Wednesday, September 27, 2017

The Shawnee Bluejacket Family

The Shawnee Bluejacket Family

The Shawnee Bluejacket family reaches back into the mid-1700s.  Records begin with Chief Bluejacket himself, also known by his Native names of Se-pet-te-he-nath, Big Rabbit, his name given at birth and Wa Weyapiersehnwaw, his adult chosen name, found in use about 1777.
Little is known of Blue Jacket’s early life. He first appears in written historical records in 1773, when he was already a grown man and a war chief. In that year, a British missionary visited the Shawnee villages on the Scioto River and recorded the location of Blue Jacket’s Town on Deer Creek (present Ross County, Ohio).

This would put BlueJacket’s birth at least before 1750.  Historians estimate it to be about 1743.
Blue Jacket participated in Dunmore’s War and the American Revolutionary War (allied with the British), always attempting to maintain Shawnee land rights. With the British defeat in the American Revolutionary War, the Shawnee lost valuable assistance in defending the Ohio Country. The struggle continued as white settlement in Ohio escalated, and Blue Jacket was a prominent leader of the resistance.

On November 3, 1791, the army of a confederation of Indian tribes, led by Blue Jacket and Miami Chief Little Turtle, defeated an American expedition led by Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory. The engagement, known as the Battle of the Wabash or as St. Clair’s Defeat, was the crowning achievement of Blue Jacket’s military career, and the most severe defeat ever inflicted upon the United States by Native Americans.

Blue Jacket’s triumph was short-lived. The Americans were alarmed by St. Clair’s disaster and raised a new professional army, commanded by General Anthony Wayne. On August 20, 1794, Blue Jacket’s confederate army clashed with Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, just south of present-day Toledo, Ohio. Blue Jacket’s army was defeated, and he was compelled to sign the Treaty of Greenville on August 3, 1795, ceding much of present-day Ohio to the United States.
In 1805, Blue Jacket also signed the Treaty of Fort Industry, relinquishing even more of Ohio. In Blue Jacket’s final years, he saw the rise to prominence of Tecumseh, who would take up the banner and make the final attempts to reclaim Shawnee lands in the Ohio Country.

Later a story spread that he was in fact a European settler named Marmaduke Van Swearingen, who had been captured and adopted by Shawnees in the 1770s, around the time of the American Revolutionary War. This story, popularized in historical novels written by Allan W. Eckert in the late 1960s, remains well known in Ohio, where an outdoor drama celebrating the life of the white Indian chief was performed yearly in Xenia, Ohio from 1981 until 2007.

However, subsequent DNA testing proved that story to be false.  Bluejacket’s DNA is unquestionably Native, and the Swearingen family’s is not.  Not only does the Bluejacket and Swearingen DNA not match, they are not even in the same haplogroup.  Swearingen is European, so they haven’t shared a common ancestors in 10s of thousands of years.  An article published in the Ohio Journal of Science in September 2006 which details the findings is shown at this link:                                               http://shawnee-bluejacket.com/Bluejacket_Folders/BlueJacket.pdf

The Bluejacket family has a website with further information about history and current activities at this link:  http://shawnee-bluejacket.com/

Also on this site is the list of the 772 Shawnee adopted into the Cherokee tribe in 1871:  http://shawnee-bluejacket.com/1871_registry.htm

Piqua Shawnee
www.piquashawnee.com

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

The Battle for Ohio and Adulthood - Tecumseh

The Battle for Ohio and Adulthood

From the Oxford Research Libraries

Tecumseh, Shawnee Land, Piqua Shawnee

From the beginning to the end of Tecumseh’s life, he and his people fought increasing numbers of settlers determined to cross the Ohio River. Settlers invaded Shawnee lands from the south, steadily expanding their sovereignty over all but the northwestern corner of Ohio, a region then known as the Great Black Swamp. For most Native peoples determined to remain in Ohio, the area of the Maumee and Auglaize region, known as “the Glaize,” became a site of resistance to American expansion. By 1785 villages led by two Shawnee leaders, Blue Jacket and Buckongehelas (Captain Johnny), and one Miami chief, Little Turtle, dotted the landscape. Situated within ten miles of each other for mutual defense, seven main towns (three Shawnee, two Delaware, one Miami, and a European trading town) joined forces. In 1790, and again in 1791, these allied villagers defeated American armies. In the second battle, the 1791 conflict now known as St. Clair’s Defeat, in which Tecumseh did not participate, the allied Indians inflicted approximately nine hundred casualties on a force of nearly seventeen hundred soldiers. Amounting to “possibly the worst defeat in US military history,” these victories convinced Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and Buckongehelas that together they could defeat the Americans and preserve their Ohio homeland. 10 These pan-Indian forces tended to fight against irregular militias, composed of both Kentuckians and Ohioans. For example, Arthur St. Clair, the commanding general of the army during the 1791 defeat, was the first governor of the Northwest Territory.

