I found this great essay here, on Gene’s blog, hope we can hear more about “old” Aurora from you Gene. You look you-know-who in that red shirt!
Growing Up on Conquered Lands
The August heat this year has reminded me of hot summer days in one of the fields on our farm in Aurora, Ohio where I grew up. The farm has long been overtaken by factories and suburban sprawl. But in my mind it is as fresh as it was 55 years ago when we took care of 25 cows and had just begun the transition to mechanized farming that included combines, tractors with rubber tires and milking machines. Two parts of the farm remain firmly attached in my brain. The first is the maple sugar bush where we gathered sap every spring to make maple syrup. I loved to skip school to help. The second was a field immediately to the north of the woods where we often found relics which we referred to as “Indian heads†(arrowheads, sometimes called flint heads} and other artifacts from a long forgotten native settlement. I never connected the two until recently.
I was reminded of the native people who once lived on our farm in Ohio on an flight from Tel Aviv when an Israeli women scolded me that America had conquered every bit of their land from native people. Our discussion which lasted for hours was ignited by my troubling reference to the quest for a Palestinian homeland. “People have been living on conquered lands since the dawn of civilizationsâ€, she said.
We often found native artifacts in the field when we plowed in the spring or as we walked through the cornfield prior to harvest. We had no idea how these products of a previous civilization got there nor did we have any connection to its people. As far was we were concerned we now owned the land. And this was long in the past, probably hundreds of years. In school we never studied about the native civilization that preceded us except as an addendum to the heroics of personalities like George Washington who once surveyed the region to the East in his pre revolutionary life.
Our township was organized in 1807, 200 years ago, a century before my own ancestors arrived to purchase the 137 acres farm. The discovery of native artifacts in the field beside the sugar bush always carried a kind of special power in our family. When we found an arrowhead it was considered a moment of triumph and word of the discovery quickly spread throughout the family. Dad collected these special finds in a box. I never knew where he kept the box. At our farm we often had visitors from Cleveland and the surrounding towns who combined a visit to us with the purchase of eggs, milk or other produce. In the early 1950s about the time when we moved from the farm my Father’s penchant for generosity got the best of him again and he gave away the box of native artifacts to a collector. His children were never happy about that. We thought those artifacts too special to give away. I wish I had a few to give back to my native neighbors today.
I am not an archeologist but I suspect that the frequent discovery of native artifacts was evidence that a native village once occupied the field towards the back of our farm. The destiny of that village has always bothered me. Who really owned “our†land? I found the existence of a previous people disconnected from my life unsettling. There was teaching in our church that the land belonged to God but I knew that somewhere in the mysterious offices of our county there was a legal deed of ownership that belonged to Stoltzfus. Through the years when I made my infrequent return visits to the farm land I would walk over that special field and try to listen to what the spirit inside me or the lingering spirits in the ground of that long forgotten village might be saying to me. On one trip I found myself silently warning a newly completed factory that it should be very careful about the spirits in the ground where they have built. But, I never put the puzzle together.
I still want to know more about the original dwellers of our farm. I google my native town, Aurora but I find only references to a host of town committees, hotels, businesses, churches and town planning. Near the bottom of the list I find something called the Aurora Historical Society but when I click I find only a reproduction of an early map, no reference to the first people. No help there. I continue to google my way through Native American history sites where I find hints about Erie, Shawnee and others who lived in Northeast Ohio for a time after being forced from native lands further East and before being expelled further West or defeated by conquering armies again after several generations of uncertain alliances with French or English colonial forces. So I am left to my imagination to make contact and peace with the first caretakers of our land who surely never sold it to anybody in the way we of European descent think of buying and selling.. I make that leap in the best way I can by telling this story particularly to native people when I meet them as an offering, one of the things that “might†make for peace in my generation.
Some years ago before I moved to Canada I learned that native people had been making maple syrup for as long as they could remember. Eventually I put this fact together with the maple trees beside our farm’s native village and I suddenly realized that long before we harvested the spring sap from the maple trees another people may have done something like we did. Perhaps they settled in the field beside the sugar bush early every spring to carry out their harvest. Sometime in the distant past long before our settlement in Ohio my white ancestors learned how to imitate them and savor the sweet and healthy harvest of maple syrup.
How do I make peace with the unearned benefits of conquered lands that have blessed me so much. I don’t have complete peace. My story is not complete. I am still looking for the connection to that original village where maple syrup flows in abundance and there is a festival of joy to celebrate the harvest where the conqueror and the conquered find a pathway to fairness and plenty.
