Presentation
Introduction
MR. GREG OLSON: Thank you very much. I’m going to fiddle with this microphone for a minute. And, also, my wife Chris is running the slides so we’re going to have to get our signals down and -- but thank you, everyone, for coming. I appreciate it.
It is -- it is an Ioway tradition for someone like me who’s giving a talk like this to begin the talk in kind of an unusual way. It’s traditional for me to, at the beginning, ask you ahead of time for your -- it’s almost like a disclaimer. But for you -- for me to ask you for your forgiveness in the inadequacy of the words I have to describe the topic that I want to talk about tonight.
Ioway culture goes back so long and Ioway oral tradition talks about how it was handed down from the Creator and passed through the Buffalo Brothers and the Bear Brothers down to the Ioway today. And such a long and vast culture with so many complex intricacies is really beyond my ability to completely understand and completely convey to you, but I’ll do my best tonight.
Especially that’s true of some of what we call S^age. Some of the old ones, who are no longer here, I’ll be talking about some of them later tonight and since they’re not here to speak for themselves, I’ll do the best I can to kind of give you a sense of who some of those people were and what they mean to Missouri history and Ioway history.
I’ve got two basic points I want to make tonight. The first point is that I want to -- I guess it’s my contention, one of the many reasons I got involved in Ioway history is I believe that the Ioway were never really given the -- their place -- their due place in Missouri history.
This is a people who, at one time with the help of the Sac and Fox, controlled the entire state of Missouri north of the Missouri River. And, yet, when we talk about American Indians in Missouri mostly what we hear about are their rivals with the Osage. And, not to say that the Osage didn’t have an important place in Missouri history, but there were other tribes, like, the Ioway, the Sac and Fox, the Shawnee, the Delaware that I think have played large parts in Missouri history, especially during those early statehood and colonial days. And so part of the reason that I want to talk about them and wanted to write this book is to try and kind of place them in that history.
And then the other, the second thing I wanted to talk about was to try and give you a little sense about what happened to the Ioway. I think that it’s certainly better than it used to be. And if you’ve been watching this series, “We Shall Remain” on PBS the last couple of weeks and it’s going to be going, I think three more weeks, our notion of American Indian history is a lot more complex than it used to be.
But back in the old days, I think we quite often played the history of American Indians in America as a military history in which the U.S. Military ran them all off. And I want to talk a little bit about how, with the Ioway anyway, that wasn’t really the case.
But back in the old days, I think we quite often played the history of American Indians in America as a military history in which the U.S. Military ran them all off. And I want to talk a little bit about how, with the Ioway anyway, that wasn’t really the case.
3:47 Ioway Culture
I wanted to start a little bit by talking -- just giving you a little idea about Ioway culture and to kind of help me remember all my talking points I want to use this piece of artwork. It was done by a friend of mine, Reuben Ironhorse- Kent. This is actually a CD cover that he put together, that he designed for a language CD, an Ioway language CD.
But I think that Reuben did a nice job in this little design of bringing up a lot of the important features of Ioway culture, especially the features I wanted to touch on tonight. And probably the most important thing that -- that I take away from my understanding of Ioway culture is the balance and the connectedness.
Ioway culture is based on the balance of all things good versus evil; spring versus fall -- you know, winter/summer. Things are always working in balance and nature is in balance and it goes that people should also kind of live their lives in balance. And it’s when things get out of balance that we get in to trouble.
So you see the design is very symmetrical. And also the connectedness of all things, you’ll notice that the design is an enclosed design and there’s many elements within one unit. The Ioway definitely believe that they are -- well, they believe they’re connected to all things whether they’re people or natural -- whether they’re natural things, animals, the Earth.
They believe that they’re part of the same system. And one thing to kind of point that out is the fact that in the Ioway language they use the same word wan^shige to mean any being whether it’s a human being, an insect being, an animal, a bird, anything like that. Beings are all called “beings”. They’re all the same thing.
And the Ioway actually believe that their oral tradition is, that they came down from Buffalo Brothers and Bear Brothers and so you see there’s a bear track on one side and there’s a buffalo track on the other side. And the oral tradition goes that in the beginning there were four Bear Brothers who came from the Earth, the world below the Earth, and there were four Buffalo Brothers who came from the sky. And they were able to talk with one another. They were able to talk with all of the other animals.
