Over the weekend, hundreds of members of the Wisconsin-based Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican community made the long trek east to hold a powwow in Lenox, Massachusetts. The ongoing return to ancestral homelands comes after centuries of painful waiting.
On the grounds of Shakespeare & Company, the smell of burnt sage, venison, and fry bread wafted across the grass as the drums, song, and dance of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican people vibrated through the earth below and air above.
For millennia, they called the northeastern lands around the Housatonic and Hudson river valleys home. The arrival of European settlers in the 17th century changed everything.
“We've been over here on the East Coast for a very, very long time, 10,000 plus years. One of the things that I am very proud of is we've had warriors in every single war since the boats started showing up," said Jeremy Mohawk, a Mohican Munsee man of the Caribou Clan and a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin. “We had warriors in each one of them wars, and I'm very proud of our warrior lineage and how we are still standing up and going to bat for the good old United States of America. But it's a long history of that, and I think people need to understand some of that. Our regiment worked directly under George Washington during the Revolutionary War.”
After fighting alongside colonists to throw off British rule in the 1770s and 1780s, the Indigenous community was rewarded by being pushed first out of Massachusetts and eventually all the way to Wisconsin to find a new home.
“When you send warriors out to war in the Revolutionary War, and then they come back, and all of their land's gone because the people that were trading with took their land - That's no way to say thank you to a people that just helped you win your independence,” said Mohawk.
Such was the success of last year’s powwow in New Lebanon – the first of its kind for the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican people in centuries – the number of community members traveling out for The Second Homelands PowWow: Tending the Fire in Lenox quadrupled this year. Lillian Belky was one of many who took an 18-hour, one-thousand-plus mile bus ride to be there.
“We was all anxious about it, and it was really when we stepped off, it was like, we're finally here, and we finally can see the different places, the different buildings, the people.," said Belky. "The people that we meet are just great.”
She said the sense of return was immediate.
“It feels great to be here," she told WAMC. "It's more relaxing. I don't have headaches when I'm here. My body doesn't ache. I feel really relaxed and energetic.”
Her sister Linda Rudesill also made the trip.
“The land's grabbing you, and you feel all the people that was here before you, and you're finding out your own history of where you come from,” she said.
The undulating topography of Berkshire County embraced her with open arms.
“We don't have like the hills or the mountains or anything. Ours is just flat," said
Rudesill. "So, it's a nice place to be. It makes you feel safe and all that stuff.”
Taylor Jade Gurney was one of the younger community members to make it out for the powwow. Taking a break from dancing in the sacred circle, she said the experience had deepened her sense of who she was and the generations that preceded her.
“It makes me think about like how they connected and like the different ways they had to like survive and like how type or how they did the dancing and everything like that, and what regalias that they made for themselves and how they did that,” said Gurney.
No powwow would be complete without food. That’s where chef Little Bear Williams comes in.
“Indigenous peoples throughout history, food - I ain't gonna say food was scarce, but it was often the currency of relationships, right?" he told WAMC. "So, when you would come across a person, they would feed you. I like to tell people that if they watched Game of Thrones, they had the bread and wine type of rule where if I feed you and I give you something to drink under my roof, then you're safe.”
Williams hails from the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, and is a member of the Turtle Clan. With his father serving as one of the powwow’s emcees and his mom vending, he was tasked with cooking.
“She wanted to do some things like sort of a culture fusion," he said. "So, it's an homage to some of the things that we would have done pre-colonial days, and then with a mix of modern. So, we're gonna have butternut squash with roasted bison and wild rice casserole. Wild rice is pretty big back home in Wisconsin and the Midwest, so we know relatives that harvested that particular wild rice by hand.”
The Williams family is itself a living cultural fusion, with both Black and Native heritage.
“I suppose there's a balancing act between - People try to make you choose," said Williams. "And that's never easy, right? How do I choose? My grandma was Black, I loved her. She was my favorite person, my favorite human. But I grew up on the rez. I was born and raised on the rez, I went to Indian school, I went to boarding schools, my wife is the director of our language department back in Oneida, in Wisconsin, and we conduct ceremonies at our homestead. So I'm really culturally grounded with my Indigenous side, but that doesn't mean that I deny or overlook the other side”
For Williams, cooking is a way to subvert expectations and show just how good blurring the lines can taste.
“People are stubborn, and they like what they like, and they think they know what they think they know, right?" he explained. "And they think, oh man, why would you put soul food with fry bread, or why would you put sweet potato cornbread with buffalo or venison, right? And you just gotta kind of spring it on them, and then they're like, this is amazing! And then you're like, yeah, man, that goes together, right? We go together.”
