A New Map of Iowa: Accompanied with Notes by W. Barrows. Cincinnati: Engraved & published by Doolittle & Munson, 1845 https://lccn.loc.gov/2007626856 

The idea comes around from time to time to make a map that clearly describes where the Native Nations of Iowa lived. In considering this idea, I have run into a number of issues that suggest a map of this type can’t be made to the level of detail we might expect, say, for place names on a current map of Iowa. Still, thinking about making such a map is a useful  exercise.

Maps are abstractions of reality. They symbolically represent the spatial relationship among various pieces of information. As models, they can’t provide all the information of what is known and they often can’t indicate well what is unknown.  I think many of us like to see information given in a map format but this can lead to false impressions when we try to map ethnic groups prior to fixed postal addresses. Many of the different Indigenous peoples  living in North America during the 17th and 18th centuries did not conform to the European notion that people often lived in a fixed place most of their lives. If we try to say a group of people lived in a specific place when we use forms of evidence that are based on preconceived ideas that are based in traditions of land ownership and academic training that ultimately came from European culture, we can run into problems. The map at the top of this post is a good example of this.  The map shows the Meskwaki and Potowatomi having defined areas with fixed boundaries that were surveyed by Euro-Americans. Neither nation originally would have had the Euro-American concept of fixed political borders. I think many people still fall into this mistaken concept when we think about where people lived in North America before the first Europeans arrived.

Before continuing, let me define some terms. Native American means an individual or group who were indigenous to North America when Europeans first arrived. Indigenous peoples are groups of Native American who share the same ethnicity, culture, language, and ancestry. This is contrasted with the collective form of the noun people, which is a group of individuals, who may be of Indigenous descent or not based on context. A Native nation is another name for Indigenous peoples, but generally indicates the group is formally recognized by one or more governments, such as that of the United States or a Native people.  The term implies respect and acknowledges the sovereign powers of these peoples. The term has a long standing tradition. France, Britain, and the United States used the term nation to refer to Indigenous peoples until about the middle of the 19th century. Native nations are considered dependent, domestic nations by the United States Government. They have powers listed in the US Constitution and are not subject to state laws, have self-rule, and are subject to US Law.

An older term used for Native nations is tribe. Over time, this term is falling out of popular favor, as is the term Indian to designate Native Americans, but both are still in use by some Native people and the Federal government. Not every Indigenous person views the term Indian as a negative word, but increasingly it is taken that way. Tribe similarly can carry a negative meaning. However, some Native nations, the US Government, and publications on topics regarding Native nations still use Indian and Tribe without the intent to be derogatory. The term Euro-American indicates people of European and American ancestry. Many of the people who eventually settled in Iowa and even many of the explorers in the area that became Iowa had European ancestry, but many were born and raised in North America. Their culture had a European perspective modified by generations of living in North America. For the most part, Black and Hispanic/Latino (Latinx) people did not make policy that influenced Iowa before statehood. I won’t be addressing their contributions to Iowa history in this post.

It is important for Euro-Americans, white people, to reflect on the complex history of relationships between Native nations and European nations—France, Spain, and England, as well as the United States and to also realize the actions of individuals or small factions often don’t represent all the people of a nation. Euro-American policy for settlement and land acquisition had many effects that were very bad for the people of Native nations. Acknowledging this is an important first step to understanding why making a map of locations of Native nations is complicated. 

To start off, there are issues with mapping Native nations because for the most part they did not write prior to the 19th century when written forms of indigenous languages were adopted. Their origins are unknown from their own written historical sources. With a very few exceptions, we don’t have early maps made by Native nations.

Euro-Americans made maps of Native nations in the area that would become Iowa, but these maps come with their own set of issues. Euro-American maps that included the area that became Iowa came mostly from accounts by French explorers and Jesuit missionaries who sent copies of their reports to France where cartographers used their reports to make maps. Their accounts carried a  number of biases, a predominant tendency to view the world from only their point of view, and this ethnocentricity held an ingrained belief that Europe was superior to the rest of the world.

Additional issues come from how Euro-Americans recorded the places and names of the peoples they learned of during European expeditions.  Explorers and missionaries of European descent often recorded a name they heard as it sounded to them and they wrote, spoke, and thought in their own dialect, something that is rarely a standard version of the languages that we use today. For example, most of the French explorers were from the province of Canada, also called New France. Many spoke 17th and 18th century Québécois French. They didn’t spell in a standardized way just as English speakers would spell the same word multiple ways at this time. 

