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We the People, Shawnee and Delaware, Our Journey

Seven years ago, as I started to prepare for the Lewis and Clark commemoration, I attended a regional conference where I met Dark Rain Thom of the Ohio Remnant Band of Shawnees and her husband, James Alexander Thom. Jim Thom was well-known as the author of a novelized life of the Shawnee resistance leader, Tecumseh. Because of his research for that book, the Ohio Remnant Band had adopted him and he had met Dark Rain. They both came to Cape Girardeau to speak at our opening program on "Changed Lives: Lewis and Clark Meet the West."

Jim Thom's Panther in the Sky was my starting point for a study of cultural tensions on the U.S. frontier -- Pittsburgh, PA and west -- in the era leading up to the Louisiana Purchase. It led me into a pile of fascinating books, including several wonderful ones by the historian, James Ronda.

I learned that Shawnees had come to Missouri to start new lives far away from the tensions and violence in their Ohio homeland. I learned that groups of Shawnees and Delawares, who were traditional allies, had "settled" an area of eastern Missouri at the invitation of the Spanish Empire. Spain wanted loyal settlers here to serve as a buffer. It turned my thinking upside down to understand "Indians" as "settlers." I saw another version of what we casually refer to as "the American Dream." Settle they did, and Lewis and Clark looked up their largest settlement on the Apple Creek north of Cape Girardeau as they journeyed north to St. Louis before embarking west.

The unrelenting arrival of Americans disrupted the Shawnee and Delaware dream of their own homeland here, and they dispersed over the next generation. "Delaware Town" is now an archaeological site south of Springfield. Sarcoxie, Missouri was named for a Delaware leader. The old Shawnee Reservation in southwest Missouri was evacuated as national policy shifted in the direction of "Indian Removal" to new homelands farther and farther away from the new American settlers.

Despite the absence of Indian Reservations in Missouri, the 2000 census reported that 25,000 people in our state -- people who live in every one of our counties -- consider themselves Native American. If you are a new Missouri school teacher, you can count on having a child of Native American genealogy in your class at one time or another. Will your instruction be up to that child's needs?

The American Indians who once knew Missouri as a homeland, now live elsewhere, for the most part. This fall there will be a "welcome home" for the descendents of the Missouri Shawnees and Delawares, in Marble Hill, not too far from the historic settlements in the 1790s. Shawnees and Delawares who now live in Oklahoma and southwest Missouri will journey to Bollinger County to view the exhibit they helped Delilah Tayloe design and create. Then they will become cultural tourists in eastern Missouri. They will see Cahokia mounds and other points of interest after they see their new exhibit.

The Bollinger County Museum of Natural History is a remarkable institution. It has a wonderful exhibit on "the Missouri dinosaur" that is the result of years of painstaking work by curator, Guy Darrough. Eva Dunn, the town's energetic librarian, is also a key person in the museum's development. Her patience with this lengthy design process is a cause for thanks in itself. There are not enough thanks for Delilah Tayloe, who stuck to this project through innumerable difficulties and created something extraordinaty.

[NOTE, October 19, 2009] The planned exhibit opening in early November has been postponed to the early spring of 2010 because of a need for additional tribal consultation before the final exhibit panels are installed.]

 

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