OTOE-MISSOURIAS
The Otoe-Missourias were two separate peoplesuntil they amalgamated in the last years of theeighteenth century. Members of the Chiweregroup of Siouan speakers, they were drivenwestward from the Great Lakes region in theseventeenth century by the Sioux, who were alsomoving westward under pressure emanatingfrom the expanding orbit of European colonization.By 1714 the Otoes were living in a villageon the Salt Creek tributary of the Platte Riverin what is now eastern Nebraska. They occupiedthat vicinity for the remainder ofthe eighteenth century. The Missourias joinedthem there in 1798 after the Sauks and Foxeshad driven them out of their former homelandof present-day northwest Missouri. Fromthat time on the Otoe-Missourias were onenation, though the Missourias remained a distinctiveconstituent throughout the nineteenthcentury.
They lived, like the neighboring Pawneesand Omahas, in earth lodge villages and dividedtheir subsistence activities between intensivefarming at the villages, biannual bisonhunts out on the Plains, and a wide array offood collection. They calibrated their annualcycle closely to the signs and rhythms of thephysical environment, and they sanctifiedtheir activities with ceremonies that enlistedthe support of sacred powers. Their way of lifeworked because they spread their subsistencebase over a broad spectrum of Plains resources,and in 1800 they sustained a populationof more than 1,000 people.
But the outside world crowded in, and withthe fur traders, missionaries, Indian agents,and settlers came disease and resource depletion.By 1804, when Lewis and Clark passedby, the Otoe-Missouria population had beenreduced by smallpox to fewer than 800; subsequentepidemics and depletion of game,bringing famine, continued the downwardplunge to 600 by midcentury. Fur traders establisheda post at Bellevue in the 1820s, just tothe east of the Otoe-Missouria village, and alcoholbecame a disruptive force in their society.Enmities that otherwise might havebeen settled peacefully erupted into violence.Head chief Big Kaw could not preserve unity,and by the 1840s the Otoe-Missourias hadsplintered into four separate villages.
Mired in poverty, and with starvation aconstant companion, they were forced to selltheir only resource, their land, merely to survive.The United States obliged, as it neededland on which to settle refugee Indians fromthe eastern United States in the 1830s andhomes for settlers after 1854. The first salecame in 1830 when, at the Treaty of Prairie duChien, the Otoe-Missourias surrendered theirclaims to any lands east of the Missouri andalso sold a sliver of land in southeastern Nebraska(the Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation)for the resettlement there of mixed-bloodsfrom various tribes. A cession of about onemillion acres in southeastern Nebraska followedin 1833. The Otoe-Missourias received4.1 cents an acre for this prime agriculturalland. As with subsequent payments for cessions,the money was used by the UnitedStates to provide annuities (blankets, farmingequipment, and other items) and to finance itsassimilation policy, which aimed to transformcommunal Indians into self-supporting farmersworking on separate 160-acre allotments.Even in 1881, when the Otoe-Missourias abandonedNebraska for Indian Territory, veryfew, if any, of their men were farming.
When the Kansas-Nebraska Act of May 30,1854, opened Nebraska for settlement by EuropeanAmericans, the Otoe-Missourias soldtheir remaining homeland for 42.6 cents anacre, retaining only a 162,000-acre reservationstraddling the Kansas-Nebraska boundary.This was fertile country, and it soon becameclear that, as surrounding population pressuremounted and land values escalated, the Otoe-Missourias would have difficulty retaining it.They lived there, poorly but still defiantly traditional,for twenty-five years. Their agentswere generally corrupt until Quakers took overin 1869. Under great pressure to change, andwith the old ways increasingly unfeasible, theirsociety cleaved into two opposing segments:one, called the "stable faction" by the Quakers,paid at least lip service to the assimilation policy;the other, the "wild party," led by traditionalchiefs Medicine Horse and Ar-ka-ke-ta,remained steadfastly traditional. When theOtoe-Missourias migrated to Oklahoma Territory,following the sale of their reservation intwo parts in 1876 and 1881, the division persistedand was not healed until after 1890.
In Indian Territory, the Otoe-Missouriassettled on a 129,113-acre reservation in what isnow Noble County, Oklahoma. Their populationcontinued to plummet, dropping to 340in 1894. Thereafter, their numbers graduallyrebounded to reach 1,550 by 1990. Their reservationwas completely allotted in 1907, butwhen oil was discovered on their lands in 1912,the trust status of their allotments was abrogated,and fully 90 percent of their land basewas lost.
The Otoe-Missourias continued to resist theUnited States' efforts to reshape them. They refusedto set up a constitutional government.which would have abolished their traditionaltribal government.until 1984, and they haveused their resources to buy back some of theirlost lands. In the late 1940s, like most otherPlains tribes, they lodged their claims withthe Indian Claims Commission, and in 1955and 1964 received awards of $1,156,035 and$1,750,000 for lands that had been taken in1830, 1833, and 1854 for payments "so low as toshock the conscience." These awards, large atfirst sight, diminished to small sums when allocatedto individuals. Still, it is remarkable–in fact a triumph–that this small nation, despitethe loss of their homeland and the assaulton their way of life, has endured into thetwenty-first century. Their annual powwow,held in July, and their continued coherencearound kinship groups, ceremonies, and socialgatherings, ensure the continuance of theirtribal identity.
David J. Wishart
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Chapman, Berlin Basil. The Otoes and Missourias: A Studyof Indian Removal and the Legal Aftermath. OklahomaCity: Times Journal Publishing Co., 1965.
Edmunds, R.David. The Otoe-Missouria People. Phoenix: Indian TribalSeries, 1976.
Wishart, David J. An Unspeakable Sadness:The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians. Lincoln: Universityof Nebraska Press, 1994.