The names the French recorded for Native nations that could have been found in what would  become Iowa came from Algonkian or Siouan–Catawban Native languages and were often provided by a group other than the people who were being named. This makes the names an exonym or name from outside the group who are named. For example, the Iowa were not asked what their name was. Their name was given by another group first. These names were modified to meet French language structure based on how the French interpreted the name. The French accounts given to map makers were haphazard in this regard, resulting in confusion and duplication in the names of Native Nations recorded, but hardly worse than the British and Americans when the French version was then converted to English language standards.  The US Government adopted the names they had on maps from British and French sources and from written accounts and made little effort to interview people who were the subject of their treaties to correct any errors. Thus Meskwaki is an endonym or autonym  of the people  typically called by the exonym Les Renards by the French, which means “Foxes” in English. The Meskwaki Nation is still recorded as belonging to the Sac and Fox peoples by the US Government, which is another exonym. Another exonym for the Meskwaki was Odagaamii, often spelled Outagamie, which is an Anishinaabe word meaning, “people on the other shore.” Some of these assigned names can be crude or offensive. An example of some of the more egregious occurrences of this are the two Indigenous peoples in Canada who were called Dog Rib and Slavey by others who didn’t like them. In the Iowa area history, Moingwena is also a highly offensive term as explained on pages 45 to 46 of this journal article.

Detail showing Iowa from Louis Joliet, Nouvelle decouverte de plusieurs nations dans la Nouvelle France en l’année 1673 et 1674 [New discoveries of several nations in New France in the years 1673 and 1674.] https://lccn.loc.gov/2001620471

The first European maps to include the area that would become Iowa in any detail were three maps made after the Marquette and Joliet expedition on the Mississippi in 1673. A number of Native peoples are mentioned on each map, but their exact locations were not given and each map has a unique but overlapping set of Native nations written on them. Regarding the spelling conventions in this period, an “8” symbol was a shorthand for either ou or w sounds, as explained by Michael McCafferty in note 1 of this journal article. Again the names are  interpretations of names that were spelled out as they sounded to the French explorers.

The earliest map was made in 1673 by an unnamed person who was associated with the Jesuits and their mission in North America. They used information provided by Marquette and Joliet to make the map. The peoples given for the area that would become Iowa include the Illinois, written as Illini8ek, transliterated as “Illiniouek,” the Ponca as Pe8anca, the Moingona, more accurately spelled as Moingwena are shown as M8ing8ena, and the Otoe are transcribed as Otontata. The name Moingwena is controversial because it appears that it is an insulting term in the Illinois-Miami language. Also on the west side of the Mississippi river and a location north of the second river north of the Missouri river are the Kithigami, spelled more often as Kitchigami, which also is a name for Lake Superior. Not much has been written about the Kitchigami people. The Missouria, Kaw (Kansas or Kaw), and Pawnee are shown south of the Missouri River as 8missouri, Kamssi sive Chaha, where sive is Latin for “or” and Paniassa. The Kickapoo are shown along the Illinois river as Pichiki8. The Ho-Chunk and Winnebago and Muscouten peoples are shown in what is present day Wisconsin as Puans and Musc8tensac.  

The second map is attributed directly to Marquette and was made in 1673 or 1674. In place of the name for the Illinois is the alternate name Peoria (Pe8rea). The Moingwena are shown as Moing8ena. The Otoe are indicated by the same spelling of Otentata. In addition, the Pawnee and Omaha are shown as Pana and Maha and the Iowa are spelled Pah8tet.  The name given for the Iowa is an approximation of their endonym Báxoje, also spelled Páxoǰe, which appears sometimes on later maps as as pahotcha or pahucha. South of the Missouri river, the Osage are shown as 8chagé. 

