Kansas Indian Reservations

The Lenape, whom the board calls Delawares, did not keep this ground. In an 1867 agreement the main body of Delaware then living in Kansas bought land from the Cherokee Nation in northeastern Indian Territory and moved there, becoming partial members of the Cherokee tribe with limited autonomy. In 1979 the Bureau of Indian Affairs ended their separate tribal status. The Bureau restored it on September 23, 1996, a federal appeals court overturned that in November 2004 after a Cherokee Nation challenge, and recognition returned on July 28, 2009. The Delaware Tribe of Indians governs from Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

What the plaque says

Kansas Indian Reservations When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, many different Indian nations occupied what is now the United States. European settlement gradually resulted in many of these native peoples being pushed to the west. In 1825 the U.S. government resolved to move tribes remaining in eastern states to lands west of the Missouri River. Treaties were made and 30 tribes were assigned reservations in what is now eastern Kansas. Historically, these tribes are referred to as "emigrant Indians" because they were asked to give up their homelands and "emigrate" to new lands. This marker stands on land once assigned to the Delawares. The Wyandots lived to the east. South were the lands of the Shawnees, Potawatomis, Ottawas, Miamis, and Chippewas. North were the Kickapoos. The tribes were assured that "so long as the sun shines and water runs down hill," this land would remain theirs. This was not to be. Two generations later, land-hungry settlers forced new treaties causing Native Americans once again to be displaced, this time to present-day Oklahoma. Northeastern Kansas remains home to four Indian reservations inhabited by members of the Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, and Iowa tribes. Erected by Kansas State Historical Society & Kansas Department of Transportation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Quindaro Townsite — 12 mi
  The wooded ruins of a free-state river port built on a Wyandot woman's land in 1857, a crossing for people escaping slavery in Missouri and later the home of Western University.
• Shawnee Indian Mission State Historic Site — 14 mi
  Three brick buildings in Fairway from the manual labor school the Methodist church ran for Shawnee and other Native children from 1839, which the Shawnee Tribe now calls by its plain name, a boarding school.
• Watkins Museum of History — 22 mi
  Douglas County's free museum in J. B. Watkins's 1888 bank and mortgage building on Massachusetts Street, a red-brick fortune built on Kansas farm loans and given to the city by his widow.
• Haskell Cultural Center and Museum — 23 mi
  Haskell Indian Nations University's own museum in Lawrence, built of cypress logs in 2002 to tell the truth about the federal boarding school the university grew out of.

More markers nearby

• Delaware Crossing and the Grinter Ferry — 6.3 mi
• Shawnee Friends Mission — 11 mi
• This Gateway to Kansas — 13 mi
• The City of Leavenworth — 16 mi