Kansas City, Mo.-In an historic occurrence for the Kanza tribe, a retired Mennonite pastor has donated her portion of the sales of a family farm to the Kanza Heritage Society.

Lands inhabited by the Kanza tribe, also known as the Kaw Nation, covered 20 million acres in Kansas before 1825, but were reduced to 256,000 acres by 1846. The tribe was forcibly removed to Oklahoma in 1873.

A few years later, a German Lutheran immigrant, Heinrich Gronemann, homesteaded 320 acres on what had been tribal hunting grounds in what is now mideastern Kansas. Recently the family sold the land and his great-gre...