Native Americans

Do you dig Prehistoric Native American Artifacts? Are you an arrowhead aficionado? A pottery person? Whether you’re an admirer, collector, or just curious, you won’t want to miss an incredible artifact show happening on Saturday, May 6

Two groups with distinct cultures emerged from our region’s first residents to dominate this land. Worshipful and warlike on an untouched landscape, the Osage and the Missouria did more than live here. For centuries, they ruled.

“There are deep things you can’t explain in English that you can in Shawnee,” he says. “It’s a spiritual language. Everything means something: the ground, the trees, the relationship of sky, water, rock. My father used to say that if you want help from the Creator, you have to speak with the language you were put here with.”

Dominated by the new US government, Missouri’s indigenous groups struggled against efforts to marginalize them—and sometimes against the indifference of their own young people. The native groups are gone from here now. But they—and their heritage—survive.

A conversation with Chief Geoffrey M. Standing Bear of the Osage Nation, based in Pawhuska, Oklahoma

At a time when the nations of Europe were competing for global control of trade and land, the New World offered the ideal opportunity to fill European coffers and expand their empires. The only problem was that someone already lived here.