Strange Entanglements: The History of Columbus Day, the Washington Redskins, and Native American Civil Rights

         On the passage of another homage to the first named European slaver and an atrocious mathematician I felt impelled to add a new perspective to the conversation of the day of “celebration.” There are some strange parallels between the inspiration of this holiday, the national capital’s pro-football team and the Native American Civil Rights movement. Let’s start with Cristóbal Colón, better known to Americans as Columbus, whose name will be mentioned only twice more in this article. The celebration of Columbus Day began, like many of the nationalistic holidays, during the late-nineteenth century and mirrored the trials and tribulations of Native Americans of the period. It became a national holiday in 1934 after many states began adopting the holiday starting in 1906. The holiday was steeped in anachronistic concepts of nationalism, patriotism, and loyalty that seemed even in the early-twentieth century in glaring contrast to the treatment of the First Nations of this continent. The tides are beginning to roll out on this “celebration” but this is a slow ebb certainly. Many more voices this year called for the “celebration” to be dismantled, others suggested that the focus should go to those who suffered the most under European incursions to celebrate their struggles and their resilience. So, in honor of Native American resilience, and as a descendent of the Europeans who proposed the “celebration,” I was inspired to show how the development of this holiday has mirrored the struggles of Indians in the US.
            Much has been written concerning the genocidal practices of the Spaniard’s first incursion into the Caribbean during the late-fifteenth century, I will not cover that here. The story of this ignominious holiday began just after the end of the American Revolution. The 300th anniversary in 1792 was marked by celebrations across the newly formed United States, meanwhile the Iroquois were attempting to regroup and figure out what could be done to protect their lands and reunite the confederated Six Nations after the war had split them apart. Like many other nations, the Iroquois were attempting to establish stable diplomatic relations with the new country but the US proved even less-reliable than Britain when it came to enforcing their treaties if it meant limiting or punishing US citizens. Every nation from the Abenaki in the north to the Seminole in the south were attempting find at least détente after years of bloody war. The fears of the future couldn’t have seemed bleaker than the 400th anniversary in 1892 as the Dawes Act wiped clear millions of acres of Indian Lands and just after Wounded Knee. The US celebrated the first European footfalls and clank of the slavers’ chains with parades and calls to national pride, though admittedly the American public and even some academics were unaware of the more insidious firsts perpetrated in October of 1492. This was even the beginning of an Italian pride movement. The man had been white-washed and placed in public view as an example of European genius, ignoring his monumental mathematical failures (namely he was insanely lucky that North America was in the way as he had calculated that Asia was actually around where Bermuda is, which it’s not!)
            The growing political organization of Native American rights groups gained a foothold right after WWI. Though the Society of American Indians was formed in 1911, it was not till 1918 that the organization developed strong political ties with Washington, DC. They were pivotal in the creation of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 which granted citizenship and voting rights to all indigenous peoples within the US even ones on reservations. Despite this, state legislatures have continued to undercut this federal act through language, ID and taxation requirements. Four years later, the Bureau of Indian Affairs produced the Merriam Report identifying the terrible conditions on the reservations and on tribal lands from economics to health to natural resource control. The BIA under the control John Collier attempted to provide for tribal renewal in the ill-fated and heavy-handed Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Washington was tiring quickly of the seemingly intractable poverty and social inequality it was facing in Indians, not to mention the systemic racial tensions flaring across the entire country.
            Two months before the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act, President FDR signed an executive order identifying the second Monday in October as a federal holiday at the behest of Italian heritage organizations. To observers at the time, even to members of the Society of American Indians, this was an innocuous action since few knew the actions that led to the man’s fame nearly five centuries after his death. The public awareness of European colonial actions, the Spanish among them, did not become critically taught in public schools until the late 1950s and 1960s. The implications for this would be complicated further in 1937 when FDR welcomed a new football team to the nation’s capital. Though they were named the “Braves” in 1932, the Boston team became the Redskins in 1933 until they were bought and sent to DC in 1937. The Washington Redskins rose to prominence in the pro-football leagues and was a powerful and fear-inspiring symbol throughout the mid-twentieth century. There was nothing as American as a cigar-store Indian.
            As Native American Civil Rights organizations became more aggressive and active during the 1950s, they were facing a dominantly Republican congress bent on rolling back the progressive agenda of the previous twenty years. They enacted a House Resolution that “terminated” the federal relationship with the Nations of Indians. This allowed many states to disenfranchise Indians both on and off reservations in direct violation of the Indian Citizenship Act. This haphazard Congressional policy led to over thirty years of state-run and federally-supported encroachment on civil and territorial land rights that hadn’t been witnessed since the nineteenth century. By the height of the 1960s most people in the US were well aware of the legacy of Columbus in the Caribbean even if they did not connect it to Native politics on the mainland. Indian Civil rights leaders, already angered by draconian state and federal policies, felt the insult of the federal holiday even more poignantly. For most nations east of the Mississippi the presence of the Washington “Redskins” with plains feather headdresses and non-Indians playing dress-up in massive expensive arenas was too much of an insult to the legacy of the word, the history of mistreatment, and to their legacy of resilience despite all of this.
            So here we are today. The Pamunkey Nation, a people visited by the first permanent English settlement, has their tribal recognition held up by litigious and petty politicians. The Monacans are just as far away. Native peoples in the US are a hidden minority whether we’re talking about the textbooks our students read or in the political discourse. Though, to his credit, Former Governor Chafee did mention the role Native Americans play in race relations in Tuesday’s CNN Presidential debate, but he was the only one.  Washington sends effigies of Plains Indians out to fight their battles for them and then welcomes them by referring to them by the eighteenth century racial slur, “redskins.” Washington still celebrates a murderer and slaver, who ironically miscalculated the circumference of the globe but was lucky enough to accidentally stumble upon an island just before mutiny overcame his ship, again. Both of these are an example of the culturally-blind, misguided, and damaging ignorance our nation’s capital, and by extension our public, exhibits towards the First Nations of the North America. It may be a complicated political mess, but from an historical standpoint, the federal holiday and the football team are both long-standing social manifestations of the racism our nation permits towards indigenous people. Let's break the cycle and no longer tolerate the disrespect of Native American people or their culture.

