For hundreds of years, Chief Billy “Redwing” Tayac’s family has lived around the Chesapeake Bay.
But, he stresses, they are not from Maryland.
“I’m not indigenous to Maryland. I’m indigenous to the Chesapeake Bay area,” Tayac said to a crowd of about 50 students gathered at Marie Mount Hall yesterday.
Tayac explained his people — the Piscataway Indian Nation — were here before the state existed, and before North America was called as such; therefore he is indigenous only to the land, adding that the land, the animals and the natural resources belong to no one but “Mother Earth.”
Tayac, who expressed contempt for U.S. laws regulating the way land could be used, said it was given to people by God, not Europeans or Americans.
“We need a permit to go fishing, but why? They don’t own the fish,” Tayac said. “You don’t sell the land. You don’t own the land.”
Tayac said he believes in only one law: the natural law. The sun will always rise in the east, it will set in the west, people will always have children, and government laws will never change this, Tayac said.
Any law other than the natural law is “man-made and broken by man,” said Tayac.
He said the main thing he’s learned in life is that the indigenous people are one people. Whether from North, Central or South America, they see no division.
And as one member of a dwindling population of American Indians remaining in the country, Tayac considers himself “a survivor of a genocidal policy of the U.S. government.”
He said it is estimated that there were once 40 million Native Americans in the United States, though he believes the number was greater, and by the 20th century their numbers have had been reduced to 245,000.
“If that’s not genocide, what is it?” Tayac asked.
He said the English people who founded the United States called themselves “the conquerors.” But the American Indians remain a presence, though smaller than they once were, and retain the traditions of their ancestors, he said.
For some students, this was the first time they heard American Indian traditions and history in the United States talked about so openly.
“It was really powerful,” said senior economics major Howard Kuan. “It made us more aware of what’s going on and what happened in the past, and it made us look into our own past as well.”
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