The day is part of the broader context of the month-long celebration of Native American Heritage Month, but it provides a concentrated moment to honor and recognize the contributions of indigenous peoples, through "appropriate ceremonies and activities".
This day is particularly significant because it follows a holiday with historically negative ties to Native American interactions with early European settlers; some Indigenous people think it's in poor taste to celebrate Native Americans on Black Friday, but I welcome the change of focus.
Agenda
1. Read "Root and Ritual"
2. My Mennonite ancestors in Pennsylvania
2. My Mennonite ancestors in Pennsylvania
3. Lenni Lenape people
4. Landback movement
I'm reading again from "Root and Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self," by Becca Piastrelli (2021). I'm on Part 2: Lineage, about tapping in to our ancestral memories to activate our connection to our line of descent.
3. The Lenni Lenape people:
The area where most of our Swiss and German Mennonite ancestors lived, in what would become Montgomery County, was part of the land of the Lenni Lenape (le-nē-le-nah-pē), “the original people.” Archeological evidence indicates that the Lenape inhabited the area centuries before the Europeans arrived.
The peace loving Lenni-Lenape are called the "grandfathers" or "ancient ones" by many other tribes and are considered to be among the most ancient of the Northeastern Nations. They were known as warriors and diplomats, often keeping the peace and mediating disputes between neighboring Native Nations. The Lenape were a deeply religious people and their belief in a Creator and eleven lessor Gods reached all aspects of their lives. They believed that all things had souls. This reflected a deep reverence for their natural environment and a concept that they were only a small part of Nature's grand scheme. This belief made it difficult for them to understand the concept of land ownership and purchase.
4. Landback movement
1. Read "Root and Ritual":
Chapter 6 is called What's Your Legacy? "Long after we are gone, all that will be left of us is the world we leave behind in the art we make, the seeds we've sown, and the stories of who we are."
She reminds us that thinking about the legacy of our ancestors can be difficult. "...it can bring up feelings of resistance and frustration, particularly when thinking about the harder moments in history that have caused harm to the planet and the beings who live on it."
She says, slow down and breathe.
We are not taught how to deal with the complex emotions like guilt, grief, and shame. But looking at our history is an important step in the process of reconnecting to a feeling of belonging. We can embrace the beautiful and difficult complexity of who we decend from, and appreciate our luck in living in a time with more awareness and freedom.
"When we allow the reality of pain to come forward in the narrative, we also allow the fullness of the love and redemption within our lineage to shine through."
2. My Mennonite ancestors in Pennsylvania:
Last week I wrote about my Swiss Mennonite ancestors, specifically three men: Hans Ulrich Berge, Nicholas Bieri, and Jacob Hunsberger, all born around 1700 in the Emmental Valley, Bern, Switzerland. All three of these men left Switzerland and ended up in Pennsylvania (and one of their descendants - Martha Saltzberger - married John Jones, my mother's great-great-grandfather).
Hans (John) Ulrich Berge immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1719. It’s not known where he went first, but on March 15, 1726, he purchased about 250 acres of land between the Skippack and the Perkiomen creeks in Lower Salford Township. On this land he erected buildings near the northeast branch of the Perkiomen Creek. Before 1730, he married Anna Maria Clemens, and in April 1743, at a session of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, he was naturalized. (As a Mennonite, he had conscientious scruples against taking an oath and so was affirmed instead.)
Jacob Hunsberger arrived in Pennsylvania with his wife Susanna, and two brothers, Hans and Uli, by at least 1720, when his son Abraham Hunsberger was born. Jacob and his brothers were farmers. They settled first in Salford Township, and later 1738 Jacob and Susannah purchased 152-1/2 acres in Franconia Township.
Nicholas Bieri probably fled from Switzerland to Germany with his parents before 1711. He migrated to Pennsylvania in 1727 aboard the ship Friendship. The Friendship carried 150 Swiss Mennonite families from Rotterdam, Holland, to Cowes, Isle of Wight, England, and arrived in Philadelphia in October after a four-month voyage against adverse winds in which a fifth of the passengers died. Nicholas married Barbara Ann Miller on December 1, 1728, at Pequea Settlement, and they crossed the Susquehanna River, traveling by covered Conestoga wagon, and settled on virgin land on the north bank of Codorus Creek, a mile or so north of the center of present day York, Pennsylvania, in what became Manchester Township but was then known as Springettsbury Manor.
The Lenape were part of the Algonquian family, like the Ojibwa, Blackfoot, and Shawnee, and they were divided into three bands or sub-tribes: the Munsi,“People of the Stone Country,” in northern Pennsylvania, the Unami, “People Who Live Down-River,” in central Pennsylvania, and the Unalachtigo, “People Who Live by the Ocean,” in the southern area of Pennsylvania. (Colonists called them all Delaware Indians.)
The Lenape lived in bands of 20 to 30 people, in single doorway wooden huts called wigwams situated near the rivers and creeks, where they hunted and farmed the land. In the spring, they planted their gardens in their home villages, where they cultivated corn, squash, beans, pumpkin and tobacco. In the summer, they hunted and traveled to the shores for clams and oysters. In the fall, they went back to their villages for their harvest. In late fall and early winter they went to the woods to hunt again. Then, they migrated back to their villages for spring planting. Due to their heavy tillage, the soils they farmed gradually lost their productivity and so they would relocate every two decades: Their life style was to set up, abandon, and then resettle communities throughout Pennsylvania.
