November is Native American Heritage Month, and last week the Nanticoke tribe, based in Millsboro, had a big public celebration, complete with face painting and fry bread. But for years, the Nanticoke kept their traditions underground. Delaware Public Media’s Anne Hoffman finds out why.
[audio:http://www.wdde.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/nanticokewrap.mp3|titles= Delaware Public Media's Anne Hoffman visits Nanticoke Heritage Day in Millsboro.]
It’s Heritage Day at the Nanticoke Museum in Millsboro and Matt Harmon is playing a traditional courting song on the flute. As a Heritage Day emcee, Harmon invites a circle of families and tribal members to enjoy a smoke dance on this bright but chilly morning. People gather in together and try to get close to the quickly dying campfire.
Harmon talks like a down to earth preacher, except the subject of his sermon, is how his people, the Nanticoke Tribe, almost died out in Delaware.
"There was a lot of pressure, and a lot of heat for our people, our Nanticoke people," said Harmon.
Harmon goes on to explain something like a Nanticoke diaspora. Pressure from white settlers caused many tribal members to migrate north to Canada -- or to Oklahoma to live on reservations miles away from their traditional homeland. But the tribal members here in Sussex County resisted.
"I keep saying we’re not supposed to be here. What happened was the ones that I descended from, they said, naw-uh, we’re not going," said Harmon. "They hid out in the backwoods and the swamps."
That sense of hiding out, of needing to keep one’s identity secret, carried on for several years. Back in the 1930s and 40s, when Chief William Daisey was growing up, Nanticoke traditions were kept underground.
"We maintained a low profile, because it was to our benefit to do so," said Daisey.
And when Daisey was little, he wasn’t allowed to go on certain rides at amusement parks in Rehoboth Beach or even go to the nearby high school.
"You’re taught in school that you are an American, the reality was quite different. Because you were not," said Daisey. "The constitution really didn’t mean a whole lot to you, because it’s just a bunch of words."
He remembers his grandfather telling him stories of hiding in the woods to stay alive. The small band of tribal members survived and tried to blend in to the rest of society. But Daisey says the state of Delaware still wanted his people gone.
"Since they weren’t able to wipe us out physically they tried to do it on paper," he said.
Daisey remembers that Census takers were instructed to not categorize anybody as Native American. Sometimes, they were classified as black or mixed race.
"Depended on what year it was. You had different census takers," said Daisey. "Sometimes you were classified as mulatto, sometimes you were classified as colored, in fact one member of my family was classified as copper. Well copper isn’t even a race, you know?
The tribe was able to survive by staying close to each other. They went to the same church , gossiped about all the same people, and their kids went the same two elementary schools.
"Well, we’re a close-knit community, and even though we didn’t have a reservation we lived close together, so you had a pseudo reservation," Daisey said.
But even so, and despite the anger he feels now about the Census, when Daisey was growing up over fifty years ago, he would never have told a classmate that he was a Nanticoke. It just wasn’t safe, he says. His generation stayed cautious.
Today that fear has lifted and the tribe can pass on traditions that were once kept hidden from the rest of the world.
Karen Clause and her husband, whose stepfather runs the Nanticoke Museum, brought their two little girls to Heritage Day. They kids played in the open meadow and watched tribal dances. As Karen was holding her toddler, she explained that they’d already been to a huge pow wow back in September together - an event that drew over 30,000 people.
Daisey and other tribal council members are grateful that they can now pass on traditions to Karen's little girls and others who show up for pow wows or events like last week's Heritage Day.