A year and a half ago when I started working as an educator at the National Colonial Farm, we had a workshop on how to integrate the Native American Heritage of the farm site into our interpretation of the farm. This is one of the directions that the president of the Accokeek Foundation wants to take the farm, and if you know me, I'm sure you would think that I would want that. I do, and yet the person who the Foundation brought in as a consultant made me very uneasy about the direction that they were going with this. I don't remember her name, but she was one of the people who came up with the idea for the Captain John Smith Trail. She initially talked about her heritage, her family is of Algonquin descent from the Carolinas... which in other words means she is as related to the Piscataway (the confederacy that controlled much of Maryland) as the Shawnee were to the Illini. The workshop eventually went for a short hike on one of our trails to give us an idea of how to integrate Native American heritage into our tours, the things she said are hard to describe but think Disney's Pocahontas. I know that at this point, my supervisor who knew of my interest in Native American history because of a mission trip she had led to a Athabaskan Fishing Village in Alaska that I had gone on, she knew I felt that we weren't getting useful information. "When Indians enter a forest, they look for the oldest tree in the forest, it is an elder..." This is all well and good, but I am not interested in spouting something that is complete conjecture as to what the Piscataway would have done. This sort of thing falls into what I would call the "Myth of the Noble Savage." I was more interested in the lifeways of the Piscataway, not spiritualist information that has been lost and skewed over the years. When I asked questions, that I hoped could give me some insight into what the Piscataway were like, she gave vague answers. What annoyed me the most though was when I asked a question that was firmly rooted in conjecture as I feel she was talking for the past three hours, and her answer to me was "History is not about 'what ifs' it is facts." Honestly that annoyed me because from my perspective that's all she had given that day, "what ifs."
I think it would have helped more to bring in a Piscataway Nation representative to talk about the history of the Nation. But more than that, I don't think it helps us to dwell on the myth of the Noble Savage. If we are going to talk about the religion of the Piscataway, we need to look at whatever written accounts we can find from the initial contact period. If we can only find a little or none at all, there were other nearby Nations that are better documented such as the Powhatan confederacy and the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) that we can draw on knowledge of them. We can also dig into the archaeology of the Piscataway region, draw whatever information that we can from that. We had historians on staff, and I know from later events that the Foundation has contacts in the Piscataway Conoy Nation.
A few months after this, my supervisor and I talked about this, she said that if I wanted to, I could do some research on the topic and if I kept track of my time, I might be compensated for it. I should have done some work on this, and to be honest, I think I might try to over the next semester when I can.
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