NEWS CHRONICLE PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY — “Red Earth Nation: A History of the Meskwaki Settlement” is a new book by author Eric Steven Zimmer, with a foreword written by the tribe’s Historic Preservation Director Johnathan Buffalo and Meskwaki Tribal Court Senior Deputy Clerk Dawn Suzanne (Wanatee) Buffalo.

Author Eric Zimmer, who grew up in Rapid City, S.D., is well-versed on the long and bloody history of conflicts between Indigenous people and white settlers in his home state, and he gravitated toward learning more about those events at a young age in an effort to understand the place where he was born and raised.

Piggybacking off of that interest, he earned an undergraduate degree from Black Hills State University in Spearfish before heading east in 2011 and beginning to work toward a PhD in American History from the University of Iowa. Zimmer was interested in native issues and federal Indian policy, and when he began to brainstorm ideas for his dissertation, he hoped to find something local that would contribute back to the state in some way.

As readers in this area almost certainly know, the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa — also known as the Meskwaki Nation or “Red Earth People” — is the only federally recognized tribe with a headquarters in the state, located along Highway 30 in southwestern Tama County. Over a decade ago, Zimmer started to conduct the research that has culminated in the publication of his new book “Red Earth Nation: A History of the Meskwaki Settlement” with a foreword by the tribe’s Historic Preservation Director Johnathan Buffalo and Meskwaki Tribal Court Senior Deputy Clerk Dawn Suzanne (Wanatee) Buffalo.

“This might kind of sound counterintuitive, but there’s a way in which studying the native history of a place that wasn’t my home allowed me to understand my home in a different way,” Zimmer said. “If you just dig in and try to understand your home, you’re kind of blinded by being from that place because of perspectives and people you know and things you’ve heard, whereas if you can study another place and understand it, it kind of brings a contrast up that makes you go ‘Oh, that’s what’s going on here (and) that’s what’s going on there.'”

An initial conversation with Mary Bennett at the State Historical Society office in Iowa City helped connect Zimmer with members of the tribe like Johnathan and Suzanne Buffalo and Mary Young Bear — and a stack of 30 books he needed to read to learn more about Meskwaki history. Before long, he was making the hour and a half drive up to the Settlement for the first of many trips.

“I just wanted to demonstrate that I was someone who was there to be a reciprocal partner, not just an academic who was gonna kind of swoop in, take a bunch of information and go make my own career with the community’s story. But I wanted to show that this was really about becoming a vehicle for something that the community wanted to explore,” Zimmer said.

Eventually, he worked up the courage to ask Johnathan Buffalo if there was something he could do for his master’s thesis that people would care about, and Buffalo suggested researching the origins of the tribal Constitution, which arose out of the Indian New Deal in the 1930s and is fervently debated and discussed on the Settlement to this day, although it has never been formally modified in any way.

“This is more of a political history. The last two books that have been made are mostly for anthropology and social history, so with Eric’s book, it deals more with what was going on at that period, in the ’20s and ’30s and how we got our Constitution,” Buffalo said. “It deals with a lot of historical stuff… We need to understand (the Constitution) if we’re gonna talk about it, officially talking about it. We need some background.”

Zimmer chose the Meskwaki Constitution as his thesis topic and eventually had an article on it published in “The Annals of Iowa, a history journal that has been in print since 1863. To fully understand the ratification and adoption of the tribal constitution, however, he felt that he needed to go back even further to the origins of the Settlement itself.

Like many other tribes in the 19th century, the Meskwaki, who first called the St. Lawrence River Valley on the east coast home before migrating to the Midwest and battling the French in the Fox Wars, were dispossessed of their land and forced into Kansas and Oklahoma, states they didn’t particularly like. In 1851, the Iowa Legislature passed an “unprecedented” act allowing the tribe to buy land and stay in the state, and six years later, its members pooled their money together to purchase 80 acres from a farmer in Tama County.

“Iowa, at a particular time, gave dignity to a group of Indians. We were treated as humans. We purchased the land, and at the same time, in other states, they were chasing down Indian tribes in California. Right up next door to us in Minnesota, there were terrible things going on,” Johnathan Buffalo said. “So it’s a credit to Iowa and its citizens at the time, and present, that we’ve always been treated well. Yes, we have arguments. We have debates with the state, with the county. But we have debates. That’s the difference, so that’s the reason Iowa was different. We found safety in Iowa where we could thrive… We’re happy with the citizens that welcomed us and helped us.”

Today, the Settlement — which is comprised of sovereign land and is thus distinguished from reservations created by government treaties — stretches out over 8,000 acres, and the tribe also owns a 709-acre wildlife preserve near West Bend in Palo Alto County.

