agreed to the terms without the approval, or even, in some cases, the knowledge, of the entire body of the Nation. As historian William E. Unrau argued, this was the period when “chief making by the government reached its zenith, the federal agents were required to identify a flexible tribal leader who enjoyed enough followers so that the government’s dispossessory objectives might not seem so blatantly pernicious.” Federal officials had sought to negotiate a Kanza land cession treaty since 1818, and some prominent leaders, such as Shonganega and Wakanzare, were notably absent in the final 1825 treaty. This ongoing U.S. government pressure led to disagreements among the Kanza on how to engage with the U.S., resulting in factionalism and town separations.⁶

The language of the treaty is worth considering. Both the current and historic definition of the word “cede” are “to give way; to yield or surrender something.” Notably, Article 1 does not state that the Kanza agreed to sell their land to the U.S. government, but, instead, that they yielded it. Given that the Kanza had few viable options other than relinquishing vast swathes of their homelands, some of which were already invaded by Euro-American settlers, the treaty’s language exemplifies the power imbalances that undergird it. Further, given that treaties are often employed to mark the terms of negotiation that end a war, the language of “ceding” invokes the structure of victor and vanquished peoples, with the victor ultimately controlling the terms of the agreement.⁷

This treaty forced the Kanza to relinquish lands they held in what, by 1821, had become the state of Missouri, a significant amount land that would later be part of the state of Kansas, and a smaller area that eventually became part of Nebraska.

This treaty – for the first time – confined the Kanza a specific and significantly smaller land area, shrinking their landbase from twenty million to two million acres. In the 1830s, other Indigenous nations, such as the Shawnee, Delaware, and Kickapoo, were removed from the east and also confined to nearby reservations in what is now the state of Kansas, but was then called Indian Territory. The concentration of more Indigenous peoples competing over the same natural resources undermined Kanza survival.⁸

Though the treaty states that teachers, instructors, and federal agents would “reside near the Kansas,” in reality the this was only “loosely enforced or completely ignored.” Agents never lived closer than twenty miles from the main Kanza towns and often between fifty and seventy-five miles away. There was also significant turnover in personnel and as historian William E. Unrau argued, there was “simply no one to look after the government’s obligations to the Kansas.” Government agents were supposed to serve as diplomats, distributing land payments and communicating regularly between the Kanza and the U.S. government. But that was not the case for two decades after this treaty was signed.⁹

The Treaty of 1825 promised $3,500 “per annum, for twenty successive years,” or $70,000 in exchange for Kanza land. Some of this land served as the basis for land grants the U.S. Congress would later allocate to public universities in the Morrill Act (1862). Morrill Act allocations included 769,879 acres of Kanza lands, from the treaties of 1825 and 1846 combined. These lands (in Kansas and Nebraska) were resold by thirty-three universities, including Kansas State University, and raised $1,067,217. This shows a significant discrepancy between the price the U.S. paid for the land and its value at the time. Furthermore, when adjusted for inflation, land grant universities raised over $21 million from the Kanza land they were given as a result of the Morrill Act.

As the first land-grant university, founded in 1863, Kansas State University, (then named Kansas State Agricultural College), received 100 percent of their land grants--87,290 acres in all--from the U.S. government’s colonization of Kanza land. Much of the Kanza land granted to Kansas State from the Morrill Act “was rented or sold by the college,” and the university raised $517,367, or $10,812,965 when adjusted for inflation. And it wasn’t just K-State that benefited. Twenty-eight land-grant colleges were given land parcels from this treaty alone.¹⁰

Article 4 notes that the U.S., along with furnishing the Kanza with livestock and farming implements as partial payment for the ceded land, would appoint settlers “to aid and instruct” the Kanza “in their agriculture.” This aid and instruction was aimed at inducing Kanza women to stop farming and Kanza men to start in the tradition of Euro-American agricultural practices.