The third map is attributed to Joliet and dates to 1674. His original field notes were lost when his canoe tipped over near Montreal while he was returning to Quebec. He made a map from memory that shows the Illinois-Peoria, written as  Illinois Pe8area located near the Mississippi and between the Missouri and Des Moines rivers. The combination here along with the other two maps showing Illiniwek and Illinois show synonymous names that have the same or nearly the same meaning. Also on the map  between the Missouri and Des Moines rivers are the Otoe, Pawnee, Omaha, and Iowa (Ioway) peoples. These names were written as Atentaeta, Pana, Maha, and Pa8tet. The Osage are not shown. The Wea are shown as  8a8iatonon and are located north of the Des Moines River and north of them, opposite the mouth of the Wisconsin river on the west side of the Mississippi, are the Kitchigami, written as Kitchigamin.

These subtle variations between these three maps from the same expedition point to the difficulty in using early maps to say exactly who may have lived in Iowa at the time of first contact with Euro-Americans. Marquette and Joliet, and other explorers and missionaries, didn’t meet all of the nations they wrote down. Instead, they would ask about other nations they knew of and some were placed on maps based on earlier accounts. The locations for most were more notes of names they heard than fixing a specific place for those nations.There isn’t enough information to excuse any of them and we don’t know if there were others who were unknown to the French expedition. In addition to these three maps, several additional maps were made based on these three but don’t differ noticeably for the information about Iowa.

The next set of maps were made by Jean Baptiste Louis Franquelin in the late 1670s and 1680s. His maps were made from earlier maps and written reports, primarily from the expeditions of Marquette and Joiliet and La Salle. However, he was very haphazard in his spelling, creating some amount of confusion. The change of Moingwena to Moingona is attributed to Franquelin’s  spelling of the name.

Guillaume de L’Isle, Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi: dressée sur un grand nombre de mémoires entrautres sur ceux de Mr. le Maire [Map of Louisiana and the course of the Mississippi: drawn up on a large number of memoirs including those of Mr. le Maire], Paris, 1718 https://www.loc.gov/item/2001624908/

Possibly of more use were the series of maps printed  between 1702 to 1785 by Guillaume de L’Isle, also spelled Delisle, who published about a dozen maps  that include the area that would become Iowa. While map makers in Britain also published maps, most of the exploration of the area that now includes Iowa continued to be conducted by the French. Despite the care De L’Isle took to be accurate with geography, the spelling of names of Native nations that were passed on to him seems to have not been standardized. For example, the Meskwaki were referred variously in Jesuit reports of the late 17th century as Outtougamis et autres nations, Outagamis, and Outagame. A similar issue with various spellings occurs on the maps made in the 18th century. Looking at the area that became Iowa on these maps the two tribes that were most frequently included for that area were the Iowa and Otoe.  The locations of these Native nations were given fairly consistently in Northwest Iowa, Southwest Iowa and Northwest Missouri.  The Iowa were recorded on the maps variously as—Aiaouez, Paoute, Aiaouez ou Paoute, Paouteaoüa, and Aioureoua. For the Otoe, they appear as only the Otactata, which is not typical.  

The Meskwaki, Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Winnebago, Mascouten, Odawa, Illinois–Peoria and Miami were showen  near the west and south of the Great Lakes during the same period. Their names were recorded as Renards, Poutouatamis, Puans, Moscuotens ou Nation de Feu, Outaouacs, Illinois, Peoria, Mitsegamea, Tamarora, and Miami. These names were more consistent, except for the various groups of the Illinois-Peoria, which included the Illinois, Peoria, Michigan (Mitsegamea), and Tamarora who all spoke the same language as the Miami. Other tribes were even less consistent. On the west side of the Missouri River were the Omaha, Pawnee, Pawnee-Omaha, and Kaw, written as Maha, Panis, Panimaha, and Cansez or Kansa. The Missouria (Missouris) appeared south of the Missouri River. To the north of present-day Iowa were the Dakota, appearing as the Western Sioux and Eastern Sioux (Sioux de l’Ouest and Sioux de L’Est). The Moingwena and Kickapoo are inferred by their names appearing as the names of rivers—R. Des Moingona, and R. Quicapou, also spelled as Kicapou. The Pawnee, written as Panibousa and Panis, were recorded within the area that became western Iowa during the 1780s and 1790s along with, at least to me, the unidentified Pammalias on maps made by de L’Isle and others. Perhaps they are also the Pawnee. 

