Turkey Tayac
Turkey Tayac (1895 â€" 1978) was a
Piscataway Indian leader and herbal doctor, born in
Charles County, Maryland with the Christian name
Philip Sheridan Proctor. Turkey Tayac was the last person to have knowledge of Piscataway (one of numerous
Eastern Algonquian languages that form a subgroup of a larger
Algonquian family of languages) through oral transmission, and was also a highly regarded oral history bearer. Two leading Algonquian linguists,
Ives Goddard from the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History at the
Smithsonian Institution, and Julian Granberry both referred to and consulted with Turkey Tayac in their field work.
Due to a strong, outspoken character that became pronounced early in life, Turkey Tayac's family gave him the name by which he was to effect his leadership, both within his nation and throughout
Indian Country. Once grown to adulthood, the chief of the
Piscataway Indian Nation began using the surname, "Tayac," both as a title of his practiced leadership, and because the name itself was part of his family's oral history. Turkey Tayac's family traced their descent from a long line of Piscataway chiefs, traditionally called "tayacs." But, by the time Turkey Tayac was born, only a few Piscataway families remained to remember and transmit knowledge of their own vibrant
Native American heritage.
Although a few families identified themselves as Piscataway Indians into the early 1900s, prevailing racialist attitudes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and
Jim Crow policies in the twentieth century determined ethnic and cultural identification in the Upper South. With the enforcement of the "
one-drop rule," anyone with a discernable amount of
African ancestry would be classified as "
negro," "
mulatto," or "
black," thereby discounting any other ancestry. Moreover, with the nullification of
Native American identity through census enumeration and state legislation, any standing
Native American treaty rights were that much easier to abrogate. Thus, when
Native American reservations were dissolved by the colonial government of
Maryland in the eighteenth century, and when the Piscataway were reclassified as "free negro" or "
mulatto" on state and federal census records in the nineteenth century, a process of detribalization was set into motion the implications of which were carried well into the twentieth century. Contradictorily, while the Piscataway were enumerated as "
mulattos" in state and federal census records, Catholic parish records and ethnographic reports continued to identify the Piscataway as Indians.
Turkey Tayac fought in
World War I in France as a part of the
Rainbow Division and was nearly killed by
mustard gas. Later in life, Turkey Tayac reported that when Army doctors determined that he would not be able to survive his exposure to the lethal gas, he was able to heal himself with traditional
Native American medicine.
Cultural revitalization
Turkey Tayac was a critically important figure in the early and mid-twentieth century cultural revitalization movements among remnant Southeastern
Native American communities, including the
Lumbee,
Nanticoke, and
Powhatan Indians of the Atlantic coastal plain. Their efforts were curtailed by the
Great Depression and
World War II. In an era when
Native Americans were increasingly regulated by
blood quantum outlined in the
Indian Reorganization Act, Turkey Tayac organized a movement for
Native American peoples that privileged self-ascriptive forms of identification. Tayac's innovative, self-deterministic leadership led to the issuance of
Native American identification cards by the Piscataway themselves rather than having tribes apply to and rely on state and federal bureacracies to issue them on their behalf.
Along with his tribal responsibilities, Turkey Tayac was also an active participant in the
Bonus Army, understanding that his participation was part of a larger, life-long dedication to seeking social justice. Turkey Tayac was also a devout
Roman Catholic throughout his life, and was active in the Catholic Veterans of America.
Cultural reclamation
Turkey Tayac worked extensively with ethnographers and archaeologists, including T. Dale Stewart,
John Harrington, Frank G. Speck, William H. Gilbert, and Lucille St. Hoyme -- scholars, all of whom were interested in finding evidence of
Native American survival in regions where it was thought that
Native Americans had long since vanished. Turkey Tayac himself maintained a deep interest in learning more about the Piscataway beyond his family's oral knowledge, and spent a great deal of time with archaeologists who excavated Piscataway sites.
Turkey Tayac was particularly concerned with Moyaone, a site that eventually was placed on the
National Register of Historic Places, and the location of the pre-contact Piscataway capital town. Turkey Tayac had gone to that site as a child to collect traditional medicines and ceremonially burn tobacco in honor of the dead. Tayac was also a proponent of the 1960s creation of Piscataway National Park, which he believed would protect the Moyaone site from corporate development. Although the Moyaone site was within the boundaries of the colonial-era Piscataway Indian reservation Turkey Tayac agreed that it should be placed under the trust of the
Department of the Interior. In exchange for his cooperation, Turkey Tayac requested that he should be buried there within the ancient
ossuary, or mass burial, of his ancestors, and moreover, that his Piscataway people would always be able to go there.
With the spread of the
American Indian Movement in the 1970s, Turkey Tayac found renewed interest in his efforts to organize the Piscataway people. Along with his son, William Redwing Tayac, and a Pima supporter, Avery Lewis, Turkey Tayac incorporated a non-profit organization, the "Piscataway-Conoy Indians," in 1974. Eventually, the Piscataway-Conoy Indians, Inc. opened the Piscataway Indian Center for the purpose of revitalizing American Indian identity not only for people of Piscataway heritage, but also for other
Native Americans living in the region.
In 1978, Turkey Tayac was diagnosed with
leukemia. Prior to his death, he sought to insure that the promise that had been made to him to have his remains interred at Moyaone be carried out. Initially however, the
Department of the Interior rebuffed his request for assurances. U.S. Representative
Gladys Noon Spellman unsuccessfully introduced a bill for his burial. When Turkey Tayac died in 1978, other arrangements had not been made for his burial. The Tayac family refused to bury him until they received assurances that the promise that had been made to Turkey Tayac would be kept. To this end, his body was kept in a mausoleum. A year later, U.S. Senator
Paul Sarbanes sponsored yet another bill to bury Chief Turkey Tayac. Sarbanes' bill successfully passed into law with the support of the
Maryland General Assembly and the
National Congress of American Indians, and in 1979, Turkey Tayac was finally laid to rest in the
ossuary site at Moyaone. Today, a
red cedar tree, planted by Turkey Tayac in 1976 to mark the location where he wanted be buried, marks Turkey Tayac's final resting place.
*Feest, Christian. "Nanticokes and Neighboring Tribes" in
Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15, 1978.
*Maynor, Malinda. "Native American Identity in the Segregated South: The Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, 1872-1956."
Doctoral Dissertation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2005.
*Rountree, Helen C.
Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.
*Rountree, Helen C., and Thomas E. Davidson.
Eastern Shore Indians of Virginia and Maryland. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.
*Tayac, Gabrielle. "Stolen Spirits," in
Contemporary Issues in American Indian Studies, edited by Dane Morrison. Lang Publishers, 1997.
*______. "To Speak with One Voice: Supra-Tribal American Indian Collective Identity Incorporation among the Piscataway, 1500-1998."
Doctoral Dissertation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1999.
*______. "Keeping the Original Instructions," in
Native Universe, edited by Clifford Trafzer and Gerald McMaster. Washington, DC: National Geographic and the National Museum of the American Indian, 2004.
*______. "We Rise, We Fall, We Rise," in
Smithsonian Magazine, September 2004.
*______. "From the Deep," in
New Tribe, New York, edited by Gerald McMaster. Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, 2005.
*
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