HEADLINE: CENSUS: MD's growing
American Indian pop. seeks stronger identity
BYLINE: By DAVID
DISHNEAU, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: HAGERSTOWN, Md.
American Indians were once commonly thought to have disappeared from Maryland.
One hundred years later, they're back and demanding recognition from a state that borrowed heavily from their language - Chesapeake, Patuxent, Patapsco - while driving many out or underground. A total of 54,860 people, or 1 percent of the state's population, identified themselves as at least part American Indian or part Alaska Native in the 2000 census. Of those, 15,423 said they were solely American Indian or Alaska Native, a 19 percent increase from 1990, when 12,972 people chose the category then defined as American Indian, Eskimo or Aleut.
The 2000 census was the first in which people could identify themselves as being of more than one race. The big jump continues the pattern of recent decades, reflecting both the migration of Indians, as well as other minorities, into the Washington area for work, and a greater willingness among established residents to declare their Indian ancestry, a researcher says.
"There's an increased pride in American Indian heritage that there wasn't earlier and opportunity for self-identification," said Gabrielle Tayac, a sociologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. Tayac also leads an effort to gain state tribal recognition for her group, the Piscataway Indian Nation. The group, with about 120 members clustered mainly in Prince George's and Charles counties, is one of three that have either filed formal petitions with the state or served notice to do so.
Recognition brings benefits including health and education services as well as economic development assistance, said Dixie L. Henry, administrator of the Maryland Commission on Indian Affairs. It also can mean something less tangible: public acknowledgement of a people's determination to survive. Tayac said she is the granddaughter of a chief, Turkey Tayac, whose family was among just four that still publicly identified themselves as Piscataway by the 1920s in an area that had been the tribe's home for hundreds of years.
"To be an Indian was a very dangerous identification through the 19th century," Tayac said. "There were laws on the books about scalping Indians and references to barbarians, savages and all the other stereotypes that still persist today." Tayac said the civil rights and Indian pride movements of the 1960s and early 1970s prompted more Marylanders to embrace their Indian heritage, resulting in a 1980 census count of 8,021 identifying themselves as American Indian, Eskimo or Aleut.
The success of Indian casinos elsewhere has contributed to further growth in the number of Marylanders declaring their Indian blood, no matter how diluted, she said. In 1978, the year her grandfather died, Tayac's group stopped accepting new members, limiting its rolls to direct descendants of the four families that could be traced to the early 1900s.
Another, larger Piscataway group, The Piscataway Conoy Confederacy and Subtribes, also has petitioned for state recognition, Henry said. The Eastern Shore was home to a number of tribes, including the Nanticoke, one of the largest. About 250 people there claiming Indian blood have organized and plan to seek recognition as the Nause-Waiwash (nah-soo WAY-wash), a reference to two Nanticoke ancestral villages, said their chief, Sewell Fitzhugh of Dorchester County.
"We know we're here. We've never left," he said. "We want the state of Maryland and all to acknowledge they didn't kill us all, that some of us managed to survive."
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