In July, I wrote a blog entry called Wapakoneta on the Warpath https://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com/2020/07/wapakoneta-on-warpath.html in which I described how my hometown in Ohio remains at odds with its Shawnee past and with the way in which our own white immigrant ancestors came by what was, essentially, stolen land. I wrote that blog within the context of the Washington Redskins’ conclusion that it was, perhaps, time for the team to get on the right side of history and quit using an anti-Indian racial epithet as their team name, pointing out that this was also the name of my hometown’s team and that the Washington franchise’s decision had spelled a major headache for Wapakoneta school authorities and city fathers. Not for the first time, they faced strong criticism for continuing to support racial insensitivity and to excuse their behavior by claiming to “honor” the Shawnee with the patently offensive term “redskin” (which many Native Americans refer to as “the R-word”).
At the time, I quoted Wapakoneta City Schools Superintendent Aaron Rex as saying, “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.”
I pointed out at the time that several of Mr. Rex’s posits were, to say the least, questionable. I said that, 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, that any redesigning of the school logo has been carried out, according to the representatives of the Shawnee Tribe, without consulting the true experts on tribal culture—namely, the Shawnees 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.
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| Professor Stephen Warren |
Warren is the author of two books on the topic, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors 1795-1870 (University of Illinois
Press 2005), and The Worlds the Shawnees
Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (The University of North
Carolina Press, 2014), as well as numerous related studies. He has also served
as editor for several historical and anthropological studies created by Native
Shawnee scholars. His research has been supported by a variety of grants from
major donors including the John D. Rockefeller Library and the Mellon
Sabbatical Foundation.
I’ve taken part of the title of this essay from one of Professor
Warren’s premises in his research on Indian removal from the Midwest. He has
asked himself the same question I have in looking at the relationship of my own
white immigrant ancestors with both Native and African Americans: How did the
region, and particularly my hometown—whose residents so often boast “pride in
‘our’ Native American history” and too often seek to deny our well-documented recent
past as a “sundown town”—become so white? Listening to the hard facts provided
by Professor Warren in answer to this multi-faceted question, it is hard not to
conclude that this relationship is less than worthy of pride and should,
indeed, be a source of profound shame.
Furthermore, there is clearly nothing unique about Wapakoneta in this
sense. According to Professor Warren’s studies, the “whitening” of the Midwest
was part of a process often blamed on the actions and inactions of the federal
government, but that was, in fact, actively aided and abetted by state and
local authorities throughout the region.
During his conference last week, Warren prefaced his remarks on the
removal of the Ohio Shawnee by saying that it was impossible to separate Native
American removal from the area from movements that gave birth to legislation
aimed at excluding African Americans as well. Removal and exclusion were then,
according to Warren, “twin policies.”
As an example of legislation that upheld such racist policies, Warren
provided the example of Johnson v McIntosh of 1823, which, he said, “made the
specious point that the Indians possessed only a right of occupancy, not
ownership of the lands where they lived.” This is nothing if not perverse,
since the lands where Native tribes lived had always belonged to them and were usurped
by white settlers who migrated for centuries from Europe in numbers that
overwhelmed the Indian population. What the legal premise of this 1823 court
decision meant was that Native tribes could be ejected from their lands
according to white whims, and, in principle, this remains a governing standard
up to the present day with regard to reservations.
Legal norms provide, Warren indicated, the nexus between Native removal
and African American exclusion. For example, he explains that, in 1804 and
1807, Ohio passed so-called “bond laws” (among the earliest legislation
following statehood in 1803), which not only required blacks arriving in the
state to show proof that they had been freed and were no longer slaves (in
other words, that they were not the “property” of a white man), but also forced
them to post a five hundred dollar bond (equivalent to about eleven thousand
two hundred fifty dollars in today’s terms) in order to remain within the
territory of the state.
