Standing in a bed of indigenous grass at the corner of Merriman Road and Portage Path, the 3,200-pound statue of a Native American lifting a canoe overhead was nearly another disgrace to the culture.

Before it was set in bronze 20 years ago, its creator — Peter Jones of the Seneca and Onondaga tribes of New York — sent a 16-inch model to a foundry in Pennsylvania to be sculpted into a clay mold.

Jones depicted a slender Miami tribesman with straight hair and sinewy thighs defined by the great distances traveled to find food or carry goods along the critical Portage Path between the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers. But an artist at the foundry produced the westernized caricature of an American Indian — puffy hair with comically bulging muscles and a physique that contradicted his people's lean diet.

“I had to remove about 20 pounds of clay from the buttocks. We didn’t have that. We still don’t,” Jones said, prompting a hearty laugh from the 40 people who gathered to hear him talk Sunday in front of the statue.

As part of a series of weekend events to educate the public and honor the contributions and culture of Native Americans, as well as draw attention to systemic attempts to acculturate or erase their culture, Jones spoke again this year ahead of North American First People’s Day on Monday.

Akron City Council adopted the local holiday in 2018 after students from the Lippman School suggested that instead of replacing Columbus Day because of the Italian explorer’s role in launching the international slave trade, the city should celebrate Native Americans in their own right on their own day. Summit County Council added the holiday earlier this year.

The four-day celebration, from Friday to Monday, featured a new art exhibit at the University of Akron and lessons in Akron Public Schools classrooms led by Native Americans.

In a fourth annual walk of the Portage Path on Sunday coordinated by the Summit County Historical Society, the Lippman School and Summit Metro Parks, members of the Northern Cheyenne, which has run an educational exchange program with the Lippman School for nine years, led with tribal songs and attire followed by dancing and drumming at Perkins Stone Mansion.

Before noon, archaeologist Megan Schaeffer with Summit Metro Parks gave a short guided tour of the Towpath Trail, which runs north and south alongside the 8-mile Portage Path.

The informational walk told of the Paleo-Indian nomads who followed mastodon and mammoth herds into Ohio after the glaciers receded some 10,000 years ago. The group stopped at a historic hunting camp unearthed in the 1990s by UA archaeologists. They ended the walk at the northern terminus of the Portage Path, forming a circle around Jones of the Seneca Nation, Dave Lieberth of the Historical Society and the statue in the Merriman Valley.

The Miami Indian, if alive, would have set down his canoe of elm bark and proceeded to carry about 50 pounds of goods south to the Tuscarawas River, where another canoe waited for him.

The 8-mile trail now marked by 50 arrowhead statues crosses continental watersheds that flow south to the Gulf of Mexico or north to the Great Lakes. As European settlers, disease and war pushed them west, eastern tribes like the Iroquois and Mohawk would use the trail to reach hunting grounds or to trade with tribes as far south as the Mississippi River flows.

In 1785, the Wyandot, Chippewa, Delaware and Ottawa tribes of Ohio agreed to relinquish all sovereignty to the federal government in exchange for a promise that settlers would not cross west of the Portage Path. Early Americans and Europeans broke that treaty 20 years later, Lieberth told the crowd.

Lenore Waukau of the Menominee and Oneida nations of north central Wisconsin stood on the train tracks overlooking the event. Her people didn't come when the glaciers left. Her origin story of the Sky People explains that Native Americans have always been here.

“We were put here by our creators. We were put here to take care of our land, to take care of the environment,” said Waukau. “If you take care of Mother Nature, Mother Nature will take care of you.”

Waukau, 67, and Jones, 72, were educated in boarding homes in the 1950s and 1960s when the federal government systematically forced Native American children to forget their past.

“We were told not to honor our ways. We were forbidden to speak our language,” said Waukau. “It made me feel bad about who I was — ashamed. You don’t realize it as a child.”

In the 1950s, Jones attended the Thomas Indian School, known as the Thomas Asylum for Orphan and Destitute Indian Children when his mother lived there as an orphan. Jones grew up when elders still spoke the native languages of the Mohawk, Onondaga and Seneca. Today, he said, there are less than 30 Seneca members who speak in the native language, including his son, Michael, who is teaching six students to speak the Iroquois language back at the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation in New York.

Waukau said less than 10 Menominee, including her adult daughter, can speak her tribe’s native language.

But there’s a “reawakening,” to reclaim their culture, Waukau said.

“If we don’t, we’re not going to be here much longer,” she said, remembering the words of her father: “Always remember in your heart where you came from, who you are. And never lose sight of that, because it will carry you a long way in life.”

Reach Doug Livingston at dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3792.

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