“It’s really this remarkable success story about what it means for a community to obtain their land on their own terms and then use that to kind of navigate federal and local and state politics and policy — in some cases, by saying ‘This is our land. We bought it ourselves. You can’t do that to us, and in other cases saying ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, we’re a tribe like other tribes. You have to afford us the same respect or resources or whatever,'” Zimmer said. “So it’s a compelling and interesting story, especially in the context of what people now call Land Back.”

Compared to the tribes of South Dakota — especially the Lakota — the Meskwaki Nation has enjoyed a relatively peaceful and successful history, and while Zimmer admits that violent episodes like the Battle of Little Bighorn are often “romanticized and popularized” in the public conscience, there are plenty of stories more focused on “diplomacy, strategy and the rebuilding of a community” as opposed to fighting.

“In a sense, part of what I’m trying to do with the book is tell one of these positive stories just to get it out there in the world, but that’s not to say that there aren’t other people who have written about or spent time with the Meskwaki Nation,” he said.

In addition to being the only resident tribe in Iowa, Zimmer noted, the Meskwaki Settlement is also located in a “triangle” between the state’s three largest universities — Iowa, Iowa State and UNI — and is close to other schools like Grinnell and Coe while remaining within driving distance of larger metropolitan areas with colleges such as Milwaukee, Madison, Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul.

“They’re one of these native communities that’s kind of smack dab in the middle of this place where there’s a bunch of academics, so for decades, anthropologists, historians and all kinds of folks have been coming out to the Settlement trying to do different projects and things, and this created a lot of different secondary source material to work from,” Zimmer said. “But that’s also not to say that the book itself just kind of rehashes. I did my best to kind of integrate what other people said, talk about different aspects of the community’s history but to interpret it in a new way that emphasizes the story about land ownership and the connection to place in the context of the 21st century and what people call Land Back.”

Zimmer, who himself is not native, hopes the book will be of equal interest to indigenous and non-indigenous readers with value to both groups, although he said his primary audience is the Meskwaki people. On the advice of Johnathan and Suzanne Buffalo, he recalibrated it into a linear chronological narrative to make it more accessible for non-academics.

Johnathan Buffalo commended Zimmer for handling the project in a respectful way and actually appreciated his outside perspective.

“Sometimes when you’re sick, you don’t want your relative looking at you. You want somebody that’s not involved. You need an outsider to look at you without any background (or) history, so that’s Eric. He looked at our Constitution without the luggage of the past — factions, ideas, beliefs,” he said. “He looked at it and wrote about it in a way that is not burdened with our past… He wrote a very good history of that time period that we can look at to learn about the past, the historical past and not factional past or what people believe happened, things like that.”

Buffalo feels that “Red Earth Nation” is a worthy companion to other books on the tribe, its history and its culture.

“I think, as a book, there’s value, among tribal members, of course, and then, in the overall Native American studies because most tribes have Constitutions, and to see that time period of how we ended up here today is a good example in the general Indian studies realm,” he said. “And then it’s also great for non-Indians to read to understand us a little bit, understand what we’ve been through so they’ll understand us. We’re not just some little Indian tribe in central Iowa, so that’s the value I see. It has many audiences that can learn from it… We’re very happy to add it to our list of books that we can recommend to people.”

Zimmer spent two years teaching history at the University of Montana, and he’s now back in the Rapid City area working at the Black Hills Area Community Foundation, which supports local nonprofits including many benefiting the native population. He joked that there are two questions he should never be asked — “Did you catch any fish this weekend?” and “Are you writing anything?”

“It took me 13 years to finish ‘Red Earth Nation.’ It was a labor of love. It was something that took an awful lot of work and patience, and I’m just, for now, kind of enjoying the fact that it’s out and that I get to have it out there and see what comes next,” he said. “I’m sure someday I’ll get the bug to write another book or write another something — I don’t know if that’ll be about history, I don’t know if that’ll be about my work in philanthropy — but right now I’m just kind of relishing that.”

“Red Earth Nation” is published by the University of Oklahoma Press and can be ordered through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other major distributors. Zimmer has plans to hold several book talks in Iowa next month — at Grinnell College on Oct. 10, Earlham at 10 a.m. on Oct. 11, an interview with Iowa Public Radio on Oct. 14 and an event on the Settlement later that day before heading to a talk at the Wisconsin Historical Society on Oct. 15 and a public Zoom in partnership with the State Historical Society of Iowa on Oct. 24. To keep up with Zimmer, visit https://ericzimmerhistory.com/, and to learn more about the Sac and Fox Tribe’s history and historic preservation efforts, visit https://www.meskwaki.org/historic-preservation/.