Several years ago, the town of Bladensburg, Maryland launched a website commemorating the Battle of Bladensburg during the War of 1812. One feature of the website was a timeline detailing the history of Maryland. The first point of interest on the timeline indicated that in 15,000 BC, Native people were living “traditionally” in what would one day become Maryland. The next point of interest was the landing of Captain John Smith in the 17th century. In other words, the way they saw it, we sat around for sixteen-thousand years waiting for Europeans to show up and make things interesting. To them, we have no history, no inherent worth, no dynamism, no evolution, no story worth telling outside the telling of their own.

Piscataways had had enough of this story. We’d had enough of being painted as a people frozen in time; a people that do not and cannot exist outside of a European context of genocide and cultural rape; a tragic and doomed race of noble savages. So we decided to do something about it.

Several years ago, a group of Piscataways created a vision of places and stories that would offer up the past, present, and future of Maryland’s indigenous people unlike anything ever seen before. It would be the first time the public would be treated to the story of Native people as told by Native people, on our own terms, under our own leadership, without being polluted by the insidious romance, stereotyping, and European coupling that is universally insisted upon whenever our visitors do the telling. We reached into our own pockets, renting flotillas of canoes and fleets of buses to take scores of Piscataways and non-Piscataways alike on tours of our homeland. We visited our places, told our stories, planted our gardens in the soils of our ancestors, spoke to our old people, danced our dances, and sang our songs. It was a thing of incomparable beauty.

What was done was so well-received that the state set aside money to turn our vision into state-wide reality. And that, unfortunately, is when we were duly reminded that Maryland treats its Indians now much as it did in the 18th century, when American Independence was won and its Native people were no longer considered necessary.

There being so few of us, they could skip the first step in the colonization program (Murder) and proceeded directly to step 2: Theft. This occurred when the Charles County government literally attempted to adopt as their own the ideas presented to them by the Native people, place the money for the project in their own treasury (where it was stated the money could be used for “other plans”), and push the Native people aside. This theft was prevented only by our hasty registration of the project’s ideas as legal intellectual property and a forceful complaint to the Maryland legislature.

With theft averted, our visitors proceeded to step 3 in the colonization program: Appropriation and Racism. With Maryland Historic Trust now commanding the money for the project, they determined that the best way for Maryland Indians to tell our own story was to “invite” some of us to sit on a project steering committee of nine people, five of whom are White. The project went from one where Native people were telling our own story on our own terms, to one where our Great White Father invites us to participate in our own storytelling as consultants with a minority vote. How thoughtful of them to give us a seat at the table we built.

Naturally, these non-Indians were added to the steering committee under the ferociously racist assumption that we, the ignorant savages, do not have the capacity to execute the project. This in spite of the fact it was the ignorant savages that issued the project into being; the ignorant savages that had already started executing the project with their own money; the ignorant savages with the capacity to convince the Governor and the Maryland legislature to appropriate money for the project. How convenient it is, now, for them to presume otherwise.

And so it has come to pass that today, the Maryland Indian Heritage Trail is steered by a majority White committee, and headed by a very busy White administrator, that have made it clear that our story is to be told in their own tradition. As the initial meetings of this committee have made clear, our pre-colonial and extra-colonial story will give way, again, to the story of John Smith and the “settlement” of America. The evolution of a socially, economically, and ecologically viable society will not be presented; instead we will get more romantic, heart-rending tales of the noble savage locked in a doomed struggle against genocide, assimilation, and the inevitability of White Power. Instead of the living and breathing culture of modern Native America, we will get stone artifacts, road signs, archaeological surveys, and other academic esoterica that have reliably put school children to sleep for over a century.

And so we have it. Kevin Coster told the story of the Lakota, Daniel Day Lewis told the story of the Mohawk, Disney told the story of Pocahontas. Now a collection of our White visitors, from the same state that houses the most racist mascot in professional sports, will tell the story of the Piscataway. I await their fairy tale with abated breath.

Naxawoapalani

Piscataway Indian