The United States maps made after 1783 showed growing consistency, but still had problems. A map published in 1814 details the information obtained by Lewis and Clarke for their expedition to the Pacific Ocean. It notes the Iowa, Otoe, Meskwaki , Sauk, and Dakaota, probably from the Eastern or Santee division, written as Iowa, Ayawas, Ottos, Sac, Fox, Sioux. An old village of the Iowa and Otoe was recorded in southwest Iowa, The Iowa, spelled Ayawas, were at a location in southeast Iowa, the Meskwaki in central Iowa, the Sauk in eastern Iowa and the Dakota in northeast Iowa. It seems the information obtained by the United States had not yet realized the difference between Ayawa and Iowa peoples.

Native nations that were moved to Iowa by the US Government appear in an 1843 map, including the Ho-Chunk and Winnebago, Sauk and Meskwaki, Potawatomi,  Odawa, Ojibwe, written as Winnebago, Sac, Fox, Pottowatamie, Ottawa, and Chippewa. A river on that map is named for the Kaw (Kansas). The Ho-Chunk and Winnebago were in northeast Iowa, the Sauk and Meskwaki in central Iowa, the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe were in southwest Iowa, and a Kansas river (R. Karanzi) was recorded in northwest Iowa. This river had typically been labeled Iowa River (R. des Aiaouez) in the early period. The Otoe and Iowa were located south of the Platte River in the area that is now southeast Nebraska and northeast Kansas. The Kickapoo were shown south of the Iowa in northeast Kansas. Even thought the names are more consistent, they remained mostly as the same spellings of the French but now more English. These spellings were then more or less fossilized in US law.

A potential bias for readers of these maps that show names fixed in a place, one that might have been shared by the map makers, was the false impression that Native nations in America were located at a fixed place. One map maker went so far as to include this idea on a map in 1785. On one map made by the firm Chés Boudet included a text block that said “The Sioux or Nadouesiens form a numerous nation which occupies many villages whose positions cannot be fixed, like most of the other Indians of Louisiana.”

Detail from Chés Boudet, États-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale avec les Isles Royale, de Terre Nueve, de St. Jean, l’Acadie &c., [House of Boudet, The United States of America with the Islands Royal, Newfoundland, St. Jean, Acadia, etc.], 1785. https://lccn.loc.gov/74695018

This gloss was added to the map even though the locations of nearly all Native nations on these early maps could be seen to change over time. This brings up a primary difficulty in mapping a culture whose means of subsistence involved movement in the land. Many Indigenous peoples of North America moved periodically through a region, mostly as part of a seasonal food procurement strategy, living in certain areas at certain times of the year. Even peoples who settled for longer periods, those in so-called permanent settlements with incipient agriculture, tended to move their villages from time to time. A few Native nations were able to be fixed fairly permanently when factors favored this strategy, like the Mandan, for instance, but this was not the usual case in the Midwest.

Movement often also resulted from other factors. As Euro-American settlement took place in the eastern French and British colonies, their new presence had several effects. One was the spread of European diseases ranging from the several common cold viruses to smallpox. The transmission of disease can occur from short contact with infected people and people later infected don’t have to come in contact with the original carrier of the disease to become sick. Diseases spread across North America well in advance of Euro-Americans arriving in a given location. Many Native nations sustained heavy losses to their populations as a result. This caused Native nations to consolidate their villages or even merge different groups together. 

Another effect of Euro-American settlement was physical displacement of Native nations and armed conflict. Euro-Americans occupied space with their settlements that had been used by Indigenous peoples before their arrival. Displacement could be as simple as the Native nations could no longer use the same space and choose to look somewhere else. Displacement could instead involve armed conflict where one group, either Euro-Americans or certain Native nations, forced other Native nations to move from their traditional areas. That in turn caused a second round of other Indigenous peoples deciding if they also would move, typically further west, or if they would stay and fight. 

Much of the conflict resulted as part of the European fur trade. The fur trade disrupted the traditional ways of Native nations by creating a demand for European trade goods. As part of trade, the Europeans introduced firearms, steel weapons, which are often viewed as leading to armed conflict as well as other steel tools, cloth and alcohol, brass kettles, copper alloy sheet metal, and glass beads. The competition to gain access to trade goods drove much of the conflict between Native nations after contact with the Euro-Americans.  This led to movements away from certain Native nations and toward others. Additionally, cultural shifts that were driven by iron and steel tools and also trade beads changed how the seasonal movements took place. Areas extending from food procurement to art were affected by trade goods. Rather than hunting large animals, there could be a shift to trapping fur bearing animals with pelts more desirable to Euro-American fur traders. These factors resulted in changes to where Native nations were located.