The victories of 1790 and 1791 proved to be short-lived. After these American defeats, the U.S. government assumed greater control of American expansion, and assigned to General “Mad” Anthony Wayne the task of breaking the allied communities at the Glaize. Wayne was an accomplished leader and a tough-minded disciplinarian who had prepared his troops for battle. Before the main battle, he had the audacity to build Fort Defiance at the traders’ town on the Glaize. On August 20, 1794, Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa, and their brother Sauwauseekau fought Wayne’s army at Fallen Timbers with not many more than four hundred warriors. Sauwauseekau fell in battle while fighting alongside his brothers. The Battle of Fallen Timbers resulted in the devastating Treaty of Greenville (1795), which laid the groundwork for the United States’ ultimate possession of the Old Northwest.11

After Fallen Timbers, President George Washington and his increasingly confident administration enacted a series of land policies that were designed to divest Native peoples of their lands. In 1796, Henry Knox, Washington’s secretary of war, worked with Congress to create a system of government trading houses. Continued under both the Adams and Jefferson administrations, and run by the federal government, these trading houses turned Native peoples into debtors of the United States. Like Washington before him, President Thomas Jefferson recognized that when “debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they [Indians] become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.” William Henry Harrison, a man widely regarded as “Mr. Jefferson’s hammer,” believed that one white hunter killed “more game than five of the common Indians.” Trading houses and increasing numbers of frontiersmen decimated deer herds, leading to starvation of the Native peoples in Ohio in the first decade of the 19th century.12

As a young adult, Tecumseh lived in villages that had experienced more than two decades of incessant violence. Settlers who once had to cross the Appalachian Mountains to reach them now lived in close proximity. Older chiefs who had struggled against these migrants for decades came to believe that peace and accommodation, rather than continued resistance, offered the best hope for survival. For example, in the aftermath of the Battle of Fallen Timbers, both the Shawnee leader Black Hoof and Little Turtle became convinced that living with Americans, behind a constantly advancing frontier, offered the best strategy for the survival of their people. Approximately eight hundred people lived at Wapakoneta, Black Hoof’s village on the Auglaize River in northwestern Ohio. At the same time, not more than forty Shawnees supported the Shawnee brothers. Their foremost adherents tended to be younger men. Notable exceptions included Blue Jacket, one of Little Turtle’s and Black Hoof’s allies from the wars of the 1790s.13

However ardent their desire to return to their traditional beliefs and values, pan-Indian leaders proposed deep innovations in Indian country. First among them was the idea that a shared history of oppression at the hands of colonizers had enabled Native peoples to reimagine themselves as a race of people, rather than as members of separate tribes. In 1810, when he was at the height of his power, Tecumseh explained that Indians “could never be good friends with the United States until [the Americans] abandoned the idea of acquiring lands by purchase from the Indians, without the consent of all tribes.” Tecumseh argued that tribal leaders no longer had the authority to speak, or to sign treaties, with the United States.14

American officials recognized the threat posed by pan-Indian leaders of revitalization and reform. Historian Sami Lakomäki explains that revitalization movements are “common among colonized peoples around the globe.” Anthropologist A. F. C. Wallace defines these worldwide phenomena as “deliberate, organized, conscious effort(s) by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture.” Tecumseh’s idea of a “more satisfying culture” hinged upon his ability to unite all of the Native peoples of the eastern half of North America. In his own words, Tecumseh aspired to “collect the different nations to form one settlement” in order to “preserve their country from all encroachments.”15

