The Báxoje (Ioway) leaders Na’je Nine (No Heart of Fear) and Ñiyu Mañi (Moving Rain) arrived in Washington D.C. at the end of September 1837 with two sheets of paper, stitched together by hand — careful work with needle and thread meant to create a canvas large enough to hold a world. The leaders, accompanied by three more members of the tribe, were in D.C. as representatives of the Ioway at a council of tribes living west of the Mississippi, called by U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs C.A. Harris. The commissioner wanted to clear the path for greater trans-Mississippi immigration and U.S. land claims.
The Ioway delegates had carried the map from the Missouri River valley to the marbled corridors of American power, a journey of some 800 miles undertaken at enormous risk for a single purpose: to show the young republic what it was about to destroy. On the map, rendered with quill and ink, lay 51 rivers, nine lakes, 23 villages and a web of trails that threaded through hundreds of miles of homeland.
The delegation presented the map to Commissioner Harris during the 1837 inter-tribal congress in the hope that a government fluent in paper and ink might finally hear what the land itself had been saying for centuries.
“This is the route of my forefathers,” Na’je Nine pleaded with Harris and the other gathered officials. “It is the lands that we have always claimed from old times. We have the history. We have always owned this land. It is what bears our name.”
The 1837 Ioway map, also known as the No Heart of Fear map, is a treasure trove of historical information that was largely lost on U.S. officials at the time. Reappraised after nearly two centuries in storage, a new book from the former state archeologist at the University of Iowa finds worlds of meaning in the map’s lines, dots and circles.
Indigenous communities throughout North America had long made maps, though rarely on paper. Animal hides worked well enough, stretched and scraped smooth, their surfaces holding charcoal, dyes and eventually ink with the same fidelity they’d once held warmth. A peel of birch bark or a patch of cleared earth smoothed with a hand or a stick could serve to diagram an entire river system in minutes.
Paper represented something else entirely. Marked with pen and ink, stamped and signed by clerks, paper was a tool of enforcement by U.S. courts, treaties and land offices. But if American officials trusted paper, then paper was what the Ioway would present.
The form was colonial, but the execution was not: there is no compass rose, no state lines, no grid of surveyed townships pressing the land into tidy, saleable squares on this map. Thick black lines spread across the page in branching currents, tracing the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the vast web of tributaries that shaped the Midwest. Rivers dominate the composition because rivers governed life; the Wisconsin, Cedar, Skunk, Platte, Kansas and dozens more appeared with geographic precision, each rendered as part of a living network. Dashed lines crossed between them, marking at least 26 overland trails that threaded the Ioway world together. Small circles, more than 20 in number, mark village sites.
The Ioway delegation arrived in Washington under enormous pressure. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 had been in force for seven years; the Five Civilized Tribes were being marched west at gunpoint. For the Ioway, the map was a preemptive argument against the same fate. It asserted the doctrine of “effective occupation,” a popular legal justification for European colonialism. Their world was not a vague, undifferentiated wilderness, nor terra nullius (empty land) available for the taking — it was known and occupied, farmed and fished.
The Ioway sought to press their claims over those of the Sauk and Meskwaki. The rival nations had encroached from east of the Mississippi, recent arrivals by any measure of Ioway memory, and they carried no comparable claim to the ground mapped by No Heart of Fear. When the council convened in D.C., Na’je Nine did not speak in abstractions. He pointed out the villages, the dots, the “route of my forefathers.” He referenced the map throughout the council session, anchoring each claim to a specific marking.
The Sauk leader Keokuk looked on unmoved. When his time came, his response was brief and brutal: his people had driven the Ioway out. That was that. Whatever the map showed, whatever the dots represented, the outcome of the contest had already been decided on the ground, in his telling, long before anyone started journeying toward Washington or set ink to paper.
The U.S. officials chose to agree with Keokuk. The Ioway delegation returned home without the protections they sought.
Within a decade, the Ioway had been removed from Iowa entirely, relocated first to a reservation in Kansas and later divided between what are now the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the state of Iowa quickly became — and remains — the most altered landscape on the continent, more than 95 percent of its tallgrass prairie and wetlands destroyed.
