Peoria Tribe - History

History

The Peoria are Algonquian-speaking people, whose ancestors came from what is now Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio. Once thought to be descendants of the Cahokia Mississippian culture of Moundbuilders, they are now believed to be related to Algonquian-speaking peoples of the Great Lakes and East Coast. The Peoria were one of the many Illinois tribes encountered by the explorers, Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet. French Jesuit missionaries converted tribal members to Roman Catholicism. Father Jacques Gravier, superior of the Illinois mission, compiled the most extensive dictionary of Kaskaskia Illinois-French terms, nearly 600 pages and 20,000 entries.

The Peoria migrated southwest into Missouri Territory after 1763. In 1818, the Treaty of Edwardsville included the cession of Peoria lands in Illinois to the United States. By the 1832 Treaty of Lewisville, they ceded Missouri lands in exchange for land in Kansas, near the Osage River.

Infectious disease, to which they had no natural immunity, and intertribal wars drastically reduced the tribe's numbers. Members of the Kaskaskia, Peoria, Piankeshaw, and Wea tribes formed a confederacy under the Peoria name. After the Civil War, most of the confederated tribe signed the 1867 Omnibus Treaty. By this means, the US government purchased land from the Quapaw tribe and relocated the majority of the Peoria tribe to Indian Territory, now part of Oklahoma.

Under the Dawes Act and Curtis Act of 1898, the US government attempted to make individual allotments of land to heads of families, to allow separate ownership and cultivation of land, and break up the common landholdings of the tribes. It was part of an effort to have the tribes assimilate to European-American ways. At the same time, they forced tribal governments to dismantle. In 1939, after passage of the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, the tribe reorganized and re-established its traditional form of council government.

During the 1950s, the US government pursued a policy of Indian termination to end its special relationship with tribes. It dissolved the Peoria tribal government, which lost federal recognition in 1959. Tribal members objected and began the process to regain federal recognition, which they achieved in 1978.