The Kansa Indians: A History of the Wind People, 1673-1873

by William E. Unrau, R. David Edmunds (Foreword)

After their first contacts with whites in the seventeenth century, the Kansa Indians began migrating from the eastern United States to what is now eastern Kansas, by way of the Missouri Valley. Settling in villages mostly along the Kansas River, they led a semi-sedentary life, raising corn and a few vegetables and hunting buffalo in the spring and fall. It was an idyllic existence-until bad, and then worse, things began to happen. William E. Unrau tells how the Kansa Indians were reduced from a proud people with a strong cultural heritage to a remnant forced against their will to take up the whites' ways. He gives a balanced but hard-hitting account of an important and tragic chapter in American history.

288 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 1971

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

After reading Ronald D. Parks’s The Darkest Period, which covers in fairly minute detail (sometimes too minute) the Kanza’s final quarter-century in Kansas, I learned of William E. Unrau’s The Kansa Indians: A History of the Wind People, 1673-1873. At the time (all of three weeks ago), I rued that I’d read the former before knowing about the latter. Now that I’ve read both, I needn’t have been worried. Unrau’s book, published in 1971, is both shorter and less detailed than Parks’s, published 43 years later. It is also, for reasons I can only speculate on, lacking in most respects the voice of its purported subject: the Kansa themselves.

Of course, before the arrival of Europeans in America, there is no written history of the Kansa, and herein there is much speculation about their origins, original homelands, migration patterns, and more. As contact between settlers, initially the French and Spanish, increased, we began to get first-hand accounts about the tribe from, primarily, trappers, traders, and explorers. It was not until after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and the subsequent widespread westward expansion that primary source material exploded, largely in the form of government communiqués, first via the Office of Indian Trade (1806-1822) and, later, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1824 on).

One would then expect to hear more from the Kansa over time, but, to the book’s detriment, the inverse is true. As they were literally disappearing—forced onto smaller and smaller reservations and dying from disease and starvation in shocking numbers—they also disappeared from Unrau’s narrative, taking an increasingly voiceless backseat to the concerns, priorities, and machinations of the government, settlers, squatters, speculators, big business, and anyone or anything else that stood to gain by, at long last, removing the Kansa from Kansas. In the end, this is not a history of the Wind People as seen through their eyes but a history of white perspectives in dealing with the Kansa—not entirely unsympathetic but hardly representational. The Darkest Period had its flaws but, at the very least, this was not one of them.

[Cws]

K-Unr

[Roxanne]

This is an older book written in 1971. The author said it was rather hard to get the information for this because there are no good records. The Kansa Indian (the Wind People) along with some other tribes migrated from the eastern United States and settled in what is now Eastern Kansas. At that time many of the tribes lived together as one but they started breaking up and moving elsewhere. They raised corn and hunted buffalo and were very happy. However they were exploited by the white men and other Indian tribes attacked them also. For most of the nineteenth century they were the prey of of traders, merchants, hostile Indians and missionieries. They were forced to live on a reservation.