I started working in repatriation efforts before I even knew what the term meant.

But repatriation—bringing our ancestors home—is in my blood. I grew up in a Cherokee community in Chewey, Oklahoma, in the foothills of the Ozarks. Sometimes I’ve wondered how my extended family could be as fortunate as we were, remaining isolated from the nearby towns, with a river running in front of us and a small creek behind. My relatives would tell me how much it was like our ancestors’ original home in the East, with mountainous terrain, ample water, and lush vegetation.

Over a century, my relatives fought for this Oklahoma home, traveling thousands of miles to push back against U.S. government overreach. Today, I continue the tradition by teaching a new generation of tribal officials how to work with the federal government to preserve what is ours. As a former “tribal historic preservation officer,” or a THPO, who reviews federal undertakings, it has been my job to step in when such projects threaten our sacred sites or our tribal interests.

My family’s land—where my grandmothers raised us—was a parcel that the U.S. government designated for individual Cherokees through the allotment process created by the Dawes Act of 1887. In the 19th century, allotment was presented as a way to “domesticate” us. I believe the real idea was to divide up families and scatter us about.

My great-grandfather, Osie Hogshooter, understood this. He had a significant role in an uprising against the allotment system, joining forces with Chief Redbird Smith, leader of the Keetoowah (Gi-du-wa) Nighthawks. The Nighthawks were traditionalists, full-blooded Cherokees who had made their way to Arkansas after ceding southeastern territory to the U.S. government in the late 1700s. They were distinct from the emigrant Cherokees who came to Indian Territory later, by way of the Trail of Tears, though both groups experienced forced displacement.

The Keetoowah Nighthawks knew that dividing our community would weaken our families, and the communal way of life that had sustained us through traumatic removals in the past. So a group of leaders, including my great-grandfather, who served as secretary, accompanied Chief Redbird Smith on a widely publicized journey to Washington, D.C., where they met with President Taft.

Unfortunately, the Nighthawks were not able to stop this moving freight train.

I learned about Osie’s participation in the Nighthawk campaign from my mother, Marie Bird, the only living person in our family who remembers him today, if vaguely, from when she was a little girl. She often spoke to me of the Nighthawks and all that they stood for. Osie refused his allotment, she told us, never living on it. When people filed to claim the land through squatters’ rights, we asked her, what do we do? She said, we do nothing—we stay away, just as Osie had. She always told me to stand up, and not to be afraid to speak my voice.

It wasn’t a stretch for me to get involved in a movement of my own, but I didn’t know what sort of movement it would be. I attended and graduated from an Indian boarding school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma; married, had three kids, worked taking care of my family.

As a young adult, I looked around our tribal communities and saw how divided we had become. Not just from family but from municipality. We didn’t have libraries. We didn’t have internet access. The rivers and creeks can only do so much for you, and we had to work for wages, but our job options were limited—chicken farms, manufacturing, any place within 30 miles each way. We shared rides, so you went to work where your neighbor did.

Stories about the Nighthawks lay dormant in my mind as I went through life’s struggles. If Osie, whose genes I shared, could educate himself about government and become a part of a movement to protect what is sacred to us, I could do the same.

Once my youngest child was a high school senior, I quit my job to enroll in the native studies program at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, something I had wanted to do since I was 18. I wanted to understand how the American government took over Cherokee lives and lands. I wanted to be able to explain why we were where we are, and how we got here, to my people back home. I wanted to continue the resistance.

A portrait of Osie Hogshooter, probably taken during his Washington, D.C. visit with the Keetoowah Nighthawk delegation. From The History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore by Emmet Starr (1921) / Author collection.

In college, I learned about sovereignty, and about federal Indian law. In 1966, Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, a law designed to protect “our cultural footprint” during construction. But the Act excluded the tribes. Which was one of the reasons why, in the name of progress, the federal government routinely flooded valleys where our people had lived since time immemorial in order to build dams. Our bones have interstates on top of them now. Anything found during construction got whisked away and placed on museum shelves. Institutions held our ancestors in collections, against their will. Who would choose to be in a box, far from your homeland?

I graduated from college in 2012, and then began to work within and sometimes against the complicated system that was emerging to bring our culture and people back home. Things had begun to change—slowly. In the early ’90s, Congress amended the National Historic Preservation Act to include consulting tribes. It also passed the Native American Graves Protections and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which allowed us to recover our ancestors’ remains from faraway institutions.

I found my movement, and made this struggle my cause.

In 2015, I became the first-ever tribal historic preservation officer, or THPO, for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. I created a process to give us a voice on the 300 projects the federal government proposed every month that posed a threat to our cultural footprint. When the federal government proposed selling leases to build a transmission line through Cherokee and other tribal lands, for instance, we figured out a path through the regulatory thicket to prevent the project. It never got built.

Across the U.S., THPOs have figured out ways to save our cultural heritage. Working with other tribes, for instance, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma developed a tribal monitoring policy for construction projects. Now, on certain projects, we accompany archaeologists working in historic preservation when they come in to determine what to save before a project. Things that signify a burial site for us might not be obvious to them. You take notes on what you see, we tell them, and we’ll take notes on what we see, and together we’ll come up with an agreement on how we’ll proceed with the project.

After two years, I left the Cherokee Nation to become a consultant to other tribes, to help them do this work. THPOs come from a wide range of backgrounds—we found our way here through different journeys, stumbling upon a job that we hadn’t even known was available. We are often overwhelmed by our workloads, by an alphabet soup of technical and legal acronyms we have to digest, by blanket U.S. government policies, and by the sheer number of projects that threaten to deplete our tribes’ cultural footprints.

