Heritage Month & StoryCorps: Home Sweet Home

Cultural Interpreter Mandy Foster (Cheyenne River Sioux) with her grandmother at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.(Photo courtesy of the author)

Mandy Foster belongs to the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe. She works as a Cultural Interpreter at at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

I was born on the prairie on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in the middle of a blizzard in January. Growing up in South Dakota was good.  Once you manage to survive that many sheer days of freezing cold weather you become a stronger person; at least for my ancestors, I know that is true.

The prairie is magnificent. Sometimes you get this feeling that you are the only person in the world, and that can be intimidating — although it isn’t quite as intimidating as moving over a thousand miles away to live in the nation’s capital. I never imagined I would be living and working in the D.C. metro area. On a recent trip back home, I found a book that I wrote in the 3^rd grade. In it, I wrote, “I want to live in Maryland when I grow up because that’s where the President lives.”  I don’t even remember writing that, but it’s funny because it happened, granted I was a little off on where the President actually lives.

Education has always been important to me and it is a big part of how I got where I am today. Just ask my dad about my first day of kindergarten when I came home crying because I didn’t learn how to read and you can see its value to me. I’ve always had support from my family to do well in school. When I graduated from high school, I received my first eagle feather and was given a star quilt my great-grandmother had made: both symbols of honor in Lakota culture. 

I chose to continue my education at Black Hills State University. My grandfather was exceptionally proud, he truly valued education.  It was there that I really began to understand the complexity of the history of Native people in America. I learned about issues concerning the history of Native people that had never been discussed before in formal education. I had many realizations during this time that gave me a desire to help people understand the history and lives of Native people. I earned my second eagle feather when I was granted a B.S. in Sociology with a minor in American Indian Studies.

 

Foster during a hands-on activity with visitors. (Photo by Katherine Fogden)

I first came to NMAI after I graduated as an intern in the Visitor Services department. I was amazed at the museum. What I loved the most was that it is a living cultural museum. I returned to work here as a Cultural Interpreter so that I can take what I have learned and share with people the important history and presence of Native people in the Western Hemisphere.  

I am rewarded every time a museum visitor expresses to me that they have learned something new that changed their perceptions of Native people. Education within our communities and outside of them is what can move us forward as Tribal Nations. I believe I have a responsibility to my family and my ancestors to make sure that people know the story of who we are and where we come from, even if it’s a prairie a thousand miles away.

American Indian Heritage & StoryCorps 2011: One Woman's Family Story

Phoebe Mills Farris is the arts editor for Cultural Survival Quarterly and professor emeritus of art and design and women's studies at Purdue University. She is also the curator of and a participating artist in the U.S. Department of State's traveling exhibit Visual Power: 21st Century Native American Artists/Intellectuals.

Below, Dr. Farris shares her family's tribal history:

 

Chief Paul Miles and his wife, Nannie. (Photo courtesy of the  NMAI Photo Archives )

I am a direct descendant of the Miles/Mills families on the Pamunkey Reservation in King William County, Virginia. The Pamunkey reservation, founded in the early 1600s, is the oldest American Indian reservation in the U.S.; formed by a treaty with England before the U.S. became an independent country. It is now a state-recognized reservation.

The Pamunkey tribe and its village were very significant in the original Powhatan Confederacy. It was the home of Chief Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas. Today, Pamunkey tribal members work collaboratively with other Powhatan tribes in Virginia and also have descendants who are members of the Powhatan-Renape Nation in New Jersey. Some of my cousins still live on the Pamunkey reservation, while others have migrated to northern Virginia, Maryland, D.C., New York and New Jersey.

  Chief William Miles standing in a cornfield on the Pamunkey reservation, ca. 1980s (Photo on display in the museum's 3rd floor exhibition, Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities) 

Three members of the Miles/Mills family have served as chiefs on the Pamunkey reservation, including William Miles, pictured above. The necklace he is wearing in the photo above was created by my maternal aunt, Georgia Mills Jessup. Upon his passing, Chief William Miles's son was elected chief and served until a few years ago.

My great grandfather John Watson Miles left his home in King William county in the early 1870s and moved to  Fairfax County, the land of the Dogue Indians, a Powhatan tributary tribe. John married Martha Loretta Goings in Fairfax County on July 18, 1876. Like many Indians living away from the reservation, his racial classification changed on his marriage license without his permission.

My great grandmother, Martha, was a substitute teacher at the all-white Carper School and my great grandfather was a farmer, carpenter, fisherman, and lay minister; one of the founders of the historic Pleasant Grove Church, which now also functions as a museum.

