Thunder Moutain Lenape Nation coaxes Native American heritage out of closet

“The things that are passed down from generation to generation, we need to have them in order to be whole people … Our way teaches us, to look behind you at the next generation coming up. Now look further back, to the generation coming up behind them. And then, look further back to the next seven generations coming up, to those yet not born, and in all things, in all decisions that we make, in all the things we do, that is to be our number one consideration.”

— Jack Many Colors
Thunder Mountain pow-wow MC

Centuries after their ancestors went underground, descendants of the Native Americans who once made their homes in our neck of Penn’s Woods are stepping forward to teach about the lifestyles and revive the traditions of old.

In 1997, these descendants banded together to form Thunder Mountain Lenapé Nation, a volunteer-run, non-profit organization now based near Nowrytown in Connemaugh Township, Indiana County.

“We’re basically educators,” Mollie Rising Sun Eliot said. Mollie serves as council member and public relations director for the group.

Education is the driving force behind the group’s current project — purchasing the remote acreage on which they held their Native American festival, or pow-wow, last weekend and in August, 2002.

At the entrance of the festival grounds in Connemaugh Township, the group has put together a “Living History Village,” which features wigwams, a teepee in the making, a “Three Sisters” garden and hands-on displays of replica tools and utensils once used in the everyday life of local natives.

“We’ve developed a lot of things here to entice kids in,” Mollie said. “Once you get the kids interested, the parents come in, so we can teach.”

“All the things here, people can pick up,” she said. “They can explore. There’s an Indian dart game back there. We have children’s things to do; clay-making; games.”

The wigwams are constructed using tree limb frames which are covered with poplar bark. “We have a fellow in our group, Jim Sallinger, who makes wooden crafts, wooden toys. He uses the wood and we use the bark.”

The group is working on finding funds to buy the property so the exhibit can be a permanent educational tool, Mollie said. “It’s about 200 acres, and we’re going to have a cultural center here someday, and the living villages.”

Plans are to blaze a trail through the wooded acreage, where, she said, “you’ll walk through the woods and come to a Lenapé village; walk a little farther and come to an Iroquois village; go a little farther and there may be a Shawnee village.”

“We’re asking people to come and build a village the way their people once did,” Mollie said. “Then, in the summer they can come and man that village, sell their crafts all summer long, so instead of going on the pow-wow circuit, it will give some of the families a place to be all summer.”

“We’re still in the process of getting acquisition money for the property and then we have to start fund raising for the building as well.”

The building plans include a cultural learning center. Although it would be ideal, she doubts the group will have the cultural center built in time for the upcoming 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War. Meanwhile, members of the group continue to offer workshops through which they teach the history and lifeskills of their ancestors.

A great deal of their cultural information comes from oral histories, passed down from one generation to the next. “A lot of it has been passed down,” Mollie said, “and our oral history will differ, in a lot of cases, from written history, because the written history was written from a white prospective.”

“If you talk to our elders, they’ll laugh, and say, ‘That’s just what we told them,’” she added. “Indians have a very dry sense of humor, and they would perpetrate jokes, so a lot of things written in the history books aren’t accurate for one reason or another.”

“It was either self-serving for the white settlers coming in to say, ‘Well, there’s no Indians left here,’ and we’re all sitting here saying among ourselves, ‘Well we’re not leaving, so you can call us Irish if you want.’”

“I’ve personally done a lot of research because I teach at workshops,” she said. “I’m still learning.”

“I’m doing research, comparing what the elders tell me with the written records and trying to winnow it down to the reality.”

By Cynthia Venturini, Staff Writer

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