ABSTRACT
This is a story of removal and return, one version of the complex pasts of a landscape in the northeastern part of what now is known as the state of Iowa in central North America. The Missouri River delimits the land on the west, as does the Mississippi River on the east. Although they are no longer present in the state, the state derives its name from the Ioway (also spelled Iowa) nation, 1 the primary tribe living in the area before the arrival of European and American invaders. What happened in Iowa to American Indians 2 living there is a story typical of many states, especially in the eastern United States. Native Americans had been part of these lands for at least 12,000 years and longer by the reckoning of their oral traditions. The waves of immigrant European colonizers from the sixteenth century onward, however, brought massive, mostly negative, changes to the cultures living on the prairies and in the eastern woodlands of North America.
