Welcome
To
On
This
Land
Have you ever wondered:
What happened to the Indigenous people who lived where my home town stands today?
This is the answer you would get if you lived in Wayne County, Ohio:
“Their sudden disappearance from the county was most remarkable, occurring, as it were, in a single night…soon after the War of 1812 had been announced. They scented the bad breath of the coming carnival, we suppose, and hastened westward to deepen the blood-stain of their hands.”
–Benjamin Douglass, History of Wayne County Ohio, page 166
Benjamin Douglass, the author of the above quote, leaves us with more questions than answers.
Why was Douglass so quick to accuse these people of having blood on their hands? Where did he get the story that they all left “in a single night”? Better yet, what compelled someone like Douglass to tell this story in the first place? Why was it important, in 1878, that people knew this fact?
Passages like this make one wonder what it felt like to live as a Wyandot, Delaware, or Shawnee person in the Wayne County area. According to Douglass, these people were bloodthirsty, guilty, and even cowardly.
What information did local historians like Douglass leave out, and how can we recover the perspectives of Wayne County’s Indigenous people?
Questions like these make researching Indigenous history difficult. Sometimes, the only people who can answer these questions are people like Ben Douglass, who claimed to be objective but may not have delivered on this promise.
We can’t go back in time and follow Wayne County’s Indigenous inhabitants as they navigated a world of white settlement, war, and uncertainty. Without many sources that pertain to the county, it can be hard to know exactly what happened on this land.
That’s where this project comes in.
This project is designed for local historians, tribal nations, students, educators, and anyone who has come across a book like Ben Douglass’s when researching their local area. Here, we will think differently about how local history has been written, whose voices are heard, and how we should record it going forward. Most of all, you will get to the voices of Indigenous people who have ties to Wayne County.
“Indigenous Communities are the knowledge keepers of their own history. Which is shared with each generation from the ones before, whose lived experiences are and have been interpreted as history by others, usually historians not of that community. Indigenous Communities have a first-person perspective of their own history. One can’t possibly interpret Indigenous history authentically and accurately without indigenous representation.”
– Carissa Speck, Historic Preservation Director, Delaware Nation, 2023.
Explore excerpts from Douglass’s work, learn about myths of Native American history, and discover what this book can tell us besides local facts.
Indigenous History of Wayne County, Ohio
Learn more about pre-contact and contact-era Indigenous history and how we can fill in the knowledge gaps left by Douglass.
Benjamin Douglass: The Man Behind the Book
Learn more about who Douglass was, who inspired him when writing his history of Wayne County, and what his life can tell us about Wayne County’s relationship to Indigenous history.
Find the books, articles, and websites used in this project