A traveling exhibit about American Indian cultures will be the topic at this Sunday’s winter meeting of the Allen County Historical Society. Guest speaker Dr. Eric P. Anderson, one of the original consultants on the exhibit, will give more insight into the movement westward of Native Americans into Kansas and Missouri territories.
The program is at Sunday, Feb. 23 at 2 p.m. at the Frederick Funston Meeting Hall, 207 N. Jefferson Ave., and is free to the public to attend.
“This is the first time I’ve been asked to speak at one of the exhibit’s stops,” noted Anderson. “My presentation will give an overview of Native Tribal Sovereignty within the context of time from pre-contact to the present, highlighting its recognition and challenges in relationships with other Euro-American government systems.”
Anderson holds a doctorate in American History from the University of Kansas, specializing in American Indian cultures and the history of the United States West.
While attending the University of Kansas, Anderson’s undergraduate studies focused on political science and philosophy. He later obtained graduate and doctoral degrees, focusing on the relationships between the United States and the Indigenous societies it encountered. Today, Anderson is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and teaches at Haskell Indian Nations University.
FOUNDED IN 1884, Haskell is a public tribal land-grant university that was originally established as a residential boarding school for Native American children. The university is operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and is the oldest continually operating federal school for American Indians. There are approximately 140 tribal nations represented at Haskell, which is funded directly by the Bureau of Indian Education.
Anderson’s major research focus is on American Indian education, especially the system of federal boarding schools established for Native youth in the late 19th century.
He is an instructor in the school’s Indigenous and American Indian Studies Department and is an expert on Haskell’s own long and complicated history.
THE EXHIBIT — titled “Living Sovereignty: Sustaining Indigenous Autonomy in ‘Indian Territory’ Kansas” — explores the struggle the tribes faced against the United States government for self-governance.
In 1823, the United States Supreme Court issued a decision stating that European discovery of land in North America superseded Indigenous ownership claims and Indigenous people were occupants, rather than owners, of their own lands. In 1830, the federal government passed the Indian Removal Act — a legal means to remove Indigenous peoples from their homelands to open the territory for American settlement.
Forced removal began in 1838.
Despite the atrocities that came from the forced removals, Indigenous peoples and cultures survived and tribal sovereignty is codified in U.S. law.
For more information about the exhibit or the Allen County Historical Society, stop by 20 S. Washington Ave., Iola, or contact Kurtis Russell at 620-365-3051 or [email protected].
