Dr. Lyla June Johnston (Diné/Tsétsêhéstâhese) is a musician, author, community organizer, and Cultural Survival Board Member. She blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives, and solutions. Her doctoral research focused on how pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans. Here she speaks with historian Gabrielle Tayac (Piscataway), Associate Professor at George Mason University, former curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, and Co-founder of Nekamaco (House of the Mother), an Indigenous Elder women-led nonprofit organization.
Lyla June Johnston: Who are the Piscataway people, and where is your traditional homeland?
Gabrielle Tayac: Piscataway means “where the waters blend.” Piscataway refers to two bodies of water, specifically [where] Piscataway Creek flows into the Potomac River, about 15 miles south of contemporary Washington, D.C., where our people had their main town. That town was called Moyaone, on the side of the Potomac River that today is called Maryland. That’s really the center. Often, we have heart centers of spaces in Indigenous worlds and ancestral times that are more important to the people who live there than what becomes of them during and after the colonial invasions.
Piscataway was originally made up of a series of about a dozen Peoples, each with their own town leader that could be a man or a woman. It stretched from the falls above contemporary Washington, D.C., and then flowed all the way down the Potomac River to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, and then between the Potomac River and the Patuxent River, so primarily in what’s called Maryland today, and also some spaces that include Washington, D.C., and the other side of the river, which today we think of as Northern Virginia. It’s where our community still lives to this day. Piscataways are now one consolidated Peoples who are made up of the survivors of that original, larger chiefdom. We’re a Tribe of families and kin and structures that have persisted over the past 400 years together.
Gabrielle Tayac on the boardwalk through marshlands leading to the ancestral sacred site, Moyaone, on the Potomac River at Piscataway National Park in Maryland. Photo by Greg Kahn.
LJJ: What makes you the most excited about being a descendant of these Peoples, a descendant of Tskado’i ancestors?
GT: There is an incredible richness in this biosphere in this space. The Chesapeake Bay we’re a part of has probably among the most massive migrations—the bird flyways, the f ish, the systems, the life that exists in these spaces, and the feeling of the ground itself having love. For us, for me, it was wanting to understand what happened to us, what we’ve done to even know who we are, and to stay together in some form in a community. There’s a very deep, internal rootedness part to this.
There’s another piece to it that really moves me because of the position of being in a place like Washington, D.C. It means that not only the whole world, but the Native world, in the quest for having a voice, working for rights, sharing, and being, the opportunity to walk alongside so many people who were seeking the grounding for their own People. It was the support and solidarity that also helped us break through a sense of loneliness, because Piscataway people, like many small East Coast communities, had been cut off from the larger Native world for a very long time. There was a profound sense of longing to have that relationship with other Native people. That, to me, is very stirring: the grounded sensibility of this place. I have a student who’s Eastern Band Cherokee, and she talked about her mountains and said, ‘We’re of this place.’ There’s something very particular about being of a place.
Nanjemoy Creek, a recovering refuge and healing space, home to Piscataway Peoples for millennia.
LJJ: I saw your name on a very interesting scientific article, “Millennial Scale Sustainability of the Chesapeake Bay Native American Oyster Fishery” by Dr. Rick Torben, showing how the Piscataway Nation tended and cared for oyster beds without interruption for thousands of years in the Chesapeake Bay. Not only did they care for these oysters, but they actually helped them get healthier over time. If that’s not regenerative agriculture, I don’t know what is. And within less than 300 years, the United States has managed to completely destroy that oyster fishery, [which] is less than 1% of its original size.
GT: When I teach history, I spend the first month with my students looking at ancestral values and traditions and ceremonial teachings of the parts that you can share. The motivations that Native Peoples have and the way they’re making their decisions is coming from a different place. It’s not just economic resources. The spaces are imbued with these sacred qualities at their best. For us here, oysters are just a big part of it that completely changed the ecosystem. The water that I’m looking at right now is very muddy now. It’s more shallow. It was 95% old-growth forest before. It was crystal clear and deep and narrower. I was told that when people would go into the swamp, they could ride a horse across the marsh because it was firm enough. It wasn’t mucky, it wasn’t all that silt.
When I talk about relationality, the underlying part of it is about working within these lands, these beings, this whole interconnected self that we’re a part of. In Chesapeake, Peake means shell. Chesa means great, big. So Chesapeake actually means the Great Shellfish Bay, and it refers mostly to the oysters that are there. We think about the oysters as part of the lungs, almost like the little bronchioles that filter our breathing, because we’re in a tidal space. The Chesapeake Bay is tidal. It comes in and out. Even here on Nanjemoy Creek, it’s tidal. It comes in and out twice a day. It breathes. Those oysters were the mechanism of those lungs, that filter. When we see intense storm surges, it’s because the oysters have been ripped out. The intentional care, when we think about the forests or the waterways, is a very intentional shaping based on our values.
Traditional tobacco, as a medicine plant, is now grown again after decades of loss. Green tree frogs signal rare ecological balances in rematriated lands.
LJJ: What is one of the biggest messages you want to give to the world about your Nation and your Peoples today?
GT: Never give up. When I say never give up, it doesn’t mean to not change strategy or to sometimes realize that your energy needs to get put into something that moves forward or that you’re stuck in something that is toxic or traumatic. When I think about Piscataway, I think about our relationships. A lot of who we are is the relationships that we’ve had with what we come from. On the Piscataway side of it, we are formed out of the love between Native people who were survivors with indentured white women and enslaved Africans. That’s the reality of who Piscataway people are now.
I worked for many years at the National Museum of the American Indian, and doing this history work, I learned that policies were designed to prevent us from having these conversations. We’re not even supposed to exist. We always have this narrative of extinction. Just thinking about all of these incarnations, maybe you’re the only person who’s holding on to that thread. But if you hold on long enough, the chance of someone else, or someone like you in your generation, picking it up and carrying it a little bit more...you never know who’s going to pick it up. Just hold on to it. For Native people, there is that level of responsibility not to give up, but also to imagine what things can be and live in that direction, positively.
LJJ: You put that so beautifully, and other Elders of mine have said that, too. They said, hold on. They said it might not be easy, but hold on. Hold on. Even when it’s easier letting go.