The Kanza viewed women’s farming as complementary to men’s hunting; both were equally valued and necessary for community sustenance and survival. This gender parity is foundational to Kanza worldviews. To upend gender structures was to undermine everything the Kanza understood about the world and their place in it.¹¹

As historian Ronald Parks notes in one of the Treaty Project interviews, the introduction of such male-dominated agricultural practices was extremely difficult for the Kanza. He explains the “difficulties with what the government was asking the Kanza to do... was a major cultural revolution in terms of gender roles, because the Kanza were horticultural people. They raised corn, beans, and squash, later watermelons, potatoes, and some sunflowers, but that was considered women's work…. [As the United States government] began to try to provide some training for the students… they ran into opposition from the… hierarchy of the tribe.”¹²

Blacksmiths were commonly provided in treaties because U.S.-style agriculture required metal goods such as axes, plows, mowers, and wagons. Kanza women's farming did not require the same kind of metal equipment, in large part because they didn't cultivate single-crop fields for commercial sale. Nevertheless, the Kanza utilized blacksmith services to repair guns, spears, and cooking utensils. The Treaty of 1846 makes clear, however, that the U.S. government failed to reliably provide a blacksmith as guaranteed in this Article.¹³

This seemingly innocuous clause, then, holds weighty consequences because it is part of a larger attempt to systemically dismantle Kanza cultural practices and replace them with Euro-American modes of living and thinking.

In this article, the U.S. government set aside Kanza lands, which would be resold and the profits used to pay for schools. These “good lands,” which were well timbered and therefore extremely valuable, totaled over 23,000 acres, which, at the time would have been worth at least $30,000.¹⁴

Since the seventeenth century, assimilationist schooling was part of both European and later U.S. colonization in North America. By 1819, the U.S. Congress provided some funding for mission schools. Indigenous children were indoctrinated in the beliefs of U.S. culture through a settler-focused education. Even though Congress was partially funding assimilationist efforts, Indigenous people were often forced to pay for their own colonization as seen in this article. Because the treaty provided for the resale of land, numerous Catholic and Protestant Christian missionary groups competed over the opportunity to collect these funds and missionize the Kanza.¹⁵

In 1851, Methodists opened a mission in Council Grove on Kanza land. Notably, the Kanza successfully resisted this attempted educational assimilation and, by 1854, the U.S. government ended its support for the Kaw Mission. The school remained open for the children of white settlers and the Kaw Mission Historical site now functions as a museum.¹⁶

This article exacerbated factionalism among Kanza people and their leaders by privileging a small group over the larger Kanza population. Twenty-three “half breed tracts” of individually owned land were allocated to minor children of specific families that were deeply tied to non-Native traders and Kanza chief White Plume, all of whom were central to approving this treaty. These valuable Kansas-river-side plots were also highly coveted by speculators and settlers.¹⁷

In his interview for the Treaty Project, scholar Ronald Parks notes that this article of the treaty increased a growing schism within the nation. He explains, “It really created considerable amount of suspicion and division within the tribe. … There were anywhere from 1600-1800 members of the tribe, and we’re probably talking about the twenty free . . . sections that were given there. It's disproportionate in terms of population… There was a considerable amount of jealousy and dissension… I think in retrospect it was a really bad idea and caused a lot of fractiousness.”¹⁸

For the United States, factionalism and disagreement within an Indigenous nation was advantageous because it weakened the nation’s ability to mount a forceful resistance to continued colonization. Hence, mechanisms like “half-breed tracts” were commonplace in U.S. treaties with Indigenous people.

Because U.S. settler colonialism sought to eliminate Indigenous people, and thus their rights to land and sovereignty, the U.S. government used terms like “half-breed” “half-blood” or “full-blood” to describe Indigenous people. “Breed” was originally used to talk about animal species and such language subsequently became a racial slur. Nevertheless, even today, blood quantum is still part of U.S. Indian policy and law, based on the alleged ability to determine one’s identity and ancestry through a percentage of “Indian blood.” Such language and ideas were used to arbitrarily divide Indigenous communities and the federal government treated Indigenous people differently based on these assumptions. This language was also used to imply that “real Indians” were somehow (conveniently) disappearing. Often one’s supposed blood quantum had more to do with physical appearance or name than with personal identity, ancestry, or ties to tribal culture. Indigenous societies had long histories of incorporating people and defining nationhood and membership or citizenship in far different ways that had nothing to do with so-called “Indian blood.”¹⁹

The language used in this article is especially inflammatory. The treaty writers blame the “animosities” between the Kanza and the encroaching settlers on the Kanza people. In reality, however, the “animosities” referenced here were due to the white encroachers’ land theft. In brief, this clause means the Kanza were forced to pay claims to non-Native people who settled unlawfully on their land.²⁰

