Dear Hollywood: Please Make a Blockbuster About the Native Americans Who Helped the Underground Railroad
By: Heather M. Edwards
Tags: Education, Media, Native Americans, History, American History

Dear Hollywood: Please Make a Blockbuster About the Native Americans Who Helped the Underground Railroad

Take a break from the reboots and tell the untold stories

Photo credit © The Institute of the Black World 21st Century

Drag social media all you will but were it not for my most compassionate intelligent friends I shudder to think of the stories I might never learn otherwise. I’ve curated my newsfeed to be a wellspring of education, inspiration, advocacy, travel, filthy memes and adorable animals. I follow friends and groups who contribute thusly.

Today’s goldmine in a link comes from a writer I grew up with, the boy next door turned novelist and adjunct writing professor. He is fighting the good fight and I appreciate his reading recommendations as much as his garden pics. Both are good for the soul.

“The Native Americans Who Assisted the Underground Railroad” is a sentence I have never read before. I am today years old when I first learn of yet another gap in what Americans are taught about our own history.

Pre-Civil War, when the Midwest was called the Old Northwest freedom seekers found shelter in numerous Native American villages on their way to Canada. Some traveled by foot and some paddled tributaries in canoes from Kentucky and West Virginia to Ohio. Some hid on steamboats. Most traveled by night.

An entry from the Ohio Archeological and Historical Quarterly from 1900 only briefly mentions Chief Kinjeino of the Odawa tribe among fascinating anecdotes and tales from freedom seekers themselves and of the “simon-pure abolitionists” who ferried people, hid them in forests, zig-zagged them around known dangers, and one who shot the horse of a Kentuckian “slave-catcher” known to ambush escape parties at night.

“… thence to the Grand Rapids of the Maumee (where the river could be easily forded most of the year), and at the Ottawa village of Chief Kinjeino where all were friendly, and the poor slave was treated kindly; thence by a plain trail north to Maiden Canada.”

That’s it. But this mere quark of a sentence represents the possibility of an entire new genre. In Hollywood terms, this is an opportunity for Django Unchained to meet Dances With Wolves.

What do studios love? Besides big names and bigger returns? Action. What do audiences love? Action. And characters we care about overcoming obstacles. Inspiration.

An ensemble cast of Black and Native American actors could navigate the elaborate political and physical landscape, the long road to Canada with Willem Dafoe or Joaquin Phoenix as an independent mercenary, one of the so-called slave-catchers, an Enflield rifle slung over one shoulder and a Springfield over the other. Roots meets Last of the Mohicans.

There are other stories they could tell too.

I am also today years old when I learned that the Chicasaw and Choctaw Indians supposedly held people captive as slaves and took these enslaved people with them when they were forcibly removed.

The Delmarva Nanticokes were also called the ‘Tidewater People’. They were known to provide refuge in the swamps along the Nanticoke River in Dorchester County, Maryland — swamps being cumbersome terrain for those chasing freedom seekers. The dense vegetation and vast marshes were known as ‘maroon communities’.

But it is the Seminole peoples whose relationship with newly freed people we seem to know the most about.

“In 1812, a combined force of Africans and Seminoles repelled Georgians known as the ‘Patriot Army’ who intended to capture slaves and seize parts of Spanish Florida for the United States.”²

Some historians posit that it was the end of the Seminole Wars, the decline of their territory as a safe haven that led to the more formalized and strategized Underground Railroad and the increase in African-Americans enlisting in the Union Army becoming the two likeliest paths to freedom.

Yet our film industry is as pockmarked as our historiography. Admittedly it is difficult to find written resources from communities steeped in oral tradition. But it is not impossible. And not one single mainstream movie is captivating us with the suspense, inspiration, bravery and adventure these American heroes fought with. Yet.

So, dear Hollywood, when you do see the untapped potential in these stories, like discovering entire underwater cities, please note the power of language.

Hollywood will first need to read “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help” by P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al.

For as much as we were taught in the 90s, including the week we spent watching Roots in 8th grade, our textbooks and teachers till used terms like ‘slave masters’ and ‘runaway slaves’. While we were taught more than generations past we have so much more to learn, and changing the language we use to teach our nation’s violent history is critical to shifting attitudes toward those that bear its most violent legacy. No one is inherently master or slave.

But everyone’s story is part of our collective American history. And Hollywood is a grand stage for untold stories.