Really?

The word 'kanren' means 'relation' in Japanese, and was proposed by Oleg.

Is there a naming connection to the Kansas thing?

IIRC, Dan told me that a million years ago, when they were choosing a name for the Kanren sourceforge repo, they had to use a name with a word that was sufficiently prominent on the internet. Kanren worked because there were enough hits for KanREN.