“The Lands of My Nation”: Delaware Indians in Kansas, 1829–1869

The Delaware Tribe of Indians is one of a number of federally recognized tribes that are currently designated as “landless tribes.” This uncommon status often limits a tribe in many ways as well as makes its federally recognized status potentially more tenuous and easier to terminate. A landless tribe is a tribe that may own land, but the land is not held “in trust” by the federal government. Instead, the land remains private land subject to state and local jurisdiction and is not considered a reservation. Thus, the land lacks the federal protections and exclusions afforded to tribes with reservations. Given the current politics of the modern self-determination era, many landless tribes, including the Delaware Tribe, often seek the security and economic advantages that come with establishing or restoring a federally protected land base of their own. However, such establishment can often be difficult; the reason a tribe is landless today is often the result of a history of dispossession, removal, and/or neglect by the federal government, and these errors of the past are not easily corrected.¹

The Delaware Tribe’s effort to restore a land base is further complicated by their current relationship with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Their relationship began when the Delaware were removed to the Cherokee Nation in 1867. This final removal to what is today eastern Oklahoma included a provision that the Delaware would become citizens of the Cherokee Nation. As individual citizens, each member would be able to hold land in the Cherokee Nation, but the Delaware Tribe was not given a separate reservation of their own. Because the Delaware Tribe lacks a reservation or trust land today, according to the federal government, they must look to lands within the former boundaries of their last reservation in order to establish a federally protected land base. Although identifying the boundaries of the Delaware Tribe’s last reservation may seem straightforward, the histories of dispossession for Indian communities from the colonial era to the twentieth century seldom involve uncomplicated narratives of loss. More often than not they encompass more disruptive and complicated experiences that weave together kinship networks, economic desires, political chicanery, and extralegal activities of all varieties. Whether dispossession occurred during the transformation of the New England landscape in the seventeenth century or as part of the relentless expansion of the American nation west of the Mississippi River in the nineteenth century, it was never explained by a simple property exchange.² Such was certainly the case for the Delaware, Munsee, and Stockbridge Indians who together and separately occupied lands in the region of Indian Territory that became Kansas Territory in 1854 and then the state of Kansas in 1861. Indeed, we find in the experiences of these connected Delaware communities a narrative of dispossession that effectively captures both the twisted path such communities took as well as the ripple effects such events created in the decades and centuries that followed, including the loss of reservation lands for the Delaware Tribe despite the fact that such a reservation was promised to the Delaware in their last treaty with the United States.

Despite this treaty promise, the Delaware Tribe’s last reservation was located at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers in present-day northeastern Kansas. This reservation was established by one treaty in 1829 and ultimately dissolved by their last treaty in 1866. In the intervening years, a number of other treaties and agreements modified the boundaries of the Delaware Reservation in response to the needs and demands of existing and arriving Native groups as well as to the citizens and government of the United States. These modifications included land sold to Wyandots removed from Ohio, land ceded to the federal government to appease the onrushing hordes of American settlers, and allotments distributed among tribal members hoping to preserve some remnant of their promised permanent homes. And in the particularly influential 1854 treaty, the Delaware even set aside four sections of their reservation for a...