As the sun rises in the sky at the Allegawaho Park near Council Grove, a killdeer and cardinal sing out to the morning breeze.
The Grandfather bears witness.
Iⁿ'zhúje'waxóbe — or the "Sacred Red Rock" — is a 28-ton red, quartzite boulder. And its journeys and stories are all sacred to the Kaw Nation or Kanza people.
"He is our Grandfather, or Grandfather Rock," said Pauline Sharp, chair of the Kanza Heritage Society.
The Grandfather used to sit at the juncture of Kansas — or Kaw — River and Shunganunga Creek for hundreds of thousands of years.
"The Kanza people would go there and pray to Waconda, our God," Sharp said. "He has held our prayers for centuries."
Sharp was one of the people most instrumental in recently reclaiming the Grandfather for the Kaw Nation.
The move was made possible, in part, because of a $5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to the University of Kansas. That provided the funding for the Kaw Nation to relocate the boulder from a park in Lawrence to the Allegawaho Memorial Heritage Park, near Council Grove.
More than 300,000 years ago, the Grandfather was deposited by the remnants of a glacier near what is now Tecumseh, east of Topeka. And there, the Grandfather sat.
The Kaw or Kanza nation — for whom the state of Kansas is named — were forcibly removed from Kansas in 1873.
In 1929, as Lawrence was celebrating the 75th anniversary of its founding, the rock was moved by train to a city park where a plaque honoring the predominately white pioneers of the community was affixed to it.
For nearly a century, the rock remained in Lawrence.
Then, in 2015, Sharp began working with others to recall the stories of the Sacred Red Rock. In 2021, the city of Lawrence and Douglas County formally apologized to the Kaw Nation for taking the rock and agreed to its unconditional return.
It was no small journey.
Moving the rock was nearly a two-year process and involved members of the Kaw Nation in collaboration with the city of Lawrence, KU, the school's Spencer Museum of Art, Kanza Heritage Society, and others.
A large crane lifted the rock onto a flatbed truck, and it was carefully moved to the park near Council Grove. For the first time in 151 years, the Grandfather was back on Kaw land.
The land where the park is located has been owned by the tribe since 2002.
"When we started talking about where we might move (the rock), there was talk about moving him to Oklahoma where the Kaw Nation headquarters are, and I said, 'I would really like to keep him in Kansas because he has been here for thousands of years,' " Sharp said.
"We lost so much after removal. We got down to 187 people at one time. We lost everything. The elders thought they had been sent to Indian Territory to die."
In June, the Grandfather was rededicated at Allegawaho Park near Council Grove.
"It was an amazing experience to have him there and to know that this is the first time he has heard the drums of our people for gosh, over 100 years," Sharp said. "I still get emotional.
"I think about that he's the oldest living thing associated with our culture that we have."
If you go: Allegawaho Park is at S. 525 Road in Council Grove. It is open to the public.
The park is the site of the last Kaw or Kanza Indian Village in Kansas prior to the 1873 forced removal of the tribe from Kansas.