OUR INITIATIVES

For almost a century, the city of Lawrence, Kansas used Iⁿ‘zhúje‘waxóbe, our sacred grandfather glacial erratic boulder, as a monument to the town’s founders. KHS board members led the effort that eventually culminated in the Mellon Foundation funded Sacred Red Rock project that returned Iⁿ‘zhúje‘waxóbe to Kaw Nation’s Allegawaho Memorial Heritage Park.

Learn more about this project in the book,

Shokhí: A Kanza Relative, a Monument, and Rematriation

KHS is one of numerous collaborators on the Kansas Treaties Project, a digital resource for educators, students, and the public to learn more about how Kansas went from the ancestral homeland of Kaw Nation to a state within the United States. On the project’s website, you will find annotations and historical contextualization of treaties between the Kanza and the U.S., interactive maps that show Kanza land sold by land grant universities, oral histories, resources for educators, and short films: Creator Gives Us Language: A Story of Rematriating Kaánze Íe and Flooding Kaw Nation: Submerged Cities, Desecrated Graves, and Kaw Lake.

Interviews, Panels, and Conversations
KHS participates in many events that provide the public with broader knowledge andunderstanding of Kanza culture, history, and sovereignty. Recent examples include:

• “Indigenous Voices: Jim Pepper Henry,” Kansas Historical Society

• “Listening to the Prairie,” collaboration between C. Huffman and Lydia Zeglin of Kansas
  State University and Konza Prairie Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER)

• “Kansas without the Kanza: Understanding how the Kanza Homeland became K-State,”
  Kansas Treaties Project

• “Charles Curtis, the first Native American Vice President,” CBS Sunday Morning

• “Seizing and selling tribal land in Kansas funded scores of American universities,” Kansas
  News Service