The Eastern Shawnee Tribe is now based in Northeast Oklahoma. But before that, the tribe’s ancestors lived in the Midwest, including what’s now Ohio.
The tribe recently took a big step toward re-establishing its presence in the Heartland. That’s with the hiring of Jennifer Aultman as executive director of strategic homeland partnerships.
She used to work with Ohio History Connection as the chief historic sites officer and oversaw the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks’s application to be added to the UNESCO World Heritage Site list.
WYSO’s Indigenous affairs reporter Adriana Martinez-Smiley spoke with Aultman to learn what she’s been up to in the first six months in her new role.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
JENNIFER AULTMAN: I would say at the high level, it's to help the tribe reconnect with the homelands. There has been a lot of work in the last 15 to 20 years, especially by Chief Glenna Wallace. She's been chief for over 20 years and she's made many connections and relationships here in Ohio. Some of them through the World Heritage Project, some of them for other reasons, but she is retiring.
So my role is to continue those relationships, deepen them and help the tribe reconnect with Ohio in even some new ways now that hey have many relationships in place.
MARTINEZ-SMILEY: Yeah, and I'm sure your previous experience with Ohio History Connection will help facilitate that a little bit.
AULTMAN: It will, my previous role I worked statewide and I worked with some of the sites that are ancestral Shawnee sites, or more broadly speaking, American Indian sites. So I know the history pretty well, although there's always more to learn, especially about the Eastern Shawnee Tribe specifically. But having those statewide relationships and kind of a big picture of Ohio's history is really helpful in this role.
MARTINEZ-SMILEY: I understand that you aren't an Eastern Shawnee citizen yourself, and like you mentioned, you're over here in Ohio when the tribe is currently headquartered in Oklahoma. Can you describe to me how you built a relationship with the tribe, that they trusted you to take on this role?
AULTMAN: Yeah, I'm not an Eastern Shawnee citizen and I am not Native. My training is in anthropology and archeology and that's the direction that my relationship with the tribe was built through, and it was really through the World Heritage Inscription Project for the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.
Again, Chief Glenna Wallace was very involved in that project and I worked on it for about nine and a half years. So working with Chief and many other tribal representatives over the nine and half years, I think you build a level of trust, you understand what motivates the person to do the work, and she and I just really enjoy working together and have a lot of the same goals. So I was very honored to be asked by the tribe to come and work for them.
MARTINEZ-SMILEY: And now that you've been in this role for six months, what are some of the things that you have accomplished so far?
AULTMAN: One of the big accomplishments in the first six months was actually the homelands tour that we did. So we had a bus tour and we had approximately 55 or 60 people on that tour, Eastern Shawnee citizens and a couple of staff members. They came from Oklahoma to Ohio and actually some of the surrounding states. We had stops in West Virginia and Pennsylvania and Michigan and many, many, sites in Ohio. So that was a nine-day trip for them. It was really important to me to make sure that everybody felt really cared for.
You know, all their meals were taken care of, their lodging, and they could just focus on being together and being in the homelands and deepening their knowledge of their own history and getting to experience places that many of them had never been before, where their ancestors had been.
MARTINEZ-SMILEY: You were touching on this a little bit earlier, and I want you to expand a little bit more on it. But for the Eastern Shawnee Tribe, Ohio is its homelands, and it's been a long time since the tribe has been displaced from this area. So can you tell me, why does this position feel important now?
AULTMAN: Absolutely. So a little bit of history, the Eastern Shawnee Tribe had a reservation in Ohio, so their historic territory covers 20 some states, but their last reservation in the East was in northwest Ohio, actually around the area that's now Indian Lake, just south of there.
When Andrew Jackson became president in 1830 and the Indian Removal Act was signed, it then took until 1832 when the Eastern Shawnee Tribe was forcibly removed from the homelands. I mean, there was a treaty signed and so on, but it wasn't a place that they wanted to leave, right?
So that was 1832, that's almost 200 years ago. And I think for any of us, we can imagine that if our ancestors, our family, had to leave a home that they loved, they would want to come back someday, or they would hope that their descendants would get to come back someday. And so here we are, it's been almost 200 years and I think that's really important for the tribe to have an actual official presence in the state of Ohio before we hit that 200 year mark. So I think that's a big piece of the reason why now.
And I would say the other reason for that, for the timing of bringing this position on, is that Chief Wallace is retiring and she's going to continue to do work with me here in Ohio, but that's a big transition for the tribe. So just ensuring that the relationships can be maintained and deepened as part of it too.
MARTINEZ-SMILEY: Yeah, are there any things that you are looking forward to?
AULTMAN: One of the really exciting efforts that we have underway is to learn more about the specific history of that last reservation. So I get to go up to Logan County and meet with local historians there who have just been holding on to information and waiting to share it. So it's really great because now we're working directly together, the Eastern Shawnee Tribe and the local historians up in Logan County and sharing that information with the tribe and then with tribal citizens.
So I'm really excited to help pull that information together and find ways to share it with citizens so that they can know their family history in Ohio better, and in particular, the history of that last reservation at Lewiston, Ohio.
MARTINEZ-SMILEY: It sounds like you're off to a really great start in your first six months, so, excited to learn more about what you'll accomplish. That was Jennifer Aultman, Executive Director of Strategic Homeland Partnerships with the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. Thank you so much for joining me.
AULTMAN: Thanks for having me.
