(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the Journal, I'm Steve Kendall.

Bowling Green State University's "In the Round" series features Native American creatives in an effort to make more visible the creations of Native American artists.

We're joined by one of the speakers who'll be part of that series, Talon Silverhorn, who's a Cultural Program Manager with the Ohio Division of Natural Resources.

Talon, welcome to "The Journal" today, and thank you for joining us.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you for having me.

- [Steve] Yeah, tell us a little bit about yourself, because I've introduced you as, you know, working with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, but obviously there's so much more about you.

So give us an idea of your background and why this is so important that we talk about these things with Native American creative activities.

- Sure.

So, yeah, I am a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe from Oklahoma.

I grew up in Oklahoma on the Shawnee Reservation, and, you know, I lived there and went to school there and, you know, everything I did was there until I eventually started traveling outside and meeting new people and came to realize that there was a lot that people didn't know, you know, that was available to them.

And so I started working professionally in cultural education in museums, you know, places like Colonial Williamsburg, NMAI, et cetera.

And then found the skill of interpretation as sort of my niche in trying to communicate with people and build connections, so, yeah.

- [Steve] Yeah, one of the things that I know that, you know, we talked about this and obviously there's a lot of other things we're gonna touch on, but the university of course, is trying to make sure that people understand that where the university sits, where we're sitting right now was Native American terri, as was all of North America, basically.

And to remind us of the heritage, the cultural, what was here before there was the, you know, where Europeans moved in.

So where we're here in Northwest Ohio, obviously Ottawa territory, possibly Shawnee territory, can you give us a little idea of the background of the tribes that were here, the Native Americans that were here, and some of the things that we should look at culturally that we might take for granted every day as we drive around, walk around Northwest Ohio?

- Sure, yeah.

So, I mean, obviously Ottawas and especially Wyandots, Ottawas and Wyandots, some of the more Eastern Potawatomis, and even some of the more Eastern Anishinaabeks, there's a lot of people, I'm actually looking at an 18th century map right now, and, you know, I mean there are, especially on the Southern Lakes, lots of different people coming and going using those lakes as culturally significant and also just geographically significant areas.

So Bowling Green and that greater Toledo area is all, you know, very Ottawa, Wyandot, some Seneca-Cayugas, Potawatomis.

And then yeah, you noted that there is a Shawnee township not far from you guys.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And so Shawnees are pretty well traveled, we get around.

And...

But I mean, yeah, so culturally speaking and, you know, talking about the people, yeah, obviously people sort of have this sense that there was someone here before.

It's important to know who that was historically, but then also the other part of that understanding is where are those people now?

You know, where did they go?

If they're not still living here, where are they today?

- [Steve] Sure.

And one of the things of course, obviously we know what little bit of this works its way into American history, and probably a lot more of it should, is the, as you said, where those people are now, because this was their homeland, this was where they live, this was their land.

And, and as we know, we've moved Native Americans all over America to areas that weren't necessarily culturally correct for them, let alone lifestyle-correct, the life they were used to living.

Some in the Great Lakes ends up in the Great Plains.

It's not exactly the same sort of situation.

So talk a little about that, about the way we've, the things you wanna bring and let people know that, yeah, people lived here, but we've moved them here, but they still maintained a lot of their culture, even though they were displaced from their native ground.

- [Talon] Yeah.

That's actually one of the things that's pretty present for us living in Oklahoma, is trying to, I mean, we've got Seneca-Cayugas, Wyandots, Shawnees, Miamis, Ottawas.

I mean, I lived in Ottawa County, and the Ottawas were right next door to us.

So, you know, there's 39 tribes that reside in Oklahoma today.

Most of them do not originate from Oklahoma.

We've got people from Northern California, from the Great Lakes, from the East Coast, just all over the place.

And we're all trying to maintain our own individual cultures, even though we represent wildly different regions of the US.

And so for me, growing up, trying to be Shawnee in Oklahoma, it is sort of difficult to hear and think about and try to imagine some of the, you know, stories that we tell, the histories that we passed down, talking about the Great Lakes and the sort of spiritual world that goes along with the geography, the medicines that grow in certain environments that have a hard time growing in Oklahoma, you know, just everything about it, the soil texture, you know, it all plays a part in it.

And I remember first coming to Ohio for the first time and sort of having this epiphany of like, looking around, I think I was just, I had stopped at a rest stop and I just looked around at this area behind this rest stop and there was a little creek, and sandstone, and horsetail, and blood root, and like everything that was like culturally significant was just there.

So, and it's so hard to find some of those things, you know, in Oklahoma, so yeah, the geography makes a huge difference.