6:04 Ioway Government
And over time they became part human and part animal and they decided to come together to create one nation and that was the Ioway Nation. And for -- for centuries the way they governed themselves to kind of -- in homage to the way that their tradition taught that they were -- that they came from.
They had a government that changed every six months. And imagine if we had that today. Imagine if the Republicans and the Democrats switched every six months to end their control of the government. You’d hear the tree frogs in the spring. It’s time for the Republicans to come into office. And you’d hear the elks rutting in the fall and it’s time for the Democrats.
And that’s the way the Ioway for centuries ran their government. And the Buffalo, the Sky People they were -- there were clans, there were Sky clans and the buffalo were the head of that. And they ruled one part of the year and then the Earth clans led by the Bear ruled another part of the year. And it was kind of an ingenious way to decentralize power. One group never got ahead of the other group. And it also, you know, kept kind of things again go back to that balance.
7:07 Sacred Pipe Ceremony
In the bottom you’ll see there are two sacred pipes crossed. The green dots are the clans. I mentioned that there are Sky clans and there are Earth clans. And so there are four dots meaning one set and three dots meaning the other. And then the crossed pipes are really important to Ioway history.
I think probably a lot of you have heard of the -- the Pipestone National Monument in southeastern -- southwestern Minnesota. And you know that there’s a red pipestone that’s mined from there called Catlinite. And those -- that’s where a lot of the sacred pipes come from.
And probably historians and archeologists think that there was probably a time in the 1600s when the Ioway were very present in that area and that they were actually the nation who introduced the pipe ceremony to a lot of other nations, the Sioux and some of those Algonquian tribes that lived up in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
And by doing that they were able to make friends with a lot of people, a lot of other tribes through these -- these sacred pipe ceremonies. The Ioway were never a very big group, but because they were able to make friends and able to work well with other -- with other tribes, other nations through the pipe ceremony they were able to not only do well but they were able to live a rather peaceful existence in what -- in southern Minnesota which during the late 1600s was getting to be kind of dicey area with different tribes coming and going and moving for dominance and for hunting land. I think that’s it. Let’s go to the next slide, please.
8:43 Ioway Origins and History
I want to just quickly kind of rundown Ioway history and kind of connect them to Missouri because there’s been an Ioway presence in Missouri for a long, long time. They originally came from up around the Great Lakes and Green Bay in a place that they called MayanShuje, Red Earth. And their oral tradition tells of a time when they were a much larger group. They were called, what arch- -- what linguists now call them part of the Siouan. The Chiwere Siouan Group and that was -- it consisted of tribes, like the Otoe and the Missouria Indians and the Winnebagos, who were sometimes called the Ho-Chunk were all part of one family.
And they lived in Wisconsin and northern and eastern Minnesota for a long time, but over time things change, climate changed, the Europeans landed on the continent they kind of -- they unleashed -- I’m sure you’ve heard that once Europeans hit the shores they unleashed a wave of disease that spread quickly across the continent, even quicker than the Europeans spread across the continent.
And so as climate changed and the presence of Europeans started to kind of decimate the tribe they broke up into smaller groups and became separate nations called the Ioway, and the Otoe and the Missouria and the Winnebago.
And you’ll notice there are two maps here. The map that’s closest to me, you’ll notice it’s the state of Iowa and northern Missouri and you just notice a series of dates. And I took this from an article and sort of added some of my own dates, but basically what happened over time when they first were -- when the first were met by the -- by the French in the late 1600s they were living in southern Minnesota and over time they kind of moved because of -- you know, the incoming Europeans and the cultural shift of different tribes. They moved down into northern Iowa and over time you see them moving over to the Missouri River.
The Missouri River, by the way, in the 1720s around the current site of Omaha, Nebraska, is where they acquired the horse for the first time. As probably a lot of you know horses came to this continent from Spain. And the Spaniards brought them to Mexico and they came up to the United -- Continental United States through Mexico and up through the southwest.
And those plains tribes got a hold of the horses before most of the eastern tribes and so when the Ioway were moving to the -- to the -- to the Missouri River that’s when they got the horses for the first time. So you can tell from the dates that they’re a highly migratory tribe. They, you know, sometimes would live on the Missouri River, sometimes would live on the Des Moines River or the Iowa River. Always moving kind of depending on -- on a lot of different things--depending on the season, depending on if they were hunting buffalo or if they were farming, depending on who they were friends with and who they were enemies with.
