Finding Arrowheads

I grew up in a brand new housing development in Buechel. It was built on an old farm, and it wasn’t that unusual in those days to find arrowheads left by the Native Americans who had hunted in the area. Of course in the days of Gunsmoke on TV, this did a great job of stimulating a young boy’s imagination. And it fit with what we were taught about Kentucky: that it had been a hunting ground for the Native American tribes and that none had actually lived here. It turns out that this was a myth, and that there were settlements in Kentucky for 10,000 years. Land speculators seem to be the origin of the myth because it made it more comfortable for settlers to move in. In fact the last bands of Native Americans in Kentucky left in the 1830’s after the Indian Removal Act relocated them to Oklahoma.

So whose arrows were we finding, then? Which tribes lived where we’re living now? In Canada in the last few years it has become common for churches to acknowledge the ancestral lands they are built on. I thought that for Kentucky’s second Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Monday it might be nice for our two parishes to do likewise. So let’s remember that St Frances of Rome and St Leonard sit on the ancestral lands of the Shawnee and the Eastern Band Cherokee. And let’s pray for those tribe’s descendants who live now primarily in Oklahoma.

-Fr Lou