The Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma is a federally recognized sovereign nation with headquarters in Perkins, Oklahoma. Its people call themselves Baxoje (say it "Bah-Kho-Je"), the People of the Grey Snow. Their story does not begin in Oklahoma. It reaches back to the ancient village cultures of the upper Mississippi, through a long chain of treaties that stripped away a homeland, and into the reservation and allotment era that left the tribe with a fraction of the land it once held. This page lays out that history in detail, names the leaders who shaped it, and gives you the tribe's current facts and contact information. You can explore many more nations on the AAA Native Arts home page.
Baxoje: The People of the Grey Snow
The name Baxoje means "grey snow." Tribal accounts tie it to lodges dusted with fine ash and snow stained grey by the smoke of hearth fires, and to a story of warriors who returned to find their village burned, with ash drifting over the ground like snow out of season. The word is often written Bah Kho-Je, which is simply the name spelled the way it sounds. The English name "Iowa," and the state that carries it, comes to us through French traders and older neighboring languages, and the tribe is the source of the state's name even though it was later pushed far from that ground.
Ancient Origins: Oneota, the Moundbuilders, and the Chiwere Family
The Ioway descend from the Oneota, an archaeological culture that farmed and built villages across the upper Mississippi and Missouri river country for centuries before European contact. The Oneota were part of the wider Woodland and Mississippian world, the same broad tradition that raised the great earthen mounds at sites like Cahokia and across the river valleys of the Midwest. When you read that the Ioway were once "Moundbuilders," this is the connection: they belonged to that farming, mound-raising cultural world of the Mississippi Valley.
The Ioway speak Chiwere, a Siouan language. That language ties them closely to three other nations: the Otoe, the Missouria, and the Winnebago, who call themselves Ho-Chunk. These groups share a single origin. Oral history and language both point to one ancestral people who gradually separated as bands moved apart, a process that ran through the 1600s, 1700s, and into the 1800s. The Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) remained in the western Great Lakes country, while the Ioway, Otoe, and Missouria moved south and west. The close kinship among these tribes is not a legend. It is written into the grammar and vocabulary they still share.
From Longhouses to Tipis
In their woodland homeland the Ioway did not live in tipis. They built settled villages of bark-covered longhouses, sturdy pole-frame lodges sheathed in bark, and they also used earthen lodges. They farmed corn, beans, squash, and tobacco in the river bottoms, gathered wild plants, and hunted the surrounding country. Village life was rooted and agricultural, not nomadic.
As the tribe moved west onto the edge of the Great Plains, it took on Plains ways of living. The Ioway adopted the horse, followed the buffalo on seasonal hunts, and began using the hide tipi, which could be packed and moved as the hunt required. By the 1800s the tribe blended both worlds: the farming, village-building heritage of the eastern woodlands and the mounted buffalo culture of the Plains. That blend still shows in Ioway art, dress, and ceremony.
Migration Across the Heartland
Ioway history is a history of movement, much of it forced. Earlier generations lived near the Red Pipestone Quarry in what is now southwestern Minnesota, a place sacred to many Plains nations, and along the Rock River country of Illinois. Over time bands settled around Spirit Lake and the Okoboji lakes in northwest Iowa, then spread south toward the Des Moines, Grand, and Platte rivers into Missouri. By the early nineteenth century the tribe held and used a vast stretch of the central heartland. The treaties that followed took nearly all of it in about fifty years.
The Treaties That Cost the Ioway Their Homeland
Between the early 1800s and 1861, the Ioway signed a chain of treaties with the United States. Some were peace agreements. Most were land cessions, and several were signed under pressure, without adequate interpretation, or after the terms of earlier ones had already been broken. Tribal sources describe the pattern plainly: through these agreements the Ioway lost all of their ancestral homelands in roughly fifty years. The exact dates matter, and here they are.
The Treaty of 1805 was an early peace and friendship agreement among several tribes and the United States; it took no Ioway land. The Treaty of Portage des Sioux, September 16, 1815 restored peace after the War of 1812 and again ceded no land. The Treaty of Washington, August 4, 1824 was the first true land cession, giving up Ioway claims in northern Missouri and creating the so-called Half-Breed Tract.
The Treaty of Prairie du Chien, August 19, 1825 drew boundaries between tribes rather than ceding land outright. The Treaty of Prairie du Chien, July 15, 1830 ceded lands in western Iowa and Missouri; tribal accounts note the Ioway signed without a proper interpreter and did not fully understand what they had given up. The Treaty of Fort Leavenworth, September 17, 1836 surrendered the Platte Purchase country of northwest Missouri and moved the tribe onto the Great Nemaha reservation on the Kansas-Nebraska line.
The Treaty of St. Louis, November 23, 1837 ceded still more land in Iowa. The Treaty of the Great Nemaha Subagency, October 19, 1838 relinquished the tribe's remaining claims across central and eastern Iowa and Missouri, ending Ioway landholding in the region that bears their name. The Treaty of Washington, May 17, 1854 gave up most of the Kansas reservation itself. Finally, the Treaty of the Great Nemaha Agency, March 6, 1861 ceded the western half of the shrunken reservation to the Sac and Fox. In about half a century the Ioway went from holding much of the central heartland to a small reserve on the Kansas-Nebraska border.
Removal to Indian Territory
Conditions on the Great Nemaha reserve were hard, and the government pressed the tribe to break up its land under the coming allotment policy. Dissatisfied with the treatment, a band of Ioway left the reserve in 1878 and moved south into Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma. This is the split that created two federally recognized Iowa tribes today: the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma, and the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, headquartered at White Cloud, Kansas.