The peace loving Lenni-Lenape are called the "grandfathers" or "ancient ones" by many other tribes and are considered to be among the most ancient of the Northeastern Nations. They were known as warriors and diplomats, often keeping the peace and mediating disputes between neighboring Native Nations. The Lenape were a deeply religious people and their belief in a Creator and eleven lessor Gods reached all aspects of their lives. They believed that all things had souls. This reflected a deep reverence for their natural environment and a concept that they were only a small part of Nature's grand scheme. This belief made it difficult for them to understand the concept of land ownership and purchase.
The Lenape first encountered Europeans in about 1638, when Dutch and Swedish business men established a settlement on Tinicum Island (near today’s Philadelphia International Airport) . Swedish and Finnish settlers who engaged in fur trading followed. In 1682, William Penn came to claim lands throughout southeast Pennsylvania which were granted to him by King Charles II of England, in order to establish a haven for Quakers. The Quakers believed strongly in the principles of goodwill and friendship and Penn practiced these principles with the Lenape. He entered into purchase agreements with the Lenape that brought lands deeded to his proprietorship under his absolute title. Although he took ownership rights, he still recognized and reserved certain lands where Lenape villages were located, not allowing them to be sold.
Peaceful relations between the European settlers and the Lenape would disintegrate, however, not long after Penn’s death in 1718. In the 1730s, Penn’s sons reinterpreted an accord that Penn had reached with the Lenape in 1686, insisting that the Penn family claim extended a full day-and-a-half’s walking distance. Sending out so-called "walkers" to determine the extent of their asserted domain, the Penn family seized ownership of lands sixty-five miles to the north and west of the earlier purchase agreements, effectively adding 750,000 acres to the family estate. The Lenape famously lost all claims to the terrain they had inhabited for centuries in the fraudulent "Walking Purchase" deed of 1737.
Curtis Zunigha, a Lenape of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, says, “Unfortunately, all of those colonial encounters that are in the history books ended tragically ... during a period of over 100 years, many of the Europeans who first showed up and ostensibly were seeking goodwill, trade, commerce and peace and the idea of shared occupancy in the New World, their new world, that ended over a period of time with a series of land theft, swindles, and violent, oftentimes murderous actions by the colonists to run the natives out of their land.”
Zunigha said the colonists’ success in taking the land was largely because of their sheer numbers and firepower. He also pointed to disease that the colonists brought over, which decimated Indigenous populations along the East Coast.
Zunigha is an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, in Oklahoma; the other two federally recognized Lenape tribes are the Delaware Nation, which also calls Oklahoma home, and the Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Wisconsin. There also exist three recognized Canadian tribes in Ontario: the Munsee-Delaware Nation, the Moravian of the Thames First Nations, and the Delaware of Six Nations.
Outside of federal recognition, there are four communities that have received state recognition. In Delaware, there is the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware, and in New Jersey, the other three are the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation, the Ramapough Lenape Nation, and the Powhatan Renape Nation.
4. The Landback movement:
In order to celebrate Native American Heritage Day with "appropriate ceremonies and activities", I decided to sign up for a workshop on the Landback movement, happening later this afternoon. I did some preliminary research:
Landback is a movement that has existed for generations with a long legacy of organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands. Currently, there are Landback battles being fought all across Turtle Island (North America). The closure of Mount Rushmore, and the return of that land and all public lands in the Black Hills, South Dakota, is the cornerstone battle. Mount Rushmore sits in the heart of the sacred Black Hills, and is viewed by Indigenous people as an international symbol of white supremacy and colonization.
The Landback Manifesto includes the words:
It is the reclamation of everything stolen from the original peoples: land, language, ceremony, food, education, housing, healthcare, governance, medicines, kinship
It is a relationship with Mother Earth that is symbiotic and just, where we have reclaimed stewardship.
It is bringing our People with us as we move towards liberation and embodied sovereignty through an organizing, political and narrative framework.
It is acknowledging that only when Mother Earth is well, can we, her children, be well. It is our belonging to the land – because – we are the land.
The goals of Landback are herculean, but the movement has seen recent successes, including the removal of dams along the Klamath River in Oregon following a long campaign by the Yurok Tribe and other activists, and the return of 1,200 acres in Big Sur, California, to the formerly landless Esselen Tribe.
Environmentalists recognize that Landback victories can help mitigate the impacts of climate change; from fire management to forest stewardship, Indigenous peoples have over generations amassed crucial knowledge about living and caring for ecosystems in a sustainable manner. It’s no wonder many consider Landback a keystone of environmental justice.
Jeff Kisling, member of Iowa Yearly Meeting Conservative, says on his blog Quaker Social Concerns as Mutual Aid and Landback:
It is becoming increasing clear how quickly and deeply we are moving into greater environmental chaos. Indigenous peoples have the knowledge and Spirit to do the best that can be done in these increasingly dire circumstances. And white people need to do our part to accept our accountability for the grievous damage done to indigenous peoples. ... White people cannot continue to act as if these things aren’t their problem, especially if we have any hope of working together.
Queries:
What ways of knowing have we all lost through the legacy of colonization?
What ways of knowing are we missing now in our ways of learning, listening, respecting voices different from our own?
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