- [Steve] Yeah, and it's interesting too that you mentioned that because obviously when people looked at their art and their culture and the way they worked their environment into what they did, it's a good point that suddenly now you're seeing all of this sort of history with the things you described, like plants and trees and rocks and things like that, and now suddenly you're in an area that doesn't, it has things like that, but they're not the ones that are culturally significant.

And you mentioned the medicines, because obviously there were a lot of remedies that were derived from the plants and the environment, and as you said, you can't necessarily find what you were using in the Great Lakes area out in Oklahoma as a Shawnee or any other tribe.

And I think we have a tendency too, to lump all of them, all of the tribes together, all of the Native Americans into one category.

And obviously they're as different as they are individually, the cultures are that different as well too.

Yeah.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- Now, when you look at that and as you mentioned, there are all of these different Native American groups in Oklahoma, has there been any sort of like, like transfer of culture among those different groups to some degree now that they're geographically close by?

- Yeah, one of the biggest things that we've sort of began to blend is our calendars, so how we keep track of time, our seasonality, et cetera.

And that's mostly because like, as we've lived in Oklahoma for the last, you know, more than a a hundred, a hundred and, you know, some years, all of our families are now, you know, our daughter has married to Kiowa, our son has married a Pawnee, you know, et cetera, and so now it's like, okay, well, we have a lot of different celebrations to keep track of and go to, and so you, you start to see some of the calendars start to align and, you know, certain times of year, like in the springtime and fall, you know, whether it be Green Corn or whether it be Sun Dance or what have you, like, those types of celebrations are now kind of coming closer together, and a lot of multicultural families, and so you'll find bits and pieces of different practices, religions, you know, all sort of blended together in one home.

And that's not too dissimilar from what's been happening in all of history.

It's just that now we have sort of a lot of different cultures condensed into a small area.

For example, Ottawa County in Oklahoma, the highest concentration of federally recognized tribes in the country with nine tribes in one county.

And so, you know, it's just up to a greater degree.

- [Steve] Yeah, when we come back, I'd like to talk more about calendars and time and those sort of things, 'cause those are, you know, we take for granted, we're working on a 24, you know, a 12-hour clock, 24-hour day.

But obviously each of the groups had different ways and as you said, different seasons, different events, different cultural things went on.

So when we come back, let's talk about that.

And as you mentioned too, you've got these groups now concentrated in one area, and so the differences, the similarities, the way things have sort of assimilated a little bit too.

So back in just a moment, our guest is Talon Silverhorn.

He's gonna be a speaker at the Bowling Green State University "In the Round" series, an ongoing series back in just a moment here on "The Journal."

Thank you for staying with here on "The Journal."

Our guest is Talon Silverhorn, Cultural Programs Manager, Ohio Department of Natural Resources, but so much more than that, obviously.

And that's an important part of what he does, and we'll be talking more about the Department of Natural Resources and how the cultural programs are trying to get us more in tune and aware of the culture of the Native American culture of Ohio.

When we left that last segment, we were talking about the fact that, as you said, you have nine tribes, nine groups now concentrated in one county, which would've been not necessarily the way it would've been in the 1700s back in history.

You mentioned the fact that they all have had, all had different cultures, different ways of keeping track of time, different celebrations, different ways of doing things.

So talk about that, how that concentration has changed and how different tribes we're able to adapt to each other that way because we tend to think of them as being isolated, individual units, but the reality is they were interacting back before the white man showed up on the continent.

Yeah.

- Yeah, very much so.

So I mean, even historically, we'll start historically and then we'll talk about today.

So in history, I mean, tribes are much more familiar with each other than people might think, you know, we do kind of get this very sort of fenced off kind of pocket, you know, people live here, people live here, and they don't talk to each other.

But that's not the case.

One account from the latter 18th century, a young man by the name of Jonathan Alder talks about how his adopted mother is Shawnee, his adopted father is Mingo, probably Seneca or Cayuga from Canada, and all of the kids that he played with growing up were Seneca, Shawnee, Delaware, they spoke different languages because all of, you know, all of those people there had come from other places and were now living in that town.

And it's just the same way today.

You know, we have nine federally-recognized tribes in Ottawa County, you know, and our calendars, our celebrations, even though though historically we might've been celebrating those things within our own little communities, doing those independently, you know, now being all together and having all of our people and families kind of blended together, it sort of form this year-long sort of pattern and celebration where it's like, you know, everybody's New Year happens at a slightly different time, everybody's summer celebrations happens at a slightly different time, whether it be your Green Corns or your Sun Dances, or those things like that, and then your winter celebrations, your winter ceremonies and things, it sort of forms this continuous line, this like schedule for the year that everybody acknowledges and sort of, you know, you'll see the same cast of people coming to every tribe's, you know, celebration, gathering, you know, ceremony, et cetera, so.

