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| Shawnee Chief Catahecassa, or Black Hoof, 1740-1831 |
Alas, we are not. In fact,
ours is a blindingly, nearly homogeneously white community. And therein lies
the rub, which has caused a direct clash between the Wapakoneta Superintendent
of Schools and the Chief of the Shawnee Nation. As a result, the controversy
about the team name and mascot has gone from being an ongoing and bitter debate
between local residents—with other far-flung Wapakoneta alumni weighing in as
well—to actually making a ripple on the national scene.
Last week, Wapakoneta schools Superintendent Aaron Rex released a
statement in the midst of a backlash from the Washington Redskins’ historic
decision in which he stated, “At Wapakoneta we have always believed that our
representation of Native Americans and their history in our area has been done
with a great deal of respect. Our community was once a place inhabited by many
Indian tribes with the last being the Shawnee under the leadership of Chief
Black Hoof. In the last few years we have redesigned our school logo and feel
that it has been done keeping the idea of respect and history in mind.
Wapakoneta has a great deal to be proud of, as you know. Native American history
is one piece of what makes our town one of the best small towns in Ohio.”
There are a few things blatantly wrong with that statement: First, as an
educator, Mr. Rex should know that “beliefs” aren’t facts. What Wapakonetans
have “always believed” about our way of representing Native American culture
and history is in apparent and aggressive conflict with the view of the
ethnicity involved. Second, any redesigning of the school logo has been carried
out, according the representatives of the Shawnee Tribe, without consulting the
true experts on tribal culture—namely, the Shawnee themselves. And third,
although Wapakoneta may indeed have attributes that it can be proud of, its
history with Native Americans in general and the Shawnee Nation in particular
isn’t one of them.
The fact is that our white ancestors first forged a peace treaty with
the Shawnee and then betrayed the trust of once great warriors and defenders of
the land like Black Hoof, breaking the treaty, stealing the sacred lands of the
Native American residents and driving them en
masse on a forced march to the far off Kansas territory, during the course
of which large numbers of them perished. Our history with the indigenous tribes
of the region is, then, not a happy story of respect and ethnic diversity.
Rather, it is one of abject tragedy, betrayal and complete disregard for the
native peoples of our area, who had come to trust the European settlers enough
to agree to a treaty in the belief that it was better to live in peace with
them than to attempt to fight a burgeoning trend. Their trust, like elsewhere
throughout the continent, was met with a ruthless and genocidal push to be rid
of Native Americans once and for all.
In response to Mr. Rex’s rather cavalier statement, Shawnee Tribal Chief
Ben Barnes tweeted, “You said, ‘Our community was once a place inhabited by
many Indian tribes with the last being the Shawnee under the leadership of
Chief Black Hoof.’ The office of Chief of the Wapakoneta Shawnee is now me. Ask
us our opinion first.” So far, the chief reports having no response from
Wapakoneta school officials.
In statements to a Native American publication called Indian Country Today—an online magazine
that, it is worth noting, never writes the word redskin, referring to the clearly
racist term as “the R-word” just as has become standard practice everywhere
else when mentioning “the N-word” on citing racist references to African
Americans—Chief Barnes again referred to Superintendent Rex’s statement, asking,
“How can they say they’re honoring us if they won’t even speak to us?”
The Shawnee leader had earlier stated the position of his tribe
regarding the decision of the Washington team to change its name and his hope
that high schools would follow suit in also rejecting anti-Indian racism. “We
are not mascots,” Chief Barnes said. “We are living cultures and languages with
histories going back thousands of years. Our stories are a thousand-fold,
filled with wondrous stories of our ancestors and our relationship to the land.
It is in this way we want people to know us, not as an emblem on a hat.”
