history – Young Naturalists Club

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day! We celebrate this on second Monday of every October. This is the same day as Columbus Day.

What does ‘indigenous’ mean?
Indigenous people are the people who lived in a place before colonization. In the U.S., the many different tribes of Native Americans are all indigenous. They lived here thousands of years before Europeans arrived, and still live here today.

We celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day to honor the histories and cultures of indigenous people all over the world. It is celebrated in many cities, towns, and states. Some areas have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Many celebrations include dancing, sharing food, and singing songs of local tribes.

You can learn more about Indigenous People’s Day at history.com.

Re-thinking the “Discovery” of America

“In 1492 Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue.” Where did he end up? What did he discover?

As many of you might already know, Christopher Columbus, an Italian explorer, set sail to chart a route to China in 1492. This became his most infamous voyage with his “discovery” of the Americas. Upon arriving in the Americas, Columbus encountered the people, who he referred to as Indians, that inhabited these lands and called them home.

From the perspective of some indigenous Americans, it isn’t exactly a “discovery”if thousands of people already live there. This holiday is a chance to remember indigenous people’s part of the story as well.

Ideas for Celebrating Indigenous People’s Day

Learn about the Native Americans of southeast Ohio and try seeing your home from a different perspective! Keep reading this post for more info.
Attend a cultural celebration and participate in dancing
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, song, and eating foods from local indigenous tribes. If there are not any celebrations available to you locally, consider trying to make your own cuisine.

“The Sioux Chef” teaches about how to cook Native American cuisine and why it is important. To learn more or get their cookbook, visit sioux-chef.com

Watch a movie! Choose a movie that celebrates indigenous people and their accomplishments. Look for a movie that shows indigenous people in an authentic way, but avoid inaccurate Hollywood movies. We Shall Remain is an inspirational and educational series! It covers the “discovery of America” and its colonization from various perspectives. It includes the perspective of the indigenous peoples who lived in the Americas. Watch it here.
Read folklore stories from the Wyandot
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, one of the influential tribes of Ohio. Choose your favorite folklore story and post a comment to the blog! Myths from Wyandot Tribe.

Native Americans of the Hocking Valley

Hartman Mound in The Plains, Ohio was built around 2000 years ago by the people known as the Adena. They were sometimes used for group gatherings or rituals, or burials.

Indigenous peoples thrived in Athens and Southeast Ohio for thousands of years. Many places in our towns were first made by native people.

For example, many of our roads were first created by indigenous peoples. The James Rhoades Appalachian Highway (including US 33 and US 50) and East State St (in Athens) used to be a well-travelled path made by Indians in the region. This road was called the “Buffalo Trace.” Some of the trails through Strouds Run State Park also connected to this system.

In The Plains, Ohio, you can find mounds built by the Adena people about 2000 years ago. This is the third largest concentration of Adena mounds in the eastern portion of the United States. Drive by Mound Street in The Plains to see the largest one! You can also watch our virtual field trip at the mound here.

The Adena were the ancestors of the Shawnee. The Shawnee, as well as the Wyandot and Delaware tribes, were the people living in the Hocking River valley when European settlers arrived. Most of the Shawnee were forced to move west in the 1800s. Today, most Shawnee live in Oklahoma, but still have connections to Ohio.

Learning from indigenous forest management

Pawpaw fruit is a wild fruit in Ohio. Local people tended it and encouraged it to grow near their homes. Photo: “Pawpaw fruits” by naomivantol is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

European settlers cleared many forests. They needed room for agriculture and timber for building. The forest looked wild to the settlers. But evidence shows that indigenous peoples carefully tended the forests. This helped give them food and shelter.

They made choices to encourage helpful trees, plants and animals to grow. They increased the number of oak, hickory and fruit trees in our forests. These trees make delicious food! Have you ever tried them?

Go on a Forest Resource Scavenger Hunt

The forests are still full of trees that indigenous people cultivated. Try hunting for the trees on the list below in your local woods! Share a picture or tell us where you found them in the comments.

TIP: Consider using a field guide like the ODNR TREES OF OHIO field guide to help identify trees!

Plant	Picture/Identifying Features	Location/Hints
Pawpaw Tree		Try hiking through Sells Park and the Ridges! These trees bear fruit that ripens in September and October.
Persimmon Tree		Find the Persimmon Tree on Radar Hill. There are some at Strouds Run, too!
Red Mulberry Tree		Go to Highland Park! There is also a Mulberry tree at the top of Radar Hill.
Sumac Tree		Sumac trees have red leaves in the fall. Check around the pond at the Ridges!
Oak Tree		These are plentiful! If you find acorns on the ground, it fell from an oak tree!
Eastern Redbud Tree		This tree has heart-shaped leaves that are bright yellow in the autumn! Can you find a bright yellow leaf?
Chestnut Tree		The leaves on this tree are long and jagged. We’ve seen a few on the the east side of Athens! Watch out for their nuts!
Osage Orange Tree		Check out fence lines! These trees were the original barbed-wire. Look for the hedge apples!
Maple Tree		There are several varieties of the Maple. You just have to find one! Do you have any in your yard?

How did you celebrate Indigenous People’s Day? Leave a comment!

What are we walking on?

How often do you think about the earth beneath your feet? While you move about your day do you consider who owns the land you’re walking on? Do you think of who used to own that land? What about what that land was like before anyone owned it?

When we study the environment, we often study the here and now: what’s growing in this forest now, what is the pH of this stream today, how is the water flowing through our watershed? These questions are important, but we often forget about our environment’s history. The impact of glaciers on our landscape in the past tells us a lot about how water moves today. To know why our forests grow the way they do

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, we have to know how the forests used to be–if they even were forests! The pH of a stream is more meaningful when you have its past values to compare it to.