There's a pretty tight-knit community around just going to those and being present and helping out, so.

- [Steve] Yeah, it's interesting too and when you talk about the time, was there a difference in the way that, say, the Senecas in New York, kept track of the seasons, the time, that sort of thing, versus the Ottawa or the Shawnee or another group?

I mean, was it geographical because simply the way the sun moved across the sky and light and dark and that sort of thing?

Or how did they actually keep track of time versus the way we think of time now?

- [Talon] Yeah, so I mean, so without the presence of a clock and a set, you know, schedule to your day, a lot of tribes are keeping track of time through the movements, like cyclical movements in nature, whether that be stars, whether that be season, certain plants.

So for example, Shawnees have 13 seasons traditionally, think of those sort of like our months and each one of those corresponds to a different resource that exists around us, whether it be our maple sugaring time, our deer hunting time, you know, whether it be the time that, you know, we make bread, you know, all of those things have their own particular season.

So there are 13 of those.

That has to do with the way that the moon actually moves, the cycle of the moon.

And so, you know, within that, I mean, our New Year basically is in the springtime, not January one, but in the springtime.

And so, you know, so those types of things might be different than, you know, agricultural-based societies like Shawnee versus more hunter-gatherer societies or fishing-based societies, you know, I mean their calendars are gonna revolve around what's important to them, whether that be the movements of the sun or moon as an agricultural people or the movements of animals, you know, so.

- Yeah, well, it's interesting too, 'cause you mentioned, you know, New Year's in the spring, which in a way makes a lot more sense than New Years in what we, you know, in January where it's the middle of winter.

Spring would be the time where everything would be new so it would kind of make sense that that would be the start of another cycle, another year or another cycle like that.

When you go out and do the presentations that you do, and I know one of the things we're gonna talk about is the effort to provide, especially at Ohio's parks, more interpretation, more background on Native American culture.

What are some of the things that you really emphasize when you talk to people, you know, like me who don't have, you know, the background I should have in this, obviously I live in Ohio, Indian names all over the place, Native American names, streets, counties, cities, you can't cross, you can't go, you know, a hundred yards probably anywhere in Northwest Ohio and not encounter a Native American name on a location.

What are some of the things you talk about and how those things, how we adopted, you know, some of those things and made them somewhat part of our culture, but really they were really Native American culture to begin with?

- Yeah.

Actually, I've used that very same example.

You can't go, you know, you can't throw a stick in the air in Ohio without it landing on a place that is named for person or tribe, you know, or even a traditional place like Wapakoneta, which is a Shawnee word, you know, and so.

But the thing that you probably won't find in that place are native people.

So my goal in doing educational programs and getting out and talking to people is not only to sort of get everybody on the same page on our history, that's important because there's so many different, you know, understandings, misunderstandings, mythologies, that sort of just really muddy the waters when it comes to our history.

And so much of the relationship that we as native people have to everyone else around us is based on that history so it's important to have a clear understanding of it.

But the second half of that, and arguably the most important half of that is getting beyond the history, understanding where we are today, how we live today, and then sort of using that as a platform to think about our future, right?

Because we as tribal people, you know, we are concerned with what we're gonna do tomorrow, next week, next year, next 10 years, next 20 years.

But most people are still stuck asking questions about what we did 200, 300 years ago and haven't progressed past the point.

They haven't found any value in looking at us as modern people because they're still stuck on trying to understand our history.

So if we can get all on the same page on that, then I think we can get to a different topic, get to somewhere else and start having different conversations.

- [Steve] Yeah.

Well, we'll come back 'cause we got one more segment here.

Let's talk a little about how Native American tribal people would like to be viewed versus the way, as you say, the way that we tend to put them in a box and say, well, they're just the way they were.

It's funny 'cause we don't look at other people like that, but them, it's like, oh, they're still doing what they did 200 years ago, but it's not that at all.

So back in just a moment, our guest is Talon Silverhorn, Cultural Programs Manager, at Ohio Department of Natural Resources, he's gonna be talking about the "In the Round" series here in Bowling Green in just a few days.

Back in just a moment on "The Journal."

You're with us on "The Journal."

Our guest is Talon Silverhorn.

And we're talking about tribal people, Native Americans, part of the Bowling Green State University "In the Round" series, which is an effort to make sure that we understand not just the history of Native Americans and tribal people, but who they are today as well.

And Talon, one of the things we left that last segment was the fact that we tend to view tribal peoples, Native Americans the way we think they were a 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago.

And the reality is, yes, they still appreciate their culture, but there is a contemporary tribal people, they're not the Native Americans of the movies or the Native Americans of TV shows or Saturday afternoon serials at the movies, that kind of thing.

