Turkey Tayac

Turkey Tayac was a Piscataway Indian leader and herbal doctor, born Philip Sheridan Proctor, in 1895 in Charles County, Maryland. Tayac was the last person to have knowledge of the Piscataway language. Two leading Algonquian linguists, Ives Goddard, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, and Julian Granberry both referred to and consulted with Turkey Tayac in their field work.

Early life

Due to a strong, outspoken character that became pronounced early in life, Turkey Tayac's family gave him the name by which he was to effect his leadership, both within his nation and throughout Indian Country. Once grown to adulthood, the chief of the Piscataway Indian Nation began using the surname, "Tayac," both as a title of his practiced leadership, and because the name itself was part of his family's oral history. Turkey Tayac's family traced their descent from a long line of Piscataway chiefs, traditionally called "tayacs." But, by the time Turkey Tayac was born, only a few Piscataway families remained to remember and transmit knowledge of their own vibrant Native American heritage.

Although a few families identified themselves as Piscataway Indians into the early 1900s, prevailing racialist attitudes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Jim Crow policies in the twentieth century determined ethnic and cultural identification in the Upper South. With the enforcement of the "one-drop rule," anyone with a discernible amount of African ancestry would be classified as "negro," "mulatto," or "black," thereby discounting any other ancestry. Moreover, with the nullification of Native American identity through census enumeration and state legislation, any standing Native American treaty rights were that much easier to abrogate. Thus, when Native American reservations were dissolved by the colonial government of Maryland in the eighteenth century, and when the Piscataway were reclassified as "free negro" or "mulatto" on state and federal census records in the nineteenth century, a process of detribalization was set into motion the implications of which were carried well into the twentieth century. (It should be noted that since the Piscataway lack government recognition the effects of detribalization still persist now in the 21st Century.) Contradictorily, while the Piscataway were enumerated as "mulattos" in state and federal census records, Catholic parish records and ethnographic reports continued to identify the Piscataway as Indians. In the 20th century, social scientists referred to the Piscataway as "Wesorts", and moreover, reclassified them this time, not as "mongrels," "mulattoes," or "negroes," but as "tri-racial isolates". Many would argue that the last is just a restating of the former terms, admitting the people's Native American ancestry but undermining its potential meaning.

Rise to leadership

Turkey Tayac fought in World War I in France as a part of the Rainbow Division and was nearly killed by mustard gas. Later in life, Turkey Tayac reported that when Army doctors determined that he would not be able to survive his exposure to the lethal gas, he was able to heal himself with traditional Native American medicine.

Turkey Tayac could have learned traditional medicine from many of his kinspeople. The following were known to have been herbal doctors: Elizabeth Ann Wiseman-Thompson (1820's-1884), Henrietta Harley-Proctor (1851-1941), the granddaughter of Mary Henrietta Collins, and Frank James Proctor (1845-????), known locally as the "Herb Doctor."

Cultural revitalization

Turkey Tayac was a critically important figure in the early and mid-twentieth century cultural revitalization movements among remnant Southeastern Native American communities, including the Lumbee, Nanticoke, and Powhatan Indians of the Atlantic coastal plain. Their efforts were curtailed by the Great Depression and World War II. In an era when Native Americans were increasingly regulated by blood quantum outlined in the Indian Reorganization Act, Turkey Tayac organized a movement for Native American peoples that privileged self-ascriptive forms of identification. Tayac's innovative, self-deterministic leadership led to the issuance of Native American identification cards by the Piscataway themselves rather than having tribes apply to and rely on state and federal bureaucracies to issue them on their behalf.

Tayac's efforts were especially courageous given the centuries long struggle by numerous tribal nations east of the Mississippi River to be legally and legislatively accorded indigenous status. The volatility of the region's politics of identity can be traced into the present. In 1907, the Catholic Encyclopedia wrote that people claiming to be Piscataway were "negro mongrels." As Native peoples of the mid-Atlantic and Southeast gained recognition and legitimacy in the post-Civil Rights era, fresh opposition attempted to perpetuate the fiction of a fictive biracial society. For example Sociologist Thomas Ford Brown has gone so far as to repeatedly apply the term "bastard" when referring to many of the ancestors of the Piscataway. An internet publication by Leah C. Sims criminalizes and racializes the Piscataway by referring to them as "frauds" since the Piscataway throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries intermarried with both blacks and whites. Sims's logic ignores the fact that tribal identity is at heart a cultural issue. Today's Piscataway people understand that while the work of Brown and Sims, who were married, is not respected by peer-reviewed scholars who publish in university presses, that such attempts are nevertheless deliberately harmful to the work of indigenous cultural revitalization. Ultimately, the self-published material that Brown and Sims have distributed is part of a larger politics of identity that insists that indigenous peoples must comply with non-Native notions of "Indianness", and yet must also abide by a larger set of changing standards, laws, and practices.