Joseph Henry Mills (Miles), the author's grandfather, ca. 1910. He was born in Virginia in 1886 and died in 1961. (Photo courtesy of the author)

John and Martha's son, Joseph, was my grandfather. Joseph's first wife Evangeline had 11 children and died in childbirth during her last delivery. His second marriage to my grandmother Margaret Hall produced seven children. After a fire on their Virginia property, the family re-settled in Georgetown, D.C. and my mother, Phoebe Loretta Mills, was born in DC in 1927. My mother was one of the museum's early patrons. Her name and that of her mother, Margaret Hall Mills, are inscribed on the walls of the museum. My family and I have spent years searching through the museum's archives -- as well as local, state and tribal records -- to find out everything we could about where we've come from.

 

My grandfather's sister, Lucy Mills, married Lewin Boston in Fairfax County on July 24, 1907. The Bostons are a historic Virginia family and several generations of Mills and Bostons married each other. The Bostons have roots in New England tribes and upon migrating to Virginia, they married Indians of Tauxenent heritage, also known as Doegs, Dogues, and Taux.

Their most famous ancestor was Keziah Powhatan, leader of the Tauxenent Indian band who burned the county courthouse in the 1700s. During the same year (1907) when Lucy Mills married Lewin Boston, her cousins on the Pamunkey reservation participated in the 300th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. The NMAI photo archives has a photo of the Miles/Mills family participants in the 1907 play, "Pocohontas Pageant," pictured above.

  The author's mother, Phoebe Mills Lyles (Pamunkey), 1927-2006 (Photo by Phoebe Farris)

 

In 2005, I co-curated an exhibition with artist Rose Powhatan at the Fondo del Sol Visual Arts Center in D.C.. The exhibition featured the works of contemporary Powhatan artists and writers, including several of my own relatives who, like me, continue to comb local and tribal records to learn about our family's history and community's heritage.

The exhibit's title?

"Still Here."

 

Author's note: The documentation for this brief family history can be found in the article, We're Still Here: Pamunkeys of Fairfax County, written by Georgia Mills Jessup and published in "Yearbook: The Historical Society of Fairfax County, Virginia, Volume 23: 1991-1992, the magazine, The Mills-Boston Family Reunion: Celebrating the Mills-Boston Family Centennial 1907-2007, the book Pamunkey Speaks: Native Perspectives, by Kenneth Bradby Jr., and publications listed in the family reunion magazine by acknowledged scholars such as anthropologist Frank Speck and historian Helen Rountree.

 

To learn more, visit the museum’s 3^rd floor exhibition “Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities,” which examines the identities of Native peoples in the 21st century, and how those identities are the results of deliberate, often difficult choices made in challenging circumstances. In addition to the Pamunkey of Virginia, seven other communities contributed their stories: the Campo Band of Kumeyaay Indians (Southern California), urban Indian community of Chicago (Illinois), Yakama Nation (Washington State), Igloolik (Nunavut, Canada), Kahnawake Mohawk (Quebec, Canada), Saint-Laurent Metis (Manitoba, Canada), Kalinago (Dominica).

Heritage Month & StoryCorps: Do American Indians celebrate Thanksgiving?

The Wampanoag Nation Singers and Dancers, 2011. Salt Pond, Cape Cod National Seashore. Courtesy of the Wampanoag Nation Singers and Dancers

In thinking about my earliest memories of elementary school, I remember being asked to bring a brown paper sack to class so that it could be decorated and worn as part of the Indian costume used to celebrate Thanksgiving. I was also instructed to make a less-than-authentic headband with Indian designs and feathers to complete this outfit. Looking back, I now know this was wrong.

The Thanksgiving Indian costume that all the other children and I made in my elementary classroom trivialized and degraded the descendants of the proud Wampanoags, whose ancestors attended the first Thanksgiving popularized in American culture. The costumes we wore bore no resemblance to Wampanoag clothing of that time period. Among the Wampanoag, and other American Indians, the wearing of feathers has significance. The feathers we wore were simply mockery, an educator’s interpretation of what an American Indian is supposed to look like.

The Thanksgiving myth has done so much damage and harm to the cultural self-esteem of generations of Indian people, including myself, by perpetuating negative and harmful images to both young Indian and non-Indian minds. There are so many things wrong with the happy celebration that takes place in elementary schools and its association to American Indian culture; compromised integrity, stereotyping, and cultural misappropriation are three examples.

