To know what Wichita was like in 1823, you have to consider three great tribes of the Great Plains: the Lakota to the north; Comanche to the south, and out east — on what eventually would become Missouri, Arkansas and eastern Kansas — the sprawling, powerful Osage Nation.
Wichita State University professor Robert M. Owens, who teaches courses on early American history and Indian affairs, says the history of south-central Kansas is one of colonialism and empire-building. And it all began with horses.
“Bison and horses want the same things: They want lots of grass, and they want good water,” Owens said. “And you would have had that here.”
Conventional wisdom is that horses were introduced to Native American tribes by European explorers, particularly the Spanish. But a study published earlier this year suggests that Indigenous people may have lived alongside horses nearly a century earlier.
Whatever the case, the animals became a prized possession for buffalo-hunting Plains Indians. And the Wichita area, with its lush prairies and flowing river, was a great place to hunt.
“By that point, these big groups (of Indians), they’re not just hunting to feed themselves,” Owens said. “They are also commercial hunters for trading the buffalo meat or the buffalo hides.”
Native people lived and traded peacefully alongside explorers and early pioneers at first, Owens said. But by the early 1800s, tribes were moved west to make room for more settlers.
“When you have lots and lots of people wanting to come in and fence off areas and control land in perpetuity, that’s a different ballgame,” he said. “And that really disrupts their economies and their cultures.”
Indigenous populations, including the Wichita, lost much of their land to displaced tribes from other areas. Tribes moved into Kansas and Missouri with the promise of permanent homes, only to be uprooted again into what would become Oklahoma.
“Two hundred years ago, by 1823, there’s … sort of constant change,” Owens said.
The Delaware were the first American Indians to sign a treaty giving them land in what was to become Kansas. After 1830, more than two dozen tribes lived in the state, including the Iowa, Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, and Potawatomi, which remain the four federally recognized tribes in Kansas.
“The Osage are starting to really feel some pressure, and they’re actually being pushed to the west,” Owens said. “As we get into the mid- and late-1820s, that becomes even more the case. … Eventually, they’re going to be shoved down across the border into northern Oklahoma.”
Michelle Conine, education coordinator for the Mid-America All-Indian Museum in Wichita, said “the past was not pleasant” for Indigenous people once explorers and settlers arrived.
“While we acknowledge this dark chapter of our nation’s history, we choose to focus on the contemporary achievements of their descendants, share the culture with the youth and preserve it for future generations,” she said.
Dal Domebo, director of the Native American Indian Education program for Wichita schools, gives presentations throughout the school year, but especially during Native American Heritage Month in November.
“History is told by the side of the winners, and unfortunately, we were on the losing end of it,” he said. “So our story has never been properly told, or … thoroughly told.”
Domebo descends from the Kiowa, Ponca and Quapaw tribes. He said he didn’t learn much about Native American history at school. But when other kids were going to Disney World or the beach, his family made other plans.
“Growing up, I was what we kind of affectionately call a powwow kid,” Domebo said. “Our vacations consisted of visiting relatives down on the reservations … in Oklahoma. I got to speak with a lot of my grandparents, and they would teach us a lot of our history. They would teach us our culture.”
Now, teaching that culture to Wichita students — both Native and non-Native — is Domebo’s primary goal.
“A question we get a lot is, ‘Why do some Native Americans not celebrate Thanksgiving? Why do they treat is as a day of mourning?’ ” he said. “Or we’ll talk about the boarding schools and things like that. … And the kids are engaged, and they love to learn. They start hearing some of these facts and they understand, ‘Hey, this isn’t in our history book.’
“Unfortunately, when you graduate, you know more about what happened in the Holocaust than you do what happened here in America to Native Americans.”
When the Wichita school board voted to remove a mascot at Wichita North High School that was a racial slur, it also pledged to beef up lessons about Native American history at the school. Domebo helped craft what became a supplemental history curriculum for freshmen.
Native history is American history, he said, and it’s part of Wichita’s legacy.
“We can’t go back and undo what was done. We have to move forward, and we have to learn from it,” he said. “And in order to learn from it, we have to acknowledge that it happened.”