And also, too, so we think that Miss- -- that the Ioway once they became the Ioway or as they called themselves the Báxoje. Once they came -- we think that probably they actually arrived in northern Missouri by about, in the late 1700s, but even before that they were part of this ancient culture called the Oneota.
And Oneota people have lived in -- the funny thing about Oneota is, the Oneota Villages -- there are Oneota Village sites throughout the map that I’ve created here close to me. And the Ioway were part of that ancient culture. That’s part of that bigger culture that broke in to smaller ones.
So even though as -- as the Ioway we know that they’ve been here now for what 300 -- no, 200 years before that, their ancestors were even living in Missouri, so there’s quite a long -- quite a long history of them living in Missouri.
The map on the far side is kind of interesting it looks a little bit like the leaves of a tree or the veins in a leaf. And that’s a map of Missouri that they came up with themselves to sort of describe places they had lived in their lifetime. It’s a map that was made in the 1830s. I’m going to see if I can pull this out and walk over.
It’s a map that was made in the 1830s and basically it shows exactly the same thing that’s in this map, but it’s done from a different point of view. Instead of geographical locations, basically, the most important thing in this map are rivers. And so this line, right here, is the Mississippi River and it goes all the way up to northern Minnesota. This line, right here, is the Missouri River so according to this map St. Louis would be right here.
This would be the Illinois River. Here we have the Gasconade River, the Osage River and then right above the Osage River there looks a circle with a little dot in it and that would be Van Meter State Park where they think that there was probably a sizable Ioway Village at one time.
But anyway, the little things that look like dotted lines are the travels that the Ioway made. And the little things that look like chocolate chip cookies are different village sites. And so what this is is kind of the oral history illustrated. It’s a 200 year jaunt through history and where they lived.
So you can see they lived all up and down the Missouri River. This would be Illinois. So they lived up in Illinois. I think those five circles up there represent the Great Lakes so they lived -- it shows them up in the Great Lakes. And all the way in to where I’m from, which is northern Iowa.
But anyway, so by around 1800, about the time of Lewis & Clark, I guess, the Ioway were really pretty well established in northern Missouri. They were living along the Chariton River and the Grand River and even though Lewis & Clark didn’t run into them while they were here, at that time, they -- they claimed most of northern Missouri north of the river. And it was an area that they were able to pretty much hold with the Sac and Fox, with the help of the Sac and the Fox.
See Ioway were never a large tribe, probably only about 2,000 people at any one time. But because again they were able to make friends, form alliances, they were able to control a pretty significant piece of property. So even the Osage -- even though the Osage were south of the river, down here, and you had the Kansas Indians over by Kansas City and then above them would be the Otoe and the Omaha and the Ponca and the -- and then some of the Algonquian Tribes over in Illinois they were still able to hold down this sizable area up until the War of 1812.
And I’d say probably during the War of 1812, that’s when the Ioway probably were the most prominent here because there was a branch of the Ioway that sided with the Sac and Fox and with the help of British arms, British military backing, were actually able to create quite a bit of trouble here in northern -- northern Missouri.
When we talk about the history in Missouri, we talk about the Louisiana Purchase being the thing that opened up Missouri to White settlement or to American settlement, but really this was a highly contested area up until the War of 1812. And it was really only after the British were chased off after the War of 1812 that the Ioway really lost their hold on this part of the state.
16:00 Ioway Villages
I’m going to fiddle with this a little more. Next slide, please. This is a village site in southern Iowa and I wanted to show this. It’s two pictures put together and it’s a little -- it’s a little magnified or a little -- the -- it’s a little -- what could I say? A little magnified, but anyway I wanted to show it to you to explain a little bit about village sites.
Like most American Indians that lived in this part of the world the Ioway always had their villages, their permanent villages near the rivers. And that was important for a lot of reasons. I mean river valleys were perfect places for food. Okay? And in the river bottoms, which is where this picture was taken, in the river bottom along the Des Moines River there was perfect places to garden or to raise fields. Okay? Up in some of those bluffs and in the -- in the water itself and in those areas, those were great for hunting.
And then, also, with rivers nearby it was easy for trade and travels so river valleys and river bluffs were perfect places for settlement. If -- what you can’t tell, I think Chris took this picture, and what you really can’t tell is that right behind her is the Des Moines River. And then you see a field, but notice how there’s a little bit of a crown or a little bit of plateau to that field because if you look up on the horizon you don’t see a whole barn, you just see kind of the top half of a barn. And so you can tell by the way that there’s a little bit of an arch to the landscape there.
