The Walking in the Footsteps Student Support Fund

About the Campaign

Before there was UNL and before there was Lincoln, there was Nyi Brathge (“flat water”), the homeland of the Otoe-Missouria people for hundreds of years. Under duress, in 1833 and again in 1854, the Otoe-Missouria Nation signed treaties with the U.S. government ceding the land that became Lincoln and the University of Nebraska. They moved first to the Big Blue Reservation, near Beatrice, but were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma in the 1880s.

Walking in the Footsteps of our Ancestors (Ahadada Wathigre Hįnéwi Ke) is a joint project of the Center for Great Plains Studies and the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma that aims to promote healing and reconciliation in southeast Nebraska by reconnecting the Otoe-Missouria to their homelands and by educating non-Native people about the history and ongoing presence of the Tribe and other Indigenous peoples in our region.

The Walking in the Footsteps Student Support Fund provides crucial financial support to students from the Otoe-Missouria tribe as well as other tribes with historical connections to Nebraska. Funds can be used for all educational costs, including tuition, room and board, books, and student fees.

This fund was initiated by Margaret Jacobs, the Charles Mach Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Tom Lynch, professor emeritus in the University of Nebraska English Department and former editor of the journal Western American Literature.

The goal of this fund is to enable Otoe-Missouria people not only to walk, but also to study, in the footsteps of their ancestors.

Your contribution can help make that aspiration a reality.