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Charles Fox
Special to ICT
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. — With a wooden ceremonial staff in hand, Haudenosaunee matriarch Louise McDonald, known as Wa’kerakátste, walked across the surface of cracked marble and crumbling slate in downtown Philadelphia on an overcast February day in 2020.
She had the look of a traveler who had returned home to discover the familiar had changed.
The Mohawk Bear Clan Mother had led a group of six women from the Iroquois Confederacy from upstate New York in search of the Wampum Lot, a plot of land given to the Haudenosaunee in January 1755 by John Penn, William Penn’s grandson.
What they found instead was Welcome Park, a park completed in 1982 for the 300th anniversary of the founding of Pennsylvania by William Penn. They had validated the land their ancestors had told them about, but it was not the bucolic setting they had imagined.
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The paved surface based on a 1782 Philadelphia street grid had the look of an oversized board game. Neighboring condominiums and a parking garage surrounded the park on three sides, and a replica of the Penn statue that adorns Philadelphia City Hall towered above them, silhouetted against the stark winter sky.
McDonald was frozen by the unexpected setting and the altered intentions of the space.
“I was thinking about my ancestors and the way that they thought about it,” McDonald told ICT. “I thought there would be more remnants of their presence there, whether it be a tree or actual fire pit. … I was imagining it to be something like a garden and was disappointed to see it so molested by the intrusion of colonization in its many forms.
“It was a complete erasure of the Indigenous essence,” she said.
The women burned sage and prayed as they huddled in the park and let out cheers to let their ancestors know they had returned to a place they called “a sacred site, a place of convergence.”
If they were disappointed in their findings, a spark of hope for the future was ignited. They let their ancestors know they would return, but with more people.
“I felt suddenly like there was hope that the ancestors reactivated the energy around that particular parcel of land,” she said. “So, for me, it was kind of like synchronicity in terms of the ancestors speaking to us, saying, ‘All right, you came. We heard you. Now you need to do this.’ ”
Through a series of in-person meetings and virtual discussions with the National Park Service, their hopes seemed close to becoming a reality by late 2023. Artist’s renditions presented a redesign of the urban park with large trees, native plants, an informational display of Native history and culture, and a circular area where Indigenous groups could gather.
They all underestimated, however, the political sentiments that would derail the plans earlier this year, even for a confederacy whose democracy has been credited as being a model for the U.S. government.
The delegation hasn’t given up hope, however, particularly with the U.S. semiquincentennial — marking the 250th year since the signing of the Declaration of Independence — approaching on July 4, 2026.
“To me, what is important is that the trail continues to be made visible for the next generation coming behind us,” McDonald told ICT. “I just want to make sure that we continue to leave a trail as our ancestors did. Somewhere along the way, the other side of history needs to be told.”
Today, the statue of William Penn remains in Welcome Park, but there is, as yet, no mention of the Haudenosaunee people or the significance of the lands whose history is at risk of being suppressed by the outside world.
‘A time of truth-telling’
For Michelle Schenandoah, the historical oversights are a family matter.
During the winter of 1777-1778, her ancestor, Oneida Chief John Shenandoah, along with an Oneida woman named Polly Cooper and a band of Oneida warriors, made a 300-plus mile journey from what is now upstate New York to deliver approximately 600 bushels of white corn to General George Washington’s suffering forces at Valley Forge.
The Continental Army had lost nearly 20 percent of its soldiers to cold, disease, and starvation that winter, and while the Iroquois Confederacy had split over whether to remain neutral during the American Revolution, the Oneida had backed the colonial forces.
In addition to taking corn to the troops, the chief led 250 Oneida and Tuscarora warriors in battle in support of the revolutionaries.
“Why is this history not known to the public?” asked Schenandoah, Kaluhyanu:wes, Oneida, founder of the nonprofit Rematriation and an adjunct professor at Syracuse University School of Law. “Yet within our oral history, we still have these pieces of information, living history. We still keep those stories very much alive.”
It’s time, she said, for Philadelphia leaders to recognize the past and look to the future.
“This is a moment of time in which there’s a great opportunity for the city to really look at and consider what its relationship has been with the Indigenous peoples from these lands, but also look at the modern democracy that came from the Haudenosaunee people and from our great confederacy,” she said.
