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Part I: Introduction — A name in memoriam
Keona
Heaton, age 12, dances with a “fancy shawl,” at a Native American
intertribal gathering at Eagle Creek reservoir in Indianapolis in June.
Heaton, who attended the gathering with her parents and sister, is
learning the ways of her Native American ancestry. The Heatons are
Northeastern REMC consumers from Columbia City.
Part I: A name in memoriam
When Dark Rain Thom lived in her native Ohio, the mayor of Dayton once called her with a problem. Dignitaries from Dayton’s sister city in Japan had come to visit and wanted to meet some Indians. He turned to her, a Shawnee active in the state’s Native American community, for help.
“Where can I take these people?” he asked. “They want to go to Indiana…. They said that’s where the Indians are.”
“Well, you can ask anybody on the street and they’re going to say, ‘We don’t have any Indians here,’” said Thom, who now lives on a wooded ridgetop west of Bloomington. “‘They all moved out West.’”
Her story points out two myths. People living outside the United States think Indiana, merely from its name, is still “The Land of the Indians.” Meanwhile, most folks in the Midwest, and even Indiana, think the state is no longer home to any Native Americans.
While there are no Indian reservations or federally-recognized tribes within the state’s borders, some 40,000 Native Americans live in Indiana today. Some descended from indigenous tribes that never left during the forced Indian removals in the first half of the 1800s. Here they stayed, worked, married and lived within the white dominant society. Yet, they never surrendered their identity, their culture or spirituality.
Some, belonging to tribes like the Navajo and the Lakota, migrated here in more recent times. Many of them began new generations here — native-born Hoosiers who are American Indians displaced from their traditional tribal lands.
Now, Native American Hoosiers from these varied backgrounds are working like never before to keep their cultural fires burning for future generations . They’re raising awareness of their presence — and their past. And the general public is listening.
“It’s very clear to me now that society is much more receptive to who we are and is very supportive,” said Brian Buchanan, chief of the Miami Nation of Indians of Indiana. “It’s just been so positive. Times change, and people change.”
Through educational programs, gatherings and a newly-funded state commission dedicated to their specific issues, Native groups are making Indiana more than just a moniker in memoriam.
Go to Part II: The Land of the Indians
Go back to “Following the Path” index
Go back to August 2007 contents
Written By: eceditor
Date Posted: 7/19/2007
Number of Views: 1020
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