Akron is marking North American First People’s Day on Monday.
It's the annual celebration meant to honor the Indigenous people who inhabited the country including in the Akron area, according to Dave Lieberth, president of the Akron History Center.
“We've been doing that for nine years now,” Lieberth said. “It’s been truly rewarding for those of us who've been involved with the collaborative this past decade.”
A focal point of First People’s Day is the Portage Path, an eight-mile trail linking the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers. The path, Lieberth said, was used for thousands of years to travel between Lake Erie and the Ohio River.
“They came through the Cuyahoga River, stopping at the big bend in what we now call the Merriman Valley,” Lieberth said, “then portaged their canoes and their goods over the eight miles of the Portage Path to the mouth of the Tuscarawas. The Tuscarawas would then lead them into the Muskingum River, and the Muskingum River would lead them into the Ohio River.”
The Portage Path held another area of significance as well: it once served as the western boundary between Indigenous land and areas authorized for European settlement, Lieberth said, agreed upon in the 1785 Treaty of Fort McIntosh.
“European settlement was to be limited to the east side of the Cuyahoga river, the Portage Path and the Tuscarawas river.” Lieberth said. “That was a boundary that lasted only 15 years.”
The Northwest Indian War broke out that same year, culminating in a defeat which saw Indigenous people removed from the state of Ohio.
“European migration not only overtook Indigenous settlements, but eventually all Native peoples in Ohio,” Lieberth said, “including those who had made permanent reservations for permanent settlements. They were forcibly removed from Ohio.”
Many of the First People’s Day celebrations, Lieberth said, involve Native peoples, including Akron residents.
“Today we are certainly gratified that many of the tribal nations who originally were here now return to Ohio to commemorate their difficult history and heritage,” Lieberth said. “The important point is to make certain that students in the public understand the simple phrase that Native peoples recite on a regular basis: ‘We are still here.’”
Efforts to celebrate the history of Native Americans in the United States have grown. First People's Day commemorations, he said, started with members of the Lippman School in Akron, and their partners, the Northern Cheyenne Nation in Montana.
“They were already doing an exchange program with students and adults from the reservation in Montana coming to Akron every fall, and then in the springtime they would take their students from Akron to stay on the reservation for a few days and learn something about each other's cultures.” Lieberth said. “That initiative that led to Sam Chestnut asking, ‘could we walk this Portage Path?’”
Lippman school members, according to a press release, helped prompt First People’s Day adoption by the city of Akron, which took place in 2018, followed by Summit county a year later.
Nationally, however, the environment has changed. The discussions over how to remember American history became a flashpoint cultural issue, especially in the 2024 presidential campaigns. In his reelection bid, President Donald Trump promised voters that his administration would push back against what he called “indoctrination” in academia and wider society.
Since taking office, Trump signed an executive order directing government departments to remove language critical of U.S actions, while also removing references to “DEI.”
Lieberth said an effort did exist to whitewash America’s past. Local efforts to shed light on the history of Native peoples in the Cuyahoga Valley, he said, had grown significantly.
“There are those who would try to whitewash our history and to eliminate those parts of our past where there were real tragedies and negative behaviors by European people,” Lieberth said, “but an accurate telling of history is never wrong, as long as it's accurate and as long as its inclusive, so that the stories of American Indians as they experienced historic violations against them in the past are revealed.”
Acknowledging the past, Lieberth said, would also help people in the present determine the type of future they wanted.