Warren says that statutes were also passed in Ohio that prohibited blacks and Indians alike from entering into contracts, testifying in court or serving on juries. And an Ohio Supreme Court decision (Van Camp v Board of Education) basically instituted the segregation of schools in 1853. The professor explains that it wasn’t until the eighteen-eighties—well after passage of the Fourteen Amendment to the US Constitution (1868) extending the individual guarantees stated in the Bill of Rights to former slaves—that Midwestern states, including Ohio, passed laws protecting the civil rights of people of color.
While Native Americans had long been pushed from their traditional lands
by white migration, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 made this official policy.
Signed into law by President Andrew Jackson—who, among historical revisionists
is often the sole scapegoat for what was already an ad hoc nationwide
trend—this act made it legal to forcibly remove Indians from their homeland and
drive them across the Mississippi into the unsettled western territories, thus
clearing the way for white migrants to take over their lands without
compensation.
Already by that time, the Shawnee, who were a quintessentially Ohio
tribe, with many villages in the southern part of the region, had been pushed
further and further north and west within the state by a white migratory
movement from the south, in which, Warren explains, people from Kentucky
crossed the Ohio River at Cincinnati and “filled the state from the bottom up
like a glass of water.” And this is where the extraordinary importance of
Wapakoneta in Shawnee history becomes evident—and what makes our white
ancestors’ role in it so shameful.
By the time of the Indian Removal Act, and indeed well before,
Wapakoneta had become the council house of the Shawnee Nation. In short, my
home town was the headquarters of the Shawnee people. One of the main streets
in Wapakoneta is named after the great chief who presided over that Native
nation—namely, Black Hoof, known to his brethren as Catahecassa (1740-1831). In
his online conference, Professor Warren recapped Black Hoof’s life, explaining
that war had been a constant throughout his time. Black Hoof lived through
three major world wars that all had definite consequences in America: the Seven
Years War, the lengthy American Revolution and the War of 1812. And after each
of these conflicts, he had seen the Shawnee have to start over from scratch.
Until the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, when Black Hoof was already
in his mid-fifties, he was a fierce warrior in the struggle against white
expansionism. That was the decisive final battle between Indians of the region
(with their British allies) and white Americans in the struggle for control of
the Northwest Territory, and it gave birth to the Treaty of Greenville (Ohio).
The Battle of Fallen Timbers took place near what is today the city of Maumee,
Ohio, coincidentally the point of confluence of the Maumee River with the
Auglaize, which runs west through the heart of Wapakoneta before turning north
on its journey to Great Lake Erie.
Black Hoof now only wanted peace. But, according to Warren, it was after Fallen Timbers that Piqua (Ohio) Indian Agent John Johnston told Black Hoof, “War is our trade and you cannot live quiet and take no part in it.” In an attempt ally himself and his people with their former American enemies, the Shawnee chief thus ended up serving as a scout for US troops during the War of 1812 against the British.
As such, Black Hoof participated in the Battle of Thames in Canada on
the side of the Americans against the Native confederacy and their British
allies. During that battle, on October 5, 1813, Tecumseh, the leader of the
Indian confederacy and Black Hoof’s fellow Shawnee, was killed. This level of
commitment was part of Black Hoof’s plan, as a Shawnee chief, to lend his
support to peace while actively, if peacefully, resisting removal. The chief
nevertheless admitted that “the war took everything from us.”
According to Warren, in the three and a half decades between the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Removal Act of 1830, Black Hoof strove to make Wapakoneta the center of an alliance between the Shawnee and white settlers. He was a driving force behind the development of Shawnee agriculture and animal husbandry and shipped livestock between Wapakoneta and the slaughterhouses of Cincinnati on the Ohio River. He worked with Quaker missionaries who lived in the area and although they didn’t manage to Christianize the Shawnee, they worked with Black Hoof on his social and agricultural projects. With their help, it was Black Hoof who, for instance, established Wapakoneta’s first grist mill.
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| Tecumseh |
Warren makes it clear that Wapakoneta was Black Hoof’s last stand. Now
in his seventies, he vowed that he would die there. It would be, Black Hoof
hoped, the permanent home of the Shawnee. Black Hoof argued that, “We’re
arrived at the point beyond which we could not go.” He said that going further
west was futile since, looking across the Mississippi, all he could see was
white people spreading over the land as fast as they had earlier over the
territories of Kentucky and Ohio.