“And that’s something that has been lost upon almost all of America. It’s not been present in history books,” she said. “It’s time now to tell that story. This is a time of truth-telling.”
The plot that initially brought the Haudenosaunee delegation to Philadelphia is a sliver of land near Second and Walnut streets, originally located in the shadow of the now-demolished Slate Roof House, where William Penn lived from 1699-1701.
During that era, Native leaders often visited Philadelphia for diplomatic and trade meetings, sometimes numbering in the hundreds. John Penn had asked the Provincial Council of Philadelphia to set aside a piece of land for these gatherings, since the Native leaders often refused to negotiate until they could build a council fire on their own ground.
The Wampum Lot became that gathering place after the land was presented by John Penn in 1755 to 12 visiting chiefs, including a Mohawk chief named King Hendrick Theyanoguin. The exchange was deeded with a wampum belt, made from purple and white beads cut from clam shells to signify agreements.
It was a bright spot in Pennsylvania history before the relationship with Native people took a dark turn.
In 1763, just eight years after Penn’s grandson presented the Wampum Lot to the chiefs and 45 years after William Penn’s death, Pennsylvania became the site of a massacre of the Conestoga people by a White renegade group known as the Paxton Boys, who killed 20 and burned the tribal village in two incidents in and near Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
The next year, in 1764, John Penn, who by then was governor of Pennsylvania, issued a scalp bounty on Indians deemed to be dangerous, including women and children, and agreed “that all Indians should be ushered out of the province.”
Pennsylvania also became the site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School from 1879-1918, which served as a model for the notorious boarding school systems in the U.S. and Canada.
Today, the actual boundaries of the Wampum Lot are not immediately clear, having been obscured over the years, but it is believed to be no larger than about 700 square feet. The location of the wampum belt deed is also unknown; it may have been destroyed in a March 1911 fire at the New York State Library in Albany.
The Wampum Lot is now occupied by a portion of The Moravian condominiums and the southeast corner of the National Park Service’s Welcome Park, bordered by Hancock Street on the east.
Welcome Park is part of Independence National Historical Park, a federally protected historic district in Philadelphia that includes Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were debated and adopted; the historic City Tavern; the Liberty Bell; and other historic sites.
Historical accounts mention the Wampum Lot repeatedly, but Philadelphia records do not reflect the Haudenosaunee ownership of the property.
The only real recognition for the Haudenosaunee is in the nearby Museum of the American Revolution, which has an exhibit and daily film that focuses on the Oneida’s military involvement in the Revolutionary War. The museum is a private, nonprofit entity, and not part of the National Park Service. It was built with the aid of a $10 million donation from the Oneida Nation, which is part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
Anticipation and hope
The Haudenosaunee delegation had initially hoped to determine ownership of the Wampum Lot when they first visited the park, but their discussions with the National Park Service soon shifted. They began working on a redesign of Welcome Park into a new park that would present a true reflection of Native American history and the confederacy’s inspiration to the colonial government.
“I could sue [over] every fraudulent act that has taken place to steal that land from its original intentions … but we’re playing nice as we did in the beginning,” McDonald told ICT. “Our only mission and our only request is that they tell the right side of history, not to have it be infused with a one-sided story, and to bring our ancestral story back to life. And to put it back at the forefront of people’s minds to let everybody know, it isn’t a one-point-of-view history. There are two sides here.”
Starting in 2022, after a long delay caused by the pandemic, an expanded group of Haudenosaunees held nearly a dozen exploratory discussions with National Park Service officials and other officials.
They followed in the steps of ancestors to meet in Independence Hall’s Long Room with the park service representatives, held closed door sessions in City Hall with then-Mayor James Kenney, researched at the American Philosophical Society, and brainstormed park designs at a roundtable discussion at City Tavern.
Relationships were formed and meetings with productive exchanges began to turn handshakes into hugs.
“We are moving at the speed of trust,” McDonald said, following a 2022 meeting.
In a series of meetings in 2023, the park service presented an artist’s rendering of the redesigned park to the Haudenosaunee, Lenape, Shawnee, and the Delaware Tribe of Indians. The design featured many of the elements McDonald had hoped for to cultivate an atmosphere of anticipation and hope, serving as an educational site but also a gathering place for Native peoples.
