Sewell Winterhawk Fitzhugh
Sewell Winterhawk Fitzhugh is chief of the Nause-Waiwash (nah-soo WAY-wash) Band of Indians based in Dorchester County on the lower Eastern Shore. At Tuesday?s signing of a new law creating American Indian Heritage Day in Maryland, Chief Winterhawk talked about the 250 members of the band, remnants of what Europeans called Nanticoke, Choptank and Pocomoke tribes who fled into the marshes in the 1700s.
What do you hope to achieve as tribes? None of you is federally recognized.
No, but we would like to see state recognition. We would like not to have to fight every day to hold onto our identity. We are the only people in … Maryland that have to constantly prove who we are. And we?re Maryland?s original people.
For quite a while, you had to hide your identity.
Well, yeah, you?d get shot. We have records where people would come out in the marsh and burn our homes. I have an aunt on tape talking about when she was a little girl, to be an Indian where we lived was worse than being black, and they shot black people.
What would state recognition do for you?
State recognition would help us to move ahead and make certain things available to us at the federal level. We could maybe function a full-time office and work in education.
A lot of Native American people have very low self-esteem, because of all the years pushing against us. It would maybe help us to hold our heads up in the sun.
Does anybody still speak the language?
There are a few of us who still speak bits and pieces. But the last person of our people that spoke our language fluently died … around 1860. But the language was recorded. It can be rebuilt.