A Critical response to Cremean's and Appleton

I would like to respond to DavidCremeans’ and Wayne Appleton’s op-ed letter concerning recognition of NativeAmerican tribes in the state of West Virginia. I am a supporter of HB2121 and a trained academic historian who has spent the last 15 years focused on West Virginia Native American history. Their proposed law, HB2635, along with their “history lesson” is dangerously flawed and misguided. They misrepresent the supporting evidence and wording of their bill. While I share Cremeans’ and Appleton’s desire to have a formal policy towards Native Americans in the state, these two do not represent the voice of all Native Americans in the state.

The story behind these two bills is complicated but bear with me. For decades “multi-tribal” organizations have been attempting to pass laws in West Virginia that give them tribal recognition without any form of documentation. The 566 federally-recognized tribes, such as the Cherokee and Shawnee, have had to provide detailed historical and genealogical evidence of their status. Cremeans’ and Appleton’s currently proposed bill, much like the many before, exempts NAIF and AAIWV from this process but requires future “tribes” to meet unknown standards. This is not fair or appropriate and could lead to corruption of Native American rights. In order to create a fair and equitable solution to this I became supporters of HB2121. I have four basic reasons for this support:

1.      It follows the well-established guidelines for tribal recognition that 566 other tribes have used to protect their sovereignty across the country.

2.      It provides a beginning of a much needed conversation about Native Americans in West Virginia, both in the past and in the present.

3.      It has been supported by tribes and tribal members across the country along with many residents of West Virginia.

4.      The alternatives of not doing anything, or passing other proposed legislation (HB2635) would be damaging to Native American interests and to the state of West Virginia.

This support has upset some of the leadership of NAIF and AAIWV, two self-admitted multi-tribal organizations in West Virginia. This greatly saddens me because I believe these two organizations could be solid allies in protecting Native American interests in the state.