Jennie A. Brownscombe (1850–1936), The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth (1914). Oil paint on canvas. Courtesy of Pilgrim Hall Museum.

When children are young, they are often exposed to antiquated images of American Indians through cartoons, books, and movies. But Thanksgiving re-enactments may be their most active personal encounter with Indian America, however poorly imagined, and many American children associate Thanksgiving actions and images with Indian culture for the rest of their lives. These cultural misunderstandings and stereotypical images perpetuate historical inaccuracy.

Tolerance of mockery by teachers is a great concern to Native parents. Much harm has been done to generations of Indian people by perpetuating negative and harmful images in young minds. Presenting Thanksgiving to children as primarily a happy time trivializes our shared history and teaches a half-truth. And while I agree that elementary-school children who celebrate the first Thanksgiving in their classrooms are too young to hear the truth, educators need to share Thanksgiving facts in all American schools sometime before high school graduation.

Let’s begin with Squanto (aka Tisquantum), a Patuxet, one of more than 50 tribes who formed the Wampanoag Confederacy. Around 1614, when he was perhaps 30, Squanto was kidnapped along with others of his people and taken across the Atlantic Ocean to Malaga, Spain, where they were sold into slavery. Monks in Spain bought Squanto, shared their faith with him, and made it possible for him to find his way to England in 1615. In England he worked for shipbuilder John Slany and became proficient in English. In 1619 Squanto returned to his homeland by joining an exploring expedition along the New England coast. When he arrived at the village where he has been raised, all his family and the rest of his tribe had been exterminated by a devastating plague.

What about the Pilgrims? Separatists who fled from England to Holland seeking to escape religious persecution by English authorities, and who later booked passage to North America, are now called "Pilgrims," though Americans did not widely use the term until the 1870s. In November, 1620, the Mayflower dropped anchor in present-day Provincetown Harbor. After exploring the coast for a few weeks, the Pilgrims landed and began building a permanent settlement on the ruins of Squanto’s Patuxet village, now renamed New Plymouth. Within the first year, half of the 102 Pilgrims who set out from Europe on the Mayflower had perished. In desperation the Pilgrims initially survived by eating corn from abandoned fields, raiding villages for stored food and seed, and robbing graves at Corn Hill.

Squanto was introduced to the Pilgrims in the spring of 1621, became friends with them, and taught them how to hunt and fish in order to survive in New England. He taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn by using fish as fertilizer and how to plant gourds around the corn so that the vines could climb the cornstalks. Due to his knowledge of English, the Pilgrims made Squanto an interpreter and emissary between the English and Wampanoag Confederacy.

What really happened at the first Thanksgiving in 1621? The Pilgrims did not introduce the concept of thanksgiving; the New England tribes already had autumn harvest feasts of thanksgiving. To the original people of this continent, each day is a day of thanksgiving to the Creator.  In the fall of 1621, William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth Colony, decided to have a Plymouth harvest feast of thanksgiving and invited Massasoit, the Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag Federation, to join the Pilgrims. Massasoit came with approximately 90 warriors and brought food to add to the feast, including venison, lobster, fish, wild fowl, clams, oysters, eel, corn, squash and maple syrup. Massasoit and the ninety warriors stayed in Plymouth for three days. These original Thanksgiving foods are far different from the meals prepared in modern Thanksgiving celebrations.

Squanto died in 1622, but Massasoit outlived the era of relative peace in colonial New England. On May 26, 1637, near the present-day Mystic River in Connecticut, while their warriors were away, an estimated 400 to 700 Pequot women, children, and old men were massacred and burned by combined forces of the Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Saybrook (Connecticut) colonies and Narragansett and Mohegan allies. Colonial authorities found justification to kill most of the Pequot men and enslave the captured women and their children. Pequot slaves were sent to Bermuda and the West Indies. In 1975 the official number of Pequot people living in Connecticut was 21. Similar declines in Native population took place throughout New England as an estimated three hundred thousand Indians died by violence, and even more were displaced, in New England over the next few decades.

Looking at this history raises a question: Why should Native peoples celebrate Thanksgiving? Many Natives particularly in the New England area remember this attempted genocide as a factual part of their history and are reminded each year during the modern Thanksgiving. I turned to the Internet to find out what Native people think of Thanksgiving. Here are some of the responses:

I was infuriated when my daughter’s school had a mock feast complete with paper mache headdresses and pilgrim hats!