The park service announced the proposed revisions to the park on Jan. 5, 2024, along with plans to permanently remove the statue of William Penn as part of the Indigenous-themed redesign.
That’s when the plans came to a standstill. The planned removal of the statue provoked a sharp outcry from top Pennsylvania politicians, including Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and Pennsylvania House Republican leader Bryan Cutler.
“It certainly seemed to come out of nowhere,” Cutler said. “The communication from the federal government, specifically, the National Park Service, could have been much better.”
Independence National Historical Park officials released a “revised” press release on Jan. 8 that the proposed plans had been released prematurely, and that they would be “engaging in a robust public process to consider options for refurbishing the park in the coming years.”
There was not any explanation in the park service announcement of the multi-year process that had already taken place, or the reasoning behind the revisions. Despite numerous attempts by ICT to obtain additional information, Steven Sims, the superintendent of Independence National Historical Park since late 2023, and park service officials in Washington, D.C., have simply referred ICT to the Jan. 8 press release.
“They (news reports) made it sound like the Haudenosaunee had gone down there and bullied our way in there, which is far from the truth,” McDonald said. “And it’s just upsetting that it paints us as the bad guys again. For me, it’s just so disappointing because I was really hopeful that there was an evolution in the thought process and that they wouldn’t go back on all the work that’s been done.”
According to McDonald, the removal of the William Penn statue was the park service’s idea. The park service felt Philadelphia was already heavily saturated with other statues and images of Penn, and the delegation believed that the statue would likely be relocated to another site other than the rarely visited Welcome Park.
Park service officials had indicated they hoped a new design would add new vibrancy to the area, since Welcome Park is used often as a shortcut between Front and Second streets.
The Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous groups wanted a true reflection of Native American history and their importance in the historical area. They wanted inclusion; there was never an attempt to denigrate Penn, delegation members said.
“I’m pretty much feeling disrespected,” McDonald said. “There was all this momentum, there was all this relationship building, and there was all this consultation. … They were treating us like we were equals and then next thing you know, it was just like, ‘Oh, sorry, it’s all gone back to the drawing board.’
“I think it puts a blemish on Penn’s history, when they don’t step into that kind of spirit that Penn had with Native Americans,” she said.
McDonald, who envisioned the day she could proudly bring her grandchildren to a Native-themed park in Philadelphia to see the next generation walk in the footsteps of ancestors, began to expect the worst.
“Now they’re going to say, ‘Oh, my grandmother went down there (to Philadelphia), and she got the door slammed in her face again,’” she said.
‘A future in this land’
Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, the great-niece of Grant Mt. Pleasant of the Tuscarora people, spoke of the importance of the land at a gathering Nov. 16, 2022, at Welcome Park for an Edge of the Woods ceremony.
A group of about 30 Haudenosaunee, Lenape and others gathered with park service officials under a chilly, grey sky to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of a rededication of the Wampum Lot by then-Philadelphia Mayor J. Herman Moore on Nov. 24, 1922.
William Penn descendant William Penn Gaskell Hall and five visiting chiefs were present for the 1922 ceremony. It would mark the last time Philadelphia officials recognized the Haudenosaunee ties to the Wampum Lot.
“Why did our people find it so important to set aside that land in perpetuity for our use so we can come back here?” asked Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, a former faculty member at Yale and Buffalo universities, in a roundtable discussion after the 2022 ceremony.
“They set something in motion back over 250 years ago to say there’s a future for this land,” she said.
She also noted the missed opportunities of the current site.
“This place is devoid of Native pasts, presents, and futures,” she said. “Having a space in such close proximity to Independence Hall creates opportunities to not just return here, but also to remind everybody that Indigenous people have always been here…. And so there is an opportunity to repair the fabric that’s been torn. People can make connections when those threads are reconnected. People start to shift their way of imagining what the past looks like.”
For now, the Haudenosaunees say they are caught in a waiting game while the park service remains silent. There is only speculation about where the redesign process currently stands, and the group questions what will come from their years of meetings, communications, and seven-hour drives. Park service officials have indicated they are still working on restarting and funding the project, but are not prepared to hold meetings just yet.
