Wyandot Removal Trail

In 1843, after years of negotiation and resistance, the State of Ohio succeeded in removing the last Indigenous tribe from its boundaries. Emboldened by the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, Ohio citizens set their sights on Wyandot lands in the fertile Sandusky River Valley. As a result of increased pressure and unscrupulous dealings, the Wyandot agreed to move to present-day Kansas City, Kansas. They trekked 150 miles south to Cincinnati and boarded two steamboats headed west. Within a decade, the United States terminated the Wyandots' tribal status, prompting a portion of the tribe to relocate once again from Kansas to Oklahoma in protest. In 1867, the Office of Indian Affairs returned tribal status to the Wyandotte Nation in Oklahoma. Other Wendat bands in Kansas and Michigan are still not federally-recognized.

Project Origins

Establishing a partnership between a community group and an academic institution requires time and careful planning to build trust and capacity. It is also useful to establish benchmarks that allow all partners involved to reassess their involvement and the direction of the partnership. A semester is a reasonable time commitment for all parties, and many community engaged projects have their origins in the classroom as a result.

The common pedagogical roots and inherently collaborative nature of community-engaged work makes it difficult to assess. In 2010, the American Historical Association, National Council on Public History, and Organization for American Historians' co-authored a report on "Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Historian." They define community engagement as "an active partnership between scholars and a community for the creation and application of knowledge through teaching and scholarship." Indeed, community engagement projects often straddle the categories of research and teaching, forcing these otherwise rigid categories to become more flexible in evaluation for tenure and promotion. The Wyandot Removal Trail is no exception.

In the Spring of 2022, I was scheduled to teach our graduate-level public history practicum, a course which generally works with a local community organization to create a publicly-engaged project. Establishing the organization and project generally requires a lot of lead time. I was on pre-tenure academic leave in the Fall of 2021, and I used this time in part to identify a community partner and potential project.

I also teach our Native American History course for undergraduates which is required for early education majors. I knew from my research preparing several Ohio-based weeks of course material that there was a dearth of information about the Wyandot. A partnership with the present-day Wyandotte Nation (Oklahoma) could not only amplify an understudied Indian Removal story, but it could also produce better teaching materials for my Native History course and Ohio's future educators.

map of ohio with trail markersIn November 2021, I reached out to Kim Garcia, the Cultural Preservation Officer and head of the Cultural Division of Wyandotte Nation, to ask if her division would be interested in collaboration. I noted that the current commemoration of Wyandot history in Ohio was abysmal, and the historic markers through which passersby learn Wyandot history are racist and weaponize passive voice to mask settler aggression. Her response was immediate: "This has the potential to work into a much bigger project. I say yes, let's go for it!" After connecting with a few more folks in the Cultural Division and a contractor working on a driving tour of Wyandot Removal, we decided to spend the semester creating a prototype of a virtual removal trail. The Cultural Division reviewed and approved my syllabus.

I divided the course into three segments: reading, research, and building. First, students and I read deeply about Wyandot history and Midwest removal. Then, we began our own research on Wyandot removal. White whiskey peddlers and spectators stalked the Wyandots on their arduous trail from Upper Sandusky to Cincinnati, and they wrote about it in their newspapers. Newspaper accounts were our primary source of information, which admittedly biases our prototype in favor of white voices. I was clear with the Cultural Division and students that this was going to be a limitation from the start. My department assigned me a research assistant for the semester (Delaney White), and she and I worked in parallel to find Wyandot voices through other archival sources.

In the "building" portion of the course, I divided the students into teams to co-author our virtual removal trail in ArcGIS StoryMaps. I embraced students' varied skillsets, and we ended up creating new maps of the Wyandot Removal Trail and also transcribing county-by-county census data to show white encroachment on Indian territory in Ohio over time. These maps play as .GIFs. At the end of the semester, the students presented the prototype to the Cultural Division.

The students and I also produced two additional documents for the Cultural Division. The first is a robust Wyandot bibliography / library guide for current and future researchers. This document will remain under development as I locate more sources. The second document is a spreadsheet of all the newspaper articles we were able to find. They are organized by city and state and include direct links to the articles on Newspapers.com as well as a brief summary.

Next Steps

As the Cultural Division folks stated during our final presentation, the Virtual Wyandot Removal Trail is a great v.1.0. Knowing that the prototype would be limited, I wrote an Ohio Humanities Quarterly Grant (with permission of Chief Billy Friend) that would fund further development of the trail over the summer of 2022. We were successful. This summer, my previous RA, Delaney White, is working with the Cultural Division and myself on the following: incorporating Wyandot voices past and present into the prototype; developing sample curriculum for early education teachers in Ohio and Oklahoma; and drafting a historic marker for installation on Cincinnati's riverbanks. At the close of the grant, members of the Wyandotte Nation Cultural Division and several key scholars in the field will review the final products.

Ohio Humanities invited me to contribute an article about Wyandot Removal to their magazine Lumen. They are currently working on a series of articles that retell the history about the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and its present-day impact. While page proofs are not yet available, the article is complete and edited. It will be published in September 2022.

As I wrote in Digital Community Engagement, "when we parachute in and leave, we replicate the same systems that marginalized the community in the first place." Maintaining a community partnership is more important than creating it in the first place. All things continuing to go well between myself and Wyandotte Nation, we are discussing a documentary, a permanent trail along the closest highway routes, the replacement of the historic markers in Upper Sandusky, and the inclusion of representatives from other bands in the Wendat Confederacy to tell a more just history of the Wyandot.

What to Evaluate