Seven episodes of the 12-part series have been released so far. You can listen to them on WYSO.org.
Editor’s Note: The transcript below has been edited for brevity and clarity. You can also listen to the full interview with Ellis:
Why is this such an important story to tell right now?
It’s an important story at any time. There’s so much happening now in the United States and around the world that I think we can relate to in Ohio. To understand our history is to make better choices about our future. Without knowing what happened here, I think it keeps us from moving ahead and understanding the diversity of opinions and experiences we have here in Ohio.
One of the most powerful experiences for me has been to learn about how the indigenous tribes of Ohio manipulated the landscape as farmers, as hunter-gatherers. Thousands of years before Europeans came to North America, there were thriving cultures here, and I feel like because these tribes were removed, we are missing the advantage of so much experience that happened right here where we live. So episode three, for example, is all about the Shawnee life on the land and how highly sophisticated their agricultural practices were. Episode four is about fire and how they used fire to manage the landscape. This is knowledge that we could use right now. Look at all that fire is doing around the country, because we haven’t managed our landscapes very well — not just in Ohio.
In my journey of learning all of these practices, it was so eye-opening to me that there’s hardly anything I do anymore around where I live, in Greene County, that I don’t see some relationship to the tribal people who were here 200 years ago. When your eyes are opened, it’s everywhere.
So I’m really hoping to share everything that I’ve learned, to let other people in on what you don’t learn in school. I’m from the Midwest. I grew up in northern Indiana. We had a very similar situation. There were many tribes, thriving cultures, Europeans who came in and removed them. I didn’t learn that in school. I went to public school in Porter County, Indiana. So when I came to Ohio and realized what I didn’t know, and the fact that tribal people here were walked from Ohio across Indiana, across Illinois, across Missouri — they walked. I didn’t know that. I drove across Indiana probably 300 times in my life and never did I know that people were made to walk that distance. I’ve been a journalist for a long time. I started doing this work in high school, in the 70s. I’ve traveled around the world doing stories about indigenous people and cultural conflict, and when I learned that people walked across the place where I grew up, and I didn’t know that, because some educational policy prevented me from knowing that, I was kind of amazed.
I spend a lot of time in southwest Michigan, which is a beautiful part of the state. And last summer, I went to the Pokagon reservation there. They have a beautiful campus of buildings where they offer services to their tribe. And there were notices all around the town about this event coming up, where this tribal ceremony will happen, or this tribal music will be played, or these tribal stories will be told. And I thought, ‘I don’t even have that in Ohio.’
When Great Council State Park opened in June, it was thronged with people like me who were like, wow, finally we get to hear these stories. Finally we get to, as adults — maybe too late — we get to learn more about this history that we only have the slightest hints about. So that’s why there’s so much happening in Ohio that’s related to the tribes and Great Council was just one example. Also, the World Heritage sites were approved just in the last year, and the state of Ohio, I have learned, has been working with the tribes for 20 years. I didn’t know that. So there has been a lot going on, and there is a lot going on, and all of that means there are opportunities for us to learn and educate ourselves. So for me and my partner in this series, Chris Welter, it was not hard to find stories to tell.
Talking about Chris and the team, it’s evident that great care went into the cultural sensitivities surrounding the project. The logo was designed by a Miami Tribe of Oklahoma citizen, you also have a cultural advisor on the team. Tell me a little bit more about how you and the team decided on its approach to the subject matter.
We knew that as European-descended people that we were going to see this in the way that American history is usually taught. We have not been raised to see this any other way. But when you intentionally pull yourself back and say, ‘Wait, there’s another way to look at this and there are people who are ready to help me see it in a new way.’ That was the turning point for us. We’re not going to just tell this story the way it’s been told. That’s not the point. The point is to see it through new eyes, in a new perspective. And there’s lots of scholarship, and there are lots of historians, people who are historic reenactors, who are tribal citizens, who’ve been raised with these stories, and know how to tell them, and know what’s authentic. There is a real history. The people are still here. They don’t live in Ohio, but they still exist. So I just hope that people like myself will find this exciting and say, ‘Wow, look what our future could hold for us if we keep open minds about how we tell our stories about ourselves.’
The series debunks many things that might be commonly held knowledge for Ohioans. “Take what grandma says with a grain of salt.” No disrespect to grandmothers out there, but there’s something to be said about taking a few minutes, a few hours of your time to explore what you were told as a kid. These are things that are built into our collective consciousness that maybe we don’t explore very much — and we should. And when you’re telling somebody what you’ve been raised to believe is untrue, you’re compounding, oftentimes, guilt or shame in there. That’s a very difficult thing. Chief Glenna Wallace, in one of her interviews, talks about how all of us today aren’t responsible for what happened, so why put that guilt on people? She doesn’t intend to do that. She says “I come willing to speak to you, but I will always try to have a message of hope. I’ll always try to have history and humor in there so that you can ask the question yourself: Do I really know the history of Ohio?”
