Statehood Day was observed here in Ohio earlier this month. In 1803, on March 1, the legislature met for the first time and Ohio became the 17th state in the union.
It had been called The Ohio Country: part of the Northwest Territory, a huge tract of land the U.S. won from the British in the Revolutionary War.
Before that, this land was home to Indigenous people who had been here for thousands of years. They stewarded the land: forests, prairies, streams and wetlands full of wildlife. The soil was good for farming and foraging.
They had large settlements and trading posts, and elaborate ceremonial and burial mounds.
But as more and more settlers came, they encroached on tribal lands, and within 30 years, Native people were overwhelmed and forced out.
What happened then still resonates today. Here’s Neenah Ellis to talk about a new project from the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices.
Transcript (edited lightly for length and clarity):
Neenah Ellis: We’re making a podcast about Ohio history and how it affects us today. The Buckeye state is 220 years old and whether you realize it or not, you can still see reminders of Ohio’s early days. My colleague Chris Welter and I — along with a team of producers — will help you see those signs, and understand how and why Ohio was settled the way it was.
Chris Welter: Europeans arrived in the late 1600s. They were mostly British and French explorers, fur traders and Christian missionaries. Then came the so-called frontiersmen and eventually, American settlers.
Already living here, though, were thousands of Indigenous people. Among them were the Shawnee and Miami, the Delaware, the Wyandotte, the Ottawa, the Potawatomi, the Ojibwe and the Seneca-Cayuga.
Just before Ohio became a state, the U.S. government passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to regulate the settlement of the Northwest Territory.
That led to another wave of people. This time a surging flood came down the Ohio River from the East and up from the South — people who wanted land and felt entitled to it.
There was cooperation between the settlers and the Indigenous people of Ohio in those years before statehood, an exchange of ideas and technology and lots of intermarriage in cosmopolitan communities. But over time, pressure from the new settlers for more land increased.
Neenah Ellis: And so, the early years of statehood were full of conflict and death. U.S. leaders pressed for treaty after treaty, all with questionable motives, and the Ohio tribes were pushed onto reservations further and further north in the state. Then, the U.S. government imposed forced removals.
Chris Welter: During the Ohio removals, Native people were mostly sent west of the Mississippi. Some had to walk in winter with children and elders and livestock at their side. Communities were torn apart. People died. It’s a grim chapter — painful, ugly, frightening, even. And you probably didn’t learn about it in school.
But the descendants of those Indigenous people who were forced to leave their homelands in Ohio exist today. Many of their tribal governments are now based in Oklahoma, and they have vibrant cultures with exciting futures.
It’s easy to find towns, counties, schools, rivers and mascots in Ohio named after Native people and using their language, but no federally recognized tribes exist in Ohio today — but that fact doesn’t tell the whole story.
Maybe you’ve noticed, as we have, that some citizens of recognized tribes — like the Shawnee and Miami — are here in Ohio in 2023, embracing their heritage, building relationships, and insisting that their story be told. The land here, informs the cultures, food traditions, and ceremonies of many historic Ohio tribes and communities.
Here’s Talon Silverhorn, from the Eastern Shawnee tribe of Oklahoma. He’s recently moved to Ohio to work for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and, to take part in a new conversation:
Talon Silverhorn: So, I think the best place to start in telling my story in connection to this place would be an introduction of myself.
So, in the Shawnee language: I would tell you — (Hato—in Shawnee….)
So, I told you what tribe I was from, what country I was from, I told you where I was born, what clan I am, I told you my own name, and then I told you my mother and her mother, my father and his father. And so all of that kind of put together gives you a complete picture of my own identity. For Shawnee people as a whole, our identity is very deeply tied to our connection to the land.
Neenah Ellis: There is a reconnection with recognized tribes happening all over Ohio. As we lay out this story in the coming months we hope we’ll be able to explain all this history in detail and share a bigger, more complete telling of Ohio’s history and its present.
This series is made possible, in part, by the National Endowment for the Humanities' A More Perfect Union initiative. Any views expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of Ohio Humanities or the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Chris Welter is a reporter and corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms.
Thanks to filmmaker Catalina Jordan Alvarez for audio from her film series Sound Spring.
