photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World
The Shunganunga boulder, pictured Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2020, is a 23-ton red quartzite rock that sits in Robinson Park in downtown Lawrence across from City Hall. In 1929, a group of Lawrence officials arranged to take the boulder from the Shunganunga Creek near Tecumseh, where the creek joins with the Kansas River â a site that was sacred to the Kanza tribe.
In an effort to right one of the wrongs of Lawrence’s past, city leaders have officially committed to returning a sacred prayer rock to the Kaw Nation and to issue a formal apology for its removal from the tribe’s homeland decades ago.