Their proposed amending HB2121 is based on the suggestion that West Virginia Indians “cannot qualify for federal recognition,” thus requiring the state to give tribal recognition to these two groups without documentation. HB2121 simply requires that before West Virginia will recognize a tribe it must “have been” recognized at the Federal or State level. Or to put it another way, that ALL groups must provide historical and genealogical evidence of their tribal status. Appleton’s letter plays a dangerous game with historical events to support his suggestion that the ethical and moral justice of indiscriminate tribal recognition is the solution to righting the wrongs of the past. As he puts it: “We believe that it is time … to restore our history and status to us.” The authors’ historical lesson did not support any of the claims he makes because:

1.      The letter is full of gross errors in detail.

2.      He misuses historical events for emotional support that have nothing to do with Indian issues in WV.

3.      His “evidence” has no reference to actual historical documents.

4.      The evidence does not establish the specific history or cultural context of either NAIF or AAIWV that would qualify them for tribal recognition. 

They began their diatribe against the injustices perpetrated against Indians in West Virginia with a criticism of the West Virginia studies curriculum: “Public school civics classes teach that there were no ‘Indians’ present in West Virginia when the ‘White’ settlers arrived.” He would find a solid ally in myself in reforming the educational standards concerning Native peoples in West Virginia but this is NOT a rationale for giving these two groups “tribal” recognition. The void in Indian education in the state is ill-served by Cremeans’ and Appleton’s “evidence.” I have provided a guide to the main points of the letter and rebuttals in the table below.

Please support HB2121 for a historically-sensitive common sense solution to this very important problem for Indian residents of West Virginia. Uphold equal application and protection under the law. “Customary indigenous law aims to restore the harmony and balance in a community; it is essentially collective in nature.” These collective laws are what is at stake here, not the heritage or identity of individuals. If these two groups are allowed to misuse historical evidence and exempt themselves from laws that have protected Indian tribes across the US then the state of West Virginia will have opened up tribes to further corruption and blatant identity theft. Please don’t let this happen, support HB2121 without exemptions for ANY group. We may not be able to correct the wrongs of the past, but we can avoid adding further injustice. Thank you or your time. If have further questions please email Isaac Emrick at iemrick@mix.wvu.edu.

Critical Examination of Appleton’s Claims

His claim that “prior to 1830, the boundary between the Cherokee and Shawnee land claims was the Kanawha River and along the Ohio River,” is grossly inaccurate. The lands south of the Kanawha River had changed hands from Siouan control during the seventeenth century to dominantly Shawnee control through most of the eighteenth century. The Treaty of Lochaber, signed between the Cherokee and British in South Carolina on October 18, 1770 ceded the limited hunting rights that a few northern towns claimed in an effort to protect southern lands that were more important. The Iroquois had done similarly in the Treaty of Lancaster 1748, Treaty of Logstown 1754, and the Albany purchase in 1755, where the Iroquois attempted to protect more important lands closer to home by “giving” the British access to southern lands. The Shawnee maintained their claims to the Ohio and Kanawha valleys despite the Cherokee and Iroquois deals until the Treaty of Greenville in 1814. But one claim made frequently by Appleton, that Indians in the Ohio were impelled to “hide in the mountains among the settlers and to intermarry into ‘settler’ families.” This is completely true but as in many cases across the country, these groups are often traceable through genealogy and census rolls.[1]

HB2635’s list of groups to be recognized includes some obvious choices such as the Shawnee and Cherokee, but also includes others with very limited historical presence within West Virginia, namely the Ottawa and Lakota. The bill also recognizes the Tutelo and Saponi, two Siouan-speaking groups that were closely related to the Seventeenth century inhabitants of the Kanawha-New River Valley. These two nations were dispersed during the late-Seventeenth and early-Eighteenth centuries. Small bands joined the Creeks, Catawba, Iroquois and many other nations in the Eighteenth century and by the Twentieth century were incorporated completely into their hosts. The last known fluent speaker of Tutelo died in the late-Nineteenth century amongst the Cayuga. Another Siouan-speaking group, the Monacans, are a state recognized tribe in Virginia with a complex cultural history closely tied to the development of the Tutelo and Saponi during the early-Seventeenth century. Their ancestors may have been closely allied with villages within what are now West Virginia’s mountains and the Kanawha-New River valley, but there are some archaeological differences that have yet to be explored.