After the treaty negotiations ended, the government kept the Ioway map. Officials penciled in some English place names, then placed it in a box. On Feb. 20, 1838, clerks entered it into official files as “Map made by Iowa Chief Non chi ning ga,” Record Group 75, Central Map File 821.
Indigenous-made, paper-based documents produced for a colonial audience and preserved in a federal archive are extremely rare. Time and repeated handling eventually made the map too fragile for casual examination. Archivists sealed it in protective mylar. Without it, the delicate document would risk crumbling.
Most scholars who wanted to study it turned to reproductions, printed plates or photographs. The original stayed mostly out of reach, receiving far less attention than it deserved. Scholars noted its existence, cited it occasionally, and moved on.
William Green decided to look closer. His new book, This Is the Route of My Forefathers, published by the University of Iowa Press in February, is the first full-length attempt to reckon with the No Heart of Fear map on its own terms.
Green, state archeologist at the University of Iowa from 1988 to 2001, spent years assembling a long-fragmented puzzle from three main sources: Ioway oral traditions preserved by tribal historians, including the recently deceased Lance Foster; archaeological site records that helped locate villages and travel corridors; and government archives containing treaty transcripts and the correspondence of officials who had negotiated, argued and eventually prevailed against the people whose world the map recorded.
The method is patient and precise. Green matches each village circle on the map with documented Ioway settlement sites from the 19th century, aligning the drawn trails with known historical routes. Generations of careful observation had taught the Ioway where to establish villages based on which elevations stayed dry when the rivers rose and which low-lying stretches turned to marsh each spring. Euro-American settlers arrived without that knowledge and proceeded without seeking it. They built on the floodplains the Ioway had deliberately avoided, and they lost crops and homes to floods the Ioway might have warned them were coming.
The trails told a similar story. Twenty-six overland routes reflect the optimal pathways through a landscape of rivers, marshes, prairies and oak savannas, refined over generations for speed, safety and the demands of seasonal travel. Surveyors and engineers who arrived later, working from their own instruments and surveys, eventually reached most of the same conclusions.
Many of Iowa’s earliest wagon roads grew from Indigenous pathways long carved into the soft soils of the land. Some of those wagon roads became state highways. The Ioway had worked out the geometry of the landscape long before anyone else thought to try, Green demonstrates.
In This is the Route, readers coming to the No Heart of Fear map for the first time will find careful context, patient reconstruction and rich illustrations. For the specialist, including this UNI history professor, the rewards run deeper. Green’s historiographical analysis is exacting, his reading of the map’s individual elements meticulous, and his appendices thorough enough that most any question is preemptively answered. It is rare for a book to genuinely serve both audiences. This one does.
Green’s collaboration with Lance Foster, the late Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, gives the book a layered quality that no single scholar could have achieved alone. The volume carries what appears to be Foster’s final published academic contribution, the capstone of a lifetime devoted to recovering and preserving the Ioway perspectives on their own history. Foster spent years documenting Ioway place names that had been stripped from official maps and recovering oral traditions that predated European settlement.
Green carries that legacy forward, weaving Foster’s insights into a broader reconstruction of the 1837 map and using them to anchor the Ioway world more firmly within the state’s historical record. Green openly acknowledges that some of his identifications remain tentative, but his atlas-style approach is unparalleled among previous studies of the map. This Is the Route of My Forefathers stands poised to become the standard reference on the No Heart of Fear map, joining a growing body of scholarship that treats Native cartography as evidence of complex knowledge systems rather than historical curiosity.
Nearly 200 years ago, Na’je Nine and Ñiyu Mañi carried two hand-stitched sheets of paper 800 miles to make an argument they believed, with justification, could help reassert Ioway claims to Iowa. The stitching on the map still holds. So does the argument.
Kevin Mason, Ph.D., is the author of Retracing the Dragoon Trail in Iowa, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern Iowa and the founder of Notes on Iowa. This article was originally published in Little Village’s June 2026 issue.
Upcoming event:
“This is the Route of My Forefathers”: The 1837 Ioway Map with archaeologist and author William Green, Monday, Oct. 5, 4-6 p.m., Luther College, Decorah, Free