In contrast to Sims' and Brown's self-published internet pieces, the State of Maryland appointed a panel of anthropologists, genealogists, and historians to review thousands of pages of Piscataway genealogical primary sources. The panel, including a genealogist with the Maryland State Archives, concluded that the Piscataway records showed a clear link to the historic Piscataway. A Letter to the Editor published on August 29, 2007 in the Maryland Independent provides testimony by a member of the Recognition Advisory Committee testifies to these facts. Turkey Tayac's genealogical information was also validated by this panel of independent experts and reviewed and approved by the Maryland Commission of Indian Affairs. In contrast, Leah Sims' allegations were disproved and characterized as a politicized action to dispute state tribal recognition.

Cultural reclamation

Along with his tribal responsibilities, Turkey Tayac was also an active participant in the Bonus Army, understanding that his participation was part of a larger, life-long dedication to seeking social justice. Turkey Tayac was also a devout Roman Catholic throughout his life, and was active in the Catholic Veterans of America. Turkey Tayac worked extensively with ethnographers and archaeologists, including T. Dale Stewart, John Harrington, Frank G. Speck, William H. Gilbert, and Lucille St. Hoyme -- scholars, all of whom were interested in finding evidence of Native American survival in regions where it was thought that Native Americans had long since vanished. Turkey Tayac himself maintained a deep interest in learning more about the Piscataway beyond his family's oral history, and spent a great deal of time with archaeologists who excavated Piscataway sites.

Turkey Tayac was particularly concerned with Moyaone, a site that eventually was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the location of the pre-contact Piscataway capital town. Turkey Tayac had gone to that site as a child to collect traditional medicines and ceremonially burn tobacco in honor of the dead. Tayac was also a proponent of the 1960s creation of Piscataway National Park, which he believed would protect the Moyaone site from corporate development. Although the Moyaone site was within the boundaries of the colonial-era Piscataway Indian reservation -- land he always considered to be unceded land -- Turkey Tayac agreed that it should be placed under the trust of the Department of the Interior. In exchange for his cooperation, Turkey Tayac requested that he should be buried there within the ancient ossuary, or mass burial, of his ancestors, and moreover, that his Piscataway people would always be able to go there.

With the rise of the American Indian Movement in the 1970s, Turkey Tayac found renewed interest in his efforts to organize the Piscataway people. Along with his son, William Redwing Tayac, and a Pima supporter, Avery Lewis, Turkey Tayac incorporated a non-profit organization, the "Piscataway-Conoy Indians," in 1974. Eventually, the Piscataway-Conoy Indians, Inc. opened the Piscataway Indian Center for the purpose of revitalizing American Indian identity not only for people of Piscataway heritage, but also for other Native Americans living in the region.

In 1978, Turkey Tayac was diagnosed with leukemia. Prior to his death, he sought to insure that the promise that had been made to him to have his remains interred at Moyaone be carried out. Initially however, the Department of the Interior rebuffed his request for assurances. U.S. Representative Gladys Noon Spellman unsuccessfully introduced a bill for his burial. When Turkey Tayac died in 1978, other arrangements had not been made for his burial. The Tayac family refused to bury him until they received assurances that the promise that had been made to Turkey Tayac would be kept. To this end, his body was kept in a mausoleum. A year later, U.S. Senator Paul Sarbanes sponsored yet another bill to bury Chief Turkey Tayac. Sarbanes' bill successfully passed into law with the support of the Maryland General Assembly and the National Congress of American Indians, and in 1979, Turkey Tayac was finally laid to rest in the ossuary site at Moyaone. Today, a red cedar tree, planted by Turkey Tayac in 1976 to mark the location where he wanted to be buried, marks Turkey Tayac's final resting place.

References

*Feest, Christian. "Nanticokes and Neighboring Tribes" in "Handbook of North American Indians", Volume 15, 1978.
*Maryland Commission on Indian Affairs, Correspondence with R. Christopher Goodwin, August 12, 1999.
*Maynor, Malinda. "Native American Identity in the Segregated South: The Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, 1872-1956." "Doctoral Dissertation". Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2005.
*Rountree, Helen C. "Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries". Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.
*Rountree, Helen C., and Thomas E. Davidson. "Eastern Shore Indians of Virginia and Maryland". Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.
*Tayac, Gabrielle. "Stolen Spirits," in "Contemporary Issues in American Indian Studies", edited by Dane Morrison. Lang Publishers, 1997.
*______. "To Speak with One Voice: Supra-Tribal American Indian Collective Identity Incorporation among the Piscataway, 1500-1998." "Doctoral Dissertation". Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1999.
*______. "Keeping the Original Instructions," in "Native Universe", edited by Clifford Trafzer and Gerald McMaster. Washington, DC: National Geographic and the National Museum of the American Indian, 2004.
*______. "We Rise, We Fall, We Rise," in "Smithsonian Magazine", September 2004.
*______. "From the Deep," in "New Tribe, New York", edited by Gerald McMaster. Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, 2005.
*______.Oral & Documented history of the Southern Maryland Outcase, [ Allie Dragoni ] 2003

External links

* [http://www.piscatawaynation.org/ Piscataway Indian Nation home page]
*http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12114a.htm
*http://www.somdnews.com/stories/082907/indylet183859_32113.shtml Dr. R. Christopher Goodwin's Letter to Maryland Independent