Native Peoples of the Nebraska Plains

Long before Nebraska had a name, the land supported several distinct nations, each adapted to the plains and rivers in their own way.

The Pawnee were the most numerous people in the region. They lived along the Loup and Platte rivers in earthlodge villages, farming corn and beans in summer and following bison west in winter. Their astronomical knowledge was precise enough to guide planting calendars by the stars. At their height, the Pawnee may have numbered more than ten thousand people.

The Omaha occupied the Missouri River country in the northeast, trading along networks that connected the plains to distant peoples. The Ponca, close relatives of the Omaha, held the Niobrara River valley in the north. Both nations negotiated a series of treaties with the United States, with results that proved deeply costly to them.

The Lakota ranged into the western panhandle from their base in the northern plains. Their resistance to American expansion in the eighteen sixties produced one of the most effective military campaigns against the United States Army ever conducted by any Native nation on the plains.

All of these peoples were removed from most or all of their Nebraska lands through treaties and coercion between eighteen fifty and eighteen eighty. The Pawnee left in eighteen seventy-five. The Ponca were forcibly removed in eighteen seventy-seven. The Omaha retained a reduced reservation in the northeast corner of the state, where the tribe remains today. The Lakota were relocated to reservations in South Dakota.

Nebraska's Native history is not a prelude to settlement history. It is a history that runs alongside it, and continues.