Native American Art in Missouri: A Brief Historical Context

People have lived in the land that we now know as the state of Missouri for thousands of years. Oral history, archaeology, and linguistics tell us this. To accurately convey the history of Missouri, the beginning isn’t in 1812 when it became a territory of the United States, or in 1821 when it became a state, but rather much further back with the first people who lived in and identified with the land that would become Missouri.

First Peoples

The earliest recovered physical evidence of people in the area dates as far back as at least 12,000 years ago. At the Kimmswick archaeological site south of St. Louis, remains of bison and mastodon in association with stone tools known as Clovis points were found (Graham et al. 1981). Over the successive centuries, many different cultural groups lived in and traveled throughout the region including the Clovis, Dalton, Adena, Hopewellian, Mississippian, and Oneota peoples.

The Mississippian peoples had an incredible sphere of influence over the eastern half of North America, stretching from the Plains of the Upper Missouri River and into the Southeast as far as the Appalachians and Gulf Coast from 800 to 1500 C.E. (Pauketat 2004). One center of Mississippian culture was the American Bottom, within the Mississippi River Valley where the Illinois, Missouri, and Ohio rivers meet (Cordell et al. 2009). From this fertile land grew the city of Cahokia, flourishing from around 900 to 1300 CE; it was a center of trade, religion, and politics, likely due to abundant local resources and rivers to facilitate travel (Pauketat 2004). At its height in 1200 C.E., Cahokia was estimated to have a population as large as 20,000 people (Berlo and Phillips 2015).. While the cause of the fall of Cahokia remains unknown, it is suspected that climate change, the pressures of maintaining a large population, and political unrest all contributed to its decline and eventual abandonment by 1400. (Pauketat 2004). After the fall of Cahokia, recent studies indicate that the region continued to be occupied by native peoples until the end of the eighteenth century. (White, Munoz, Schroeder and Stevens). Sometime before the 1600s, tribes of the Illinois Confederacy would move into the American Bottom including the Cahokia tribe (for which the city of Cahokia was later named), Michigamea, Peoria, and Tamaroa (Hall 2004; Sweatman 2010).

Much of what is known of Cahokia is from archeological digs conducted in the 1960s of the large mound structures left by its people. These mounds probably served various purposes, including funerary rites and burials, and by 600 C.E. they became the foundations for culturally significant buildings such as places of worship and the homes of leaders (Hall 2004; Cordell et al. 2009). Due to urban and residential development beginning in the eighteenth century, many of the mounds of Cahokia have since been demolished (Pauketat 2004; Dickey 2011). 

In Northwestern Missouri, near where Kansas City rests today, are a series of archaeological sites resembling Cahokia and other Mississippian sites. These sites in Missouri are part of the Steed-Kisker phase of the Central Plains tradition (900–1450 C.E.) and are possibly descended from the Kansas City Hopewell culture (Logan 2010; McMillan 2012). Similarities to Cahokian motifs and settlement patterns support the idea that the residents interacted and traded with Cahokia, other Mississippian peoples, and after Cahokia’s decline, the Oneota. The people of the Central Plains tradition may have become the Pawnee tribe (Cordell et al. 2009).

Native Identities – Early History

The builders of the Cahokia Mounds likely included Dhegiha Siouan peoples (Pauketat 2004, p. 154), and archeological evidence suggests that the Oneota peoples may have migrated from Cahokia. While the Oneota culture existed primarily in the Eastern Plains and Great Lakes Region, they lived as far south as the Lower Missouri River (Olson 2008; Logan 2010). The tribes who may descend from the Oneota are also referred to as the Chiwere Siouan people, a term given by anthropologists based on linguistic features. This group comprises the Ho-Chunk, Ioway, Missouria, and Otoe tribes (Hall 2004; Iowa Tribe n.d.) all of which traveled and lived on the land that would become the state of Missouri.

According to both oral history and linguistic evidence, the Dhegiha Siouan peoples, also named by linguists, traveled westward from the Ohio River Valley to the Mississippi River late in the seventh century (Hall 2004; Hunter 2013; Bandy 2023). Upon their arrival to the Mississippi River, the group split into the Quapaw, the “Downstream People,” and Omaha, “Upstream People.” The Quapaw moved south and into Arkansas (Bandy 2023), while the Omaha traveled upriver and into the Northern Plains, where they eventually separated into the Osage, Kansa, Omaha and Ponca tribes. The Osage, Kansa, and Omaha would all live in and travel through Missouri (Hall 2004; Hunter 2013).

