Native Ground: The First People of Missouri Before Statehood

Dr. Brad Lookingbill, Distinguished Professor of History at Columbia College of Missouri, offers a program on the state’s earliest people. Long before Europeans arrived and claimed dominion over an imagined wilderness, the original inhabitants developed diverse cultures in relation to the rivers, prairies, plains, plateaus and woodlands. Missouri was native ground to multiple tribal groups; the Osage, Quapaw, Otoe, Missouria, Ioway, Sauk, Fox, Omaha, Peoria, Piankeshaw, Ponca, Kaw and Chickasaw all resided in parts of the state before its boundaries appeared on any map. Then, after the formation of the United States, migrating communities of the Shawnee, Delaware, Pottawatomi, Miami, Kickapoo and Cherokee relocated to the western side of the Mississippi, leaving their trace on the Missouri landscape. Join us as Dr. Lookingbill discusses Missouri’s first people, as well as how Native stories of origin now illuminate worlds of wonder in mid-America.

This program is funded through the MO Humanities Speakers Bureau Program.