When 17 members of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe, ranging from high school freshmen to tribal elders, stepped off a tour bus on the Luther College campus in Decorah on Monday, they had been on the road for nearly a week.
The group left the tribal reservation in Red Rock, Oklahoma, on July 29 on a journey through Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa, retracing their tribe’s removal path and entering their historic homeland between the Great Lakes and the Missouri River. The trip continued to Wisconsin, where they reunited with the HoChunk Nation, which shares a common ancestry. Before returning to Oklahoma, the 11-day journey ends back in Iowa at the Meskwaki Powwow.
The tribe has been organizing trips for tribal youth and adult chaperones since 2023. They grew out of “dream” for a land-based approach to education, according to trip co-organizer Christina Gichagemi Goodson, who works as a community and language facilitator with the tribe’s cultural department.
“My original plan was very overzealous — wanting us to backpack from Green Bay, Wisconsin, all the way to Red Rock, which in hindsight is a wild thing to think we could do immediately,” Goodson said, laughing.
But she said the project is growing. This is the first trip to traverse Iowa, giving the group access to additional ancestral sites. It's also the first year the group has traveled to Wisconsin.
One of their stops was at the Fort Atkinson State Historical Park in Nebraska, where the tribe encountered Lewis and Clark in 1804, a meeting that gave the city of Council Bluffs its name. They also visited sacred sites near the Iowa Great Lakes and the Effigy Mounds National Monument.
At Luther College, the group met with Professor of Anthropology Emeritus Lori Stanley, who presented her research as a doctorate student at the University of Missouri on Chiwere, the tribe’s traditional language.
Stanley shared stories from her time working with tribal elders in the 1990s, many of whom shared last names and direct relations with members on the trip.
Chiwere was largely lost as part of U.S.-enforced assimilation efforts. Reviving it is now a focus, said Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Elsie Whitehorn, another trip organizer.
“There are all kinds of repercussions and damage that happened when we lost our language,” she said. “By having it, by speaking it, it provides healing.”
Tour members spoke similarly about the trip. Tribe staff member Naomi Roubedeaux-Quiroga said returning to the tribe’s homeland can be “painful.”
“I love Oklahoma, but the landscape does not always fit our culture. It can be difficult to grow our own food and to really survive in ways that we ancestrally lived,” she said. “These trips help open our eyes to that, to our roots, to where we come from, to the landscapes that we once lived on.”
Tribe staff member and documentary filmmaker Annette Arkeketa said there's a sense of homecoming, even seeing these places for the first time.
“We were so loved by our ancestors, and they took care of us for so many generations,” Arkeketa said. “They always knew that we were going to come along, so they left things for us. Now, we're coming back, and we're touching those things and the things that they left for us, and the memories that they want us to know about who we are as a people.”
Coordinating the trip was a wide-ranging collaboration between the Otoe-Missouria government, the National Park Service, the Iowa Department of Transportation, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, other Midwestern tribes and many others.
