Kansas Land Treaties Project

FAIN: AA-295675-24

Kansas State University (Manhattan, KS 66506-0100)
Mary E. Kohn (Project Director: May 2023 to present)
Tai Edwards (Co Project Director: May 2023 to present)
Lisa Tatonetti (Co Project Director: May 2023 to present)

A three-year project to revise curriculum and create digital humanities resources that support undergraduate and K-12 teaching about local Indigenous history and culture.

The Kansas Land Treaties Project foregrounds the knowledge that Kansas State University, the first land grant institution in the United States, rests entirely on land that was once held in common by the Kaánze níkashinga (Kanza people), today known as the Kaw Nation. Our project creates public-facing digital resources—annotated treaties, oral histories, educational videos, curricula—that augment humanities in Kansas by promoting essential understandings about Indigenous peoples and histories as a best teaching practice within our university and region. This project rests on a foundation of Indigenous knowledges and centers Indigenous perspectives and voices to infuse place-based understandings into our principals and methods of teaching at K-State, concretely extend these understandings for use across the state, and offer another powerful example of how land-grant institutions can grapple with their complicated histories through humanities education.