Last modified: 2019-12-04 by rick wyatt
Keywords: kansas delaware tribe | kansas | native american |
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image located by Valentin Poposki, 29 November 2019
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Kansas Delaware Tribe is unrecognized tribe in Kansas.
"The Delaware
originally resided in northeastern United States. They were the first native
Americans to have contact with explorers from Europe. Over the following decades
they were scattered and pushed westward by colonists and the U.S. government
into Ohio and Indiana, then into southern Missouri. Some Delaware split off and
moved to Idaho and Canada and Texas. In 1829 the Delaware in southwestern
Missouri were moved to a "permanent" reservation in Kansas. Today that area is
Wyandotte and Leavenworth counties. The Delaware reservation also included a
ten-mile-wide strip of land running west across Kansas for passage into the
central plains for hunting. The Kansas Delaware reservation was similar to their
original land on the east coast. It was green, fertile and bordered on a river.
There was a problem, however. Rather than living in isolation as they had in
southwestern Missouri, the Kansas reservation put the Delaware on a hub for
western expansion. They were soon inundated with settlers and land speculators
and the railroad. Though the government was supposed to protect the sovereignty
of the native American lands in Kansas, it didn't. Forty years after moving to
Kansas, the Delaware were again asked to move, this time to Indian territory in
Oklahoma. The U.S. government gave the Delaware an ultimatum: move to Oklahoma
or no longer be recognized as Delaware. To preserve the tribe, the bulk of the
Delaware moved to Oklahoma. A handful of Delaware for various reasons decided to
stay in Kansas. Some like Anna and Rosanna Grinter had married frontiersmen and
had established permanent homes. They did not want to break up their families by
moving some of the members to Oklahoma. As one current Kansas Delaware tells the
story: when the government in the 1860s told my ancestors to move to Oklahoma or
they wouldn’t be recognized as Delaware by the U.S. government, my ancestors
responded: "We don’t need the blessing of the federal government to know who we
are. We’re Delaware and we’re not going anywhere. In past treaties between the
U.S. and the Delaware, the government has consistently been dishonest and
deceitful. Moving to Oklahoma will just be more of the same." The Delaware who
stayed in Kansas became Citizen Delaware, or Kansas Delaware as they’re known
today." http://www.kansasdelaware.org/
Image of the seal and photo of the
flag from Tribal Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/KansasDelaware/
Valentin Poposki, 29 November 2019
image located by Valentin Poposki, 29 November 2019
image located by Valentin Poposki, 29 November 2019
Image of the former flag from Wikimedia
Valentin Poposki, 20 September 2019