Federal officials ignored these demands and continued to sign treaties, largely in secret, with small numbers of leaders committed to older, tribal understandings of identity and politics. American officials hoped to transform tribes into nation-states modeled after the United States. Jefferson himself consulted with one of Tecumseh’s rivals, Black Beard, assuring him that “if the United States can be of any service in bringing you [the Shawnees] all together in one place, we will willingly assist you.” William Wells, then Indian agent at Fort Wayne, believed that “each nation should be collected together and some regular sistam [sic] of government established among them.” Jefferson, Wells, and Tecumseh’s arch-rival, the territorial governor of Indiana, William Henry Harrison, worked assiduously to defeat Tecumseh by consolidating authority in the hands of tribal leaders sometimes called “government chiefs” because of their desire to live peacefully, as sovereign nations, within the United States. Tecumseh recognized the U.S. strategy, accusing village chiefs of “ruining our Country” by ceding so much land to the Americans.16

Americans ignored the long history of Native reform and revitalization. They preferred to see revitalization movements as the brainchildren of competing empires determined to thwart the United States’ continental aspirations. They could not imagine that Native people themselves could develop such a sophisticated response to American expansion. For example, in February 1803, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn believed that “certain persons among Indian nations . . . were agents from the French or Spanish government” who were trying to “engage the several tribes” in a general war against the United States. General James Wilkinson, who was in 1805 governor of Louisiana Territory, feared a pan-Indian attack. Ironically, it was Wilkinson himself who dreamed of joining forces with another empire. In 1805 he was “secretly on the Spanish government’s payroll” in order to bring new territories into New Spain.17

Among Indians of the Great Lakes–Ohio valley region, Tecumseh embodied a social movement decades in the making. As historian Richard White has written, Tecumseh was “the culmination of the complicated village and imperial politics of the middle ground.”18 Religion was a vital component of the movement. For example, Tecumseh’s brother inspired the pan-Indian movement that Tecumseh later championed. For many years, Tecumseh lived in the shadow of this more famous younger brother, Tenskwatawa, or “the Open Door.” It had not always been so. Prior to Tenskwatawa’s conversion experience, sometime between April and November of 1805, this brother, also known as the “Shawnee Prophet,” had been called Lalawethika, or “the rattle/loudmouth.” He was blind in one eye from a hunting accident as a boy. And while he was coming of age, Chiksika had refused to take him along on his many hunting trips. According to most accounts, he was a failed hunter and an alcoholic who depended on his older brother to feed and clothe his wife and children. Lalawethika embodied the worst effects of colonialism. His circumstances began to improve when he began listening to “an aging shaman” known as Penagashea, or “Changing Feathers.”

After Penagashea died in 1804, Lalawethika fell into a trance so deep that his relatives believed he was dead. Miraculously, he awoke with a vision of reform that featured some of the components of sin and salvation common during the Second Great Awakening in places such as Cane Ridge, Kentucky. Tenskwatawa described an Indian hell in which alcoholics were forced to swallow molten lead for all time. But he also preached that polygamy, hide hunting, and relying on personal medicine bundles were sins. Both the five Shawnee divisions and individual Shawnees possessed medicine bundles that conferred special powers on those who took care of them. In asking his supporters to destroy them, Tenskwatawa asked his followers to abandon their individual power and follow him. For many, this had to have been a terrible choice, because it meant forsaking sacred powers conferred on them during their vision quests. Shawnees regarded their bundles as living beings, other-than-human persons, tasked with protecting the individual and advancing his interests. In abandoning them, Tenskwatawa hoped to lead them into a new way of life. He also demanded that Indian women married to non-Indian husbands must leave them and return to agricultural pursuits. In contrast, Indian men had to abandon domesticated animals, from chickens to cattle, and return to hunting for meat rather than trading. Those who ignored his demands, and continued to believe in their bundles, were often accused of directing the power contained within them against their followers. Witchcraft allegations led to the deaths of Shawnees, Wyandots, and Delawares in both Ohio and Missouri. Those who were killed tended to be tribal leaders, Christian converts, and men deeply invested in trading with the Americans. Such advocates of living in a plural world, behind the frontier, were an affront to Tenskwatawa and the reforms he promoted.19

