Synopses & Reviews
After their first contacts with whites in the seventeenth century, the Kansa Indians began migrating from the eastern United States to what is now eastern Kansas, by way of the Missouri Valley. Settling in villages mostly along the Kansas River, they led a semi-sedentary life, raising corn and a few vegetables and hunting buffalo in the spring and fall. It was an idyllic existence-until bad, and then worse, things began to happen.
William E. Unrau tells how the Kansa Indians were reduced from a proud people with a strong cultural heritage to a remnant forced against their will to take up the whites' ways. He gives a balanced but hard-hitting account of an important and tragic chapter in American history.
Synopsis
Volume 114 in the Civilization of the American Indian Series William] Unrau's book is the definitive written history of the Kansa to date, particularly in terms of their interaction with the federal government.--American Indian Quarterly Unrau examines tribal legends and tradition to trace the origins of the Kansa culture to a single Indian nation, located in 'an unidentified area east of the Mississippi River' and made up of the people who separated before the mid-sixteenth century into the Kansas, Quapaws, Omahas, Osages and Poncas. Balancing tradition and archaeological evidence with French and Spanish records, Unrau] suggests several routes of migration that could have brought the Wind People to the Kansas River valley.--The American West
About the Author
William E. Unrau is Professor of History in Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas. He has published several studies of Kansas and Indian history, including, with Craig Miner, Tribal Dispossession and the Ottawa Indian University Fraud, also published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
H. Craig Miner, Willard W. Garvey Distinguished Professor of Business History in Wichita State University, has written many books, including Tribal Dispossession and the Ottawa Indian University Fraud, coauthored by William E. Unrau, published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
R. David Edmunds, Professor of History at Indiana University, is an award-winning author of Native American histories.