Wyandotte Nation history

In 1842, the Wyandotte lost all of their land east of the Mississippi River, under pressure of the United States government policy to remove the Native Americans to the West.

In 1843, survivors buried their dead on a high ridge overlooking the Missouri River in what became the Huron Cemetery in present-day Kansas City, Kansas.

One of the stipulations required that a parcel of land in Kansas City, Kansas, reserved as the Huron Cemetery, which had been awarded to the Wyandot by treaty on 31 January 1855, was to be sold by the United States.

The Seneca, Shawnee, and Wyandotte Industrial Boarding School, also called the Wyandotte Mission, opened for classes in Wyandotte, Oklahoma in 1872.

In 1893, the Dawes Act required that the tribal communal holdings in the Indian Territory be divided into individual allotments.

In 1906, the Wyandotte Nation authorized the Secretary of Interior to sell the cemetery, with the bodies to be reinterred at nearby Quindaro Cemetery.

In 1916 Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas, who was of partially Native American descent, won passage of a bill protecting the cemetery as a national park and providing some funds for maintenance.

In 1971 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

On 15 May 1978, in a single Act entitled Public Law 95-281, the termination laws were repealed, and the three tribes were reinstated with all rights and privileges they had prior to termination.

In 1998, the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma and the Wyandot Nation of Kansas reached agreement to preserve the Wyandot National Burying Ground for religious, cultural and related uses appropriate to its sacred history and use.