In 1805 the Shawnee brothers established a new town at Greenville, Ohio, where they intended to consolidate all of the Shawnees and their neighbors in a single, revitalized community. It was a place freighted with meaning. They built their town near the site of the infamous Treaty of Greenville, where Native peoples resigned themselves to American power in the wake of the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Establishing a pan-Indian community there symbolized Native people’s desire to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of that defeat. But for American officials, Tecumseh offered a more philanthropic rationale. He explained: “The Shawnese have heretofore been scattered about in parties, which we have found has been attended with bad consequences. We are now going to collect them all together to one town that the chief may keep them in good order and prevent drunkenness from coming among them, and try to raise corn and stock to live upon.”20 Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa attempted to build their coalition at Greenville for the next three years. However, living in such close proximity to their Native opponents, as well as traders and government agents allied with them, was not a winning strategy. In the spring of 1808 they moved farther west, on the Tippecanoe River, a tributary of the Wabash River, which granted them easier access to western tribes that were more sympathetic to their cause. By May 1810, Harrison wrote, “The Prophets force at present consists in part of his own Tribe, which has always been attached to him; nearly all the Kickapoos, a number of winebagoes, some Hurons from Detrot who have lately joined him, a number of Potawatomis, 20 or 30 Muskoes or Creeks and some stragglers from the Ottawas. Chippways and other tribes in all perhaps from 6 to 800.”21

In a speech to Harrison in August 1808, Tenskwatawa proclaimed that his supporters “were once different people, they are now but one.” Such rhetoric belied the fact that most of these supporters came from lands to the north and west of the middle Ohio valley. Tribes such as the Kickapoos, Potawatomis, Ojibwes, and Ho-Chunks were central to the revitalization movement. In contrast, tribes in the vicinity of Greenville (1805–1808) and Prophetstown (1808–1811) opposed the reforms.
As their revitalization movement gained momentum, Governor Harrison fueled Tecumseh’s and Tenskwatawa’s popularity by confronting Native peoples between 1803 and 1809 with the most aggressive series of treaties they had ever encountered. His treaty making culminated with the Treaty of Fort Wayne, which ceded more than three million acres of land along the southern Indiana-Illinois border and east-central Indiana.22 These treaties galvanized his opponents, and Tenskwatawa became more and more bellicose. Harrison sent spies such as Michel Brouilett and John Tanner in an attempt to gauge the prospects of war. The Prophet discovered them and responded by telling Harrison “that his people should not come any nearer to him, that they should not settle on the Vermillion River—he smelt them too strong already.” Prophetstown became a prominent resting place for Potawatomis, Kickapoos, Sauks, Meskwakis, and Ho-Chunks on their way to consult and trade with the British at Amherstburg. To accommodate the traffic, village dwellers built a large dwelling they dubbed “The House of the Stranger.”23

Like most Americans, Harrison believed that the British were ultimately responsible for all anti-American actions on the frontier. He could not imagine that Native peoples acted on their own. In his opinion, they were little more than British pawns. And so, in an 1810 letter to Secretary of War William Eustis, he wrote, “I have as little doubt that the scheme originated with the British and that the Prophet is inspired by the superintendent of Indian affairs for Upper Canada, rather than the Great Spirit, from whom he pretends to derive his authority.”24

Between 1808 and 1811, Tecumseh traveled far and wide in search of people willing to join the revitalization movement. He visited the Sauks and Meskwakis in Illinois and Iowa, and his own kinsmen at Cape Girardeau, Missouri. But his central aim remained the unification of southern and northern tribes into a grand confederacy. Like so many Shawnee leaders before him, including Peter Chartier in the 1740s and, more recently, Black Beard in the first decades of the 19th century, Tecumseh had a deep connection with the large confederacies of the Southeast, and the Creeks and Cherokees in particular. His awareness of southeastern protocols, combined with his mother’s Creek lineage, gained Tecumseh favor among the Creeks. He arrived at Tukabatchee in mid-September, just in time for the meeting of the Creek national council. And it was here that Tecumseh competed for the Creeks’ attention with Benjamin Hawkins, the southern superintendent of Indian affairs. Hawkins advocated a “civilization plan” that included slave ownership, stock raising, and the privatization of land. In public speeches, Tecumseh asked his allies to “unite in peace and friendship among themselves and cultivate the same with their white neighbors.” But in Hawkins’s recollection of Tecumseh’s visit, he demanded that the Creeks “kill the old Chiefs, friends to peace; kill the cattle, the hogs, the fowls; do not work, destroy the wheels and looms, throw away your ploughs, and everything used by the Americans.”25 Small numbers of Creeks did travel with Tecumseh and fight with him during the War of 1812. But more importantly, Tecumseh helped to ignite the Redstick War of 1813–1814, a Creek civil war over Hawkins’s civilization plan that Tecumseh’s Creek supporters ultimately lost.