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| Ben Barnes, Chief of the Shawnee Tribe |
In telephone statements made to newsman José Nogueras for an article that
appeared in The Lima News—published
in Lima, Ohio, fifteen miles from Wapakoneta and the county seat of what was
once the Hog Creek Shawnee Reservation—Chief Barnes again commented on
Superintendent Rex’s unacceptable defense of the Redskin name and logos saying,
“Our nation and our office is totally preoccupied with COVID, and I can’t
devote fifty hours to this, but at some point I will reach out to the school
district, and so my tweeting was in a way to say don’t presume to speak for the
Shawnee tribe.” In response to Mr. Rex’s historical reference to Chief Black
Hoof, he added, “We are still here. I occupy the seat of Black Hoof’s
descendent government. I’m in that position, so why not come to our nation and
ask us. Black Hoof’s family exists. I know these people. They are here. They
are available.”
Referring to the importance to Shawnee culture of the land where
Wapakoneta now stands, the chief had earlier told Indian Country Today, “Wapakoneta is holy ground for us; it is
where Chief Black Hoof died.”
The Shawnee chief also told Nogueras, “I think saying they are honoring
us is at best disingenuous.”
After a week of wrangling with local opponents to a team name change, I
feel that “disingenuous” is a perfect term for the arguments I’ve heard for maintaining
a racial epithet and a racial stereotype for the name and mascot of
Wapakoneta’s home team. One local history-hobbyist sought to convince me that
it was only now, in the wake of the George Floyd slaying and the Black Lives
Matter movement that people had started getting touchy about anything that
could be construed as being even vaguely racist. The term “redskin” had only
recently become taboo in this context, he claimed. Before, he indicated, when
we were all young, it had no pejorative significance. It had been, he posited,
a sort of term of endearment.
In order to provide a bit of context, I should mention that this is the
same local history-hobbyist and antique picker who, the previous week, had
sought to convince me that there was nothing racist about so-called “lawn
jockeys”, those caricaturesque and stereotypical little hitching post statues
that depict antebellum stable slaves holding the hitching ring and a lantern at
the service of their masters.
A quick perusal by myself and others of a variety of online dictionaries
that all qualified redskin as a pejorative and insulting term failed to
convince the pro-Redskins crowd including my local history buff interlocutor.
It was all a recent liberal (for many “libtard”) political play and they were
sure the Indians wouldn’t mind “because we’re honoring them and ‘our’ Native
American history.”
Clearly, Chief Barnes and the folks at Indian Country Today beg to differ, as do I. There is nothing
recent about the pejorative, racist status of the R-word. While the same
revisionist movement that erected multiple statues glorifying the Confederacy
in the first half of the twentieth century apparently also ended up convincing
dictionary publishers to edit out references to the pejorative nature of the
term “redskin”, both earlier and later (post-civil rights era) editions have
identified it as such. For instance, an early edition of the Webster’s
Collegiate dictionary from 1898 defines it as follows:
Redskin — A North American Indian; —often contemptuous.
In referring to Wapakoneta, I say “our town”, because, wherever I have
wondered in my life, I have remained, truly, a Wapakoneta native son. Much of what
I consider my best writing has been done about my home town and I have always
felt a deep, inextricable attachment to it. So much so that I often describe
myself as being like an aging vampire who still carries some of his native soil
with him wherever he goes. Except that mine doesn’t hail from Transylvania, but
from Wapakoneta, on the banks of the legendary Auglaize River, where the Shawnee
once made their home and founded the Council House of their nation.
Expats like myself tend to be just the opposite of how the people we
left behind see us. We all have different reasons for why we live abroad, but many
of us find ourselves living in a kind of permanent limbo between the world we
adopted and the world we left behind. We are not detached. We are, in fact, invested
and hungry for news from “home”, from our next of kin, from our heartland. What is more, while we tend to get deeply involved
in the current affairs of our homeland, we also tend to idealize that world of
our childhood and youth, freezing it in our minds exactly as it was when we
left it.