In the time before European contact, Missouri would have seen many people come and go through the area on its extensive trade avenues. These routes would rely on the many rivers to quickly get from place to place in the Midwest (McMillan 2012; Steinke 2015; Betts 2019). Shaped by this movement on the river, Missouri would become an important part of many different peoples’ cultural landscapes, from the Plains in the West to the Woodlands to the East .

European Contact

After European discovery of the Americas in 1492, expeditions by various European nations were launched and with them extensive colonization of the Americas began. Expeditions by Europeans extended into North America with Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León in 1513, who landed on Florida’s southwest coast in 1513. The first European expedition to venture into the middle of what is now the United State was Hernando de Soto’s 1539 Spanish mission into North America. De Soto landed in Florida with an army of 620 men and 220 horses. This delegation made it as far north as Arkansas, likely encountering the Quapaw, before they turned back. De Soto’s expedition is believed to have introduced many European diseases to Native peoples, exposures that would increase with future European expeditions spreading death and disease (Sonneborn 2001; Bailey 2004). As early as 1580, European trade goods began filtering down from the Gulf of St. Lawrence (Mazrim and Esarey 2007). Native peoples in the East and Midwest began to experiment with new forms of art, using traded glass beads, wool cloth, and silk ribbon from Europe (Wade 1989; Berlo and Phillips 2015; Yohe and Greeves 2019). These new mediums continue to be incorporated into Native peoples’ art and culture to the present day.

By 1650, population pressures created by Europeans arriving in the east started to push Native people further west into territory already inhabited, instigating intertribal warfare (Sweatman 2010). As the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, moved into the Eastern Great Lakes, they drove other, smaller tribes out of the area and west including the Kickapoo, Meskwaki, Miami, Sauk, Wendat, and some bands of Potawatomi (Wade 1989; Sweatman 2010). The Wendat Confederacy, composed of four allied nations, was weakened by disease and defeated by the Haudenosaunee. Surviving members split into smaller groups; after moving into Michigan and Ohio, one group became known as the Wyandotte, who were removed to Ohio and then to Kansas. In the 1840s the Wyandot purchased 23,000 acres from the Delaware, or Lenape, people and another parcel of land at the junction of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers (Sonneborn 2001; de Stecher 2022). The Illinois Confederacy, composed of up to 13 tribes in the Mississippi River Valley, had a population of around 10,000 in the sixteenth century. By 1700, the Illinois were only made up of five tribes, and by 1832 there were only two: the Peoria and Kaskaskia (Sweatman 2010). The Peoria and Kaskaskia ceded land in Missouri and were forced onto reservations in Indian Territory. Similarly the Delaware and Shawnee, due to warfare and population pressures, had populations living in Missouri through the 1832, when they ceded the last of their lands in the state (Sweatman 2010; Absentee Shawnee Tribe n.d.).

During this time of unrest and upheaval, Native peoples’ political alliances with the European nations shifted as they struggled to maintain their land and way of life. The turbulence caused by the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812 all affected relationships between tribal nations and European nations. In 1778, the Delaware became the first Native nation to enter into a treaty with the newly formed United States (Delaware Tribe n.d.). 

Displacement and Removal

In 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition departed from St. Louis to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Territory (Sonneborn 2001). Purchased from France in 1803, it doubled the size of the United States at that time. After Lewis and Clark returned in 1806 and the publication of their journals in 1814, European Americans quickly invaded Native territories in the West and developed treaties to remove Natives from their lands. In the years from 1804 to 1837, all Native lands in Missouri were ceded, and Missouri became a state in 1821 (Royce 1899; Kaw Nation 2022). Tribes that ceded lands in Missouri include the Delaware, Ioway, Kansa, Kaskaskia, Kickapoo, Meskwaki, Missouria, Omaha, Osage, Otoe, Peoria, Piankashaw, Sauk, Shawnee, and Wea (Royce 1899; Sweatman 2010).

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which spurred on further removal of Native Americans from their lands in the east to unsettled lands west of the Mississippi River (Sonneborn 2001). Many groups of Cherokee traveled through Missouri on their forced removal to Oklahoma in 1838, known as the Trail of Tears (Cherokee Nation). A group of Potawatomi from Indiana also traveled through Missouri that same year during their own removal to Kansas, called the Trail of Death (Sweatman 2010; Potawatomi Trail of Death Association 2023).

