Bonner Springs, Kansas, sits near the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, in territory that was home to Native American peoples for thousands of years prior to European contact. The Kaw Nation — also called the Kansa people, from whom Kansas takes its name — lived along the Kansas River valley for centuries, their villages, hunting grounds, and ceremonial sites woven into this landscape. When French explorers arrived in the 17th century and American expeditions followed in the early 19th, they encountered a landscape managed and inhabited by human beings for millennia.
Lewis and Clark noted the Kansa villages in their journals. By the 1820s, American pressure — land cession treaties, removal policies, relentless settler expansion — had reduced the Kaw Nation to a small reservation, and by 1873 they were removed to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. The Kaw Nation was federally terminated in 1956 and restored in 1990; today it is headquartered in Kaw City, Oklahoma.
The landscape around Bonner Springs holds their memory without a single monument. Learning to see that absence is part of understanding this place.