The Haudenosaunee group hopes their efforts were not a misspent endeavor. Relationships that were formed and nurtured during the discussions are now obsolete. Historical Park Superintendent Cynthia MacLeod retired in April 2023. Philadelphia Mayor Kenney is no longer in office. The new park superintendent took over in November 2023.
A person within the park service has assured the group that the park redesign will still happen, McDonald said, but the Haudenosaunee question whether the visionary fire that produced the Wampum Lot in 1755 can again be rekindled.
They’re concerned that the concept of a new park with a corrected historical narrative has been placed on a back burner or extinguished altogether. The “speed of trust” that characterized earlier meetings appears to have joined a long line of broken promises to Indigenous people by the federal government.
But hope is not lost on either side.
Cutler, who formerly served as the Pennsylvania House Speaker, feels that the missteps of the park service in January can ultimately lead to a more powerful park presentation, one that can put a spotlight on a positive element in Pennsylvania history.
“The story of that peaceful coexistence really should be celebrated,” Cutler told ICT. “And I think there’s no better way to do it than to have that statue plus the new exhibits … You could have the perfect opportunity to tell the story, as misguided as the Park Service’s handling of this has been.”
He continued, “I think that you could tell a story of peace in a park, like the Welcome Park. We need more peace. And we need more celebration of that.”
The Haudenosaunee believe the country’s upcoming semiquincentennial creates a unique opportunity to make changes to the Independence National Historical Park that include revisions to Welcome Park. But they fear the controversy over the Penn statue and the ensuing delays over public meetings will cause the project to be postponed or scrapped altogether.
“They want to celebrate Americanism and the birthday of America, yet they can’t even honor their own agreement. So, what’s to celebrate?” asked McDonald. “It’s just the idea of this false personification of greatness and honor and diplomacy and democratic principles. They don’t want to honor the human story.”
For now, the Haudenosaunee delegation plans to petition President Joe Biden and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, to intervene and restart the public commentary period, to allow the redesign process to move forward.
In the petition, they will express that they are not opposed to the Penn statue remaining.
McDonald will be attending an Indigenous peace summit in Washington, D.C., in mid-April and hopes she may be able to meet with Haaland, or stop enroute in Philadelphia to introduce herself to the new superintendent of the Independence National Historical Park.
Schenandoah said their stories must be told.
“What I encourage Americans to do is to continue seeking out untold history and stories from people who have been silenced because of systemic oppression,” Schenandoah said.
“It’s critical for the truth to be told so that the country can be well,” she said. “Until we can come to collectively embrace our histories, plural histories, then can we find true friendship, and peace together. Across all nationalities across all races, and truly celebrate one another.”
Deeper meaning
The effort by the Haudenosaunee delegation goes far beyond a land dispute. For them, and other Native people, it is very personal, since it is their homelands that birthed America.
During a visit with officials in May 2022, Jonel Beauvai, Kaianahawis, Mohawk, who is one of the founders of the Welcome Home Circle, a nonprofit that works with formerly incarcerated Akwesasne, walked through Independence Hall and viewed historical copies of the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence. They also visited the American Philosophical Society, which was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin and maintains a collection of manuscripts and other documents to promote “useful knowledge.”
The tour reopened painful wounds for Beauvai, providing evidence of past crimes against Native people.
“It made me angry,” Beauvai said. “I could feel the injustice in this structure that’s godly glorified for having brought some kind of justice to people, when they’re the ones literally holding the murder weapon. I can’t walk through there like a tourist… I’m over here, you know, cleaning up our genocide while you’re paying little rangers in brown shorts to tell people to stay on the sidewalk.”
At the end of the group’s visit to the American Philosophical Society, Beauvai stood and sang a Mohawk women’s empowerment song.
As tears rolled down her face, she closed her eyes and envisioned their ancestors, joyful and proud, approaching her and the gathered assembly.
“They fought so hard under unimaginable circumstances,” Beauvai told ICT. “So, I have no reason to give up. I only have reason to pay homage, to pay respect, and to honor them, because they wanted me to be a living embodiment of the love that we carry.”
Broken-hearted yet hopeful, Beauvai made it clear that the Founding Fathers never extinguished the living fire inside her or her people. Indigenous America had survived European diseases, armed conflicts, land dispossession, and assimilation.
“After all your attempts,” she said, “here I am, still loving, still giving, still true to my people.”
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