As Native communities were displaced, they would often find themselves on land where other Native people were already living (Kaw Nation 2022; Wyandotte Nation n.d.). While this often resulted in conflict, it could also result in alliances and an exchange of ideas. This is evident in ceremonial Ghost Dance, which began in the late 1800s with the Paiute and quickly spread to the Pawnee, Otoe, Missouria, Ioway, Osage, and Quapaw, and in art, where Woodland-style floral motifs would find their way into the beadwork of the Prairies or styles of ribbon appliqué could be seen in textiles across the United States (Wade 1989). Today, there are many shared motifs in artwork and regalia across Native communities, evidence of these cultural exchanges (Dickey 2011).

Through centuries of displacement, Indigenous Americans found it increasingly difficult to follow traditional ways of life. Many were far from their ancestral homes with the U.S. government continuing to break up their lands with new laws. In the late nineteenth century, the U.S. government took Native children from their families, placing them into boarding schools where they were forcibly assimilated into European-American value systems such as Christianity and individualism (Bailey 2004; Berlo and Phillips 2015). Both in and out of boarding schools the expression of Native culture was punishable, and many facets of spirituality, language, and customs were criminalized. While these factors contributed to a great loss of culture and traditional knowledge, it was also at this time that powwows emerged and thrived because these gatherings were perceived to be secular (Berlo and Phillips 2015).

Euro-American Perceptions of Native Identities

As America moved into the twentieth century, early anthropologists began to grow concerned about losing the knowledge carried only by Native Americans, and they began to take initiatives to record their lifeways and customs (Yohe and Greeves 2019). To the European-American public, this loss was considered tragic but ultimately necessary in the goal of assimilation. The incongruity of this can be seen in the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, which celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. The fair drew thousands of people from across the world to see exhibits of art and science. The anthropological division of the fair created what has been described as “human zoos,” with exhibits featuring Indigenous people from around the world for fairgoers to observe (Parezo and Fowler 2007; Sonneborn 2001). 

People from the Acoma Pueblo, Akimel O’odham, Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Dakota, Kickapoo, Laguna Pueblo, Lakota, Maricopa, Navajo, Nez Perce, Ojibwa, Osage, Pawnee, Pomo, San Ildefonso Pueblo, Santa Clara Pueblo, Sauk and Fox, and Wichita as well as students from boarding schools were presented as exhibits in the fair (Parezo and Fowler 2007). These exhibits perpetuated the idea that Indigenous people were “primitive” and that European Americans had the right to take control of these peoples’ lifeways and homelands. In contrast, at the same fair many Native artists attended to display their talents in woodworking, pottery, weaving, basketry, and other crafts. While Native artists’ work was included in the fair’s “fine art display,” they were discouraged from exploring the rest of the fair or purchasing goods elsewhere to preserve the “authenticity” of the anthropology exhibits and avoid European-American influences (Parezo and Fowler 2007). 

The concept of “authentic-ness” continues to haunt Native art and artists in the 21st century. From the 1700s, Native people began to create artwork for European audiences, as the creation of souvenir art often provided reliable income to Native communities (Torrence and Alexander 2020; de Stecher 2022). By the late nineteenth century, these White audiences began to express concern about the “authenticity” of Native art, expressing concern about the influence of Western crafts (Parezo and Fowler 2007; Ohnesorge 2008; Berlo and Phillips 2015). Often the concepts of traditional and Native versus modern and contemporary art were not allowed to coexist within the same space (Anthes 2006). Similarly, this mimics many European Americans’ misperceptions of Native communities living in the past and not the present (Pauketat 2004; Ohnesorge 2008).

Present and Future

As of 2025, there are no federally recognized tribes within the state of Missouri, but individual Native people continue to make Missouri their home, and Native stories and experiences impact the history of the state. Despite the hardships of displacement and forced assimilation, Native people continued to create art and pass it on to the next generation. Art has always been a medium of expression for both the self and community, be those emotions of grief, nostalgia, anger, joy, or hope. We hope that this resource may be used to contextualize the stories of the Native artists and their expressions that are shared through the Missouri Remembers portal.

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Contributors

Katie McClure, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Record Published

Published on June 13, 2025