Arrowheads, skinning knives, spearheads pulled from Kansas City fields and prehistoric woven fibers teased from centuries-cold fire pits sit on the floor of a closed wing of the Wyandotte County Historical Museum.
They are now under a yearlong review to comply with strict federal guidelines designed to give Native American tribes greater control of the items’ fate.
Few area residents know about the small museum nestled downwind of the Kansas Speedway.
Few, too, might be aware that hundreds — perhaps thousands — of Native Americans tromped through the metro area over the centuries, from the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers to Riverside, Independence, and beyond.
The Wyandotte County museum, 631 N. 126th St. in Bonner Springs, and other area institutions have recently reviewed, or are now reviewing, long-archived Native American holdings and cultural riches.
The catalyst is a federal law, little known outside museum and archaeological circles, called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. NAGPRA became law in 1990, but its strictures, including potential fines, tightened last year.
Museums and federal agencies now must obtain “free, prior, and informed consent from lineal descendants, Tribes, or NHOs (Native Hawaiian Organizations) before allowing any exhibition of, access to, or research on human remains or cultural items,” according to the Taft law firm.
Taft added that a museum covered by the regulations should “immediately consider whether it has such items on display without clear consent from culturally affiliated Tribes.”
Academics at the University of Kansas, along with professional and amateur archaeologists, are keenly interested in the long-unseen artifacts emerging from storage.
The cataloguing spurred by NAGPRA has brought to the fore a long-vanished past and spotlighted the uniqueness of a Native American mound that sits in a secluded park in Kansas City’s Historic Northeast.
Many of the Wyandotte County museum artifacts sat in boxes in a cramped closet for decades.
The county recently hired Eldon Yeakel as curator of collections. He is reviewing an estimated 5,000 artifacts and said as many as half were recovered from around Kansas City.
When the process is complete, museum Director Amanda Martin hopes the holdings will be digitized and posted online. Exhibits will change more frequently to spark greater public interest and deeper engagement with the museum, she said.
In Missouri, Lisa Shockley, curator of collections at The Museum of Kansas City, said, “A lot of museums closed their Native American galleries or pulled them off of exhibit” to launch the process of complying with NAGPRA.
In the past year, she participated in conference calls with representatives of six Native American tribes to discuss the provenance of Native American items held by the museum.
“We have three … things eligible for repatriation,” she said. “There will be a few others.”
It would be inappropriate to share pictures or details about the items, she said, since they could be related to human remains, funerary or ceremonial items of cultural patrimony.
“The intent is to send home (human remains) and items that never should have been taken in the first place,” she said.
Trowbridge & Butts
The Native American holdings of the Kansas and Missouri museums are largely tied to two friends from long ago.
Henry Trowbridge, a World War I army intelligence worker, in 1939 discovered an artifact-rich site in his backyard near North 61st Street and Leavenworth Road in Kansas City, Kansas. It was inhabited as early as 1,800 years ago by the Hopewell culture.
More than two dozen Hopewell sites have been identified near the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas or Kaw rivers.
Trowbridge started a museum in his home.
After retiring from the Abner Hood Chemical Company in 1952, he became the first curator of the Wyandotte County museum. Trowbridge gave the museum the bulk of his Native American collection, except for some items shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
“Without Trowbridge, we would have nothing,” Martin said.
Edward Butts, with the Kansas City Public Library, in the early 20th century became fascinated by the large Native American burial mound in northeast Kansas City. It sits at the intersection of Belmont and Gladstone boulevards on the bluffs overlooking the Missouri and Blue rivers.
Butts excavated two 15-foot trenches in the mound, each five feet deep.
“Butts reported finding arrowheads, spearpoints, flint knives and stone grinding tools for processing grain,” according to a report on file in archaeological records maintained by the Missouri State Historic Preservation Office.
The report noted that “years of neglect, picnickers, erosion, and indiscriminate digging had left only a resemblance of the mound’s former size and shape” since Butts’ excavation.
Thanks to the Kansas City park board and the federal Works Progress Administration, the report said, workers resculpted the mound in 1937 “to what was thought to be its original shape and dimensions.”
For nearly a century, the grounds have been undisturbed, serving as a site for dog walkers, Frisbee tossers, and others who had no clue as to what once lay, or still lies, below the knoll.
The report’s authors said the flat top and absence of human remains suggested it was a temple mound with a structure on top, and they surmised that the location “had probably been visited and used by prehistoric people for over 10,000 years.”
Butts was curator of a museum housed in the Kansas City Public Library.
Its 40,000 artifacts in 1940 were transferred to the Kansas City Museum of History and Science, now The Museum of Kansas City.
It is hard to know for sure, but one expert believes some of those artifacts include items Butts extracted from the northeast Kansas City mound.
“It is very likely the Kansas City Museum probably has some of it in their collection,” said Melissa Eaton, president of the Kansas City Archaeological Society. “They may not know it.”
Meanwhile, the heads of the Sheffield and Indian Mound neighborhood associations, Mark Morales and Jimmy Fitzner, respectively, said that area residents are curious about the mound.
There is talk of a fall neighborhood picnic at the park containing the mound, possibly in conjunction with programming by the local branch of the Kansas City Public Library, the University of Kansas Department of Archaeology, and the Kansas City Archaeological Society.
The goal would be for all to better understand and marvel at the origins of such mounds, most of which have been destroyed by urban growth and agriculture.
“They could have been used for burials,” Eaton said. “Or they were regional markers for people traveling through the area, or they were watch points on a bluff or creeks to look for enemies on the move, or animals to hunt.”
Extensive trade routes once passed through what is now Kansas City, linking the inhabitants of the massive Cahokia Mounds region in western Illinois near St. Louis with Kansas City and points beyond — all the way to the Yellowstone region and the plains of western Canada, experts said.
Mound culture
How extensive was the mound culture?
A book in the Kansas City Public Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collection offers a clue.
Author Louis Houck, who published “A History of Missouri” in 1908, wrote that “a large population at some prehistoric period” doubtlessly dwelt in what is now Missouri.
“It is impossible to estimate the number of these prehistoric people,” he wrote. “Large as the number may appear, I am certain that the 28,000 mounds which have been discovered within the limits of the state… only indicate approximately the prehistoric population.”
A vanished civilization once lived in what we know as Kansas City and the surrounding region. Contemplating that fact should inspire wonder in us all, say those who routinely work with and study these items.
The Wyandotte County museum holds seven volumes of Trowbridge notebooks that meticulously record the items he found locally and the circumstances of their discovery, recapturing for us the magic of the moment.
While strolling near the Missouri River on Sunday, Aug. 19, 1934, he recounted, he discovered “near an alfalfa patch … a nice agricultural implement, a hand spade or hoe, 6 1/4 inches long and 2 5/8 inches broad at the blade. Within five minutes appeared a beautiful four-bladed skinning knife… near the hoe, perhaps within 75 feet of it.
“From this elevation, a fine view up and down the river is obtained, and to the southeast can be seen the skyscrapers of Kansas City, Missouri.”
