When I travel in the “old homelands” of the Ohio valley, I often find myself among
professors, historic societies and institutions. I feel compelled to remind those educators,
archaeologists, and anthropologists that when we Shawnee people speak about our ancestors, they are not abstractions for us. The people of our past still live in recent memory with us through our stories, traditions, and ceremonies. We continue to honor their perseverance and tenacity and to see how they enabled the modern Shawnee tribes to survive.
This living memory of our ancestors may seem foreign to non-Native students of history, but for Shawnee people, we remember them at our Bread Dance, our War Dance, our death feasts, and in the stories we tell our children. Even when we recall them in the most agnostic of ways, such as researching family histories and genealogies, our ancestors live on through collective memory. In contrast, academics have a deeply ingrained habit of describing our ancestors in impersonal, abstract ways. For us, as Shawnee people, we see how this leads to error-plagued assumptions about the history and culture of the Shawnee people. We know that these errors sometimes result in paternalistic decisions regarding our federal right to protect the graves of our ancestors and the ancient, sacred places in the east that my people once called home.
Non-Native readers should imagine their own home, lands and precious belongings. While we consider all of the comforts of our homes, imagine that some dire, family emergency arises and we must leave our homes, and all our belongings behind. This place where we were born, where our people have lived for generations, and where our beloved, departed ancestors rest in the soil beneath must be left behind for an unspecified period of time. Our urgency to leave does not allow us the time to arrange for our household, precious belongings, and departed family members.
Perhaps after we have left, there might be the well-intentioned neighbor who has decided to watch our house for us. As time wears on, those intentions fade and soon the house is overrun with people rifling through the silver drawer, vandalizing the walls, breaking windows, defacing old family photos, defiling our most important religious symbols, creating caricatures of our beliefs. Even more time wears, and we still have yet to return home. People begin to talk amongst themselves and create false stories about you and your home. Soon, people impose their own imagined idea of you on what remains of your presence. Some even claim to be your long, lost cousins, and they often act in your name. Self-proclaimed gurus have moved into your master bedroom and founded a club for new age spiritualists. Someone even has taken down the old family bible and begun inserting their own family’s names into your family tree in an attempt to establish some sort of kinship and claim to your cherished home and land."
For Native people such as myself, the forced removal of my ancestors is part of my
inheritance. The first Shawnees to return to our homelands... (For more of this article and more, the Eastern Shawnee Tribe's project can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Eastern-Shawnee-Tribe-Oklahoma-Resilience/dp/0806157445)
Excerpt from the Eastern Shawnee's book, The Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma: Resilience through Adversity
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