            Two names on the list, Adena and Uninh, provide the starkest examples of the bill writers’ complete lack of historical and cultural understanding. Adena is the name of an archaeologically identified cultural pattern found in Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky during the millennia before the common era CE, roughly 800 BC to AD 1. This was not the name of a single political or tribal group but rather a set of cultural traits practiced in a region and time period. We have no way of knowing what political-tribal allegiances or identities existed over two thousand years ago. The name “adena” itself was selected by Thomas Worthington, the owner of the property containing the first identified Adena site, from a Hebrew word meaning “delightful place.”[2] Even so, the cultural changes over nearly three millennia make it impossible and unsupportable for an individual to claim Adena membership. Uninh is even more enigmatic. I first encountered this name on a map of Indian nations found in many cheap shops around the US.[3] I have searched for the term within the anthropological literature and not found its origin. I think it stems from an eighteenth century reference to the mountains being “uninh-abitable.” This is not an Indian political-tribal term historically nor in the present.

Returning to the letter, Appleton’s most blatant historical misuse comes from his attempts to use the Indian Removal Act of 1830 to support his case. He begins by referring to the 1823 Marshall Court decision “that individual Indians could not own or sell land as that land belonged to their tribes not to individuals.” The 1823 Johnson v. M'Intosh decision was US Supreme Court Chief Justice Marshall’s attempt to protect the Piankeshaw from individual members being coerced by non-Indians into selling lands, instead land cessions must be through a treaty with the Federal government and the tribal government.[4] The only connection between the M’Intosh decision and the Trail of Tears was that it may have given Andrew Jackson the idea of using treaties to remove all Indians from the East.

                Sadly, the history of the removal period, is much more complicated than Appleton might want to admit. The Treaties of Greenville of 1795 and 1814, drew the line between Shawnee and American land along the Great Miami River. Wapakoneta and Lewistown in western Ohio were the last vestiges of Shawnee control and they were only permitted through the grace of Miami and Wyandot owners. Progressively, the populations of these towns had dwindled as they gathered in Missouri, Arkansas and Indian Territory [Oklahoma] by 1831 when Andrew Jackson’s administration sent representatives to “aggressively negotiate” with leaders they knew were too weak to resist.[5] “Ohio where the Shawnee were forcibly removed in 1831. These forced removals were powerful motivators for Indians and “mixed bloods” to hide in the mountains among the settlers and to intermarry into “settler” families.” The ethics of his move aside, the transaction of 1831 was an offer of a land swap, giving them reservations in Oklahoma. They had the option, however ill-advised to stay, but they would lose their tribal status. These two groups, and many others, decided to keep their tribal rights and move west. But again we return to the serious flaw of Appleton’s logic that this rationalizes giving his two groups tribal recognition in West Virginia. The Indian residents of what would become West Virginia may have hid, but at this time there is no evidence that any Indian individuals were removed in the 1830s.

            The Dawes Act of 1880, a deeply flawed federal law with dire consequences for Native Americans throughout the US, was thankfully never applied to tribal members living outside reservation boundaries. Therefore, the Dawes Act had no effect on whether an individual could or could not be called Indian in West Virginia. In fact, in the US Decennial Census in 1870 there was one individual of Indian descent living in West Virginia. As you can see from the table below, the US census has shown identifiable Indians living in the State in every Census since Indians were first counted in 1870. This alone undercuts Appleton’s argument that “we [state residents] could not be ‘Indian’ and still live in West Virginia as citizens or own land here.”

