Mideastern Kansas features prairie grasses and was once the home and hunting land of the Kanza tribe, also known as the Kaw Nation.
Kansas City, Mo.-In an historic occurrence for the Kanza tribe, a retired Mennonite pastor has donated her portion of the sales of a family farm to the Kanza Heritage Society.
Lands inhabited by the Kanza tribe, also known as the Kaw Nation, covered 20 million acres in Kansas before 1825, but were reduced to 256,000 acres by 1846. The tribe was forcibly removed to Oklahoma in 1873.
A few years later, a German Lutheran immigrant, Heinrich Gronemann, homesteaded 320 acres on what had been tribal hunting grounds in what is now mideastern Kansas. Recently the family sold the land and his great-great granddaughter, Florence Schloneger, gave her portion of the proceeds, $10,000, to the Kanza Heritage Society.
Her letter to the society read: "This gift is a small acknowledgment that what our family homesteaded and owned was not unoccupied land-it is acknowledgment that no land can truly be owned and that the pride in our farm passed down through our family came at a great cost to your people. As my eyes have been opened, I have experienced great sorrow. Not only were your hunting grounds appropriated, but your rich culture and language was nearly lost through assimilation. My hope is that this small gift can help build and restore the strength of Kanza traditions for coming generations."
When Schloneger and her husband were co-pastoring a Mennonite church in Nebraska nearly 20 years ago, the congregation took on a project to craft boxes for reburial of Native American remains in museums and hosted in their home Mennonite pastor Lawrence Hart, who was a Southern Cheyenne peace chief. During conversation with Hart, Florence Schloneger told her complicity of being among the people who settled Native land.
"His response was so gracious," she told the Mennonite World Review. "Although he said that was generations before and this is not part of what you need to worry about now and was very gracious, I didn't feel let off the hook."
Later, Schloneger read a story in the Mennonite World Review about how a Mennonite leader had given half his profit from the sale of family land in Minnesota to a Dakota tribal organization, sparking the idea in Schloneger when her family was ready to sell.
"Our country was built on the need to have land," Schloneger told the Wichita Eagle. "There wasn't a way to give the land back. And what it did to people, such as the Kaw, is heartbreaking. Their hunting grounds were lost and so much of their culture was taken. [The donation] seemed right to me. It is really just an acknowledgment that they lived on the land."
"It is not an insignificant donation. I think a lot of people are beginning to understand the history that a lot of the lands that their families acquired over the years were swindled, taken away or coerced from the Kaw people, even forcibly taken," Jim Pepper Henry, board president of the Kaw Heritage Society, told the Wichita Eagle.
"Our intent is that this could set an example for others who want to help with the preservation of Kansas history, especially with the Kaw Nation. I see other people stepping forward and maybe wanting to help with the proceeds or with some of the wealth they have acquired to the detriment of the Kaw people."
The Kanza Heritage Society is a private non-profit organization that helps support the efforts of the Kaw Nation to preserve heritage sites and cultural activities.