When they did that 2 my kids in elementary I TORE those items up and signed my kids out of school for that day.

For thanksgiving I was the Indian. Umm Go figure . . . .

 Someone took a picture of me in front of the class and to this day...it bothers me. Don't get the whole making a fest in school.   

Tonight I have to lead a children's Bible class, and they want me to theme it around Thanksgiving. I will, but it's not going to be about the happy pilgrims and all that stuff. Thankfulness to God is one thing, but elevating pilgrims to hero status is out of the question.  

 When my daughter Victoria was in grade school she had a teacher give them the assignment to write a report on Thanksgiving Dinner, and Victoria wrote hers as to why our family doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving. Victoria got an F on the paper, and I threatened to go to the school board if the principal didn't get it changed. Victoria got an A and the class got a lesson on Native American heritage. 

 Ignorance and not near enough education in the school systems! It is very sad that a majority of what is taught is very superficial and the dark aspects of our history are neatly tucked away. Very sad!

Considered a day of mourning in our house.

And,

For skins [American Indians], Thanksgiving should be The Last Supper.

The United American Indians of New England meet each year at Plymouth Rock on Cole's Hill for a Day of Mourning. They gather at the feet of a statue of Grand Sachem Massasoit of the Wampanoag to remember and reflect in the hope that America will never forget.

Do I celebrate Thanksgiving? No, I don’t celebrate. But I do take advantage of the holiday and get together with family and friends to share a large meal without once thinking of the Thanksgiving in 1621. I think it is the same in many Native households. It is ironic that Thanksgiving takes place during American Indian and Alaskan Native Heritage Month. An even greater irony is that more Americans today identify the day after Thanksgiving as Black Friday than as National American Indian Heritage Day.

—Dennis W. Zotigh

Dennis W. Zotigh (Kiowa/San Juan Pueblo/Santee Dakota Indian) is a member of the Kiowa Gourd Clan and San Juan Pueblo Winter Clan and a descendeant of Sitting Bear and No Retreat, both principal war chiefs of the Kiowas. Dennis works as a writer and cultural specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

American Indian Heritage & StoryCorps 2011: Where The Buffalo Roam

 (Photo courtesy of the ITBC)

 

The American buffalo, also known as bison, has always held great meaning for many American Indian people. To certain tribes, buffalo represent their spirit and remind them of how their lives were once lived: free and in harmony with nature. During the 19th century, the U.S. government encouraged mass hunting of bison as a tactic in the war against the tribes of the Great Plains. An estimated 60 million bison were killed in just 100 years. By 1893, only a few hundred bison remained in North  America.

In recent years, many tribes that traditionally depended on bison have been engaged in efforts to bring back the Buffalo Nation and reclaim an important part of their people's traditional diet.

The InterTribal Buffalo Council is a significant force in this growing movement. Made up of 56 member tribes across the country, the ITBC is a federally chartered, nonprofit tribal organization devoted to reintroducing bison to their former ranges. The organization now has a collective herd of more than 15,000 bison.

The ITBC supplies the museum's own Mitsitam Cafe with the meat used to make bison burgers, chili and other traditional and contemporary American Indian dishes. The popularity of buffalo meat continues to grow among Americans from all backgrounds. In fact, Americans now consume approximately one million pounds of bison meat each month.

  (Photo courtesy of the Buffalo Field Campaign)

 

Jim Stone, executive director of the ITBC, talks about what this work means to him:

I have spent considerable time looking at the relationship between man and buffalo; how it began, the evolutions it has undergone and what the future holds. I look at it through the eyes of a biologist through my education and as a Native American through my heritage.

When we talk of our heritage, the buffalo played a crucial role: It provided us with the foundation for life, it provided us with the foundation for our social structure, and it was a major component of a diet that made us strong and healthy people.

After college I started to work for the Yankton Sioux Tribe, where I am enrolled and grew up. I worked there for 14 or so years directing a number of Tribal programs. I had never been much of a spiritual person nor did I practice any form of religion and these issues came up from time to time in my interaction with the people I worked and lived with. I had many members of my family who participated in the Sioux religion and some who were involved in the Native American Church, so I spent time around the religious aspects of my heritage but never fully adopted any one religion. A good friend of my father’s and a person I considered a mentor said it was because I was a scientist and I always needed proof before I would believe something or follow someone. This seemed to make sense to me and that was something I lived by for quite a while, and today it still seems an accurate description as it was 20 years ago.     