During Tecumseh’s travels, Tenskwatawa became the leader at Prophetstown. Aware of Tecumseh’s absence, Harrison seized the opportunity and marched north from Vincennes, along the Wabash River, to Prophetstown. Warriors tracked his army’s progress and, on November 6, sent a delegation in an attempt to forestall combat. But inside Prophetstown, the diverse inhabitants of the village called for war. Tenskwatawa headed their demands, and chose to initiate conflict with Harrison’s army in the predawn hours of November 7, 1811. The Battle of Tippecanoe lasted approximately two and a half hours. After their initial surprise, Harrison’s men rallied, and Tenskwatawa’s men retreated from the battlefield. When the dust settled, approximately 35 warriors had been killed. In contrast, 62 Americans had been killed and another 126 wounded.26 When Tecumseh learned of the battle, he threatened to kill Tenskwatawa. Indeed, their movement never again obtained the same level of support. Harrison’s men’s burned food stores and made it difficult for Prophetstown to rise to power once more. However, by disbursing Tecumseh’s and Tenskwatawa’s followers, Harrison vastly expanded the field of combat between settlers and Native peoples. The revitalization movement fragmented, but it did not fall apart.

Piqua Shawnee
www.piquashawnee.com 

Monday, September 25, 2017

Pioneer Days, Simon Kenton Festival, Piqua Shawnee

Students learn, have fun at Pioneer Days,  Simon Kenton Festival  

The Ledger Independent by

MAYSVILLE -- Students from Mason County Intermediate School received history lessons Friday about the early days of Kentucky.
The students traveled to Old Washington for the annual Pioneer Days where they learned about crops grown, what homes looked like, played old-fashioned games and had a chance to pet horses and oxen.

"This is a great learning experience for the students," Kim Galloway, special education teacher said. "They got to see a lot of things they would never get to experience."

Abby Collen-Nickell, Madison Hardin and Kionna Alexander said they had a lot of fun singing the old songs as Mary McGlone played the dulcimer.

High school volunteers Sarah Crason, Constance Craig and Grace Huber, dressed in periodic clothing, played old-fashioned games such as duck-duck-goose and hopscotch with the students while other students took a moment to eat lunch on the old courthouse lawn.
Other students took turns petting Gerry Barker's oxen while others learned how to throw hatchets and use a bow and arrow from Josh Kriger.

Students also learned about the goods that were used in the pioneer days.

Piqua Shawnee Chief Gary Hunt, along with other Native American volunteers, took time to speak with the students about the roles Indians played back in those days.

This is Hunt's 12th year in the re-enactment as Simon Kenton was adopted by a Shawnee tribe.
"The organizers wanted to bring my people and the Kentons back together for a type of reunion," he said. "I enjoy my time here. It is a chance to portray history without dealing with the politics."
Hunt said he enjoys seeing the children faces as they get enjoyment seeing Native Americans.
"We are bringing real history to them," he said. "I enjoy being in the land of my ancestors."




http://www.maysville-online.com/news/local/students-learn-have-fun-at-pioneer-days/article_41bf7d86-51fa-5c08-a15e-439c15eacc8d.html

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

The Shawnee Indians: Their Customs, Their Traditions and Folk-Lore

https://digital.libraries.ou.edu/utils/getfile/collection/indianpp/id/7857/filename/7858.pdf

The Shawnee Indians: Their Customs, Their Traditions and Folk-Lore

Written by: James R. Carselowey, Journalist
April 26, 1938
 Indian pioneer papers, 1860-1935. (Millwood, New York: Kraus Microform, 1989).

The University of Oklahoma: Digital Library


James R. Carselowey wrote several articles for the Indian Pioneer Papers.  The above referenced article written in 1938 focuses on stories, traditions learned for those who lived among the Shawnee after they made their move out of Kansas from 1868-1871.

"Some of the leaders, including three ex-chiefs of the Shawnee Tribe, together with a small band of others came down to the territory as early as 1868, selected their land and went back for a time.  The three chiefs: Charles Rogers, Johnson Blackfeather, Cyrus Cornatzer."


