Land Acknowledgement

This exhibition takes place on the historic homelands of the Lenape people. Settler colonialism dispossessed the Leni Lenape, just as it did the Kiowa, and Natives today live widely dispersed from their ancestral lands Plains tribal members, like Tonepahhote, residing in the Northeast, are not immigrants however. Indigenous people reside outside their homelands as displaced populations; people, according to historian Claudio Saunt, constituted by deportation, mass expulsion, and forced migration.

KIOWA or Cáuigú (the “Principal People”)

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The Kiowa are a sovereign Indian nation in present-day Oklahoma. The Kiowa once inhabited a large swath of the Southern Plains, stretching south to Mexico, north to Kansas and Colorado, east to Arkansas and Missouri, and west to New Mexico. But the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty with the U S forced the Kiowa onto the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation (see map), which was dissolved in 1887, when the U.S. government violated the Medicine Lodge Treaty in order to break up tribal lands for Indian allotments and White homesteads. Despite the vigorous legal challenge to this dispossession mounted by Kiowa band chief Lone Wolf, going all the way to the Supreme Court in 1903 (Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock), the Kiowa lost their tribal land base, though they are one of the 574 federally recognized tribes in the U S today.