It can be very difficult, especially if your family had a lot of farmland, if your family came here in the early 1800′s and were the first deed-owners of that land. Within 50 years of it having been tribal land, there’s a lot of difficulty in accepting a new version of the history, and I get that. My family doesn’t have land, but people have a strong attachment to land, and that’s where this all came from, right? That’s where the conflict originated. There were people here, stewards of the land. They were Shawnee, they were Miami, they were Delaware, they were Wyandotte. They had been here, and then new people came who wanted the land. They were denied that in the places where they came from — it was a dream.
My husband’s family is from Appalachia. They came from Scotland and Ireland and England because they couldn’t be landowners there. So they immigrated to the New World where they could be landowners. Guess what? There were already landowners here. So that’s a very sensitive subject. I get that, but it’s real, right? It happened. And just like in a family, you can cover over things that happened in your family, but you’re never going to get over them and make progress unless you deal with them. These are really super-sensitive and difficult issues for some people, especially if you come from people who have land or were what we would call pioneers.
These pioneers struggled mightily. They did not have easy lives. And they lost children, and they had to deal with diseases. But there were people here before them. And there are many ways to learn about it, and lots of scholarship. And as we go along now, I think Ohioans will have more and more opportunities to meet people who are tribal citizens. We’re meeting them more and more often here, so I hope people will be calm, look at it, take it in, think about it, talk to their families about it. At Thanksgiving, maybe, say ‘Hey, does anybody know the real story of our great, great grandfather?’ And maybe nobody does. Maybe somebody says, ‘Well, Grandma told me this.’ Let’s talk about it. Let’s do some research. Let’s call Greene County Historical Society. Let’s find out if it’s possible to do that research.
Like you mentioned, these people are still here. They may not be in Ohio, but these people exist, they’re all over the country, sometimes the world, and you can meet them. That gives a life to this history — it can feel very abstract when you read it out of a textbook. But when you meet these people, or when you, more importantly, hear them speak in these stories, you’re able to get a very powerful, visceral reaction from them that I think the radio format, the audio format, does such a great job of conveying.
I’m glad to hear you appreciate that. I feel that same way about radio, that you can read somebody talking about being removed, but when you hear somebody telling the story of their ancestors being removed, it goes right into your body, right? You feel it, and you begin to imagine what that must have been like. Good writing can do that, but audio is a very quick way to experience something like that.
You’ve mentioned other states’ tribal activities and programming in Michigan and Indiana, certainly Oklahoma in this series. And I’m not saying Ohio’s a backwater in this regard, but it does feel like we ought to catch up. What takeaways do you have for Ohio and Ohioans? What can we be doing better?
We educate ourselves. That’s the first thing. Read, go online and Google like crazy. We spent three years just educating ourselves for this series and we could have spent another three years. Be open-minded and accepting and look for indigenous sources. The tribes have websites, they have cultural history. They have all different titles, but the information is there. Go to reputable sources. The Smithsonian has tremendous resources because of their National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, and try to find scholars who’ve done original source research. Try and go to events where they have tribal interpreters. Ohio History Connection is working very hard now to collaborate with the tribes to make sure that more and more public events are attended by and are interpreted by citizens of indigenous tribes. Just try to be a little bit discerning. Think to yourself, ‘Is this real? Is this person dressed up to play a part, or do they have a legitimate role in this history?’ If you don’t ever think about it, you’re going to accept whatever anybody tells you. I hope that people will listen to this and then go to events and say, ‘Huh, I wonder if that’s real. I wonder if that really happened. I wonder if that guy knows what he’s talking about.’ And I think people’s eyes will be opened.
There are notable examples in the series where folks who might not have known better about indigenous history but, when confronted about it, choose to do better. There’s a lot of hard stuff, as we’ve already talked about, the guilt and pride and things like that that can make these conversations very difficult. Is there any other advice you have to those who are looking to undertake this kind of research in their own families or in their communities?
Humility. Don’t think you know. Katherine Wilson from the Greene County Historical Society really inspired me because she’s related to Daniel Boone — royalty in American history — and she’s willing to say, ‘You know what? That’s not the whole story.’ She’s been working to help the Shawnee tell their story. Because she sees also — as a woman I’m telling you — when you look back at this early Ohio history, you ask ‘Where are the women?’ So she has that perspective, and she’s not afraid to talk about it. Not afraid to suggest that, as individuals, we might not know the whole story, or what our grandma told us might not really be true.
I have this in my family. Somebody married into my family, believed all his adult life that he was descended from Tecumseh. No proof. No evidence. An aspiration. He admires the Shawnee culture. He grew his hair long and tied it in a braid and did a lot of stuff, and I’m sure there are a lot of people out there like that. And instead of the truth, his family is stuck with that story, and not knowing the truth makes you be stuck. It’s very, very common. There’s a trope, you know, “my grandmother was a Cherokee princess.” I mean, look into it. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not.
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