Social media has lent a hand, creating a way for us to pool our experiences, but we have trouble communicating and educating on a broader scale. I searched high and low for a better way, and finally settled on a podcast to bring our tribal interests and landscapes together. “THPO Talk,” which I launched in the spring of 2022, connects preservation officers’ voices. We talk with federal partners, or any interested party who wants to understand our goals. Repatriation, international repatriation, historic preservation—we touch on it all. We support one another, and hope that in doing so, we will honor our ancestors, and assure our survival.

Our ancestors paid the ultimate cost, and paved the way for us to be resilient in this work. We’re telling our stories. We’re telling our grandchildren about the past and also about how to protect our future.

It wasn’t until I became a THPO that I went to Washington myself, to testify before a commission. While I was there, I found a Washington Post article that described my great-grandfather’s journey with the Nighthawks, more than a century earlier.

I wore moccasins that I had made myself. I looked down at my feet and I thought, I could be walking the same path Osie did.

The post Following in My Cherokee Great-Grandfather’s Footsteps appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There are certain things about the nation’s founding era that many Americans don’t want to see messed with. The Declaration of Independence, despite its inaccurate claims that King George had already unleashed Indian warriors against the frontier, is an almost sacred text.

And George Washington, despite the barrage of criticism he attracted during his second administration, sometimes seems immune from criticism.

While I was working on a new book about Washington, someone asked me: “You’re not going to say anything negative about the General, are you?” As commander of the Continental Army during the Revolution, and as the first president of a nation that was not yet entirely sure it wanted to be, or could survive as, a nation, Washington united Americans, and Americans ever since have been united in their admiration.

One legacy of the father of this country is often overlooked.

At a time when the United States was still weak, many Indian nations were still strong and represented a significant threat to a precarious infant republic. Washington knew that he must build his nation on Indian land, and by war and diplomacy, he helped set the United States on a path of westward expansion that transformed tribal homelands into American territories and then into states.

From our time and perspective, the outcome might seem inevitable; from his time and perspective, it was anything but. His dealings with Native Americans in securing the nation’s independence, survival, and future growth could be considered as another measure of his greatness. Unfortunately, those same dealings inevitably call that greatness into question.

The primary goal of Washington’s Indian policy was to acquire Indian lands. In that, he succeeded. His second goal—and it was a distant second—was to establish just policies for dealings with Indian peoples.

“The Government of the United States are determined that their Administration of Indian Affairs shall be directed entirely by the great principles of Justice and humanity,” Washington informed treaty commissioners heading off to deal with the Southern Indians in August 1789. Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox agreed that the most honorable and least expensive way to get Indian land was to purchase it in treaties. Offering Indian tribes a fair price for their land, Washington hoped, would allow the United States to expand with minimal bloodshed and at the same time treat Indian peoples with justice.

But when Indians refused to sell, Washington was ready to wage war against them. “Extirpate” was the term he used. (The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides two definitions of the word: one is “to pull up by the root”; the other “to destroy completely: wipe out.”) After he dispatched armies to ravage their country during the Revolution, the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) called Washington “Town Destroyer.”

The Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, after visiting Washington in Philadelphia in 1792, warned other Indians: “General Washington is very cunning, he will try to fool us if he can. He speaks very smooth, will tell you fair stories, and at the same time want to ruin us.” Six months after meeting the president, the Cherokee chief Bloody Fellow declared, “General Washington is a Liar.”

The chief was right to be skeptical. A man who had swindled fellow officers out of the bounty lands they had been promised as payment for their services after the French and Indian War hardly could be expected to protect Indian rights against forces of expansion which he himself helped set in motion.

Yet Washington envisioned a place for Indian people in American society. He offered them the chance to remake themselves as Americans by extending them the benefits of American civilization—agriculture (to be practiced by Indian men, not, as had been the case for centuries, by Indian women), education, and Christianity.

Some tribes seized the lifeline. The Cherokees rebuilt their tribe after years of war and land loss. Looking back from the 1820s and 1830s when Andrew Jackson was leading the charge to remove eastern Indian peoples west of the Mississippi, the Cherokee chief John Ross remembered with reverence the first president who had dealt justly with Indians. Ross even named his son George Washington.

Washington’s decisions set precedents that are still with us. As the father of the country, he was also the father of America’s tortuous, conflicted, and often hypocritical Indian policies. While he aspired to a national Indian policy that might somehow reconcile taking Native land with respecting Native rights, he shared and shaped the attitudes and ambitions of his time, and employed deception and violence to attain his own and his nation’s ends.

For example, the Treaty of New York, which he signed with a delegation of Creek chiefs in August 1790, contained secret articles to secure the agreement of chief Alexander McGillivray. And in 1791 Washington dispatched an army to defeat Indian resistance to American expansion by destroying Indian villages in northwest Ohio (a tactic that backfired when the Indians destroyed the army).

In fall 2016, the museum at Mount Vernon opened an exhibit entitled “Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.” The exhibit quietly, directly, and honestly shows that Washington’s home, wealth, and daily life rested on the unfree labor and exploitation of hundreds of African slaves. Even though he worried about slavery and freed his slaves in his will, Washington’s record and legacy on slavery are deeply ambivalent.

So, too, are his record and legacy in Indian affairs. We can pretend that it wasn’t, or we can acknowledge it as we try to understand the first president and the nation he helped to build.

The post George Washington’s ‘Tortuous’ Relationship with Native Americans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.