And what the Ioway did is they built their village right on top of that arch or a little terrace in that river bottom. And it doesn’t really look much, look like much now from this picture but if you walk -- when we there, when we walked up on top of that little terrace you got a perfect view, a really beautiful view. It was just a few feet up. But they said even during the Flood of 1993 that terrace stayed dry. And so that was a great place for the Ioway to have their village.
And it’s one of the most amazing sites now that it’s never really been fully excavated. And we were walking around and one of the kids that was with us kicked up a piece of a kettle and an archeologist from the State Office picked it up and said, “Yeah, that’s a piece of copper kettle probably from about 1800,” and threw it back on the ground. And it’s just this really rich area that no one has ever really -- everyone knows about it so it’s been picked over by amateur archeologists a lot, but never -- never really been professionally -- there’s never really been a professional dig. And I don’t know why, whether that’s because of the landowners or what. Next slide, please.
18:38 Traditional Ioway Lodges
I just wanted to show you a couple of lodges, traditional Ioway lodges. The village site that we just looked at would have been a winter village and that’s where the Ioway would have their fields, their corn fields, their bean fields, things like that.
And they would have in those villages had more permanent houses. Sometimes you hear -- we think that Indians all live in tipis. And sometimes in the summer when they were out on their buffalo hunts out further west and they needed to move, those summer villages when they were on the buffalo hunts sometimes those villages would move, you know, as much as 10 or 20 miles a day. They needed to be flexible and temporary and able to move quickly.
But some of these older houses took a long time to build. And some of these lodges called tcakidutan they could last for up to ten years. And I think the top one is perhaps bark-covered. And then this bottom one is covered with woven reed mats. And then you see there’s these little arbors out front. You’ll still see those in Powwows sometimes. Those brush arbors are places for sleeping in the summer when the weather’s warm or for entertaining friends.
But it’s kind of remark- -- this bottom picture was taken I think in about 1887 and I have no idea when that top one -- when I think of Ioway lodges I think of the top lodge as being maybe a little bit more common. And you can see lodges like that at the Living History Farms in Des Moines. There’s a reconstructed Ioway Village from around 1700. Okay. Next slide, please.
20:10 What happened to the Ioway
Okay. So what happened? Why aren’t they here anymore? When we think about -- I mentioned this a little bit already, when we think about American Indians in the way they were removed from most of the continent, we think of it as a military battle. But in -- I think in -- at least in the case with the Ioway and I would say with most of the tribes, it wasn’t really a military battle. It was something much more complicated.
And in the case of the Ioway, really it was kind of interesting. I said that around 1800 or 1804, the time of Lewis & Clark, they were a very strong presence in northern Missouri and yet just about 35 years later in 1837 that -- all that land had been taken away from them and they were living on a small 200 square mile reservation in northeast, what is now northeastern Kansas.
So how did that all happen so quickly? Next slide, please. Well, they -- I think that if you imagine an Indian culture standing on a three-legged stool. The three stools would be called economy, culture and environment. The Ioway never -- other than the War of 1812, I don’t know that the Ioway ever fought a battle against the Amer- -- United States Army.
But other things happened with White settlers that made -- that made life as they knew it a lot more difficult. And the first one was economic, trade. I mentioned that the Ioway first met the French in 1650. And so by the time they were living in here -- in Missouri they already had 150 years of experience traveling with Europeans. And they were -- and that relationship was built on trade. And so some of the very first interactions that the Ioway had with Europeans were based on, you know, I’ll give you furs, you give me copper kettles. Remember the kettle, part of the kettle we found at the village.
You know, I’ll give you something, you give me metal tools. It was built on trade. And the Ioway started getting these really nice durable, everyday goods that they used to make by hand. Okay? And they used to make their own pottery. And there’s a lot of that broken pottery in sites, in archeological village sites.
But that soon became replaced with metal kettles. And if you think about the way a pot is made, the pot is made from the Earth. You’re related to the Earth. There’s a very ritualized ceremony about how you make that pot. It’s part of the expression of your culture. It’s not just making a pot. It’s part of how you relate to nature. Okay?
And so as soon as you start not doing that anymore and you start using metal kettles, well, there’s one way in which your relationship with -- with Mother Earth, Hina Maya, has been -- has been severed. And so slowly over time, as more European goods took the place of native-made goods, that culture slowly changed.