There, in Wapakoneta, Black Hoof and his people would forge their new
alliance with the white settlers. There was, clearly, no other choice, since
the white invasion from Europe was so vast that it could no longer be stopped
by military resistance. It was time to try and win the peace.
Professor Warren explains that three factors, in principle, undermined
Black Hoof’s determination to resist removal from the Midwest. The most
powerful one was the earlier mentioned Indian Removal Act of 1830, while a
second one was the decision by another Shawnee tribal chief, Quatawepea, known
to whites as Captain Lewis, to self-evacuate. Quatawepea was the head of a
Shawnee community named for him (Lewistown) less that twenty-five miles from
Wapakoneta. The third contributing factor was the return of another Shawnee
leader, Tenskwatana, known to whites as “The Prophet”, from exile in Canada.
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| Quatawepea, a.k.a. Captain Lewis |
IIn short, Warren indicates, Native Americans had no right to defend themselves or their property against white assault. And if they signed the treaties that ended up driving them from their land, they didn’t do so willingly, but by “force of law”—a white law that ruthlessly disenfranchised the Indian.
Quatawepea, after also being away with Black Hoof fighting on the
American side in the Battle of Thames in 1813, returned to his home in Ohio to
find that white vigilantes had burned his village and fields. Seeing the
writing on the wall, Warren explains, he voluntarily left Lewistown and led a
group of over one thousand three hundred Shawnees with him to join some
twenty-seven tribes in a project to form an Indian state in southwest Missouri.
His purpose was to find a way to be both Indian and American and to live in
peace. But that project would also be stillborn.
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| Tenskwatana, The Prophet |
True to his vow, Black Hoof—aged ninety-one, having survived a lifetime
of war and an assassination attempt in which he was shot in the face, and
having sought to maintain an alliance of peace with white Americans—died near
Wapakoneta in 1831, the same year that orders began to be executed for the
definitive removal of the Shawnee from their tribal home in Wapakoneta, on the
banks of the Auglaize River.
Prior to the forced removal, Warren points out, Indian populations had
been thriving and growing. But post-removal demographics tell the story of the
harsh consequences of a genocidal project. According to the professor’s
research data—for which he quotes Jeffrey Ostler, author of Surviving Genocide—between 1822 and
1853, the Ohio Shawnee population declined from 2,183 to 1,755; from 1768 to
1857, the Ohio Seneca population dropped from 600 to 300, and from 1822 to 1859
the Ohio Miami people were reduced from 1,400 to just 466.
Listening to Professor Warren, I was not only stunned by the declining
demographics spawned by forced removal of native peoples from Ohio, but also by
how very few Indians there were to begin with. I couldn’t help but ask myself
how hard it could have been for the white settlers in my home town—people of
not so long ago, of my great-grandfather and great-great grandfather’s
generations—to make peace with Native Americans who only numbered in the
hundreds, and to have respected their ways and worked with wise leaders like
Chief Black Hoof to share the bounty of Ohio’s privileged land? The answer can
only be that Wapakoneta, the epi-center of the Shawnee universe, was part and
parcel of a national attitude of conquest and domination, of homogenizing
America, and particularly the eastern Midwest, to render it white by
definition.
Warren says that the demographic collapse of the Shawnee and other tribes
was due in large measure to the terrible rigors of a long forced march of the
Indians, mostly on foot, from their homeland to frontier reservations in the
Far West. But this genocidal trend was further underscored by the fact that the
federal government had made no significant preparations to support the Indians
once they reached those reservations. As a result, many survived the forced
march only to die from hunger and disease once they arrived at their
destination.
