Today, the United States is home to 574 sovereign tribal nations and over 400 non-federally recognized Indigenous tribes. Around 250 years ago, eleven of those tribes reportedly inhabited Nodaway County, Missouri. Yet, after the Indian Removal Act of 1830, all tribes were expelled from the state and relocated westward. As such, no Native American tribes currently reside in Missouri today. Due to a lack of Native presence in Northwest Missouri, there is a distorted understanding of Native history and culture. Schools present simplified accounts of Indigenous history, which lead people to incorrectly assume that all Native people possess a collective culture and past. In reality, Indigenous history is far from homogeneous. 

 

Pictured below are the official seals for all the Native American tribes that historically inhabited the state of Missouri. Despite some similarities, all of these tribes maintain distinct traditions, religious beliefs, and social structures. 

In an era before European colonization, Native peoples of all the region’s tribes exercised full autonomy. They were free to live, hunt, and maintain centuries-old cultural practices. Yet, with the entrance of European settlers, diseases diminished native populations,   treaties eliminated tribal claims over ancestral land, and acts of cultural suppression threatened the preservation of many tribes’ native identities. Throughout the 19th century, all tribes original to Northwest Missouri were forcibly relocated to modern-day Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. Their descendants have spent the last two centuries fighting to remember and maintain their unique tribal histories, traditions, and ways of life.