Another interesting thing happened is that trade, when -- when -- before Europeans came to this continent American Indians were involved in what’s called a subsistence economy. They grew what they needed. They traded a few things with other nations. But really trade was not a big thing with them. When they came to America suddenly they were not -- when Americans came, rather, and they got involved in trading with Americans suddenly they’re not just hunting to feed their family, they’re hunting to trade beaver pelts for tools and things.
And so where in the old days you could have all your -- all your young men out hunting to feed the tribe and make sure everybody had enough food for winter, starting with European contact, you had some of the men out hunting for food to feed everybody for winter. But you had a lot of other men out hunting beaver, trapping beaver pelts so that they could trade with the Europeans. So suddenly -- suddenly there’s a lot less con- -- a lot less emphasis on raising food and making food and a lot more emphasis on trading, hunting, things that completely changed their economy.
Environment, the trade economy had a big change in the environment. We hear a lot about the fact that after the Europeans came the buffalo -- they chased the buffalo away and that’s certainly true. But before the buffalo were chased away the beaver were all killed. The environment right here in mid-Missouri and up and down the Missouri River was affected by fashion trends in London and Paris.
People in Europe loved beaver skin, beaver pelt hats. And so there was so much beaver trapped and shipped out of here that within several decades it completely decimated the beaver population in this part of the country. Suddenly the Ioway and their tribe -- and their nation -- their nation neighbors were caught in this trade economy that had -- you know, went all -- went from here all the way to Europe.
And over time that devastated the environment. Europeans brought the -- brought cattle to this part of the country. That devastated the environment because they ate a certain kind of plant and let other plants go. So they -- the cattle are destructive to the landscape and completely changed the balance of which plants lived and which plants got eaten up.
And then finally, cultural; I guess I’ve talked a little bit about how -- you know, native culture is not just a separate thing. It’s -- it’s everything all together. It’s the way you hunt, the way you farm, the way you -- you know, you live your life. It is an expression of your culture. And all of these things got kind of -- remember balance? Remember that early slide where it showed the balance of all things, and when the Ioway were shifted from the subsistence economy to the trade economy that balance got all out of whack.
And what basically ended up happening is the Ioway went in debt as did most other Indian nations. They accrued debts they could not pay because they couldn’t keep up with the trade balance. They desired those goods. They liked those metal kettles. They lasted a long time. They liked horses. They liked all those things and they lasted a long time, but they had a hard time paying for it because they were not always dealing with honest traders.
And then when alcohol got mixed into the -- or thrown into the mix then that trade balance got thrown out of whack even further. And so basically, I would say of all of the things that I’ve talked about the biggest thing that probably forced the Indians to give up their land, whether it’s the Ioway or the Osage or other nations here in what is now Missouri, I’d say it’s debt.
Debt -- and people like Thomas Jefferson knew this all along. They knew what they were doing. They knew that if they could get the Indians to rack up big debts they could get the land that the Indians owned. And that’s why you had what are called, trading factories. If you’ve been up to Fort Osage to the visitor center and the reconstructed Fort there that big trading house is what’s called the trading factory and it was a government-owned trading house.
The government was involved in trade and that was one of the ways that they ended up with a lot of the land. Let’s go to the next slide, please.
And when it came time to pay off their debts; what was the one thing the Ioway had? Well, they had land. And they had lots of it. And so you see here the major treaties. They -- a couple of slides ago I showed you how they at one time controlled a lot of the land between the Missouri River and the Mississippi River and within -- well, from 1824 to 1836 that was all taken away from them.
27:30 First Ioway Land Cession
In 1824, a man named White Cloud and a man named Great Walker went to Washington D.C. with William Clark and they made the first ever Ioway land cession. They did it because they wanted peace. They did it because they wanted to pay off their debts. You know, remember, espec- -- if you’ve been seeing, if you’ve been watching again, “We Shall Remain”, you’ve heard the story of Tecumseh, Monday night and how tribes from the east were getting moved west by military and the settlement that was going on west of the Appalachians. A lot of those nations were coming into Missouri and the already stressed environment was getting even more stressed by more -- not only were a lot of more White settlers moving into Missouri, but a lot more Native people were getting forced into Missouri, too.