A long, long time ago

From fossil records and geologic surveys, we can tell that Ohio used to actually be covered with water. An incredibly long time ago, what is now Ohio was just south of the equator and part of the ocean floor.

What effect do you think this could have on our current environment? How might our land having previously been at the bottom of an ocean affect what’s here now? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Trilobites, an ocean-dwelling animal, lived in Ohio and are the state fossil.

Eventually, this ocean transformed several times. It became a warm, shallow sea with coral reefs and lots of fish. Later, those seas retreated. This area became largely covered by swamps, marshes, and deltas, home to animals like reptiles and amphibians.

This is why the bedrock in our area is similar to what you find on the ocean floor. We have sedimentary rocks like limestone and sandstone. These rocks form from years of pressure on top of layers of sediment, just like at the bottom of the sea. Knowing about the past helps understand why you can find fossilized shells and hardened sand in Ohio!

A long time ago

During the time of dinosaurs, there isn’t very much scientific information on what was happening in Ohio. Scientists have discovered dinosaur fossils from this era in other parts of the country, but not from where we’re standing now. We don’t know why for sure, but the most common idea is that there was a lot of erosion (wearing away of sediment and rocks) in Ohio during this period. The erosion erased records like fossils of any of the plants and animals of that time.

So, we can make educated guesses about what happened here during the dinosaur eras, but the guesses are limited by a lack of information. Go out searching in your neck of the woods: if you find a dinosaur fossil you could be the cause of an enormous scientific breakthrough!

A little while ago

The next big change for Ohio came with the glaciers of the Ice Age.

If you’ve traveled through Ohio, you might notice that most of it is incredibly flat–except for where we live, in the southeast. This is due to years and years of flattening, scraping, and carving from giant sheets of ice constantly expanding and receding during the Ice Age. Those glaciers wore down most of Ohio. But the glaciers didn’t reach as far as places like Athens, Marietta or Chillicothe–that’s why our area is so much hillier than the rest of the state!

At the end of the Ice Age, the land at the ends of the glaciers would have looked a lot like places that are far to the north today, like Canada, Alaska, or Russia. There were tundras and boreal forests.

Roaming the tundra and forests were great big animals, often described as “megafauna” (mega – big, fauna – animals), roaming Ohio. There were giant sloth, giant beaver, and mastodons! Last year, a 12-year-old boy even found a mastodon tooth while playing in a creek in Holmes County.

These were the beginnings of our native forests today

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, like Wayne National Forest right here in SE Ohio! How do you think these great creatures could have affected our forests? How might we still see any of those impacts today?

A reconstructed skeleton of a giant sloth. Photo by Paul Gravestock.

This is the time when the first humans showed up in Ohio. People followed their prey–the megafauna–across the Bering land-bridge to make it from Asia to the Americas. Our forests have changed alongside us; our cultures and ways of life changed with them. We still see some remnants of this period in our forests today. But they have gone through so much change since the arrival of humans that it can be difficult to recognize

A little more recently

As one of the top predators in recent history, humans have had an enormous impact on the world around us. What we chose to hunt and gather over the years has impacted which species grow or go extinct.

What kind of choices do we make now that have an impact on our environment? Are there any changes that you have noticed during your lifetime? Is there a species that you used to see all the time that now seems quite rare, or is the opposite true of any plants and animals that you know?

Believe it or not, the ecosystems we have around us now emerged very recently. Even the forests you see here might have been clear cut for timber 50 to 100 years ago, so different plants and animals live in them than in older forests. While humans have always had an impact on their environment, our recent history has left some scars on our land that we are now trying to fix. Other choices we make can help forests grow strong again. What choices do you see that help or hurt our ecosystems here?

Getting what we need to live will always impact the ecosystem around us. But it is important for our relationship with the environment to be symbiotic (mutually beneficial, or good for both sides).

If you’d like to learn more about the early people of this area, you can check out our Appalachian Ohio Culture Virtual Field Trip. We talked to Paul Patton, an archaeologist who has focused on the first people of SE Ohio, and Jon Sowash, the current owner of the historic Eclipse Company Town.

Wayne National Forest

The history of Wayne National Forest is an interesting one. This area was highly coveted by early colonizers for lots of different natural resources. While the SE Ohio woodlands and streams were highly regarded for their value, they weren’t always treated very well. Watch this documentary to learn about the history of natural resource extraction and how Wayne National Forest came to be!

“A Forest Returns: The Success Story of Ohio’s Only National Forest” narrated by Ora E. Anderson.

You can also learn more about the history and culture of these woodlands here on the Wayne National Forest site!

Have you been out to the Bailey’s Tract yet? The Wayne just recently opened several miles of Mountain Biking and multiple-use trails in the Chauncey-Millfield area. Check out the latest addition to one of Southeast Ohio’s most important environmental successes when you have time!

Your turn: what’s your history?

How far back can you remember? When were your first memories? Write them down or talk to a friend or family member about them.

Mine are from the year 2000. Anything that happened before that is something I had to learn from someone else!

A lot of what I just shared about our history we learned from super cool science tricks. But we also learn about history through the telling and re-telling of stories. Information passes down from generation to generation through language. People hold onto stories just like rocks hold onto fossils.
Try to find out more about the history of your family!

Interview an older family member to find out where they’ve lived
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, what jobs they’ve had, how they’ve seen the areas where they’ve grown up change. Maybe they experienced some of the the history I talked about above!

If possible, try to create a timeline for your family. Do you know how your family came to America? Or have they always been here? Did you move to where you live now during your lifetime, or do you still live where you were born?

Understanding the context of your life and of your family can help you to understand why things are the way they are now. Maybe your grandparents talk a bit differently than you, maybe that’s because you learned to talk in a different place than they did! When you understand history, everything in the present starts to make more sense.