So talk about the myth between how we view Native Americans in culture, in our historical culture versus the way we should be able to view them now as contemporary American citizens.

- Sure, so to start off with, there are two kind of big trains of thought, one of which is the idea that, you know, sort of mythologizing native people, that we still do the things that we did 200, 300 years ago and are still sort of living the same way, which is not true.

It's not true for really anyone in the world for the most part.

And, you know, people are sometimes disappointed by that, that we're not doing the same things that we did in the past.

There's also another train of thought that's very similar where, you know, people ascribe our identity so wholly to history that if we don't do the things we did in the past, then they don't view us as modern native people, as real native people.

And so it's almost like they're expecting either, you know, a reenactment or, you know, something along those lines sort of as our daily life.

And that's just not the case, you know.

What I would like people to see and and experience is what I grew up with, which is a very diverse community of individuals who have different political opinions, different social and economic statuses, who have different jobs, and are interested in different things, who want different educations.

I mean, there's a whole nother community of people that most Americans just aren't able, you know, to see and sort of view as a tangible thing.

And so, you know, getting, like I said, beyond the history and thinking about our future, you know, what will collaboration look like in 10 or 20 years between educational institutions, between cultural institutions, historical and archeological institutions?

I mean, how will tribal participation and tribal cooperation look like?

And what sort of opportunities can we create to diversify what's available to our citizens?

Because we don't want them to feel like Christmas elves, like, you know, like making toys is the only thing they can do, like history is the only thing that is valuable for us as native people to do.

Computer science, and engineering, and art, and all of these, I mean, there's so much that, you know, our people have talent in, but aren't able to express because it's not quote unquote, "what's expected".

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And that's what Great Council looks to sort of touch on as well.

I didn't know if we wanted to talk about that.

- Yeah, and it's interesting because we're looking at "In the Round" series, which is an effort to make sure people don't forget the culture and realize what was here prior to the European movement across the continent.

And yet at the same time, you're trying to make sure, look, that's not the only, that's not all we are, that's not all, yeah, we're contemporary citizens, we do that sort of thing.

And yet, we try to sort of isolate that in a box and say, well, but if you're not culturally historic Native Americans, then what are you kind of, which is interesting.

Now, one of the things, I know you work a lot with the Ohio parks and obviously there's a big center that's gonna be, ground has been broken for that.

But talk a little about what you do with the Department of Natural Resources to make sure that people understand the culture, but also understand the modern culture as well, the contemporary Native American culture.

- Sure, so I am a Naturalist Supervisor with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and also Cultural Programs Manager.

What that has meant in the last two years that I've been working with ODNR has been a lot of sort of background administration, like updating park signage, updating websites, the language, just sort of giving everybody a base level of understanding and then also to making sure that when we talk about tribal histories or tribal cultures at our 75, soon to be 76 state parks, that we are giving people the opportunity to connect with not only the history of those people, but also the contemporary identity of those people if they want to as well.

So things like QR codes, links to tribal websites, making sure that that is as accessible as possible.

But with the new state park, Great Council State Park, which is in construction and is coming along very well, that's gonna be a place where we tell the story of the intersections between not only tribal people, but white traders and settlers, sort of early statehood, We'll cover a lot.

We'll cover the archeology of Western Ohio, the history of the Shawnee people from contact to removal to Oklahoma, and then actually a large focus on where we are today and what we look like today, our vital statistics, populations, our political structures, our citizens, and their lifestyles.

We really want to give people a both feet into the river kind of, you know, introduction to Shawnee people and our culture.

- Now, and we've got just a few seconds here, if people wanna find out more about what you're describing, what you're talking about, what you're trying to make sure people are aware of, what's the easiest way for them to do that?

If yhey go online, is there, do they, what should they Google, what should they look for and, say, if they wanna know more about this, not just historical, but also as you said, the contemporary view of tribal peoples?

- Yeah, if you wanna learn more about the new state park, Great Council State Park would be the thing to Google.

I would also very much recommend either the Shawnee Tribe Cultural Center or the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma's website.

You know, to learn more about the people themselves, always go to the source.

- [Steve] Yeah.

Great, great, good.

Well, thank you so much for being on, Talon.

And best wishes, good luck with all of the things you're doing 'cause obviously it's important that we don't forget our history, but we also need to evolve that as well so that we understand each other a lot better as we move forward.

So thank you again for being here.

- Yeah, thank you.

- Yep, thank you.

Yeah, you can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can also, of course, watch us every Thursday night at eight o'clock on WBGU PBS.

We'll see you again next time.

Good night and good luck.

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