Research Reveals New Link In Australasian and South American Ancestry

[wnylib]

14. No, I am in western NY state now, but

I am originally from Erie. You must know the area if you are familiar with Meadville. My great grandmother came from a very small town near Meadville called Springboro. Both are in Crawford County, just south of Erie County. French Creek extends into Erie County.

I'm not surprised that the Shawnee man said that the people wore cloth instead of buckskin. Cloth would be one of the trade items from farther south, and also from the east.

I lived in Ohio for 5 years, first in Toledo and then Cleveland. One summer, we drove around the southern part of the state and visited the Hopewell mounds and Fort Ancient area. At that time, the belief was that Serpent Mound was built by the Hopewell. Now it is believed that the Fort Ancient people built it.

I refreshed myself on the anth/arch of the region because it's been a long time since I was there and a while since I studied the preColumbian anthro of the region. So I want to clarify something from my last post regarding the people and naming of Fort Ancient.

The Hopewell preceded the Fort Ancient culture by a few centuries. For a time, the belief was that the Fort Ancient people were descendants of the Hopewell who remained in the area after the Hopewell culture declined. That might still be true to some degree, but there is evidence that two Siouan tribes from farther east (yes, east) moved into the eastern part of the Fort Ancient culture area in Fort Ancient's later stages, but left again as other people moved in. We associate the Sioux with Plains people farther west, but there were pockets of Siouan people in the east, too.

The Shawnee share an origin legend with the Kickapoo that they were once one tribe, but split over a dispute. Their languages are nearly identical, so the legend appears to be true. Both the Shawnee and Kickapoo claim ancestry from the Algonquian Lenape, aka Lenni Lenape, aka the Delaware. (Delaware name came from European colonists, not what they called themselves.) Both tribes refer to the Lenape as their "grandfathers," which several other Algonquian tribes do also.

The Lenape territory was NJ, southeastern PA, MD, and southeastern NY, around present day NYC and the Hudson Valley. They were caught up in conflicts with the Susquehanock and the eastern Iroquois league in the beaver wars and pressured by colonists moving into their territory. Branches of the Lenape moved westward into Ohio and Kentucky. They had a name in their language for the Lenape bands who lived in the southern NJ and MD area that means "southern people." I Don't remember what that Lenape word for their "southern" bands was, but it was similar to the word Shawnee. It might be that the Shawnee man you spoke to knew the term or its meaning and mistook it to mean what we call the South today.

The Shawnee and Kickapoo languages are not only nearly identical to each other, but both derive from the Lenape language. When the Shawnee left their eastern seaboard land, they became migrants without their own territory. That happened to numerous displaced tribes in US history. Most displaced tribes sought new lands for themselves, resulting in wars, or negotiated permission to move into other tribal territories. Small bands of Shawnee dispersed into a few different areas, but the majority moved into and claimed the declined Fort Ancient region for themselves. A culturally related people, the Monongehela, went to southwestern PA and to W.VA.

Around the same time, the Iroquoian Seneca were expanding their control into western PA and parts of Ohio. Some Seneca and Cuyuga (also Iroquoian) settled in Ohio. The Iroquois Confederacy had defeated the Susquehannock and Lenape. Several people from those tribes went to Ohio, too. They became known as the Minga or Minque Seneca, under Seneca control nominally, but apart from direct control as discontented "independents."

It's that later period under loose Seneca control that Ohio became a really tribally mixed Indian Territory, until white settlers demanded their removal and they scattered. Most ended up in Oklahoma, after brief stays in other regions, like Kansas, Missouri, and Wisconsin.