So what little resources were left, were really kind of being fought over by an ever-increasing group of people. So the first land cession which is just across the river from us was in 1824. And then you see -- you see the -- the other treaty areas.
It was an interesting -- Missouri was kind of in an interesting situation because when we became a state in 1821 a lot of the land inside of Missouri was still owned by native tribes. The Osage had pretty much given up all of their rights, but the Ioway, the Sac and Fox, I think there were some other nations that I’m not remembering still had title to a lot of Missouri.
28:56 Platte Purchase
So as soon as Missouri became a state it became -- the United States got real interested in trying to tidy up some of these treaties and -- and then move -- move the Indians further west. And, of course, you probably remember that Missouri did not -- this part of Missouri, right here, and I’m going to walk over and point to it, the Platte Purchase. Right above Kansas City that wasn’t always part of Missouri; when Missouri was created as a state that part was set aside as Indian land.
And from 1821 until the Platte Purchase Treaty that was Indian land and we always wanted it. I think there’s a great quote; Thomas Hart Benton says that, “That land can’t be of any use to the Indians because it’s too narrow.” And I guess he meant the shape.
And it’s a letter -- it’s a letter he sent to the Secretary of War and so for years and years Missouri was really interested in that land. Well, for one thing they wanted to be connected -- you know, those counties north of Kansas City didn’t want to be landlocked. They wanted to be connected to the Missouri River. And settlers were moving in there anyway.
And it just got to be kind of messy deal. They couldn’t keep -- you know, one of the interesting things I never really realized until fairly recently is that squatters, White American squatters were in a lot of ways more of a problem for the United States than -- than Indian people were because they -- you know, the government would move Indian people away but they would set aside land for them, but the squatters would keep coming in and living and so there would always end up being kind of these messy things where they had to be pulling people away from each other and the squatters and the Native people would get into these scuffles.
And so that’s one of the reasons now that Missouri became, I think, we’re one of the only states that added land, the Platte Purchase Treaty in 1836. Next slide, please.
30:50 Portraits of American Indians
You know one of the reasons I got interested in this in the beginning is because, as David mentioned, I have an art background and I got interested in these portraits of American Indians. And I got interested in what art is about and the way we portray American Indians in artwork can tell us about the way we feel about them.
And some of this is things I’ve already written in different articles. This is a picture of White Cloud MaxúThka is the way his Báxoje name would be. And it’s a painting you can see at the Gilcrease Museum in --
MR. GREG OLSON: -- Tulsa. It’s only about that big. Beautiful little painting though, what’s -- it was painted when he went to Washington D.C. in 1824 to cede that first portion of Ioway land to the United States Government. And it’s a little hard to see because it’s a dark slide, but look at him.
He’s looking you right in the eye. He’s challenging you. And he looks like a pretty serious guy. This is -- you know, he’s got this dark sort of mysterious background. He’s kind of got the dark woods behind him. He’s got these really -- those bear claw -- that bear claw necklace, which was a sign of importance in the Ioway. If you were a leader or a headman you wore a necklace like that. In fact, there’s a necklace much like that on display at the Tribal Complex in White Cloud, Kansas, today. But it almost looks like metal or something -- I mean, it’s really -- he’s a serious-looking guy.
That painting was painted in 1824 when I think a lot of the United States felt that Native people were still a threat. The so-called Indian Wars out west had still not taken place and even in the east, I think, a lot of Americans were kind of afraid of -- of -- saw Indians as a real threat. And so this is the Ioway leader White Cloud. Let’s go to the next slide, please.
And this is a portrait that was done 75 years later. White Cloud was long dead. He died in 1834. But this is a portrait of White Cloud. It was done by Sherry Fry. And if that name sounds familiar Sherry Fry made the sculpture of Ceres that’s on top of the Capitol dome here in Jeff- -- here at the State Capitol.
And this was done about 12, 13 years before that sculpture was done. It’s a beautiful piece of artwork. And it’s just been restored so it’s got this beautiful patina on it. The joke about that sculpture is when Sherry Fry went to Iowa to make the sculpture he didn’t even bother looking up any of the Ioway. He went to the Sac and Fox or the Meskwaki Settlement and actually got some of them to pose for it, which was -- they’re Algonquian. That’s a whole different culture. But to Sherry Fry it didn’t really matter much.