For the first thirty years that I lived abroad, Wapakoneta was the
stateside address in my passport, just as it had been on my Army papers for several
years prior. And on every trip back to the US for a visit during those first
three decades, Wapakoneta was home base. It was where my parents lived until
their deaths, six months apart, in 2003. It was where I stayed, in the room I had
shared with my younger brother when we were boys, where my books were still on
the shelf, my keepsakes in the drawers, the place in which I was reunited with
my sister and brother on every trip, where friends and relatives dropped by to
see me. The place where my brother and I frequented the bars on the main drag
and bumped into friends we hadn’t seen in years. Wapakoneta was even the county
seat where I was registered as an overseas absentee voter.
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| Wapakoneta, my home town. |
This was the town to which my father and two of my uncles came home from
World War II to found what, over the next quarter-century, was to become an
iconic Wapakoneta eatery, the Teddy Bear restaurant. It was the farming town
where my mother’s German immigrant paternal family had started a new life, bought
supplies and sold their produce, while farming the surrounding land since the
mid-nineteenth century, and around which her mother’s people, who were of
Scots-Irish and German descent, had farmed since no one knew when. It was the
place where, for the last two decades of his working life, my maternal
grandfather, Vern Weber, was the superintendent of the local cemetery and laid
to rest the dead of three generations of Wapakonetans. Indeed, it is the place
where all of my dead loved ones have been laid to rest as well. For me, as for the
Shawnee, Wapakoneta is, then, a sacred place. But that doesn’t mean that I am
blind to either its attributes or its failings.
When my parents passed away and their house was sold, I grieved not only
for them, but also over the fact that Wapakoneta would no longer be my
stateside residence. First it was Ocala, Florida, where my brother had gone to
live in what had once been my parents’ winter home. I had no kinship to Ocala
or to Florida and resented having that address as my Stateside home. I was only
consoled by the thought that it was where my little brother had chosen to live
until two years later, when I lost him as well.
Later, my sister, by this time divorced and her children grown, moved
into a condo in Cleveland, and was kind enough to share that address with me. I
was an Ohioan once more and Wapakoneta was only two and a half hours away by
car. Each year when I return, I “go home” to Ohio and home to Wapakoneta, where
I bask in the warmth of family and friends, both new and old. And where I walk
the familiar streets of my childhood and youth and the surrounding countryside.
I mention all of this for two reasons: First, because in discussions
like the one now raging over the Redskins team name, it is on the tip of the tongues
of many “locals” to tell me to butt out, since I left and, according to them, have
nothing more to say. To these people I say, sorry, I feel I have every right to
opine, because in my mind and heart and family traditions, in my history and
the history of my family, Wapakoneta will always be my home town. And as such, I
will always not only portray my best memories of it in my writing, but also my
worst, since there is nothing more consistent in human beings than conflictive
feelings and the constant dichotomy of life itself. Second, because I think my
expatriate status provides me with a tiny crack in the window into the pain
that the Shawnee must feel when faced not only with the history of having been
driven from their sacred lands on the banks of the Auglaize, but also with the
indignity of white residents of the area mocking the traditions of their race
and supposedly “honoring” them with a racial slur.
I recall our Wapakoneta High School football games in the sixties in
which we all delighted to the “war dance” of our Sammy Spirit mascot, an
unmistakably white classmate who donned TV stereotype Indian buckskins,
moccasins, war paint and plains Indian headdress to cheer on our team, firing a
miniature cannon every time our players scored a touchdown, before whooping and
hollering and waving a tomahawk in the air. At Redskins basketball games our
fair-skinned, blonde-haired “Indian princess” with long twin braids did the
honors in a cute little beaded, buckskin outfit that distracted many of the
male spectators from the game. There was no intentionality in the inherent
racism and mockery of these theatrics, and we were indeed proud of our town’s
Native American past and unique Indian name.