Some Native nations sustained heavy losses due to battles with other Native nations or with Europeans, due to armed conflict among Euro-American nations. Native nations allied themselves with the British, French or United States at various points including the Seven Years War, which is also called the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812. Additionally, the Sauk and Meskwaki engaged in battle directly with the French over a series of years. Lives were lost and punishments were carried out by the victors. The later conflict, mostly between the Sauk and the United States, had similar results. Afterward, the location of these Native nations changed.

Since these maps were made from field observations by explorers and missionaries, some amount of information on the location of various First nations can be found in Euro-American historical  accounts. The number of these accounts is many, but the level of detail that was recorded was often fairly general. Many accounts of Native nations, as has been stated above, came from people who knew of other Indigenous peoples located further away. An attempt to make a standard Euro-American style map of the precise locations of these nations based directly on the early accounts would be challenging.

In addition to early maps and the historical accounts they were based on, some of our knowledge about where Native nations were located is based on modern maps of Native languages. These maps were based on Euro-American accounts of the peoples that were at a given location when they were encountered. Appropriately, these maps show boundaries that don’t conform to the later US government land survey. Concepts like state or national boundaries didn’t exist before Euro-American settlement.

Language maps are useful to illustrate the many different languages present at the time Euro-Americans began to record their names. These maps also indirectly indicate the displacement caused by the policy of Euro-American Governments. For instance, the recorded location of the Shawnee language was in the area of Kentucky, but most Shawnee now live in Oklahoma where US Government policy forced them to relocate after first relocating them to Kansas. The difference between where Native peoples are living now provides a good starting point for looking at Euro-American policy, especially regarding land ownership.

Detail showing Iowa from Principal Indian Tribes of North America the Department of Anthropology, University of Indiana ca. 1964.

When I was in graduate school, June Helm introduced me to the first map of Native nation locations based on language areas that I saw. She used it in her class on Native Americans at the University of Iowa. It was compiled by researchers at the University of Indiana Department of Anthropology. The original map appeared as Driver, Cooper, Kirchhoff, Libby, Massey, and Spier, “Principal Indian Tribes of North America,” Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics, Memoir 9, 1953. A stand-alone map was issued by the Anthropology Department around 1964. I made the image from a copy of that map that I received from Professor Helm. Numbers 41 and 42 are Kickapoo and Winnebago. Numbers 38, 39, and 40 are Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara. These are the names of languages, which aren’t necessarily the names of the nations that use the languages, so a bit of translation needs to be done. It is also unfortunate that language names that were assigned by Euro-Americans often didn’t reflect the names that people themselves used for their languages or themselves. The Iowa call themselves Báxoje. The Fox call themselves Meshkwahkihaki. The Sioux that lived in parts of Iowa go broadly by the name Dakota. The locations the languages were first recorded also were not always the original location for the nation that spoke them. For example, the Meskwaki are known to have lived in the St. Lawrence Valley in modern Ontario and were signatories to a peace treaty in 1701 made between the government of the French territory in Canada and 39 Native nations. Their own history, one based on oral traditions, states they came from the Atlantic Ocean.

Some more recent maps have some advantages over the older Driver map, but they still use the language names assigned by Euro-Americans, which have the built in issues I described above. A good example of a recent combined map of languages and cultures is this one. It is okay on a broad level, but it lacks the names the Indigenous peoples use for themselves. 

Another view of locations of Native nations in the  historical record are the United States treaties with Native nations  containing a version of which peoples lived in Iowa as it became inhabited by Euro-American settlers. The treaties required the Ho Chunk and Winnebago and Potawatomi to move to Iowa from locations east of the Mississippi and they also required all Native nations to leave Iowa over a period of less than 30 years (1824 to 1851). Key to interpreting land cession maps is the fact that the same land was claimed by different Native nations in treaty negotiations. I discuss these treaties and who was listed in them here. Historical accounts can therefore provide both a location for a nation and for a language group used by multiple nations. 