                                                   ##########################

The Indian-Pioneer Papers oral history collection spans from 1861 to 1936. It includes typescripts of interviews conducted during the 1930s by government workers (Works Progress Administration (WPA) writers' project grant) with thousands of Oklahomans regarding the settlement of Oklahoma and Indian territories, as well as the condition and conduct of life there. Consisting of approximately 80,000 entries, the index to this collection may be accessed via personal name, place name, or subject.

Carselowey Family History

Repositories
Family History Centerhttp://www.familysearch.org/eng/library/fhlcatal..
University of Oklahomahttp://digital.libraries.ou.edu/whc/pioneer/

Monday, September 18, 2017

The Shawnee Sun, 1: The First Indian-language Periodical Published in the United States


The Shawnee Sun, 1

The First Indian-language Periodical
Published in the United States

Doug C. McMurtrie

November 1933 (Vol. 2, No. 4), pages 338 to 342
Transcribed by lhn; digitized with permission of the Kansas Historical Society.


Visit the Official Website of the Piqua Shawnee

Friday, September 15, 2017

The Shawanese prophet and Tecumseh / Huyot. (Wood Engraving)

Library of Congress - Wood engravings--1810-1890.

Tecumseh,--Shawnee Chief,--1768-1813

Tenskwatawa,--Shawnee Prophet

 Created / Published [between 1814 and 1890]

 The Shawanese prophet and Tecumseh / Huyot.

Print shows Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, and Tecumseh, 
with other Natives and tipis in the background.




Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Digital Id
cph 3a20703 //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a20703

Library of Congress Control Number
2012645311


Library of Congress Link:


Visit the Official Website of the Piqua Shawnee:

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

History of the Shawnee Indians: From the Year 1681 to 1854 by Henry Harvey (1855)

History of the Shawnee Indians: From the Year 1681 to 1854, Inclusive

Front Cover

Ephraim Morgan & sons, 1855 - Shawnee Indians - 306 pages

Author Henry Harvey, member of the Religious Society of Friends spent time with the Shawnee Indians learning their history and culture.  Although the intent was to teach the Shawnee doctrines and principles of the Christian Religion Henry Harvey took account of the Shawnee people and their history.  This is his account of his time with the Shawnee. 

Reference links:
http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Shawnee#/State-recognized_tribes
https://books.google.com/books?id=-egNAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false


Harvey, Henry (1855). History of the Shawnee Indians: From the Year 1681 to 1854, Inclusive. Cincinnati: Ephraim Morgan & Sons. p. 18.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Piqua Shawnee - Green Corn Ceremony

The Green Corn Ceremony(Wikipedia)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Sioux Green Corn Dance c. 1860
Sioux Green Corn Dance c. 1860

The Green Corn Ceremony (Busk) is an annual ceremony practiced among various Native American peoples associated with the beginning of the yearly corn harvest. Busk is a term given to the ceremony by white traders, the word being a corruption of the Creek word puskita for "a fast".[1] These ceremonies have been documented ethnographically throughout the North American Eastern Woodlands and Southeastern tribes.[2] Historically, it involved a first fruits rite in which the community would sacrifice the first of the green corn to ensure the rest of the crop would be successful. These Green Corn festivals were practiced widely throughout southern North America by many tribes evidenced in the Mississippian people and throughout the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere. Green Corn festivals are still held today by many different Southeastern Woodland tribes. The Green Corn Ceremony typically occurs in late July–August, determined locally by the ripening of the corn crops.[1] The ceremony is marked with dancing, feasting, fasting and religious observations.

Traditions

The Green Corn Ceremony is a celebration of many types, representing new beginnings. Also referred to as the Great Peace Ceremony,[1] it is a celebration of thanksgiving to Hsaketumese (The Breath Maker) for the first fruits of the harvest, and a New Year festival as well.
The Busk is the celebration of the New Year, so at this time all offenses are forgiven except for rape and murder, which are executable or banishable offenses. In modern tribal towns and Stomp Dance societies only the ceremonial fire, the cook fires and certain other ceremonial objects will be replaced. Everyone usually begins gathering by the weekend prior to the ceremony, working, praying, dancing and fasting off and on until the big day.
The whole festival tends to last seven-eight days, if you include the historical preparation involved (without the preparation, it lasts about four days).

