Dickey to speak in Arrow Rock on the Missouria Indian Nation

Michael Dickey will speak on "The Missouria Indian Nation: A History of the Nyut^achi People" at the Arrow Rock State Historic Site Visitor Center Saturday, March 6, at 10 a.m., according to a news release from the Friends of Arrow Rock and the Arrow Rock Historic Site.

Dickey has been the site administrator at the Arrow Rock State Historic Site since 1995 and is the author of "Arrow Rock, Crossroads of the Missouri Frontier."

Dickey's presentation is based on research completed for a new book on the Missouria Indian Nation.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

The world "Missouri" evokes one of two images: The great Western river followed by Lewis and Clark or the state known for its rolling farmland, forested Ozark hills and symbolic Gateway arch in St. Louis. Even residents of the state seldom associate "Missouri" with the once powerful Missouria native nation that gave name to the river, then to the state.

Their villages on the Missouri River in present-day Saline County, made them the first American Indian tribe encountered by European explorers venturing upriver.

For more than a century, the Missouria played a key role in the commercial and military activities of the Louisiana Territory and Illinois

Country. They had numbered in the thousands, and William Clark described them as "once the most powerful nation on the Missouri River."

When he wrote this in 1804, fewer than 400 Missouria remained, living with the Otoe tribe in Nebraska or the Little Osage tribe in southwest Missouri.

Find out through this presentation who these people were, what they were like and what happened to them.

The lecture, sponsored by the Friends of Arrow Rock and the Arrow Rock State Historic Site, is part of the 2010 First Saturday Lecture Series conducted February through May in Arrow Rock.

Future topics funded by the Friends of Arrow Rock National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant are: "Legal Representation for Slaves: Zealous or Passive?" (rescheduled from February to March 13), "Frontier Landscapes, Rivers and People: Early 19th Century Missouri and the Boone's Lick" (April 3), and "Rediscovering the Tallgrass Prairie" (May 1).

The Friends of Arrow Rock and the Arrow Rock State Historic

Site share the Missouri frontier experience through ongoing education programs and interpretive activities.

On the Net:
www.friendsar.org
www.mostateparks.com/arrowrock.htm