Similar to historical accounts and languages, another way to determine an area that a given Native nation lived in is through the archaeological record. Archaeology indicates the area known today as Iowa was inhabited perhaps since 13,000 years ago, but the earliest evidence is quite sparse. By 11,500 years ago enough sites are evident to be certain Iowa was regularly used for at least hunting, if not long term living, and prehistoric sites of all ages and many types continue from that time period to the present. The names of these people are not known to us, so the names of cultures are based on artifact assemblages, which includes things such as projectile points and later pottery types, pottery appearing after about 3,000 years ago.

With changes in subsistence patterns, people began to occupy sites for longer periods of time. More recent sites contain generally more artifacts in a broader range of types and materials. These two factors lead to greater discernment between artifact assemblages known as Great Oasis, Mill Creek, Glenwood, and Oneota. 

Archaeologists and Native nations both connect native ancestry to these archaeological cultures. The archaeological Oneota culture may be a physical record of places occupied by the ancestors of the Iowa, Otoe, Missouri, Ho-Chunk, and possibly some Dakota groups. Glenwood sites may have been made by ancestors of the Pawnee and Arikara. Mill Creek Sites may represent early villages of the Hidatsa and Mandan. Some late prehistoric and historic period archaeological sites have known affiliations with the Iowa, Otoe, Missouri, and Omaha peoples as well as the Meskwaki based on historical accounts. For example, historical accounts place the Iowa in Northeast Iowa at the time that the Huron and Ottowa sought refuge with a people on a river named for the “Ay0ës” (Ioways) twelve leagues north of the Wisconsin River. Mildred Mott Wedel looked at archaeological data that led her to conclude this river was the Upper Iowa River.  

A map has been prepared by the Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist indicating all the physical locations that have known affiliation to a Native nation. However, that map does not include all the potential connections of Native nations to Iowa when historical records are consulted. Archaeology doesn’t involve many aspects of culture beyond durable material remains like tools and utensils, evidence of structures, and other items that don’t easily decay in the soil. While some of the tribes who claim ancestry in Iowa can be traced archaeologically, not all can be.

Turning now from Euro-American sources of knowledge, let’s briefly touch on how some Native nations view their place in Iowa’s past.  Indigenous People have their own ways to know things and have their own oral traditions for where they lived at any one point. This can be helpful to non-Native Americans to learn where the Native nations understand they came from. For example, Jonathan Buffalo, as Tribal Historian for the Meskwaki in Iowa, has said their history is connected to the St. Lawrence River and the east coast of North America. None of the sources I have given above have so far shown this. Similarly, there are no mapped locations for the Ponca in what today is Iowa but an Omaha oral tradition states that they and the Ponca migrated through Iowa on their way to southwest Minnesota and then to northeast Nebraska. Without oral tradition, these contributions to history would be unknown. One last example of knowledge coming from Native Americans is the 1837 map that the Iowa presented in Washington, D.C. at treaty negotiations. In this map, The Iowa recorded their history of locations they found significant in their past including village locations in Illinois and Wisconsin, as well as all of Iowa at various points through time. The historic accounts were unaware of the Iowa’s  Illinois and Wisconsin connections.

Map presented by the Iowa delegation to the US Government for the 1837 treaty negotiations. The map is often called No Heart’s map, or Nocheninga’s map National Archives Identifier 102278806. The National Archives notes a creation date of February 1838, which possibly is the date the map was accessioned. Public domain image https://catalog.archives.gov/id/102278806 

Ideally, two or more of these types of information are used to confirm a location of a Native nation on a map for a given time. This is exactly what the people at Native Land Digital have done with their collectively-sourced map of Native nations around the world. This map has been given press coverage by NPR and the Smithsonian Magazine. Unfortunately, this map also is lacking in the full detail of the wide number of Native nations that have claimed their cultural heritage includes Iowa.

It would be challenging to prepare a single, definitive map of where all Native nations have made cultural claims to space in Iowa. Maps are snapshots in time made with an imperfect lens. In addition to short term occupations and longer term villages, some peoples simply passed through Iowa, or came here to hunt but left little in the way of artifacts that identify their specific culture. But this doesn’t necessarily make the land any less part of their history. Historical accounts, historical maps, language areas, the archaeological record, and the opinions of Indigenous people should be considered. 

