What do we know about the indigenous people who lived in Lower Susquehanna region? Millersville researchers have answers.
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Scott LaMar
Airdate: November 08, 2022
November is Native American Heritage Month and it appears that more people are interested in and observing that heritage or history. Millersville University recently made a Land Acknowledgement statement that recognizes the indigenous peoples who lived in the area.
Millersville’s land acknowledgement statement reads:
“We would like to recognize the Native peoples of the lower Susquehanna River basin, those known and those unknown to us, who have stewarded the land, upon which Millersville University sits, for thousands of years. We acknowledge that the land on which we gather, study, and work is the ancestral land of the Conestogas, Susquehannocks, Shawnee, and others. One group, the Shenks Ferry people, had a village adjacent to the campus. We pay our respects to the traditional occupants and caretakers of this land.”
Part of the project includes a detailed history of the indigenous people who lived where the campus is located.
On The Spark Monday, Dr. Marlene Arnold, professor/Chair of the Departments of Criminology, Sociology and Anthropology at Millersville indicated we’re learning more about the Native Americans who lived in Pennsylvania,”I think few Pennsylvanians today realize this but Native American history goes back in Pennsylvania to 16,250 years ago. So, the Shanks Ferry people (that lived near the Susquehanna River) were one important group. The earliest archeological site for Native Americans in Pennsylvania was 30 miles southwest of present day Pittsburgh — the Meadowcroft rock shelter site. And the artifacts found there have been dated to 16,250 years ago, although some archeologists argue that that can’t be, that there weren’t Native Americans here before, 11,000 years ago.
There are myths and misrepresentations of the indigenous people who lived in this region.
Dr. Tanya Kevorkian, Associate Professor of History, at Millersville University said the Indians (American Indians prefer to be called Indians) didn’t live in teepees as is often portrayed in pictures,”They made different kinds of homes for themselves that varied. So basically the Shank’s Ferry people had round homes that were made with small branches sharpened and cut at the right time when they were the right diameter, sharpened like a pencil stuck in the ground, sort of closed, like arched over each other and covered with bark and other things to make it weatherproof. And these homes, they might be about 100 square feet, so fairly small, but they would house a family. The Susquehannocks, being an Iroquois group, they had long houses. They built long houses using about the same technique with the sharpened branches, arched and covered up. But the long houses were bigger and the villages were bigger. Conestogas lived in colonial style. Log cabins.”
