“Living Sovereignty: Sustaining Indigenous Autonomy in ‘Indian Territory’ Kansas” opened March 23 at the museum as part of a six-week stay.

Saturday is the last day visitors can check out the exhibit in Tonganoxie. It’s next stop is the Old Depot Museum in Ottawa, as it will open there next month.

Put simply, sovereignty is a group’s right to self-rule. As independent nations existing for generations before European and American settlement, America’s Indigenous peoples embodied sovereignty. Throughout the history of interactions between the United States government and Indigenous nations and tribes, maintaining sovereignty and self-government has been a challenge that continues today.

Living Sovereignty explores the histories of the tribal peoples that populated Kansas and the ways they found to express their sovereignty and maintain cultural identity.

It was fitting that this exhibit made its premiere in Tonganoxie, a town that was named in 1866 in honor of a Delaware man who lived here from the early 1830s into the early 1860s. Tonganoxie is also located in the heart of the land that made up the last Delaware Reservation, which was eliminated in 1866.

The traveling exhibit is the result of a collaboration between Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area, the Watkins Museum of History and the Museum Studies Program at the University of Kansas College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

The exhibit can be viewed from 9 a.m.-noon today and 10 a.m.-noon Saturday. Groups also can be accommodated at other times. For more information, call 913-845-2960 or email TCHSTonganoxie@gmail.com to arrange for a special tour.

Here’s a full list of remaining locations for the traveling exhibit:

• Old Depot Museum, Ottawa, opens in May

• Miami County Museum, Paola, opens in July

• Bushwhacker Museum, Nevada, Mo., opens in October

• Watkins Museum, Lawrence, opens in November

RECEPTION FOR TRAVELING EXHIBIT ATTRACTS CROWD

Members of the Tonganoxie Community Historical Society hosted a reception April 5 for the exhibit.

A standing-room-only crowd came to view the exhibit and listen to Judith Manthe, Principal Chief of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas, talk about what sovereignty means to the Wyandot Nation and to her personally. She was joined by fellow Wyandot members, Holly Zane, Acting Director of Freedom’s Frontier, and Kristen Zane, Freedom’s Frontier Board member.

Judith Manthe spoke about the history of the Wyandot, a matriarchal nation, and a peaceful nation. The Wyandot have been involved in legal struggles for over 100 years, working to keep the Huron Cemetery also known as the Wyandotte National Burial Grounds in current day downtown Kansas City, Kansas intact. Manthe was most eloquent when she described the benefits of working alongside other brothers and sisters of the Wandat Nations, including the peoples of Wendake of Quebec, Wyandots of Anderton, Detroit, and the Wyandotte Nation in Oklahoma. Creating a safe place for ancestors filled an empty place in her heart that she had not known was there.

Steve Nowak, Director of the Watkins Museum in Lawrence, also spoke about the development of the traveling exhibit. Living Sovereignty began as an assignment for a group of students in a Museum Exhibit class in 2018. 

The students were charged with developing a proposal for a traveling exhibit for Freedom’s Frontier, a National Heritage Area based in Lawrence.  Freedom’s Frontier liked the proposal and wanted to pursue its completion.  The student project managers formed an advisory group of students and faculty from Haskell Indian Nations University to work with them on the exhibit text. 

The Watkins Museum of History in Lawrence provided experienced staff to assist the students, edited the text, and found a KU student with graphic design experience to design the exhibit panels. Freedom’s Frontier provided the funding for the manufacture of the exhibit panels.

The exhibit consists of eight panels, each of which presents a piece of the long and complicated history of Indigenous peoples in Missouri and Kansas. The information is presented succinctly — the subject matter has filled volumes and will continue to fill volumes, as the topic is a current topic, with repercussions throughout our society.

The exhibit presents the names used by the various tribes juxtaposed with the names written in English. The exhibit seamlessly presents historic encounters and creation stories, legal conflicts and artistic expression.

Volunteer Joy Lominska took on the task of creating a companion exhibit to the traveling exhibit that focuses on the Delaware.

A letter written to the Department of the Interior on Feb. 3, 1864, during treaty negotiations to determine the future of the Delaware and with this sentence: “Before the government of the United States was formed, we were a nation and for time to come, as far as human mind can conceive, we wish to be a nation.” — John Moses, Delaware Reservation, Feb. 3, 1864.