More about the Shawnee in Kansas

 

The Shawnee are not indigenous to what is now the state of Kansas. They were pushed west of the Mississippi from homelands in the Eastern Woodlands and Ohio Valley through the often-violent forces of colonialist expansion.

 

One of the places in which the Shawnee were relocated in the first half of the 1800s was Kansas territory. After Kansas achieved statehood in 1861, White settlers sought the removal of the Shawnee and other Native Americans. When Shawnee who fought for the Union during the Civil War returned to their Kansas lands, many found them destroyed or occupied by homesteaders.

 

In 1869 most of the Shawnee in Kansas relocated to what is now Oklahoma. Today, there are three federally recognized Shawnee tribes—the Shawnee (also known as the Cherokee Shawnee), the Absentee Shawnee, and the Eastern Shawnee, each with its own history and contemporary traditions. For more information see:

 

History--The Shawnee Tribe (shawnee-nsn.gov)
 
 Related image from the exhibition “To the Stars Through Art: A History of Art Collecting in Kansas Schools, 1910-1950” (2023-2024):

 

Margaret Whittemore

Shawnee Mission, ca. 1937

Woodcut

Kansas Museum Extension Project, Professional and Service Division, Works Projects Administration

Original location: Roosevelt Elementary School, Arkansas City

Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery, Lindsborg, gift of Randal Lundberg, 2022.0022

 

This image is part of Kansas Landmarks, a series of forty-nine prints Whittemore created for the Kansas MEP. The group includes prints of territorial capitols, courthouses, mills, windmills, homes of famous early Kansans such as John Brown and Carrie Nation, cemeteries, and even geological formations. The series contains four images of missions, including Shawnee Mission in Johnson County.

 

Shawnee Mission was established in 1839 by the Rev. Thomas Johnson of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Its purpose was to “civilize” Shawnee pupils and students from other tribes through manual training and a Christian education. Like most schools for Native Americans in the nineteenth century, this attempted assimilation forbid students from speaking their Indigenous languages, wearing Native clothing and hairstyles, or expressing other aspects of their cultures.

 

The Mission has been operating as a museum for almost a century under the Kansas State Historical Society and is also managed by the city of Fairway.