Native Ground: The First People of Missouri Before Statehood

Join Dr. Brad Lookingbill, distinguished professor of history at Columbia College, for a discussion of Missouri’s first people, as well as how Native stories of origin now illuminate worlds of wonder in mid-America. Co-sponsored with the MO Humanities Council. Adults and teens.

Long before Europeans arrived and claimed dominion over an imagined wilderness, the original inhabitants of our region developed diverse cultures in relation to the rivers, prairies, plains, plateaus and woodlands. Missouri was native ground for multiple tribal groups, who made it home. In addition to the Osage, the Quapaw, Otoe, Missouria, Ioway, Sauk, Fox, Omaha, Peoria, Piankeshaw, Ponca, Kaw and Chickasaw resided in parts of the state before its boundaries appeared on a map. After the formation of the United States, migrating communities of the Shawnee, Delaware, Pottawatomi, Miami, Kickapoo and Cherokee relocated to the western side of the Mississippi. Native stories of origin illuminate worlds of wonder in mid-America, and making those stories more widely available has allowed Missourians are seeing them anew.

Dr. Brad D. Lookingbill is a distinguished professor of history at Columbia College. Previous to his academic career, he served in the Army National Guard and Reserve. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in education at Southwestern Oklahoma State University, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1991. At the University of Toledo, he obtained a Master of Arts in history in 1993 and a doctorate in history in 1995. From 1995 to 1996, he taught classes on U.S. and world history at Independence Community College in Kansas. In 1996, he joined the Columbia College faculty.

This presentation is co-sponsored with the Missouri Humanities Council.

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