Before their relocation to the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, the Kanza Indians spent twenty-seven years on a reservation close to Council Grove, Kansas, at the Santa Fe path. In The Darkest Period, Ronald D. Parks tells the tale of these years of decline in Kanza historical past following the lack of the tribe’s unique place of birth in northeastern and crucial Kansas. Parks uses money owed through brokers, missionaries, reporters, and ethnographers in crafting this story. He addresses either the large picture—the results of occur Destiny—and neighborhood details reminiscent of the devastating impression at the tribe of the Santa Fe path. the result's a narrative of people instead of ancient abstractions.

The Kanzas faced robust Euro-American forces in the course of their final years in Kansas. govt officers and their regulations, Protestant educators, predatory monetary pursuits, and a number of continent-wide occasions affected the tribe profoundly. As Anglo-Americans invaded the Kanza place of birth, the prairie used to be plowed and video game disappeared. The Kanzas’ holy websites have been desecrated and the tribe used to be more and more restrained to the reservation. in this “darkest period,” as leader Allegawaho referred to as it in 1871, the Kanzas’ Neosho reservation inhabitants reduced via greater than 60 percentage. As one survivor positioned it, “They died of a damaged middle, they died of a damaged spirit.” yet regardless of this adversity, as Parks’s narrative portrays, the Kanza humans persevered their dating with the land—its climate, vegetation, animals, water, and landforms.

Parks doesn't lessen the Kanzas’ tale to 1 of hapless Indian sufferers traduced through the yankee govt. For, whereas encroachment, illness, and environmental deterioration exerted huge, immense strain on tribal unity, the Kanzas endured of their fight to workout political autonomy whereas retaining conventional social customs as much as the time of removing in 1873 and beyond.