From his first footstep onto Mission land, Ben Barnes was profoundly moved. Although he’d never been to the Mission until this spring, instantly he felt a connection and a deep reverence for “this sacred ground.”
Ben Barnes is the Chief of the Shawnee Tribe, the 5,000-year-old tribe that shared its name and land with the Mission and sent many of the first students to the Mission school 186 years ago. It was Barnes’s predecessor, Shawnee Chief Fish who agreed to the founding of a mission and a school on Shawnee land.
Now, nearly two centuries later, Chief Barnes has a personal and ancestral interest in the Mission – preserving it, studying it, exploring these grounds and telling this story. Within weeks of his initial visit, he has joined the governing board of the Mission Foundation and established a working relationship with the City of Fairway. He also commissioned a team of preservationists to assess the structural and historic integrity of the Mission buildings. Next he wants to reference the Native American Protection and Repatriation Act to fund a ground-penetrating survey of the entire Mission campus.
As the elected leader of the 3,200-member sovereign Shawnee Tribe, Chief Barnes has deep concerns about tribal traditions and the truthful presentation of Native American History. Ten years ago, he chose to get involved in tribal governance because he sensed that the ancient language and culture of the Shawnee were fading. As he explained in a 2019 radio interview, “there are less than two dozen first-born speakers of the Shawnee language among the tribal citizenry.” Without a concerted effort to preserve the language, “we will lose the voices of our grandparents forever.”
Chief Barnes is critical of anthropologists and academicians who “drop in and study Native Americans on their own terms.” He refers to them an “the bunge-jumping academics. They extract some facts and write their stories but there’s no reciprocity.” Too often, the indigenous people are key players in the story, but their views are muted.
Through this partnership with the Mission, Chief Barnes is affirming his long-held commitment to “tell ‘truer’ stories.” That’s the goal shared by the operating partners of the Mission. By welcoming the Shawnee as partners and working together, pooling our resources and sharing out perspectives, we hope to tell the true, complete story of the Mission and people who shaped that story.
