Ridgetop Shawnee

In the late 18th to mid-19th centuries, many multiracial families migrated to southwestern Virginia; extreme southeastern Kentucky, particularly Harlan County; and northeastern Tennessee. In the 1870 federal census for Harlan County, Kentucky, for instance, numerous families were classified as Indian. Families with the surnames of Sizemore, Callahan, Eldridge, and Cole have had a tradition of Native American ancestry, as well as European and African.[2] Often such families moved to the frontier for less expensive land, as well as to avoid racial caste discrimination in more settled areas of slave states. Remnant members of tribes intermarried with their neighbors and a multiracial group of settlers formed.

Beginning in 1913, the Pine Mountain Settlement School educated some of the local children in Harlan County. For nearly 20 years it operated as a progressive boarding school for elementary age children in the Appalachian region; in the 1930s, it shifted to operate as a boarding high school.

Since the late 20th century, the Ridgetop Shawnee Tribe have worked to strengthen and preserve Native American traditions and culture. They contributed to passage of local ordinances that prohibit digging, or artifact hunting, on county and city lands. One such ordinance was passed by the Harlan County, Kentucky fiscal court in 2006. The only such ordinance in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, it has decreased illegal artifact hunting and helped preserve prehistoric sites. The Ridgetop Shawnee Tribe of Indians were instrumental in the creation of the Harlan County Native American Site Protection Office.

The group members work with state, city and county officials to protect Native American cultural resources in Eastern Kentucky. They gained agreement from the city of Ashland, Kentucky to put a protective fence around prehistoric earthworks in a park; the site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Indian Mounds in Central Park.[3]

In addition, the tribe has developed a database of persons documented as Native Americans in southeastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia and northeastern Tennessee, to make it easier for other persons to trace their ancestry. By December 2011, the Kentucky Native American Databank held basic genealogical data for more than 1,000 names; it is hosted on the free genealogy site, Rootsweb.[4] The tribe is seeking to preserve the Shawnee language, a Central Algonquian language that was traditional for many of its ancestors. Today it is spoken primarily by people of the Shawnee Nation in Oklahoma.

In 2009 and 2010, the State House of the Kentucky General Assembly recognized the Ridgetop Shawnee Tribe of Indians by passing, unopposed, House Joint Resolutions 15 or HJR-15 in 2009 and HJR-16 in 2010.[5][6] These acknowledged civic contributions of the group by this name: their long history in the state, their efforts to preserve Native American heritage, as well as to help its elderly and young people.

The Ridgetop Shawnee require that prospective members prove documented descent from multiracial settlers in the region from 1790–1870, and also have Y-DNA or MtDNA showing direct-line Native American ancestry. Y-DNA and or MtDNA may be used only to show descent from individuals who are documented as eligible for enrollment.[7] In 2012 the Ridgetop Shawnee began the Express Enrollment program for descendants of several family lines of mixed-Native American heritage, who have been well-documented as migrating to Southeastern Kentucky, Northeastern Tennessee, and Southwestern Virginia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These families and lines are: Sizemore (KY); Fields (KY, VA); descendants of Hawkins Bowman (KY, VA); descendants of Ezekiel Bennett (KY, TN); descendants of John Cole (KY, VA); and descendants of Porter Jackson (KY, VA).[7] In June 2012, the tribe limited new enrollment to individuals who qualified to use Express Enrollment.

Europeans reported encountering Shawnee over a widespread geographic area. The earliest mention of the Shawnee may be a 1614 Dutch map showing the Sawwanew just east of the Delaware River. Later 17th-century Dutch sources also place them in this general location. Accounts by French explorers in the same century usually located the Shawnee along the Ohio River, where they encountered them on forays from Canada and the Illinois Country.[8]

• Absentee-Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma
• Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma
• Shawnee Tribe

• Website for the Ridgetop Shawnee Tribe of Indians
• "Sizemore Surname DNA Project", Official Website