November is Native American Heritage Month, but an entire lifetime could not do justice to the history and legacy of America’s indigenous people.
In Ohio alone, the profound impact of native Ohioans is seen and felt every day.
Throughout the state, there are earthworks and mounds created by the Adena, Hopewell and Fort Ancient societies. The names of many Ohio schools, towns, counties and rivers come from Algonquin, Iroquoian and other native languages. Even the name Ohio is an Iroquoian word meaning “good river.”
James O’Donnell, author of the book “Ohio’s First Peoples,” said, “Native peoples’ assistance was instrumental to European settlers in finding the high ground for trails that highways still follow, cultivating soils that farmers still plant, and harvesting some of the plants that still feed us.”
Shawnee, Wyandot, Delaware, Erie, and Miami counties are recognizable to most Ohioans today, but the history of the native people belonging to these societies is almost completely unfamiliar. These different groups considered Ohio territory to be their home, and historian R. David Edmunds said, “The Shawnees called Ohio and the Ohio Valley the ‘center of the world.'”
However, white colonial settlers continued to push westward and encroached on Ohio land. Following the Revolutionary War, the U.S. government sought to expand and establish its empire. It implemented the factory system, in which native people exchanged furs for goods but accumulated significant debt over time. To pay back the debts, they had to give up land.
In the war for Ohio, native people from many groups vigorously resisted American expansion but were eventually forced from their land. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 systematically removed the remaining Ohio tribes and pushed them to areas in the west. Currently, Native Americans make up only 0.2 percent of the total population in Ohio.
Regrettably, there are many peculiar ways mainstream society continues to denigrate Native Americans. Around this time of year, we have a day to commemorate Christopher Columbus, a colonizing tyrant who enslaved the Arawak people who greeted him with food. Then, we celebrate a mythicized version of Thanksgiving, completely neglecting the colonists’ eventual betrayal, slaughter, and enslavement of the Wampanoag people, who helped the pilgrims survive.
There is also the ongoing controversy about college and professional sports teams using racist caricatures for team logos, such as the North Dakota Fighting Sioux, Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins.
At the local level, country clubs and neighborhood developments have taken names of native communities without any regard for the history behind the names. For example, in the Dublin neighborhood of Indian Run Meadows, many streets take different Native American names, such as Blackhawk, Erie and Arapahoe. According to the neighborhood civic association, this is meant to “pay tribute to Indian tribes native to this and surrounding areas.”
However, one street is named Fallen Timbers drive after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, which was a devastating defeat for native people that forced them to cede land in northwest Ohio.
Instead of naming street signs or commemorating colonizers, why don’t we celebrate leaders like Tecumseh who tried to unify native peoples and died fighting to establish an independent Indian confederacy? Tecumseh called on “all the Redmen to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first and should be yet; for it was never divided but belongs to all of the use of each.”
This is not simply a disconnected history lesson because the way we understand or don’t understand the past informs our present situation. Let us all take time to recognize and learn from the historic and continuing struggle of indigenous peoples of the Americas and around the world to survive, endure and exist.