But here he’s a much less threatening presence. He’s -- notice what he’s got in his -- what would that be? His -- his left hand, he’s holding -- no, that would be his right hand. He’s got that -- he’s got that eagle feather fan in his hand, that long, looks like a bird wing or something. That’s a sign of tribal leadership. And even if you go to Powwows sometimes today you’ll see dancers holding those eagle feather fans and they never carry them like that. They’re always very proper, very careful of their eagle feather fans. Never would it be pointed to the ground like that.
This has just been pointed out to me recently that because he’s got that feather fan, his sign of tribal leadership pointed at the ground that’s a sure sign that this is a defeated man. And by this time we kind of saw Indians in a completely different way. We had already taken all the land. The frontier had been gone by what, 20 years? Fifteen years, by 1909. Next slide, please.
34:25 Frank White Cloud
This is White Cloud’s son. Frank White Cloud. And Frank White Cloud was the Ioway leader who signed the Platte Purchase Treaty. This sculpture is in St. Joseph. If you know St. Joseph at all -- some of you may know the south -- the southern part of town is King Hill along the Missouri River bluffs. This is down from King Hill at the south end of the parkway in St. Joseph.
And there’s this legend that is kind of intriguing to me, and you’ll see he’s holding something. You can’t really tell he’s holding something in his hand. That is plantain. It’s a plant. And it -- a lot of us have it growing in our driveways and our yards and we have to kill it every spring. But it’s -- I think, some people call them buckhorns ‘cause they get the -- they have the broad leaves and then the buckhorns that grow up.
And the story goes that in 1836 White Cloud, Frank White Cloud was really conflicted about whether he was going to sign this Platte Purchase Treaty ‘cause it was a treaty that finally removed his people from the state of Missouri and from anything that they had east of the Missouri River and it forever moved them west of the Missouri River.
And he was really conflicted about this. And the story goes he went up to -- he went up to King Hill to pray about it and to seek guidance. And he looked down on the ground and he saw this plantain growing all over the place. Now, plantain also happens to be called “White Man’s Foot” or “Englishman’s Foot” because it had this reputation of -- of, like diseases, it kind of popped up everywhere White people went. It was a plant that White people brought over from Europe because it cured pretty much everything from headaches to hemorrhoids to -- oh, it’s an amazing list of stuff, but it --
So it was a medicinal plant and it got out of hand. And so when White Cloud looked down, the legend goes, he saw that plantain and he said, Okay. Well, that -- that’s the sign. It’s -- you know, the Creator has said it’s time for us to move on. Next slide, please.
Here’s the same tableau, basically, painted by another artist. I think this is in the Terrible’s Casino [Terrible’s St. Jo Frontier Casino] in St. Joseph. There’s a whole cycle of paintings done of St. Joseph history. And here we see another view of White Cloud. Now, you can see he’s got plantain in his hand. He’s up on the hill looking over.
Now, if that whole story sounds kind of familiar to you, it also appears in Longfellow’s Hiawatha in 1855. So I doubt -- I’m skeptical that it ever really happened to White Cloud and that it ever really happened in Missouri. But it’s an interesting way of how we as the victors in this struggle created this mythology that we didn’t really push those Ioway out of here they left because they had to go somewhere else, to go do what it is they do. They couldn’t do it where we are anymore ‘cause we changed the land. And it -- it’s kind of a way of softening that whole removal process.
There’s an interesting thing, too, that’s going on in the clouds in this painting. And I don’t know if it’s light enough that you can see, but over on the right hand of the painting you’ll see these warriors riding in the sky toward the sun and the clouds. And -- and it’s called White Cloud and the Legend of the Sun Bridge. And there was another legend that was kind of attached to this plantain, this “White Man’s Foot” legend that St. Joseph was seen by early White settlers.
This is -- there was this legend built around St. Joseph and those sacred hills there, the bluffs that that was an area where Indian people of all nations came to die because it was supposedly such a sacred place, it was on the river. It was kind of that divide -- almost like the River Styx in mythology. You know it was kind of the dividing line between the living world and then the west world where other things happen.
And so there’s White Cloud and he’s kind of facing the river and he’s looking at his future, but also there’s kind of this metaphorical thing where once he crosses that river he’s going into another world. One more -- next slide, please.
I love this painting. This is in the State Capitol. And this is Bert Phillips. And this is the Trail to the Happy Hunting Ground. And it’s just a different take on that same legend. Okay? Here they’re in that same location. They’re in St. Joseph. They’re on the banks of the river. And here we have a woman. This is right across from, I think, the State Treasurer’s Office if you’re looking -- if you ever go up on the second floor and look for it. But here you see a couple and the woman is looking off to the water and she’s evidently ready to leave the world.