To offer further context, settlers knowingly flouted treaty boundaries: they settled illegally on Kanza land where they built houses, erected fences, and grazed their livestock. Though the U.S. law was on the Kanza’s side, white settlers cast the Kanza and other Indigenous peoples as “savages” who did not use land “properly.” Settlers also used newspapers and local law enforcement to characterize the Kanza and other Indigenous peoples as innately violent while casting themselves as victims. Noted Dakota scholar Philip Deloria calls this common pattern a story of “defensive conquest,” or, the mistaken belief that “peaceful” white settlers were forced into conflict by Native aggression. This inaccurate story of settler innocence and Indigenous violence has been retold endlessly in film and literature. As numerous scholars have argued, all the Kanza and other Indigenous people did to “get in the way of settler colonization...[was] stay at home.”²¹

When the Santa Fe Trail opened in 1821, it increased traffic through Kanza lands. This impacted natural resources and the Kanza economy. With more people and livestock consuming water and disturbing wildlife, there were disruptions to Kanza hunting and agriculture. This undermined subsistence and the ability to trade. So why did traders sell supplies that they knew the Kanza could not afford to buy? As president, Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) had instructed Indian agents and traders: “we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good & influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop th[em off] by a cession of lands.”²² While the U.S. government had ended their official trading system, (at that time called the factory system), in 1822, private traders continued to operate based on this model. Knowing that more land cessions were likely to come as more Americans invaded Indigenous lands, the traders were likely to recoup any lost profit in the next land cession treaty. This process is exactly what is described in Article 8.²³

The Chouteaus were a prominent fur trading family in the Plains region who had been trading with the Kanza since 1790. Francois Chouteau, known as the “Founder of Kansas City,” was the son of the agent for Indian affairs west of the Mississippi, demonstrating the close familial relationship between private traders and U.S. government policy. The Chouteaus established kinship and thus trade relations with Indigenous communities through intermarriage, especially among the Osage in Missouri. With little competition, the Chouteaus and other traders like them functioned as a monopoly and profited from their connections with Indigenous nations and the U.S. government as well as their involvement in treaty negotiations. Furthermore, they, including Francois, enslaved African Americans.²⁴

According to historian William Unrau, this $2,000 distribution of goods was specifically intended “as an apparent inducement to a quick conclusion of the negotiations.” It was not uncommon for the U.S. government to pay for Indigenous land in goods rather than cash. The Kaw Nation has argued that these promised funds were undercut by unfair merchants, who provided overpriced goods to the nation. Furthermore, the Chouteau family used their long-standing connection to the U.S. government and tribal nations to profit from this goods-for-land arrangement. The Kaw Nation timeline notes that “The first annuity paid to the Kanza was $3,500 worth of goods purchased by Indian agent Barnett Vasquez from the Chouteau Brothers.”²⁵

This article attempted to subvert Kanza sovereignty to the “superintendent or other person appointed by the President.” The intent was to force the Kanza to cede judicial power to Americans appointed by the U.S. government and for U.S. understandings of law and institutional hierarchy to be followed instead of Indigenous cultural practices, which often involved different understandings of justice. This article demonstrates how the Kanza were not only losing land in this treaty, they were also losing sovereignty over their established law and order.²⁶

The Doctrine of Discovery was established European legal precedent for acquiring land in colonies. When the U.S. purchased Louisiana from France in 1803, the U.S. acquired exclusive purchase rights to Indigenous land within Louisiana. That meant Indigenous people could continue to occupy their land, but the only people they could sell it to was the U.S. government. This article articulates the Doctrine of Discovery for Kanza land. At the same time the Kanza learned they no longer retained sovereignty over their waterways – which functioned as water sources and transportation routes.²⁷

The treaty repeatedly refers to the Kanza as “friends” or “in friendship” with the U.S. However, rather than friends, the treaty enacted paternalism. This article stated the Kanza “shall ever remain under the protection of the United States,” which demonstrated the growing effort by the federal government to control more and more aspects of Kanza life. Of course, “protection” resulted in more U.S. demands for land, culminating in multiple treaties over the next half century.²⁸

Despite the extreme losses the Treaty of 1825 represented for the Kanza people, two more major land cession treaties would be signed in 1846 and 1859 before they were forced, this time by an 1872 congressional act--the Kaw Land Bill--to leave their ancestral homelands and emigrate to Oklahoma.²⁹

^{1. Wolfe, "SettlerColonialism," 393, 398-400; Edwards, Osage Women and Empire, 62–64; Kathleen DuVal, Native Ground; Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 174–175.}