More specifically, during the removal of the Wapakoneta Shawnee, Warren
indicates, the agent in charge, James Gardiner, had already run out of money by
the time they reached Indianapolis, one hundred sixty miles away. He asked the
Shawnee themselves to put up the money for the rest of the trip so that they
were basically financing their own forced removal. But by the time they reached
the Indiana-Illinois border, he had run out of money again, and left the
Indians to their own devices as to how to reach the Kansas Territory.
Nor was Kansas the end of the line, Warren indicates. Two decades later,
the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 forced the Shawnee to leave their reservation
in Kansas and to merge, along with nine other tribes, with the Cherokee Nation
on their reservation land in Ottawa County, Oklahoma. Ten Native American
peoples, then, were pushed and driven and dispossessed and squeezed into part
of a single county in the Oklahoma Territory, in return for their resigned and peaceful
adherence to the Indian Removal Act of 1830—in essence, racially “quarantined”
from an ever invading, ever more greedy white population.
Adding insult to injury, says Professor Warren, Native Americans would
continue to have no control even over their reservation lands. That control
remained in the hands of often-corrupt Federal Indian agents who frequently
“leased” Indian land to white farmers. This was all legal under the Dawes
General Allotment Act of 1887 that ostensibly sought to instill a capitalist
sense of private property in Native Americans and to break them of their tribal
traditions. This was to be done by allotting a portion of reservation land to
tribal leaders and heads of family. But these allotments were proportionally
small and the rest of the reservation land was declared “surplus” by the
government, thus, once again, allowing Native Americans, one way or another, to
be robbed of their land, which ended up in white hands.
What this meant, Warren explained, was that tribes like the Ohio
Shawnee, who had developed farming and animal husbandry skills, had
insufficient land on which to use them, so that by the nineteen hundreds, many
Native American men in Oklahoma were working dangerous, unhealthy, wage-earning
jobs, like lead mining, to keep their families fed and clothed. Meanwhile, Native
American children, including those of the Shawnee who lived on reservations,
were removed from their parents and sent to some one hundred fifty boarding
schools, which, according to Warren, employed a blend of Christian missionary
and military-type training. The children were kept away from their families and
were made to wear their hair in white American style, to don white American
clothing, to speak English rather than their native language and to abandon
their native religious beliefs. These were, basically, “re-education” centers
designed to brainwash Native American children to the ways of the whites, but
without permitting them access to white society.
Nor, apparently, is the attitude a great deal different under the
current administration. I’ve been following a thread on Chief Barnes’ Twitter
feed in which he explains that the Shawnee have been shorted on federal funding
from the Treasury allotted to Native American reservations to help them combat
COVID-19. Despite taking their well-documented case to a federal court, this
legal recourse has led nowhere, and the tribal council has now appealed to a
higher court. Meanwhile, Native American populations are among the worst
affected by the coronavirus plague.
In his presentation to the Auglaize County Historical Society, Professor
Warren told the story of Thomas Wildcat Alford, thought to be the first Shawnee
to return to Ohio, a century after the execution of the Indian Removal Act. Educated
at reservation boarding schools and at the historically black Hampton Institute
of Virginia, Alford, grandson of the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh, was invited
back in October of 1931, on the anniversary of Shawnee removal from Ohio.
More than a solemn and humble commemoration of this sad event, it appears
to have been a kind of raucous celebration. The day after Alford arrived, says
Warren, a headline in the Xenia Evening
Gazette read: “Skeleton, Relic of the Past, Takes Ride in Auto”. It seems
that to mark the grim anniversary, local white authorities could think of nothing
better to do that to excavate a nearby Indian burial mound, retrieve a Native
American skeleton and drive it around town in a car for all the world to see.
And Thomas Wildcat Alford was specially invited to witness his Shawnee
ancestor’s bones being used as a prop for a cruelly racist display. This
incident was, Professor Warren says, symbolic of how Indians were expected to
subscribe to the white cult of Native American erasure.