This is -- I guess this is her mother. Her mother’s not well. There’s something going on here, but the husband is saying you know, don’t go. Stay here. Stay with us. You need to stay and take care of your -- your mother. But she’s got a baby in her arms and so she’s ready to cross over into the next world.
And meanwhile, these guys over on the other side are conducting some sort of a ceremony. But notice in the sky behind there’s a tipi. Let me read you a quote here, this is pretty good. This is from the -- some of you might be familiar with the Capitol Commission when they decorated the Capitol. Oh, now like a bad speaker, look what I’ve done. I’ve gotten my notes all out of order here.
Anyway they -- here it is. They said -- this is according to the Capitol report, 1828, it said that “Phillips” Trail to the Happy Hunting Ground shows that from all points of the compass the Indians journeyed thither bearing their sick and dying that their journey to the great tipi in the sun might be short and easy.”
And so you see what this is all about as we’ve kind of created this -- I mean, this was all, well, I was going to say this was all in the 1920s, but those last few artworks I showed you were both done in the last ten years.
But you see what we’ve done, we’ve kind of created this myth that -- you know, that Indians became -- there was a point where Indians kind of went from the present into the past. As America became this civilized place and Missouri became this civilized place, Indians kind of moved on. And I don’t know. It’s a curious thing. I’m going to go to a conference in Minneapolis in a month and this is what I’m going to be talking about or about these paintings and sort of that myth of Indian removal.
I haven’t quite figured out what’s going on there, but it’s kind of an interesting -- that’s kind of what I’ve been thinking about lately. And I think we have one last slide.
I think that the real danger in writing books like the book I wrote is that it gives you the idea that Native people are a thing of the past. And, of course, that’s not true. And these are just some pictures. Some of them I took myself. And a couple of them I got off of the web.
41:21 The Ioway Today
The Ioway people are very -- are here, they’re very strong. They’re still -- you know, they’re still a very vibrant people. There are two reservations. These two pictures down here are from the Ioway Reservation in Oklahoma around the town of Perkins, which is kind of by Stillwater, south and a little bit east of Stillwater. And then the top two were taken in White Cloud, Kansas, which is basically just across the river from St. Joseph where there is still a tribal reservation up there.
And, you know, they -- they -- I spoke -- there’s probably actually more Ioway people now than there’s ever been, I think, probably -- the two tribes there’s probably four or 5,000 enrolled members. And, you know, they’re involved in all kinds of businesses. They’re involved in agri-businesses, of course, they’re involved in providing -- you know healthcare and services for their people.
But once I wrote this book and, you know, I started thinking about it, I don’t want to -- you know, think for a minute that Indian people are not still here and not still -- you know, a very important part of our culture. But I did want to try and help understand in this book and in talks like this to maybe shed a little light on how -- you know, what the story really was and the really complicated history we have with American Indians especially here in Missouri where we chased them all out.
I think Missouri is the only nation or the only state west of the Mississippi that doesn’t have some sort of formal tribal settlement or land and that’s because of our history back in the 1830s when we forced them all out, not just the Ioway, but everybody. And for that matter we forced the Mormons out, too. I mean, we were just not very tolerant people at that time, I guess, and tried to start a war with Iowa. Next slide.
43:07 Resources about the Ioway
If you’re interested, besides my book, these are just some resources if you want to take notes. There’s a very good couple of websites. Somebody who is doing language work, my friend Jimm GoodTracks is working on language. And then there’s -- up on top there’s a documentary that was just done a couple years ago about the Ioway where they actually interview several living tribal members.
But anyway that’s kind of a quick tour through Ioway history. And that’s really all I wanted to say. I guess if anyone would like to ask some questions I’ll do my best to try and answer them, but otherwise thank you very much.
(Applause.)
I, DANIELLE Y. MOSER, within and for the State of Missouri, do hereby certify that the audio transcription in the foregoing audio was transcribed to the best of my ability and therefore reduced to typewriting under my direction; that I am neither counsel for, related to, nor employed by any of the parties to the action in which this audio was taken, and further, that I am not a relative or employee of any attorney or counsel employed by the parties thereto, nor financially or otherwise interested in the outcome of the action.