A Homecoming Shadowed by History
While millions of Americans this summer are flocking to Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and Mount Vernon to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary, a caravan of 52 Eastern Shawnee citizens made a profoundly different kind of pilgrimage — traveling nearly 700 miles from their tribal headquarters in Wyandotte, Oklahoma, back to the Ohio lands from which their ancestors were forcibly expelled in 1832. The juxtaposition is not incidental. It is the point. As the United States stages elaborate commemorations of its founding ideals, the Eastern Shawnee’s journey serves as a living, breathing counter-narrative: a reminder that the expansion of American liberty was, for Indigenous peoples, inseparable from dispossession, displacement, and erasure.
The Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma are descendants of the Shawnee people who called Ohio home for generations, and their chief, Glenna Wallace, has organized these return trips since shortly after her election in 2006. “So while we can document having been in 27 different states, it was here in Ohio when we were forcibly removed,” Wallace explained during this year’s journey, her words carrying the weight of a history that American commemorations too often sidestep. The tribe’s itinerary — winding through ancient earthworks, ceremonial mounds, and village sites — stands as a form of cultural reclamation that no federal celebration can replicate or substitute.
Sacred Ground Reclaimed, Partially
Among the stops on the tribe’s journey was the Great Council State Park, situated on the site of Old Chillicothe, one of the largest known 18th-century Shawnee villages in Ohio. The group also visited Serpent Mound, a 1,300-foot-long earthen structure shaped like a serpent and designated a National Historic Landmark, built by Native Americans more than 2,000 years ago. For many in the caravan, including Amber Graham, a descendant of Chief Blackfish of the Chillicothe band, this was a first visit — an encounter charged with both grief and recognition. “I like to see where they walked, what they did,” she said. “It feels like you can feel a little bit of their presence and what they’ve been through, and it can get a little emotional.”
The group also toured the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where Shawnee people are believed to be among the descendants of the original builders — communities who used these monumental earthen structures as ceremonial centers long before European contact. For tribal members walking those grounds, the visit carried a quiet pride that no museum exhibit or textbook could fully convey. Ashley Aviles, who had visited Ohio once before as a child with her grandmother, reflected on how her understanding had deepened with age: “I didn’t get to appreciate, at that age, what I am actually experiencing, how to tie it back to our ancestors.”
From Golf Course to Sacred Site: A Slow Reckoning
One of the most telling stops on the tour was the Octagon Earthworks, a site that, until last year, had been leased to a private country club and operated as a golf course — a use that encapsulates, with almost painful clarity, the broader pattern of Indigenous heritage being subordinated to private leisure and profit. Tribal citizen Clint Kissee, who had visited the site before while golf was still being played there, described the experience as discouraging. This year, however, was different. “Excited today,” he said simply, before describing how he left tobacco and said a prayer, and noted with evident satisfaction that native medicinal and forage plants were beginning to return to the land.
The transition of the Octagon Earthworks away from golf course use represents a small but meaningful shift, one that required sustained advocacy by Indigenous groups and their allies over many years. It is the kind of outcome that illustrates what is possible when the state chooses to honor its obligations to Indigenous communities rather than defer to private interests — and it also illustrates how much ground, both literal and figurative, remains to be recovered. The site’s restoration is incomplete, and the broader legal and political framework governing the protection of Indigenous heritage remains fragile and contested.
The Weight of the Sesquicentennial — and What It Leaves Out
The timing of this year’s journey gives it a particular resonance that Chief Wallace and other tribal members acknowledge openly. The United States’ 250th anniversary celebrations are, by design, exercises in national self-congratulation, foregrounding narratives of liberty, democratic ideals, and revolutionary courage. What those narratives consistently struggle to accommodate is the foundational contradiction at their core: that the territorial expansion enabling the new republic’s growth was achieved through the systematic removal of the peoples who already inhabited the land. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, which provided the legal architecture for the Eastern Shawnee’s forced expulsion two years later, was not an aberration from American ideals — it was an expression of them, as practiced at the time.
Wallace, who plans to retire as chief this fall, expressed her hope in terms that are both generous and quietly insistent. “The past is the past,” she said. “Let’s build upon it, and let’s be more positive. And we hope to be able to return and have a presence here.” That aspiration — to have a presence in the homeland from which one’s people were expelled nearly two centuries ago — is a modest enough request. The fact that it remains aspirational rather than assured speaks to the unfinished work of repair that the American state has yet to seriously undertake.
Continuity, Memory, and the Next Generation
What the Eastern Shawnee’s return trips accomplish, beyond the immediate experience of reconnection, is the transmission of cultural memory across generations — a form of living education that no classroom curriculum can replicate. For younger tribal members joining the caravan for the first time, the journey makes abstract history visceral and personal, transforming names and dates into landscapes, sounds, and emotions. Graham’s description of feeling the presence of her ancestors at Chillicothe, or Aviles’s reflection on what she could not fully grasp as a child, both speak to the irreplaceable value of physical presence on ancestral ground.
Wallace’s hope that these trips will continue after her retirement reflects an understanding that cultural continuity requires active, institutional commitment — it does not sustain itself automatically in the face of displacement, poverty, and the ongoing pressures that bear down on Indigenous communities across the country. The Eastern Shawnee’s journey back to Ohio is, in this sense, both an act of memory and an act of resistance: a refusal to allow forced removal to become the final word. As America holds parades and fireworks to mark 250 years of independence, it is worth sitting with the question of whose independence, and at whose expense — and what genuine reckoning with that history might actually require.