Notes

1. This post is part of an update to a previous post from 2019.
2. One of my graduate assistant duties in the early 1990s was to assist Professor June Helm teach her North American Indians course in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Iowa.

Additional Resources

Most Native nations have a website and many include a history of their people. I encourage you to do a web search and locate these sites on your own. Keywords to use include the name of the Native nation given in this post along with terms such as nation and tribe. Some tribes have more than one government and choose to identify themselves in different ways. For example, The People of the Red Earth in Iowa go by Meskwaki, while the Kansas-Nebraska and Oklahoma groups still use Sac and Fox. Similarly the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin are the same ethnic group as the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. The Dakota have many distinct ethnic groups, including the eastern or Santee and the western or Yanton-Yanktonai. The Santee are divided into Mdewakanton, Sisseton, and Wahpeton. 

Online Resources

American Indians of Iowa 

Federally Recognized American Indian Tribes and Alaska Native Entities

Library of Congress Map Collection  

How to Talk about Native nations: A Guide

For Further Reading

Items with open online access are linked

Ackerman,  Brenda Papakee, The tradition of Meskwaki ribbonwork: cultural meanings, continuity, and change. MS thesis in Textiles and Clothing, Iowa State University, Ames, 2008 http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/14947/

Adams, A. T., editor, The Explorations of Pierre Esprit Radisson: from the Original Manuscript in the Bodleian Library and the British Museum, Minneapolis: Ross and Haines, Inc., 1961

Alex, Lynn M., Iowa’s Archaeological Past, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2000

Bataille, Gretchen M., David Mayer Gradwohl, and Charles P. Silet, editors, The Worlds Between Two Rivers: Perspectives on American Indians in Iowa, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000

Bataille, Gretchen, “The American Indian in Iowa: A Selected Bibliography,” in The Worlds Between Two Rivers: Perspectives on American Indians in Iowa. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pages 151–171, 2000

Blaine, Martha Royce, The Ioway Indians. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1995

Blair, Emma H., trans, Nicolas Perrot, M. De Bacqueville De La Potherie, Morrell Marston, Thomas Forsyth, Paul Radin, and Gertrude M Robertson,  Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1911 https://www.loc.gov/item/11028844/ 

Brown, Richard Frank, A social history of the Mesquakie Indians, 1800–1963. MS thesis in History, Iowa State University, Ames, 1964 http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/10/

Buisseret, David, and Carl Kupfer. 2011. “Validating the 1673 ‘Marquette Map’.” Journal of Illinois History, volume 14 pages 261–276

Carman, Mary R. “The Last Winnebago Indian in Northeast Iowa,” Journal of the Iowa Archeological Society, volume 35, pages 72–76, 1988.

Cloyd, Brett, Native American Research: Government Information: Selected Research Sources https://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/American_Indians?p=864402

Delanglez, Jean, “The Discovery of the Mississippi: Secondary Sources,” Mid-America: an Historical Review, volume 28, pages 3–22, 1946 https://ia802707.us.archive.org/30/items/midamericahistor28unse/midamericahistor28unse.pdf

DeMallie, Raymond J., editor, “Plains,” Handbook of North American Indians, volume 13, Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2001

Driver, Harold E., Indians of North America,  second Edition, revised, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969

Foster, Lance, The Indians of Iowa, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000

_____Sacred bundles of the Ioway Indians. MA thesis in Anthropology, Iowa State University, Ames, 1994 http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/321/

Gourley, Kathy,“Migrations of the Sauk and Meskwaki in the Mid-1840s: The Emigration of 1845,” Journal of the Iowa Archeological Society, volume 50, 2003 

 _____Locations of Sauk, Mesquakie, and Associated Euro-American Sites 1832 to 1845: An Ethnohistoric Approach. MA thesis, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Iowa State University, Ames, 1990 http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/338/

Gradwohl, David M., Joe B. Thompson, and Michael J. Perry, editors., “Still Running: A Tribute to Maria Pearson, Yankton Sioux,”  Journal of the Iowa Archeological Society, volume 52, 2005. 

Hamilton, Raphael N., The Early Cartography of the Missouri Valley, The American Historical Review, volume 39, Number 4, pages 645–662, 1934 https://doi.org/10.2307/1839312

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