Note: This story was originally written and published in print April 2023
Before Slippery Rock land belonged to the university or even the town, it was inhabited by members of the Seneca nation. According to legend, the area and school were named after native defeat.
“[I]n colonial times, soldiers were being chased by the local Seneca Indians. The troops, wearing heavy boots, were able to cross the creek, but the Indians, wearing moccasins, slipped on the rocks in the creek bed. They named the creek Wechachochapohka – a slippery rock,” the official SRU website states.
However, not everyone believes that this mythological defeat is a cause for triumph. For some, it represents a broader history of oppression and brutality toward Native American people.
The people of Western Pennsylvania
“The fact is that [in] the Slippery Rock Creek area, the people that were there were the people who were all over Western Pennsylvania,” a member of the Three Rivers Tribal Council, Miguel Sague, said.
“The main population group that controlled Western Pennsylvania was a group called the Senecas…the Seneca Nation belonged to a larger group of people called the Iroquois,” he said.
There were around 15 Iroquoian tribes that governed land as far west as Ohio and as far north as Ontario, Canada. The Seneca people attempted to create a coalition with all 15 tribes but were only successful in securing five. The group was subsequently called the Haudenosaunee, or The Iroquois Confederacy.
Because English settlers had occupied the east, more and more Native people moved to Western Pennsylvania with permission from the Seneca. One of those groups was called the Lenape.
“There were several Lenape settlements…one I know that was right next door to the university was called Kushkushking,” Sague said.
The village of Kuskusky, where the Kushkushking and other tribes lived, was characterized by its large stand of maple trees. Residents performed maple tree ceremonies and hosted maple tree gatherings.
“That maple tree stand lasted long after the native people had been driven out,” Sague said. “The European settlers, mostly English, they kept harvesting the maple syrup from those maple trees that the [Natives] had been harvesting. That’s one of the important features of that region that Native Americans were dealing with—the maple sugar.”
Conflict with the English
“The English, they came in as friends at first…but when they got settled in, they started…doing some really horrible things,” Sague said.
Native people made treaties with the British government that were supposed to deter the English from crossing the Alleghenies. However, European colonists continued to move west.
“They didn’t really care…as far as they were concerned. London was far away and they didn’t like the king anyway,” Sague said. “The [Natives] would get mad and they would attack the settlements. And then there would be an outcry, ‘Oh massacre, massacre, the Indians are killing white people.'”
The English eventually began to fight with the French over what is now American territory. Native people allied themselves with the French since they were more likely to honor their land treaties. This conflict is better known as The French and Indian War.
At first, the British suffered major defeat. “The Native people of this area were very happy. They felt like ‘we beat the British and the French helped us and now we can have our land to ourselves’,” Sague said.
This British failure led to policy and law changes that allowed English soldiers to hide behind trees and carry shorter guns. Soon after, the French and their Native allies lost the war.
“They took over the Three Rivers area and burnt it to the ground…” Sague said. “Native people in this area were really ticked off…they lost more and more trees and land because more colonists kept coming over.”
In retaliation, Native Americans surrounded what is now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with the help of indigenous tribes from all over the area. The Kushkushking joined in the fight. After many battles, British troops from Philadelphia were finally able to save Fort Pitt.
The effort to protect this land came to be known as Pontiac’s Rebellion. “That was the last time there was really serious Native American opposition…there was no more Kushkushking by the end of the rebellion,” Sague said.
Revolutionary War closes doors
Because the British government had more closely honored their treaties, Native people sided with them in the Revolutionary War.
“The Revolutionary War was one of the worst things to happen to the Iroquois…The general [Washington] sent up there…he went systematically village by village, burning and killing anybody that he could see,” Sague said. “He cut down all their trees…and burned all their food and crops…they went through the whole Seneca.”
“That was pretty much the end of the Iroquois Confederacy,” he said. The only Seneca land left in western Pennsylvania was a reservation in Warren County. The other groups had been displaced to northern areas, like New York State.
By the 20th century, Pittsburgh had become a bustling city which led to flooding. In 1965, the Seneca people in Warren County asked the government to help with this issue.
The government went back and forth with plans that would either save or flood out the reservation. They decided to build a dam that flooded the last reservation. The people who lived there were forced to move to reservations in New York, West Virginia and elsewhere.
Where are the Seneca today?
Today’s only existing Seneca reservations are in New York.
“The thing we have now is coalitions…it’s just a random collection of different tribes that live in the area. There’s a very small minority of indigenous people in Western Pennsylvania right now, and we don’t have a whole lot of political power,” Sague said.
Tribes across the country are united by environmentalism. Native people from several different nations now live in the greater Pittsburgh area. There are groups dedicated to protecting its land.
According to Sague, one organization is called Defend Ohi:Yo’, which is named after the Seneca’s name for the Allegheny River.
“We’re bound and determined to save this region from things like fracking and fossil fuels and pipelines.”
Acknowledging history
“We’ve begun to acknowledge that we are settlers who are occupying, often in legally murky contexts, land that was taken from indigenous peoples,” Mustafa ‘Aksel’ Casson, an associate professor at SRU, said. Casson has been working on a land acknowledgment report for the university.
According to him, Canada is much further ahead than the United States when it comes to land acknowledgments. Canadian public institutions routinely start off events by recognizing the original inhabitants of the land they are on.
Some schools in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) have begun releasing formal land acknowledgment statements. One of those schools is East Stroudsburg University, which also offers scholarship plans for Indigenous students. They also center programming around Indigenous events.
“I’ve really wanted Slippery Rock to follow that kind of model,” Casson said. “I think, optimistically, they will probably get there at some point. President Behre has been open to the idea but has been very cautious about the kind of language we would use in that statement.”
Casson believes that land acknowledgment can easily become an empty gesture if not followed through.
“For [it] to have any real power or authority, we need to take that next step. We’re still stuck on that first step of just making a statement that acknowledges past occupants of this land,” he said. “A really effective [one] has to go further and try to create equity and reparations to native communities, and I fear that step is really going to be difficult for us.”
Isabel Fernando, president of First Nations at SRU, said she is glad land acknowledgment is happening, but there is still a lot of work to be done.
“I have been in a few of the meetings where this has been brought up…I’m really trying to push them to listen to the people from Three Rivers Tribal Center and the Seneca museum…As a Native person, I want to be respectful to the people whose land I am a guest on,” she said.
“I think it’s really important that Native students see they are welcomed on this campus.”
