“Soon They Will Chase Us Over the Mountains and Into the Ocean”

Over a 40-year period in the 19^th century the Kaw Nation (also known as Kansa) was forced to give up and move from their ancestral lands four times, providing ample rationale for Chief Al-Le-Ga-Wa-Ho’s 1872 comment: “The white people treat the Kon-zey like a flock of turkeys: they chase us from one stream and then chase us to another stream, so that soon they will chase us over the mountains and into the ocean.”  We learned about this at the Kaw Mission State Historic Site in Council Grove, Kansas. From the 17^th century the Kaw Nation inhabited 20 million acres across what is today Kansas but a series of treaties forced on them by the U.S. and its imperialist tendencies in 1825, 1846, 1867 and finally 1873 progressively reduced their territory and eventually even forced them out of Kansas to a small reservation in Oklahoma (where they are based today). The land taken from the Kaws and others was used in part to provide tracts of land to settle the many tribes forcibly removed from their homes in the Midwest and Southeast.  This process of course also affected many other Indian Nations who under varying degrees of coercion also ceded land. In 1868 the Treaty of Fort Laramie forced the Crow to cede 38 million acres of their homeland in Montana and Wyoming; in 1874 and 1888 the Blackfeet relinquished 27 million acres in Montana. (We will be visiting both the Crow and Blackfeet reservation areas and sites later in our trip.) So all and all for many Indians, from the 1830s it was not a stretch to believe as Chief Al-Le-Ga-Wa-Ho did and to realize that diplomacy (treaties) was unsuccessful and armed resistance to the foreigners (Americans) or other strategies were necessary.

As a sequel to this story we learned that in 2015 the Kaw Nation officially returned to their ancestral land near Council Grove for the first time since their removal 142 years earlier. They purchased some land there and established the Allegawaho Memorial Heritage Park. They believe this will serve to reassert their spiritual and physical presence in Kansas.