1830s tribal map shows a native view of our state

At first glance, it looks like a drawing of a bare tree with Christmas lights.

But this is a document of historic significance to Iowa and to the native people who lived here and gave the state its nameit's one of the earliest maps of Iowa.

If you study it, as state archaeologist William Green has done, you'll find it remarkably familiar.

All the important rivers of the state are there, in the right locations, although with idealized spatial relationships. You can see where the Missouri and Mississippi rivers join near what's now St. Louis. Dotted lines and circles show where the Ioway tribe (also known as the Iowa or Baxoje) lived during a 200-year period.

This is the map Ioway leader No Heart presented to the U.S. government in 1837 to prove that his people owned the land, not the Sac and Fox of the Mississippi. The argument was over government payments, since neither tribe got to stay. The Meskwakisone of the Sac and Fox tribeslater bought land and settled near Tama.

A little more than 160 years ago, on Oct. 7 and 9, 1837, Ioway leaders No Heart and Moving Rain presented their case in Washington, D.C., to the Indian commissioner. No Heart pointed to the 104-centimeter by 69-centimeter map he brought as proof of ownership.

"We have the history," No Heart said. "We have always owned this land. It is what bears our name."

He also took a jab at his opponents: "My Father, those people (the Sac and Fox) have always taken the advantage of us knowing that we were a small tribe. They steal from us and then sell to you."

Keokuk, the Sac and Fox leader, responded that although the Ioway had lived there, now it was his: "This country I have gained by fighting. Therefore, I claim it. Our people once inhabited the country about the Great Lakes. We were driven off. You don't hear me claiming (that) country."

Then Keokuk added insult to injury: "We have always pushed them before us. That is the reason they have marked so many villages on their map."

Green, who has been studying the map about five years for a series of classes and presentations, said the government bought Keokuk's version.

"They spoke that language, they didn't really care about all these dots on a map," Green says. "The map didn't make much of an impression. The Iowa tribe was never really paid for this land."

The original map is in the collection of the National Archives and Records Administration and recently has been on exhibit in various National Archives exhibits in the D.C. area.

"People have been aware of it, and it's been mainly geographers and historians who have been writing about it over the past 20 years, but anthropologists haven't done anything with it until now," Green says. "Tribal members also had been pretty much in the dark."

Green has made presentations to members of the Iowa tribe, who now live in two main areas: near Perkins, Okla., and on the Nebraska-Kansas border.

"They say they had no idea the map existed or that their history in Iowa and nearby states was so well documented," Green says. "Unfortunately, most of what they learn about the history of their own tribe doesn't go much farther back than the time they were forcibly settled west of the Missouri in the 1830s."

Green is studying the map, using the oral history and documents that accompanied it, along with archaeological evidence.

"It's almost the perfect embodiment of how to approach history in an interdisciplinary way," Green says. "It shows that history isn't simple. You can't be a strict geographer or archaeologist when you try to interpret this. You have to apply all those things."

Many Iowa residents today don't realize the state takes its name from a living tribe, Green says.

"If nothing else, maybe this map can link people in Iowa today with those who lived here for hundreds of years in the past, and maybe it'll show people of Iowa today that we're just the most recent of many, many people who have lived here," Green says.

"But even if all we were doing was putting dates and dots on a map, I still think that's valuable because it shows there has been a long-term presence of people throughout the state. This was not just uninhabited. People talk about the wilderness and being settled in the 1830s and '40s. It wasn't wilderness; it was home to thousands of people."

What's more, the map represents more than just an ownership claim, Green maintains.

In a paper presented at the American Society for Ethnohistory, Green says the map defined both the physical landscape and the tribe's place within it.

"No Heart was defining an essential part of what it meant to be Ioway in the 1830s," Green writes. "By depicting both visible and invisible landscapespast and presentNo Heart issued an enduring statement of personal and group ties to the land.... We should give deeper thought to the people whose land and names we use but whose place in the landscape we have hardly begun to comprehend."

by Deb Wiley