Day One

The first day of the ceremony, people set up their campsites on one of the square ceremonial grounds.[3] Following this, there is a feast of the remains of last year's crop, after which all the men of the community begin fasting (historically, the women were considered too weak to participate[1]). That night there is a social stomp dance, unique to the Muscogee and Southeastern cultures.

Day Two

Before dawn on the second day, four brush-covered arbors are set up on the edges of the ceremonial grounds, one in each of the sacred directions.[3] For the first dance of the day, the women of the community participate in a Ribbon or Ladies Dance, which involves fastening rattles and shells to their legs perform a purifying dance with special ribbon-clad sticks to prepare the ceremonial ground for the renewal ceremony.[4] The ceremonial fire is set in the middle of four logs laid crosswise, so as to point to the four directions. The Mico (head priest) takes out a little of each of the new crops (not just corn, but beans, squash, wild plants, and others) rubbed with bear oil, and it is offered together with some meat as "first-fruits" and an atonement for all sins.[1] The fire (which has been re-lit and nurtured with a special medicine by the Mico) will be kept alive until the following year's Green Corn Ceremony. In traditional times, the women would sweep out their cook-fires and the rest of their homes and collect the filth from this, as well as any old clothing and furniture to be burnt and replaced with new items for the new year.[1][3] The women then bring the coals of the fire into their homes, to rekindle their home fires. They can then bake the new fruits of the year over this fire (also to be eaten with bear oil). Many Creeks also practice the sapi or ceremonial scratches, a type of bloodletting in the mid morning, and in many tribes the men and women might rub corn milk, ash, white clay, or analogous mixtures over themselves and bathe as a form of purification.[4]
They also drink a medicine referred to as passv,[3] also referred to as the "White Drink." (English traders referred to it as the "Black Drink" due to its dark liquid which froths white when shaken before drinking). This White Drink, known to strangers as Carolina Tea, is a caffeine-laden mixture of seven to fourteen different herbs, the main ingredient being assi-luputski, Creek for "small leaves" of Yaupon Holly. This medicine was intended to help receive purification, as it is a purgative when consumed in mass amounts. (Historically, only men drank enough of the liquid to throw up.) [1] The purgative was consumed to clean the dietary tract of last year's crop and to truly renew oneself for the new year.

Day Three

While the second day tends to focus on the women's dance, the third is focused on the men's.[3]
After the purification of the second day, men of the community perform the Feather Dance to heal the community.
The fasting usually ends by supper-time after the word is given by the women that the food is prepared, at which time the men march in single-file formation down to a body of water, typically a flowing creek or river for a ceremonial dip in the water and private men’s meeting. They then return to the ceremonial square and perform a single Stomp Dance before retiring to their home camps for a feast. During this time, the participants in the medicine rites are not allowed to sleep, as part of their fast. At midnight a Stomp Dance ceremony is held, which includes feasting and continues on through the night. This ceremony usually ends shortly after dawn.

Day Four

The fourth day has friendship dances at dawn, games, and people later pack up and return home with their feelings of purification and forgiveness. Fasting from alcohol, sexual activity, and open water will continue for another four days.

Symbolism

Puskita, commonly referred to as the "Green Corn Ceremony" or "Busk," is the central and most festive holiday of the traditional Muscogee people. It represents not only the renewal of the annual cycle, but of the spirit and traditions of the Muscogee. This is representative of the return of summer, the ripening of the new corn, and the common Native American traditions of environmental and agricultural renewal.
Historically in the Seminole tribe, 12-year-old boys are declared men at the Green Corn Ceremony, and given new names by the chief as a mark of their maturity.

Tribal Participation

Several tribes still participate in these ceremonies each year, but tribes who have historic tradition within the ceremony include the Iroquois, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole tribes. Each of these tribes may have their own variations of celebration, dances and traditions, but each performs a new-year's ceremony involving fasting and several other comparisons each year.

Visit the official web site of the Piqua Shawnee at piquashawnee.com

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Monday, September 11, 2017

The Trail of Tecumseh (1917) by Paul G. Tomlinson

The Trail of Tecumseh


Publication date
Digitizing sponsor Kahle/Austin Foundation
Language English
Preface:
Tecumseh has long been recognized as one of the most romantic characters in American history. A
Shawnee chieftain of boundless courage, devoted patriotism, and great tenacity of purpose, for many
years he was a source of perplexity as well as of trouble on the frontier.

