Last Sunday, I decided to take my own advice and attend a lecture on Native American heritage given at the Helen Plum Memorial Library.
This program was hosted by the Lombard Historical Society and presented by past municipal village clerk Lorraine Gerhardt, who is one-quarter Cherokee Indian.
Gerhardt took her audience on a trip seldom heard or thought about by most people. She started out by explaining that her father was one-half Cherokee Indian and married a Wyoming rancher’s daughter — her mother.
Besides her father’s Indian heritage he also was a cowboy and started out his life as a horseback circuit riding preacher of the west.
That’s how he met her mother. With memories of coming to Illinois from Wyoming as a young girl, she reminisced about the difference between the states.
“I can remember coming to Illinois very vividly and the changes between the western life and the western cowboy Indian life from what we found in the Chicagoland area,” she said.
Another part of her young life was not being able to admit any part of her Indian heritage.
“My mother would say to myself and my three brothers ‘Shh… don’t tell anybody you are part Indian,’” she said.
Gerhardt then told a story of changed times. Her own daughter came home from school when her mother was visiting. She was quite angry explaining she was chastised from her teacher as if she was lying that she was American Indian when they were claiming what their nationality was during class.
When Gerhardt’s mother heard how the granddaughter was treated, she insisted, “You go back to the teacher and tell her your grandmother said you are!”
When going over items on display, I found the most interesting to be an ink well given to her father by an Indian Chief. This ink well was used by the Cheyenne to sign the treaty with the United States of America.
A tomahawk, books on native American Indian history, turquoise jewelry, handsewn beaded costumes worn at the Wild West shows, arrowheads, feather headdress and moccasins were a few of the items on display.
For people interested in the history of Indians in Illinois, Gerhardt brought along a map from the historic site of Cahokia Mounds, a few miles west of Collinsville. According to archaeological finds, the city of Cahokia was inhabited from about A.D. 700 to 1400.
The dig at this site had been going on for many years and Gerhardt explained that this was a city with a population of about 20,000 people.
It was a walled city that was one of the largest tribal governments in that part of the country. To find out more about this site, log on to www.cahokiamounds.com.
There isn’t enough space in this column for everything I learned about Native American Indians. But what I did learn truly surprised me and makes me want to find out more.
Facts Gerhardt brought up were numerous. There are 284 years of history missing from the time Christopher Columbus discovered America and the first notes ever taken about Indians in this country.
Native American Indians are responsible for hundreds of food items we consume daily and never think about where they originated from.
One example is the tomato. Italians had not tasted a tomato before they were brought back from North America in 1492.
If we compare our government to the Indian culture, we would find many similarities. Many concepts came from Native Americans.
Two children in the audience, 5-year-old Cash Volpe and his 8-year-old sister Chloe, along with their grandmother Joanne Richardson, enjoyed this talk immensely. I have to say I was quite impressed how well behaved they were, listening intently for the hour.
At the end of this session, Evelyn Montgomery from Lombard shared her early life with us.
She grew up on an Indian Reservation in Pine Ridge South Dakota and lived there from the ages of 4 to 16.
She lived in a log cabin where her father was a school teacher and taught on the reservation.
Thank you to the Lombard Historical Society and Gerhardt for an enlightening afternoon. My interest has been piqued on our Native American heritage, and I will continue to seek out their history.
