Ioway Tribal National Park
The Ioway Tribal National Park is a tribal national park established by the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. The 444-acre park is located entirely within the Ioway Reservation, next to the Missouri River southeast of Rulo on the border between Kansas and Nebraska. The Park was created in 2020 and is set to open to the public in 2025. History Formerly inhabiting what is now the state of Iowa, the Iowa people were relocated to northeastern Kansas in 1836. The Ioway Reservation originally included 12,000 acres. Following the Dawes Act of 1887, the land was sold to or acquired by non-Indians, who by the 1940s owned 90% of the land. the tribe has reacquired one-third of its original territory. Botanist Ray Schulenberg owned the land where the national park would come to be for 60 years. He lived there in a shack, preserving and restoring the tallgrass prairie. He donated the land to The Nature Conservancy in 1989. In 2018, the Nature Conservancy of Nebraska transferred 160 acres of historic tribal land in Richardson County to the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. The Nature Conservancy purchased the land in 1994 with help from the Nebraska Environmental Trust. In