Visit the Official Web Site of the Piqua Shawnee at Piquashawnee.com

Friday, September 8, 2017

Tecumseh and the Shawnee Resistance Movement from the Oxford Research Encyclopedias

Tecumseh and the Shawnee Resistance Movement  

Stephen Warren

Subject: Early National History, Native American History


Summary and Keywords

Described as a “chief among chiefs” by the British, and by his arch-rival, William Henry Harrison, as “one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things,” Tecumseh impressed all who knew him. Lauded for his oratory, military and diplomatic skills, and, ultimately, his humanity, Tecumseh presided over the greatest Indian resistance movement that had ever been assembled in the eastern half of North America. His genius lay in his ability to fully articulate religious, racial, and cultural ideals borne out of his people’s existence on fault lines between competing empires and Indian confederacies. Known as “southerners” by their Algonquian relatives, the Shawnees had a history of migrating between worlds. Tecumseh, and his brother, Tenskwatawa, converted this inheritance into a widespread social movement in the first decade and a half of the 19th-century, when more than a thousand warriors, from many different tribes, heeded their call to halt American expansion along the border of what is now Ohio and Indiana. Tecumseh articulated a vision of intertribal, pan-Indian unity based on revitalization and reform, and his ambitions very nearly rewrote early American history.

Primary Sources

For an excellent, chronologically arranged collection of sources related to both Tecumseh and the Shawnees, historians should first consult the Shawnee Papers, housed in the Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Archives at Indiana University’s Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology. This collection contains a wealth of primary sources, gathered together by an exceptional team of anthropologists and historians through their work on behalf of the Indian Claims Commission. As such, this collection offers a useful springboard into more difficult and harder-to-reach archival sources.
Tecumseh’s own words come to us through Anthony Shane and Stephen Ruddell, white captives of the Shawnees who were raised alongside Tecumseh. The oral historian and archivist Lyman Draper interviewed both men about Tecumseh in the 1840s, years after his death. Draper also interviewed and corresponded with a host of Tecumseh’s adversaries, and their recollections can be found in the Tecumseh Papers of the Lyman Copeland Draper Collection, which have been microfilmed by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Colonizers left behind a rich, but terribly biased, source record on Tecumseh. For example, many of Tecumseh’s speeches can be found in the papers of his foremost adversary, William Henry Harrison, published by the Indiana Historical Society. Similarly, the papers of Thomas Forsyth and Simon Kenton offer useful, but adversarial, perspectives on pan-Indianism. Historians should also consult British perspectives on Tecumseh, including the papers of John Askin, William Claus, and the McKee family. In the 19th century, neither British nor American historians bothered to interview Shawnees about Tecumseh and his legacy. A century later, the ethnohistorian Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin interviewed Shawnees about Tecumseh, and her papers are housed at the Newberry Library.

Read the complete version at:
http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-309

Visit the Official Web Site of the Piqua Shawnee at piquashawnee.com

Thursday, September 7, 2017

Powder Horn Tecumseh at the National Army Museum, London

National Army Museum - Chelsea London

Powder horn, 1812 (c).

 
Powder Horn is believed to have belonged to Tecumseh (1768-1813)

This powder horn is believed to have belonged to Tecumseh (1768-1813), a warrior chief of the Shawnee people, who were allied to the British in the American War of 1812. A powder horn was used to pour gunpowder into the barrel of a weapon.

NAM Accession Number

NAM. 1963-10-202-1

Copyright/Ownership

National Army Museum Copyright

Location

National Army Museum, Study collection

Object URL

https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=1963-10-202-1


Visit the Official Web Site of the Piqua Shawnee  www.piquashawnee.com

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Friday, September 1, 2017

Life of Tecumseh and His Brother the Prophet By Benjamin Drake (1852)

Life Of Tecumseh and his Brother the Prophet By Benjamin Drake (1852)

https://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.32000003384825 

The Library of Congress is a great source for historical information and has many periodicals available for digital download and search.

The book notes that the earliest mention of the Shawnee by any writer is the beginning of the 17th Century.  Mr. Jefferson in his "Notes on Virginia" mentions Captain John Smith (April 1607) there was a fierce War raging against the allied Mohicans, residing on Long Island, and the Shawanoes on the Susquehanna, and to the westward of that River, by the Iroquois.