Despite the gross indignities and humiliations that “our” native Ohio Shawnee predecessors have had to suffer, they have diligently maintained their culture, their language and many of their traditions. Warren points to the constant work of Shawnees like Chief Ben Barnes, who has made a life-long study of Shawnee archeology and traditional ways. One of his projects, in collaboration with Wyandot ceramicist Richard Zane, has been to bring back authentic Shawnee pottery, so that tribal families can actually incorporate it into their everyday cooking.
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| Brett Barnes, Cultural Preservation |
In his presentation, Professor Warren also quoted Brett Barnes, Director
of Cultural Preservation for the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. Regarding
the enormous efforts of people like him and Chief Ben Barnes to retrieve,
preserve and maintain Shawnee culture, he said, “I’m so proud of the fact that
regardless, or despite, all efforts taken to put a stop to us observing our
traditions and ceremonial ways, that we have managed to maintain it and still
work and make a living, and then have to put in the extra time and effort and
the ability to finance it out of our pocket to keep that going. To me, that’s
something to be proud of because I’m one of those that am somewhat bitter about
the relationship between Native American people and the US government. I’m
proud of the fact that we can play their ballgame and beat them at their game
and still say, ‘Na-na-na, we’re still maintaining this, too, and we still know
who we are, and we still have it, and it’s still alive today.’ So I feel very
strongly about that, and I’m proud of that.”
In Wapakoneta on the Warpath, I quoted Chief Ben Barnes—in response to a tweet by Wapakoneta City Schools Superintendent Aaron Rex seeking to downplay the controversy over the school’s inaccurate mascot and racist team name—as saying, “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 Shawnees is now me. Ask us our opinion first. Do not presume to decide on our behalf.”
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| Shawnee Chief Ben Barnes |
Professor Warren brought with him yet another message from Chief Barnes for Wapakoneta whites. Namely, that non-Natives should imagine having to suddenly leave the comforts of their own homes. “Imagine that after you have left, new people move in and begin to talk among themselves and create false stories about you and your homes. Some 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 act in your name.” The chief goes on to say that the Wapakoneta Redskins name and mascot “don’t help matters much,” adding that “they bear no resemblance whatsoever to the Shawnee people or their history.”
While many Wapakonetans, including Superintendent Rex and other city
officials, have sought to convince critics that, far from racist and uncaring,
their support for the use of a racial epithet for the school team name and of a
school logo that bears no resemblance to their Native predecessors are indeed
meant to “honor” the Shawnee, their flat rejection of the requests and arguments
of the Shawnee themselves tell an opposite story—basically, that they couldn’t
care less about the true history of the area and merely want to indulge their
own fantasies.
Professor Warren, who knows the mind of the Shawnee perhaps better than
any other white man on earth, indicates that the way to truly honor our home
town’s Native past is to listen to Shawnee leaders themselves. And while this
is precisely what Chief Barnes has also asked, his request has been met with
deafening silence from the very town that was once the epi-center of the
Shawnee culture.
If Wapakoneta wants to truly honor its Native past with more than lip-service
to the Indian names that still echo in its streets, then it has to put in the
work, first by recognizing that the Shawnee are not some legend from the
ancient past, but a living breathing people, among whom the relatives of Chief
Black Hoof still live, and then by establishing a cultural dialogue with the
Shawnee leaders in order to learn and start to properly reflect the traditions
and ways of the tribe. Beyond that, however, my home town would do well to
start compensating for the past by being a radical voice for Native American
rights and for the retrieval of Native culture, as well as to actively advocate
for recognition of Shawnee historical sites and for the protection of Native American
burial grounds—since, as Professor Warren points out, there is still no legal
norm to prevent “relics from the past” from being dug up and driven around in a
car for sport.
In short, if Wapakoneta wants to truly and legitimately honor its Native
past, it needs to put aside the false pride and arrogance that render it deaf
to the sensibilities of the Shawnee people and create a deep and lasting
understanding with the descendants of Black Hoof. The people who know the
objective facts—people like Chief Barnes, Professor Warren, and the Auglaize
County Historical Society—can be of great help in taking that first important
step. If not, we need to stop lying to ourselves about our role in the tragic history
of our town’s aboriginal residents.
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