The Indiana Dunes Visitor Center now tells not only the history of the land but also its original human inhabitants.
After six years of work, the first phase of the Indiana Dunes Indigenous Cultural Trail was dedicated Wednesday.
Indiana Dunes Tourism and Indiana Dunes National Park partnered with the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi and the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma to bring it about.
So far, the cost has been about $600,000 to $700,000 to start the trail, including a fire pit.
Fundraising is underway for future phases of the trail, including public art, a welcome shelter and programming as well as a one-mile trail that will extend through National Park Service land to explore the terrain.
Students from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology offered rough design work for the trail. Park spokesperson Bruce Rowe expects National Park Service funding to be approved in the next couple of years.
“We have a lot of little micro habitats here in the 20 acres that we are excited to tell the story of,” said Indiana Dunes Tourism Vice President Christine Livingston, who spearheaded the team. The visitor center sits on five acres in Porter, with another 15 acres donated to the park by Lake Erie Land Co.
“I think you’re going to see that welcome center go through fairly soon,” Rowe added.
“We really feel the indigenous peoples story is undertold, mistold or not at all,” Livingston said. “We feel like this story is very powerful and it’s going to affect a lot of people.”
Diane Hunter, of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, explained changes in signage surrounding the visitor center. It’s important to recognize not only native species but also ones that have cultural significance to the area’s original inhabitants, she said.
Snapping turtles are significant to the indigenous nations in the Great Lakes area, and not just the Miami and Potawatomi, Hunter said.
Jennifer Kanine, of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, knows snapping turtles are among species “recovering and resurging and coming back.” She and others harvest wild rice. “We do run into snapping turtles with our feet sometimes,” Kanine said.
Rebecca Richards, chairwoman of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi’s Tribal Council, put the Indiana Dunes in perspective. “Our ancestral homelands are vast, encompassing southwest Michigan and northern Indiana,” including the Indiana Dunes and what is now the University of Notre Dame campus, she said.
“A project like this goes a long way to convince people that indigenous people are still present” and contributing, she added.
Dustin Olds, second chief of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, also knows the area.
“We were forcibly moved out of the region in the fall of 1846, but we very much enjoy coming back to this area every chance we get,” he said.
“It’s a beautiful part of the country, and every time I come here, I can see why you’d never want to leave here,” Olds said.
“It was an important place where we could interact with our relatives from other nations,” he said.
Madalene Big Bear, a Potawatomi tribal member, said designs of traditional clothing worn by dancers at the dedication ceremony represent that trading history. Tiny bells, called cones, on skirts were made from the lids of tobacco tins, representing the traditional ceremonial and medicinal use of tobacco, she said.
Like the Miami people, Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands.
“Sept. 4, 1838, was the last day that the U.S. government rounded up our people and moved them out of this area,” Big Bear said. They were forced to march 60 days, sunup to sundown, to their new home in Kansas.
“Our governments are the longest-running governments in human history,” Big Bear said. “That’s not acknowledged a lot.”
At the flag-raising ceremony, the Iron Bear Singers sang the oldest flag song on the continent, she said.
It was illegal to sing those songs and even give traditional names to tribal members, Big Bear said, until the Religious Freedoms Act was passed in 1978, although tribes defied the prohibition and continued the practices anyway.
The ceremony included a round dance, where anyone of any nation was invited to dance shoulder to shoulder. Many from the audience joined in.
Nicole Harmon, director of Humane Indiana Wildlife’s rehabilitation center in Valparaiso, released a red tail hawk, or bebamset, to use the Potawatomi word. “Hawks brought us fire from the sun,” Big Bear explained, making the Potawatomi keepers of the fire.
Phoenix, the female hawk released Wednesday, had been at the rehab center eight years, Harmon said.
The center has seen about 30 red tail hawks in the last three months because of West Nile virus, she said. “It can take up to 17 weeks for the virus to pass through their system.”
The traditional name for the Miami people, before it was Anglicized, is Miamia. That’s reflected on the new fire pit behind the visitor center.
The Miamia are “the downstream people,” Hunter said. “At first, the Miamia came out of the water,” according to legend. That site is on the St. Joseph River, between South Bend and Lake Michigan, she said.
“Miamia people have lived in this area since time immemorial,” Hunter said.
Livingston, Big Bear, Kanine and others who planned the new trail said they were pleased not only with the exhibit but also with how well it was received during its dedication.
“We’re in the business of great experiences,” Livingstone said. She hopes the exhibit will make visitors see things differently, act differently and talk differently after seeing the exhibit.
Along the six-year route to starting the new cultural trail, she learned a lot. Her board of directors did too, including a list of “dirty words” to avoid when discussing indigenous people in the area, Livingston said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.