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In the autumn of 1901, Veriola vera -- the disease known as smallpox -- swept through the Meskwaki settlement. Responding to concerns from white settlers that their Native neighbors would transmit the disease to nearby farms and towns like Tama and Toledo, the Office of Indian Affairs and the Iowa State Board of Health placed the settlement under quarantine for five months. During that time, many Meskwaki perished, and the outbreak ended in the spring of 1902. In order to stem the disease's spread and meet their assimilatory goals, local administrators ordered the total destruction of the Meskwaki village, which had made up the geographic center of the community since the 1850s. This incident had widespread consequences for the Meskwaki Nation, as deaths further unsettled tribal politics and community members sought ways to survive the epidemic while protecting sacred items and maintaining, to the best of their ability, tribal control over local affairs. This lecture explores the smallpox outbreak in great detail, revealing the ways in which everyone from local policymakers to Meskwaki women responded to the crisis, and in so doing, shaped political action and environmental adaption on the Meskwaki settlement for decades to come.

Eric Zimmer is a doctoral candidate and Dean's Graduate Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Iowa. His dissertation, 'Red Earth Nation: Environment and Sovereignty in Modern Meskwaki History,' explores the ways in which the unique land ownership of the Meskwaki Nation, Iowa's only resident American Indian community, has allowed the tribe to carve a uniquely sovereign space in the paradigms of state/tribal and federal/tribal relations since 1857. Deeply invested in publicly-engaged scholarship, Eric works with a number of public and digital history organizations, including the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies, the UI History Corps, and the Black Hills Knowledge Network, and is active in several public history projects in Iowa and his home state, South Dakota. His essays and reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming from the Annals of Iowa, South Dakota History, Native American and Indigenous Studies, the American Indian Quarterly, the Rapid City Journal, and the Indian Country Today Media Network. For more information about ®the State Historical Society of Iowa, visit www.iowahistory.org.