Native Americans: the first Kansans

[ToThePoint]

For those of you in the Kansas area....




"I was born on the prairie where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no inclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls."
Go anywhere in Kansas and the influence of the Native American tribes who lived on this land is there.
It is in the names we give our places: the Ninnescah and Kansas rivers; our cities: White Cloud, Topeka, Wichita and Tonganoxie; and counties, Pawnee, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Osage, Ottawa, Pottawatomie and more.

Even our state owes its name to the Kanza Indians, known as "People of the South Wind."

It was 17th-century French mapmakers who named the territory after the Kanza or Kaw people.

Many of our trails and highways - the Santa Fe, the Chisholm, the Cherokee - originated with tribes searching for the quickest routes.

Explore the back roads and look closely on sandstone bluffs at the drawings - of teepees and stars, deer and bison - centuries after they were etched; walk in fields and see the pottery shards and arrowheads.

After more than 15 decades of pioneers plowing the prairie and building cities, the Native American mounds and sacred places of the first civilizations of Kansas have not been destroyed.

"We are still here. The first people of Kansas, the people who gave Kansas its name, we are still strong and growing stronger all the time," said Jim Pepper Henry, a Kaw tribal member .....

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