US Decennial Census 1870-2010
1870	1		1920	7		1970	808
1880	29		1930	18		1980	1555
1890	9		1940	25		1990	2385
1900	12		1950	160		2000	3606 (10644)
1910	36		1960	181		2010	3787 (13314)
For the data, see http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/. Individuals could self-identify in 1970, then in 2000 and 2010 individuals could identify as more than one race, the combined solely Indian and Indian plus another race are combined in the parentheses.

             It is difficult to verify many of the legal issues that Appleton brings up in the West Virginia constitution and legal code. Quite simply, it was never tested that it was “illegal under state Code to register ‘Indian’ births by tribe and it was illegal for ‘status Indians’ to own land in West Virginia or to vote.” There were many racial issues and injustices that the state continues to combat but there has not been a single court case concerning Native American issues in the state courts since 1865. Considering the Census data above, and the bold accusation that recording Indian births was illegal, there would have to be evidence of some legal challenge at some point. There were none.[6]

          Likewise, the suggestion that Indians could not own land in West Virginia until the reforms of the 1960s is more based on the broad racial codes than any statements explicitly barring Indians from landownership. But the social perception of threats to property from identifying as Indian have a foundation in the state’s historical issues with racism. But there is also no evidence that land was ever confiscated for the individual identifying as Indian.

          This brings us to the underlying concern of both NAIF and AAIWV, “Because we are unable to document our heritage due to past state and federal laws, it is not possible to fulfill the requirements for Federal Recognition.” This research is difficult, but not impossible. I should know, I have spent nearly 15 years gathering historical information about the Native American history of the state, especially from 1500-1760. I have successfully connected many historical communities to modern tribes like the Catawba, Shawnee, and Seneca. The difficulty of documenting heritage, though, is not an excuse for giving these two groups tribal recognition without examination of their claims. ALL tribes currently Federally-recognized in the US have gone through the Federal application process under 25 C.F.R. §83.7. Some groups, like the Monacans, a group mentioned by John Smith in 1607, continue to struggle with their efforts for tribal recognition. All HB2121 asks is that if these two groups want tribal recognition that they meet the same standards that 566 tribes have met.

          This brings me to the last error Appleton makes in support of his group’s right. He claimed that Virginia recognized the Monacans “because of similar past discrimination that prevented Federal Recognition.” This is also a misrepresentation of the situation. The Monacans had existed as a close-knit and historically identifiable community in Virginia since at least the mid-nineteenth century and then began building a case for Federal recognition. In this effort they submitted documentation to the Virginia Indian Council, comprised of other Indian groups, seeking help getting the Virginia legislature to fund research for a Federal application for tribal recognition. They were state recognized through a series of evaluations of their research into their history and language. This was not just to “correct an historical wrong.”[7] While this has hardly been ideal for the Monacans, the difficulty is a Federal matter, NOT a state concern.

         The newly proposed HB2635 causes more problems than it solves. The cost of managing the state recognition process, alone, will be high. Not only will the bill require the Office of MinorityAffairs to hire individuals trained in tribal recognition but they will also have to find ways to manage the increased contact with Federal government. Despite Appleton’s suggestion that his bill “affects thousands of West Virginians in a positive way without any expense to the state,” it will be extremely expensive.

        Appleton’s letter misrepresents so much, from the history of Indians in the state, to the realities of HB2121, all the while attempting to give NAIF and AAIWV tribal recognition without showing the historical evidence specifically addressing these two groups. These two groups should be required to meet the same guidelines that 566 tribes have met. This is especially true since HB2635 requires all subsequent groups [exempting NAIF and AAIWV] to meet guidelines “to be established” later by the Director of the Office of Minority Affairs.

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[1] Lakomaki 66-70, http://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/773

[2] http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Adena

[3] http://www.michellehenry.fr/amertribes.jpg

[4] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/21/543/case.html

[5] Sami Lakomaki, Gathering Together, 2014: 132-164.

[6] Per conversations with Lee Ayers, attorney, Eastern Band Cherokee

[7] http://www.monacannation.com/history.shtml