Beyond the calendar: A heritage honored

It’s still early enough in the month that a tide of odd recognition days and weeks continues to pepper our inboxes. We seem to have let National Fig Week slip by unnoticed, and while Polar Bear Week is widely recognized as the first week of November in colder climates, McCook sightings are usually limited to the YMCA in the early weeks of January.

National Split Pea Soup Week runs Nov. 9-15, but we still have National Pizza-with-the-works-except-Anchovies-Day and National Sardine Day ahead of us.

One observance this month deserves more respect. On Nov. 14, 1990, President George H.W. Bush issued Proclamation 6230, declaring November as National American Indian Heritage Month, marking the culmination of decades of earlier efforts. Several states had marked “Indian Day” as early as the 1910s, followed by a 1976 resolution creating “American Indian Awareness Week” and a 1986 act establishing “American Indian Week” in late November.

Each president since Bush has renewed the proclamation, and now known as National Native American Heritage Month, it’s a time to remind ourselves of the first Americans whose presence shaped this continent long before state lines or railroads appeared on any map.

Archaeologists once believed humans arrived about 13,000 to 16,000 years ago by crossing the Bering Strait, but newer evidence from sites in Buttermilk Creek, Texas and White Sands in New Mexico suggests they were here much earlier – perhaps 23,000 to 30,000 years ago or even as far back as 40,000 years ago.

In Southwest Nebraska, Native American history is etched into the land itself, from the 1873 Battle of Massacre Canyon near Trenton – where Sioux warriors attacked a Pawnee hunting party, marking the end of the Pawnee’s final buffalo hunt through the Republican River valley. To the south, across the Kansas line, the Northern Cheyenne’s desperate 1878 flight from Indian Territory led to the so-called Last Indian Raid in Kansas, as a small band fought its way home to Montana. To the east, near Indianola, stands the small grave of the “Indian Girl,” a child found alone by settlers and later memorialized as a symbol of compassion amid turmoil.

By the time McCook was founded in 1882 as a railroad division point, the great tribal migrations and wars of the Plains had primarily come to an end. The Pawnee had been removed to “Indian Territory,” the Sioux confined to northern reservations and the Cheyenne scattered across the Plains. Yet McCook lies at the heart of the geography where these stories met – the Republican River corridor that once carried buffalo herds, hunting parties and eventually homesteaders. Artifacts still found along its bluffs remind us that those who came before left more than arrowheads; they left a legacy of adaptation, spirituality, and order.

Speaking of order, we dare not exclude the Iroquois. While the Iroquois Confederacy never reached this far west, its Great Law of Peace – uniting several nations under a council of balance and consensus – helped shape early American ideas of federalism. Closer to home, the Pawnee, Sioux and Cheyenne maintained governments no less sophisticated, guided by persuasion, shared authority and order amid constant change.

So yes, it’s easy to dismiss another heritage month as one more entry on an overcrowded calendar, but this one matters.