A BRIEF INDIGENOUS AND NATIVE HISTORY OF PITTSBURGH AND THE GREATER NORTHEAST REGION

A BRIEF HISTORY AND LANGUAGE OF THE INDIGENOUS, ABORIGINAL, AND NATIVE PEOPLES OF THE AMERICAS

Indians refers to the aboriginal race of men. Aboriginal peoples are the only sovereign people upon our lands and throughout the Americas under Article 1 Section 2 Clause 3 of the United States Constitution. They are regarded as the Onkwehonwe original beings of the entire Western Hemisphere and adjoining islands. 
By original definition, the term 'American' was "originally applied to the aboriginals, or copper-colored races, found here by Europeans, but now is applied to the descendants of Europeans born in America". 
In 1947, Walter Ashby Plecker created The Racial Integrity Act which then reclassified Aboriginal ancestors from "Indians" to "colored" as an attempt to erase Indian identity. This ruling was later overturned in 1967 by the Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia Case, but the impacts of the white supremacist ideology and attempted erasure have persisted in current education systems. 
In the Pittsburgh region, the Iroquois Confederacy (made of up the Seneca, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga and Cayuga peoples) of Aborigine American People claim a stake in native land. 
The native peoples of the Americas are immigrants who arrived to North America around 15,000 years ago via migration over the Bering Strait, as well as through sea migrations from Mongolia/Asia. 
It is important to note that Indigenous Americans are not a monoculture, and thousands of ethnic groups and languages have existed across the land.

EARLY HISTORY OF THE PITTSBURGH & NORTHEAST REGION

Known as the Mound-Builders, the Adena Tribe came to the Mckees Rocks area from around 1000 to 200 BC. They inhabited the area from modern-day New York to West Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland. Burial practices were most notable in this culture, and a large burial ground site was built at Mckees Rocks, one of the oldest carbon-dated human settlements in North America. This was later expanded upon by the Hopewell Culture.

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The Monongahela peoples had a presence in the region from AD 1050 until the early 17th century. They are most known for their maize agriculture practices, pottery and clay decoration, intricate village layouts. The exact details of their disappearance from the area is unknown, but archeological findings point to the fact that they either died out from European disease or abandoned the area from outside pressure of other trading groups.

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Following both the Adena, Hopewell, and Monongahela tribes came the Iroquois Confederacy. The Seneca or Onödowa’ga:’ (“People of the Great Hill”) made up the largest of the Six Nations of the early Iroquois Confederacy. During the 17th century, they expanded their territory to encompass all of western New York State down into the Allegheny region of Pennsylvania. 

Alongside the Iroquois, the Lenape (Delaware) and Shawnee peoples migrated into the area from eastern PA and the southern U.S., respectively.

During this time, towns and trading posts began to take form. Most notably, Shannopin’s Town, a Seneca tribe center; the Lenape tribe village of Sawcunk; and Chartier’s Town, established in 1734 as a Shawnee village on the Allegheny River.

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The British and French established trading posts in the mid-1700s along both the Ohio and Allegheny rivers. The British established the Ohio Company in 1748 which received a grant of 200,000 acres to establish settlements, trails, and trading.The French came in and took over much of the Ohio Valley through their trading center, Logstown. In 1753, they constructed Fort LeBoeuf to gain access to the Allegheny River, and in the 1754 Fort Machault was built to further establish their influence. All of these measures and establishments foreshadowed the increased the seizure of land from tribal communities through European white supremacist ideology, contributing to massive loss of life and attempted cultural erasure.

The French & Indian War started in 1754, with France and Britain battling over expanding and occupying territories in the Ohio River Valley region. Notable wars in the Pittsburgh region included Pontiac’s War and the Battle of Bushy Ben. Through forced assimilation and the threat of losing their homeland, some tribes sided with either the French or the British. Despite their alliances, the aftermath of the French & Indian War was devastating for native, Aboriginal, and Indigenous groups.  

Just as was prominent across the country, land was being seized from tribal communities in Pittsburgh all across the Three Rivers region. The British sought revenge against tribes that sided with the French by cutting off their supplies and then forcibly compelling the tribes to assimilate to British colonialist practices. This was the only the beginning of a long and scarred history of Indigenous erasure and genocide across the modern United States. Even as recently as the 1960s, about ⅓ of designated tribal land for the Seneca people was taken over by the U.S. government to install the Kinzua Dam. This led to the internal displacement of over 600 people and thousands of acres flooded. 

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Today, the Pittsburgh region is honored through the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center (COTRAIC), the community of modern Aborigine members of the Iroquois Confederacy, and all Indigenous members of the Monogahela, Lenape (Delaware), Shawnee, and Haudenosaunee ancestral lands.