  A young child during a traditional Buffalo dance (Photo courtesy of the ITBC)

 

One of the programs I managed was the Tribal Buffalo Program, and — typical of most Tribal buffalo programs — we spent a lot of time in the buffalo pasture. The time was never in sync with the amount of work we had to do in the pasture, but included a lot of time spent observing the buffalo, making a connection with the buffalo that was unique to each person, and I would say that this is universal for people who work in all the Tribal buffalo programs. My own personal experiences with the buffalo herd -- not as caretaker, or owner, or master but as a person able to view their interactions as a herd, as family groups and as individuals interacting with the earth — gave me a brief glimpse of what life used to be like.

I am still not a religious person, but I am a spiritual person and I live through the spirit of the buffalo. When buffalo are allowed to live in their natural setting, all of the strengths of their society still exist. This is a lesson we can take from the buffalo; it shows that the buffalo are still trying to provide for us in the way they have since time immemorial. It is true that as Tribal people we will never be able to fully return to the lives we used to live, but we have the opportunity to return the foundations of our heritage back to our everyday lives. Heritage is a word that stands for objects and legacies inherited from the past. Heritage also stands for what we leave for our future generations.

American Indian Heritage & StoryCorps 2011: Identity and Art

Each December, the museum is honored to host traditional artists from across North and South America for our annual Art Market. But the artwork is not only prized for its beauty and craftsmanship. For many of the Native artists who created them, these objects represent a tangible link to their community’s ancient traditions.

Katsina carvings by Hopi artist Gerry Quotskuyva.

“The artwork itself is kind of a cultural responsibility,” said Gerry Quotskuyva, (Hopi) an artisan who creates Katsina dolls and bronze sculptures. “I’ve always said if you’re born Hopi, you’re born with a paintbrush in your hand.”

The traditional version of these dolls, which have been used for centuries to teach Hopi children about the tribe’s spiritual beliefs, are meticulously carved using cottonwood roots, natural earth pigments and feathers. “Katsina dolls represent our friends”—spirits who act as messengers— “and the children are taught that when they come to visit, they bring song and dance and prayer for many things, including bringing rain for our corn to grow tall and healthy.” Quotskuyva's dolls reflect a contemporary, sculptural style that incorporates acrylic paint, wood-burning tools and hand-carved feathers.

Bronze and clay artwork by Pahponee (Kansas Kickapoo)

For artist Pahponee (Kickapoo and Potawatomi), her calling as an artist literally came to her in a dream. She had just visited a ranch with her friend, a medicine woman, to behold a rare white buffalo and her newborn white calf—creatures that are considered sacred among tribes like the Lakota because, according to legend, a holy woman once appeared as a white buffalo during a time of famine, bringing with her relief and song. Pahponee says the sight of the white buffalo left her with a memory so profound she started dreaming of white buffalo vases. “The vision haunted me for a year and a half before I realized I needed to do something about it,” she says. “And that’s what got my pottery career started.”

“I’m the only living member of my tribe to do the work that I do, so I feel an obligation, a responsibility,” Pahponee said. “I always call it my assignment: To tell my world through my eyes and my hands. I try to speak through the clay.”

Melvin Cornshucker (Cherokee) grew up surrounded by art, which has always been part of his family. One of his grandfathers was a rug weaver, the other was a stonemason, his father was a silver smith and his cousins are basket weavers. He began taking pottery classes in college, but he never thought it would become his career. That is, until he realized how much fun – and fulfilling – it was. “This is all I’ve ever done,” he says. “I've been throwing pots ever since.”

Jewelry by Tlingit artist Israel Shotridge.

Israel Shotridge (Tlingit) grew up in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, which gets its name from Shotridge’s tribal ancestors, the Tongass Tribe (Taantakwaan), or the Sea Lion people. For more than 25 years, Shotridge has created traditional and contemporary Tlingit art, from totem poles, canoes, masks to bentwood boxes, bowls and engraved jewelry, that have been displayed all over the world. But he has also kept his work close to home by offering workshops and apprenticeships to younger generations. "It is not enough to merely create masterpieces for the sake of aesthetics,” Shotridge says. “Leaving a legacy of work behind for the next generation to be inspired by is a lifetime goal.”

A coral and turquoise bracelet by Diné artist Tonya June Rafael.

This year’s Art Market in Washington, D.C. and New York will be held Saturday, Dec. 3 and Sunday, Dec. 4 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Museum members in Washington, D.C. are invited to a private preview Saturday, Dec. 3 from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.