Before Europeans arrived in North America and French explorers and traders came to what would become the state of Iowa, Native peoples had lived for many centuries in its forests, river valleys, and tall-grass prairies. Around the year 1000, it was inhabited by the people called Oneota. They were ancestors of groups who were present in Iowa and neighboring states around the time the French arrived: the Ioways, the Otoes, the Ho-Chunk and the Missouria.
An important site in the Native occupation of Iowa is at Blood Run National Historic Landmark on the Big Sioux River in the northwest part of the state. Archaeological research has shown that this site was inhabited as early as 6500 BCE. Much later, Oneota people and others settled here, with some building mounds and boulder outlines. Up to 80 mounds are still visible, though many have been destroyed.
People came to the Blood Run site because of its proximity to sources of pipestone and thus its cultural and spiritual power. Some who came were short-term visitors, but others built permanent villages. This red stone, also known as catlinite, is the material used to make the calumet or pipe used in religious ceremonies in many Native communities. At the time of contact—the arrival of Europeans in North America—the Blood Run site was inhabited by Omaha and Ioway people, along with Otoes, with the occasional presence of the Arikara. Ancestral sites of the Ioway people were also located along rivers, with sites identified in northeast Iowa.
Iowa’s biome, a combination of tall-grass prairie and forested areas with river valley wetlands, provided Native people with all they needed for food, clothing, and shelter. They built large villages along riverbanks with access to bottomland that was good for crops, primarily corn (maize), squash, and beans. Excess grains were dried and stored in underground caches. Storage containers were made of wood or fired clay: archaeologists are able to identify distinct cultures based on different forms and designs on the ceramic pieces. In these large villages, Native people built lodges of bent saplings covered with bark or with cattail mats.
As seasons changed, Native people moved back and forth from the river-valley villages with their cultivated fields to plains areas. In summer and fall, large villages broke up as small groups traveled to the prairie for bison hunts. In their bison-hunting camps, they constructed buffalo-hide tipis for shelter. Winter was spent back in the river-valley villages, where they hunted deer and trapped beaver.
In the late 1600s when the French arrived in the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi Valley, there had been considerable tribal disruption caused by the arrival of Europeans and the resulting competition among Native peoples for trade advantage. Tribes were forced out of their traditional living and hunting territories, and conflicts arose among some Native groups as they formed or broke alliances with the French, the British, and other Native peoples. As a consequence, Native people like the Sauk and the Meskwaki (referred to by the French as the Renards or Foxes) moved into the territory west of the Mississippi from their original territory farther east. In addition, some Sioux people came into what is now northern Iowa from their territory to the north. These movements pushed the Ioway and Otoe farther to the west; the Otoe moved into what is now Nebraska, though the Ioway remained in Iowa until the 1830s. Occasionally, people of the Potawatomi, Ojibwa, Mascouten, and Kickapoo tribes spent time in Iowa during the 17th and 18th centuries, as well.
France gave up its territory in North America at the end of the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War) in 1763. At that point, the territory that would one day be Iowa became part of New Spain, then part of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Native peoples continued to live here nonetheless, until the United States adopted policies to remove them from their traditional homelands. Iowa’s Native people were no exception, and gradually Iowa Territory was opened to settlement by white people. This did not happen without protest from the Native peoples, sometimes violent, and conflicts like the Black Hawk War of 1832 bear witness to this traumatic time. The Meskwaki, who lived in eastern Iowa, were dispossessed of their lands in the 1840s and with the Sauk were relocated to land in Kansas. However, the Meskwaki were able to purchase land on the Iowa River near Tama (itself named after a Meskwaki) in 1856 and move back to Iowa. They continue to live on this land today, and are Iowa’s only federally recognized tribe, the Sac & Fox Nation of the Mississippi in Iowa, the Meskwaki Nation or People of the Red Earth.
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