Remembering the Miami Indian Village Schoolhouse

I]t is the spatial image alone that, by reason of its stability, gives us an illusion of not having changed through time and of retrieving the past in the present. But that's how memory is defined. Space alone is stable enough to endure without growing old or losing any of its parts. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory In 1998 seventy-nine-year old Lora Siders was the tribal historian of the Miami Indians of Indiana. It was an office created for her that honored the value of her memory among these no-longer federally recognized indigenous people. As far as she or anyone else knew, she was the only living Miami Indian with personal memories of the Miami Indian Village schoolhouse: Otho Winger was very close to my family because he was my father's teacher and he used to come to our house and visit us. 1 That, possibly, is the beginning of my connection with the schoolhouse. . . . My father never went anyplace. About the only place he ever went was to one of my uncles' and one of my aunts'. Other than that, don't ask him to go anyplace because he wouldn't go. But, if there was a meeting up around Jalapa he would go, and we never went there and didn't go and visit the school. 2 I saw the Miami Indian Village Schoolhouse for the first time on a warm rainy day in February of 1998. Earlier in the year Elizabeth Glenn had offered to show me some of the sites in Miami Indian country in East Central Indiana, as I would be teaching a course on Indians of the Great Lakes in the spring and might want to bring students out on a field trip. I succeeded Elizabeth in the anthropology department at Ball State University in the fall of 1997. She has worked with the tribe for the last couple of decades, a group of people of whom Charles Callendar wrote in 1978 in the Northeast volume of the Handbook of North American Indians, "Very little is known about the Indiana Miami, who [End Page 135] are usually assumed to be almost entirely acculturated" (p. 687). Known by whom? we might ask, and "entirely acculturated" by whose standards? We had just visited the largest Indian cemetery in the state, where there are about forty marked graves of members of the community who lived on the state's last Indian reservation toward the end of the nineteenth century. The community of relatives and descendants of Metocina had been living on and by the good graces of the chief, Meshingomesia, on a reserve granted to his father in the treaty of 1840. Six miles east of Marion the area is rural and, as it is within a quarter mile of the Mississinewa River, unlike most of the northern half of the state the land rolls somewhat. As we drove across a timber-floored one-lane bridge, at a "T" in the road, Elizabeth pointed to what I took to be a shack about twenty feet square standing near a defunct concrete silo and identified it as the schoolhouse. She said there would be a meeting, a gathering there in a few days, as the Miamis were trying to get it back from the descendants of someone who appropriated it fifty or sixty years ago. 3 It had deteriorated to the point that it was no longer useful as a corncrib. Across the road, a brick house with a brick porch on at least two sides distracted my attention for a moment. Elizabeth noticed my noticing it and said that it had belonged to Nelson Aw-taw-wah-taw, Meshingomesia's grandson, a hundred years ago. A non-Indian family now occupied it. The wooden schoolhouse was covered with rusted corrugated iron on the sides I could see and rested a bit precariously on three rows of concrete block that were distinctly listing to the east. The

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