^{2. Edwards, Osage Women and Empire, 63–66; Unrau, Kansa Indians, 105–111; William E. Unrau, Indians of Kansas: The Euro-American Invasion and Conquest of Indian Kansas (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1991), 51, 57–58.}

^{3. Unrau, Kansa Indians, 93-110; Olivia, "Santa Fe Trail and National Expansion," 3-4.}

^{4. Unrau, Kansa Indians, 104–11.}

^{5. The Treaty of 1825 text is reproduced from Oklahoma State University Libraries, "Treaty with the Kanza, 1825," Tribal Treaties Database, accessed July 28, 2022, treaties.okstate.edu/treaties/treaty-with-the-kansa-1825-0222.}

^{6. William E. Unrau, Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution: Charles Curtis and the Quest for Indian Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 18–19, 27–28; Unrau, Kansa Indians, 121, 139.}

^{7. "Cede, v.," OED Online, accessed June 2022; Miller, Native America, 3-5; Huettl, "Nation to Nation," 131-32}

^{8. William E. Unrau, Indians, Alcohol, and the Roads to Taos and Santa Fe (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 63–64; Miner and Unrau, End of Indian Kansas, 5-6; James V. Ralston and Lauren Ritterbush, "The First Kanza Agency and Treaty Community of Kansas," Kansas History 46, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 5–6, 9–11, 14–15.}

^{9. Unrau, Kansa Indians, 112–15, 140; Miner and Unrau, End of Indian Kansas, 18.}

^{10. Lee et al., "Land Grab Universities"; "Kansas [Kanza] Land Granted to Universities," Land-Grab Universities, accessed December 13, 2022, www.landgrabu.org/tribes/kansas; "Kansas State University," Land-Grab Universities, accessed December 13, 2022, www.landgrabu.org/universities/kansas-state-university.}

^{11. Parks, Darkest Period, 46–47. 23.}

^{12. Ronald D. Parks Oral History interview, Chapman Center for Rural Studies, March 31, 2021, www.k-state.edu/chapman/kansaslandtreaties/OralHistories.html.}

^{13. Lauren Ritterbush, “Visit to Blue Earth Village,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 38 (Spring 2015), 15; Parks, The Kanza Reserve 150 Years Ago, “We Want A Gun Smith,” November 14, 2008, www.kawmission.org/places/kawmission/pdfs/11-58_We_Want_a_Gunsmith.pdf, accessed 6 Nov., 2023; Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 140.]}

^{14. Unrau, Kansa Indians, 118.}

^{15. Ibid., 116–37; Unrau, Indians of Kansas, 59–60; David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020), 8.}

^{16. Parks, Darkest Period, 37–52.}

^{17. Unrau, Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution, 19, 27, 29-35.}

^{18. Parks, Oral History interview.}

^{19. Jean Dennison, Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First-Century Osage Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 52-55. Furthermore, is it notable that the rhetoric of blood quantum for Indigenous peoples in the United States was the polar opposite of the "one drop" ideology that was applied to enslaved African American. "As opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their owners' wealth, Indigenous people obstructed settlers' access to land, so their increase was counterproductive. In this way, the restrictive racial classification of Indians straightforwardly furthered the logic of elimination. "Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism," 387-88.}

^{20. Unrau, Kansa Indians, 105–107.}

^{21. Ibid., 105–106; Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 19-21; Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism," 388.}

^{22."From Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, 27 February 1803," Founders Online, accessed July 28, 2022, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-39-02-0500.}

^{23. Unrau, Kansa Indians, 96–97.}

^{24. Ibid., 95–97, 114–15, 142–48; Parks, Darkest Period, 58–60; Tanis C. Thorne, The Many Hands of My Relations: French and Indians on the Lower Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 149–152; Stan Hoig, The Chouteaus: First Family of the Fur Trade (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 63–64, 70–73; Kristen Epps, Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 13–44.} 

^{25. Unrau, Kansa Indians, 109; "Kanza People," Kaw Nation, accessed July 28, 2022, kawnation.com/?page_id=72; "A Timeline of the History of the Kaw Nation," Kaw Nation, accessed July 28, 2022, www.kawnation.com/wp_content/uploads/2012/03/Timeline.pdf; Hoig, Chouteaus, 261–64.}

^{26. Calloway, First Peoples, 343–44.}

^{27. Miller, Native America, 1–5, 70–73.}

^{28. Unrau, Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution, 38–39; Miller, Native America, 43, 47–48.}

^{29. Parks, Darkest Period, 233–35.}