The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland, 1846–1873
- Sep 20, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
★★★☆☆
At the end of PrairyErth, author William Least Heat-Moon and a friend retraced, as best they could, the route the Kanza took through Chase County on their way from their last Kansas Territory homeland—what was known as their “diminished reservation”—just south of Council Grove, Kansas to what was to become their new home in Indian Territory (just across the border in what is now present-day Oklahoma).
This certainly wasn’t the only mention of the Kanza Least Heat-Moon made in the book, but coming as it did at the end of PrairyErth, my curiosity led me to Ronald D. Parks’s The Darkest Period, published in 2014 by the University of Oklahoma Press and listed as Volume 273 in the Civilization of the American Indian Series. Had I searched the variant “Kansa,” I would have also found and perhaps instead selected William E. Unrau’s The Kansa Indians: A History of the Wind People, 1673–1873, published in 1971 as Volume 114 of the same series. The latter covers a greater period in fewer pages and undoubtedly would have been the better entry point of the two.
As a story, The Darkest Period is heartbreaking. How could it not be? Though I haven’t read books covering the plight of other American Indian tribes post Euro-American contact, I suspect, just as the several slave narratives I have read are not identical to each other but share a common set of circumstances and realities, what happened to the Kanza was not, in the main, different from what happened to other tribes. In the case of the Kanza, Euro-American expansion into southeastern Kansas Territory (Kansas became a state in 1861, or about midway through the period covered herein) forced them to relocate onto ever smaller reservations until they were eventually required to either assimilate as individuals independent from their tribal community or settle onto a new reservation in Indian Territory.
That is, of course, not the whole story. The whole story, which Parks unfolds methodically and academically (read: dryly) and often with a level of detail too minute for this reader (but is, no doubt, useful for future historians), is also presented sympathetically and comes to life with a host of contemporaneous accounts from all sides. Any attempt to summarize the Kanza’s final years before their forced removal to Indian Territory would do their story a grave disservice as it, like the stories of so many others, should be widely taught, widely known, widely acknowledged, and widely empathized with.
The Kanza, like all native tribes, were viewed through the twin lenses of cultural racism and Manifest Destiny, the vestiges of which we have neither fully come to terms with nor fully shed (or live on in ideologies like American Exceptionalism). I chose The Darkest Period because I wanted to learn more about the Kanza, on whose former lands my home was built. I will continue to read more, including Unrau’s The Kansa Indians and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (which has, sadly, been on my list for seven years), but, more importantly I believe, I will remember.
Comments