No Heart Map of the Baxoje
so i decided to take my own advice for ndn heritage month and research a bit more into my own heritage.
i’ve seen this map over and over- it’s pleasing and familiar. the aged brown paper and strokes of ink, there’s just something about it.
it’s called the “No Heart Map” because in 1837, No Heart of Fear lead a delegation of Ioway aka Baxoje people to Washington D.C. to prove our ancestral homelands.
in a nutshell, other tribes were a lot closer to the US government and had laid claim to these lands for the cession payout. they were basically trying to sell us out to the government. for context, the tribe had just been relocated to the reservation in White Cloud, KS the year before in 1836.
before this time period, my ancestors had been pushed southwest out of the ancestral lands and deeper into Missouri. the story goes that other tribes had once been welcomed into our nation when they needed help, with certain permissions for camps in designated areas. but then they claimed rights once the Baxoje nation got pushed south and they were the only ones left. this claim of ownership was a huge offense to a war torn people still adjusting to homesickness in Kansas.
and so they made a detailed map that only they would know, “the land between two rivers”- the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. they made this famous map and brought it all the way to D.C. to prove their heritage to the land. the drawn circles are lakes, the circles with inner dots are ancestral villages, and the dotted lines are ancestral trails. and of course, the lines are rivers.
it is incredibly, incredibly accurate. i had heard about its accuracy, and how it was still used today for archeologists. but i wanted to see for myself. so i pulled up an interactive river map, got my notes together, and started to recreate it line for line.
WOW. i had seen this map over and over, on the cover of books about our history, i knew the story, but it never quite clicked how HUGE of an area this map covered. each RED line is a river drawn on the No Heart map, the yellow circles are my guesses on where the villages were, size equates to how big they were. the trails are pretty sloppy and not at all accurate but, i tried? the white X at the top right is where they say we came from in the old, old days, Green Bay.
that little star at the top left is where the red pipestone quarry is. a sacred place my ancestors protected and oversaw by right of the creator coming to earth and delegating it to us itself. so long as people came without weapons, we protected their right to harvest red pipestone for their pipe ceremony. warring people would come together and mine for it side by side on our land. it was a special responsibility.
“The Ioway ultimately lost their claim to the Sac. Although the Sac leader Keokuk did not dispute the history illustrated on the 1837 Ioway Map, the Sac were the current inhabitants and the US government sided with them.”
