Iowa and Sac & Fox Mission Museum

Through the Iowa and Sac & Fox Mission Museum, the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska is working to revitalize our culture and land. 

The ITKN Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, Lance Foster, and several other tribal leaders worked together with the State to bring the Mission School under the Tribe’s custody. After assuring State legislators that the Tribe would not develop the land into a casino, the building and the 10 acres around it were returned to the Tribe on October 7, 2021, after 153 years of being in the hands of others.

The museum was reopened under the Tribe in May of 2022. Michael Kelley, Museum Director and Historian for the Iowa and Sac & Fox Mission Museum, loves to share the history of the museum and the Tribe to guests.

Currently, a set of sketches of Ioway ancestors by Rudolf Frederiech Kurz(1818-1871) are on display on the museum’s first floor. Kurz was a Swiss artist who traveled along the Mississippi and Upper Missouri Rivers from 1846 to 1852. Upon arriving in the United States, he aimed to give an honest portrayal of the American Indian. In 1850 he married Chief White Cloud’s daughter, Witthae. Witthae missed her family so much that she ran away after only two weeks of marriage. Kurz returned to Switzerland in 1852 where he lived out the rest of his life as an art instructor and artist. Upon his death in 1871, he left numerous sketches, paintings (some of which were burned by his family due to nudity), and texts. He also compiled a brief dictionary of Native American dialects. Kurz’s sketches are on loan from the St. Joseph Museum and are due to be returned in January 2025.