But it was all a fantasy, a myth, like the bedtime stories we were fed
about noble Chief Wapa and his lovely daughter, Princess Koneta, who only
existed in white people’s story books. Our feeble attempts to “honor” the native
past of our town have blithely ignored and continue to ignore and inadvertently
disrespect the true and tragic history of the Shawnees’ encounter with white
settlers. Says Chief Barnes, “The Shawnees of Wapakoneta and the Shawnees of
Hog Creek were both forced marched after The Indian Removal Act (1830), so
Wapakoneta is built on the pain and suffering and tears of the Shawnee people,
and they can’t even get the headdress right or talk to us about the mascot.”
I asked some of the people I debated with this past week how they would
feel about “honoring” our own ancestors, the German and Scots-Irish settlers
who replaced the Indians on the site of our town and the surrounding countryside.
Perhaps we could call our team “the Krauts” and our mascot could be an
apple-cheeked lad in lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat with a feather waving a beer
stein in the air to cheer the team. Or maybe the mascot could dress in a storm
trooper’s uniform and goose-step up and down the sidelines threatening to send
the other team to the Russian Front. Or, how about calling ourselves “the
Micks” and dressing the mascot in a kilt and bagpipes on which to drone the
Fight Song, while waving a whisky bottle at the crowd? Don’t our own ancestors
deserve to be “honored” as we “honor” those of the Shawnee?
Chief Barnes makes it clear that the Shawnee have never tried to step in
and legally force teams to change racially charged names and logos, but his
people ask that whites permit a dialogue to discuss a more empathic and
respectful use of Native American names, history and symbols. In particular, he
considers the use of the R-word as a team name unacceptable, pointing out that
it is beyond hypocritical to pretend to “honor” the Indians while using a name
that is racially insensitive and has a long history of demeaning application.
The chief laments the fact that while terms such are Oriental, colored,
the N-word and logos that were offensive to other races and ethnic groups have
been retired from use, stereotypes and racial slurs that are offensive to
Native Americans continue to be considered acceptable by the white community at
large.
My hometown has a poor record for racial tolerance. This is a confession
that has always hurt me, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Until far too
recent decades, it was known as a “sundown community”—a place where African
Americans were forcefully discouraged from allowing the sun to set on them
within city limits. It made national headlines in the latter part of the
twentieth century by turning down a project to build a Japanese firm’s auto
plant there because the mayor at the time had “fought the Japs” during World
War II and refused to have them in “his” town no matter how much progress and
how many jobs the firm might bring. And time and again, it has resisted
attempts to change the Redskins team name and logos despite unequivocal
messages from Native Americans explaining that the name is disrespectful and
racist and that the logos are offensive and have nothing to do with the tribe
that they allegedly honor.
Local defenders of the Redskins name argue that they mean no offense and
don’t consider it a racist term. But that argument is rendered invalid by
virtue of the fact that the Shawnee are indeed offended by it, no matter what
white townspeople’s intention might be, and do indeed consider it a racial
slur.
I find it sad that the white leaders of the hometown that I still carry
in my heart have once again had the chance to get on the right side of history
and do what is proper and have failed the test, thus missing yet another
opportunity to shrug off the town’s racist reputation of the past. And in so
doing, they have also offended the very aboriginal tribe that they groundlessly
claim to be honoring, turning deaf ears on the outreach from Chief Black Hoof’s
own descendants.
Blogger’s Note: I would like to
apologize to readers of my blog, the Shawnee Tribe and the
Blackfeet Tribe for an error in an illustration that originally accompanied this post, "Wapakoneta on the Warpath". The photograph that I captioned
Chief Black Hoof was actually of Chief Mountain of the Blackfeet Tribe. The
fact that I had only seen one image of Black Hoof in my life—the one
above, which now illustrates the blog entry—and that the image I used was
mislabeled on the site from which it was culled is illustrative of precisely
what I discuss in the "Wapakoneta on the Warpath": namely, the abject
ignorance of most white people, including myself, about the history and
protagonists of Native American tradition. My thanks to FB friends and reader Judy
Clark Walter and Joel Smith for the heads-up, and again, my apologies to all, even when the
error only serves to underscore the premise of the piece.