The 1883 Reservation and How the Land Base Was Cut
An Executive Order dated August 15, 1883 set aside a reservation for the Ioway in Indian Territory, between the Cimarron River and the Deep Fork of the Canadian, just west of the Sac and Fox lands. That original reservation covered roughly 228,000 acres.
It did not last long. Under an 1890 agreement with the Cherokee Commission, ratified by Congress on February 13, 1891, the reservation was broken up through allotment. Each tribal member received a small individual parcel, a tiny tract was reserved for a church and school, and the large remainder was declared "surplus" and opened to non-Indian settlers by presidential proclamation in the land run of September 22, 1891. About 221,528 acres of that surplus passed out of tribal hands in that single opening, sold for less than 28 cents an acre. Federal allotment records show 8,685.30 acres allotted to 109 members, plus 20 acres held in common. (Some published histories instead describe 80-acre allotments for 86 members, roughly 6,880 acres; the 109-allottee figure comes from the official allotment tally.) Either way, the tribe went from about 228,000 reservation acres to under 9,000 acres of allotments almost overnight, a loss of roughly 96 percent of the land base. Over the following decades, even much of that allotted land was sold or lost once federal restrictions lapsed. This is why the tribe today exercises jurisdiction across parts of several counties but holds no large intact reservation from the 1883 grant.
Famous Ioway Chiefs and Leaders
Several Ioway leaders left a strong mark on the historical record, and portraits of a number of them survive from the 1820s through the 1840s. Among the best known are these.
Mahaska, also written Mahaskah and known in English as White Cloud, was a principal Ioway chief in the early 1800s. He traveled to Washington in 1824 in connection with the treaty of that year, and his portrait was painted for the War Department by Charles Bird King. His son, Francis White Cloud (the younger White Cloud), later led a group of Ioway who toured England and France in the 1840s, where the artist George Catlin exhibited them and their culture to European audiences.
Moanahonga, called Great Walker and also known as Big Neck, rose to lead his own band despite humble birth and was among the delegation General William Clark brought to Washington in 1824. After settlers violated the treaty terms, violence broke out in 1829, and members of his family were killed. He was tried and acquitted, and later died in a fight with a Dakota (Sioux) rival.
Nacheninga, whose name is often given as No Heart or No-Heart-of-Fear (also spelled Notchimine), was an important chief who signed several of the treaties between 1837 and 1861. His portrait, too, was painted by Charles Bird King for the federal government. Another noted figure, Neomonni (Rain Cloud), stood nearly six and a half feet tall, was remembered as a distinguished warrior, and was among the Ioway who visited England in 1843.
Government and Leadership Today
The Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma reorganized under the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act in 1936 and adopted its own constitution and bylaws in 1937. It governs through a five-member Business Committee: a Chairman, Vice-Chairman, Secretary, Treasurer, and one Councilperson. Each serves a two-year term, with elections held on the first Saturday in June. Seats rotate, so the Chairman, Treasurer, and Grievance Committee posts are filled in odd years and the Vice-Chairman, Secretary, and Councilperson in even years. As of 2026, Jake Keyes serves as Chairman. Because seats turn over every two years, confirm the current roster on the tribe's official website before contacting a specific officer.
Enrollment and Membership
The tribe has roughly 800 enrolled members, with more than 490 living in Oklahoma. Its jurisdictional area covers all or parts of Lincoln, Logan, Oklahoma, and Payne counties. To enroll, an applicant must have a parent already on the tribal roll and must show at least 1/16 Iowa blood quantum. If you believe you qualify, the enrollment office will ask for documents tracing your line back to an enrolled ancestor, so gathering birth records and family history first will save you time. Many people begin by working through Iowa tribe genealogy records to confirm a direct ancestor.
The Chiwere Language
The Ioway speak Chiwere, the Siouan language they share with the Otoe and Missouria. The last members who grew up speaking it as a first language died in the winter of 1996, and by 2006 only about 30 members were still semi-fluent, which placed the language at real risk. The tribe has responded with steady effort: elders received recording devices to archive words, stories, and songs, and the language program produces video lessons and printed materials for younger learners. If the sound and structure of the Chiwere language draws you in, the tribe's own materials are the place to start.
The Annual Powwow and the Eagle Aviary
The Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma has hosted its annual powwow every year since 1985, near Perkins. It falls on the third full weekend of June, counting from the first full weekend of the month, and it often opens on the preceding Friday. In 2026 the powwow was held June 19 through 21. Knowing the pattern helps you plan: it is not simply "mid-June," but the third full weekend, which shifts by a few days from year to year.
The tribe also runs the Bah Kho-Je Xla Chi eagle aviary, established in 2006, which rehabilitates injured eagles and is one of the few facilities of its kind in the country that the public can visit. The aviary also provides naturally molted feathers for ceremonial use, which matters deeply to many Native families.
Tribal Enterprises
The Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma is the largest employer in its area, with more than 160 employees. Its businesses include the Cimarron Casino and the Ioway Casino, along with a travel plaza, smoke shop, and RV park. The tribe also owns BKH Solutions, an SBA 8(a) certified company offering trucking, construction, and energy services. Revenue from these operations funds tribal health services, child development, education, social services, and vocational programs for members.
Contact the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma
Federal recognition status: Federally recognized.
Mailing address: 335588 E. 750 Rd, Perkins, OK 74059.
Phone: (405) 547-2402.
Official website: iowanation.org (this replaces the older bahkhoje.com address). For enrollment, language resources, powwow dates, or aviary visits, the official site lists current contacts and forms. To explore other nations and their history and art, return to the AAA Native Arts home page.
