Turkey Tayac
Turkey Tayac (1895-1978) was a leader in the Native American revitalization movement of the twentieth century, Piscataway Indian and herbal doctor. Born Philip Sheridan Proctor, in 1895 in Charles County, Maryland, Tayac had some knowledge of the Piscataway language. Ives Goddard, senior linguist in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natrual History, consulted with Tayac.
Turkey Tayac traveled all over the East Coast helping native people, whether it was to attend a conference, a Pow-Wow, or if someone was sick. He was also a well-known healer, and a root and herb doctor. His mother passed her knowledge of healing and medicine to him, and more importantly, what it is to be used for. Mostly he worked and traveled to keep his Piscataway tribe active and visible in Maryland. He worked with numerous anthropologists, especially William Gilbert and Frank Speck, along with others, seeking to record vanishing tribes.
By an Act of Congress, Turkey Tayac became the only Indian to be buried in a National Park after its creation. Turkey Tayac is buried in the Ossuary, site of a village in which Piscataway people were living when John Smith journeyed up the Potomac River in 1608.
Native American Leader
Due to a strong, outspoken character that became pronounced early in life, Turkey Tayac's family gave him the name by which he was to effect his leadership, both within his nation and throughout "Indian Country." Once grown to adulthood, he began using the surname, "Tayac," both as a title of his practiced leadership, and because the name itself was part of his family's oral history. Turkey Tayac's family traced their descent from a long line of Piscataway chiefs, traditionally called "tayacs." Yet, by the time Turkey Tayac was born, only a few Piscataway families remained to remember and transmit knowledge of their own heritage.
Although a few families identified themselves as Piscataway Indians into the early 1900s, prevailing racist attitudes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Jim Crow policies in the twentieth century determined ethnic and cultural identification in the Upper South. Moreover, with the nullification of Native American identity through census enumeration and state legislation, any standing Native American treaty rights were that much easier to abrogate.
World War I Veteran
Turkey Tayac fought in World War I in France as a part of the Rainbow Division and suffered mustard gas poisoning. Later in life, Turkey Tayac reported that when Army doctors determined that he would not be able to survive his exposure to the lethal gas, he was able to heal himself with traditional Native American medicine.
Turkey Tayac was a critically important figure in the early and mid-twentieth century cultural revitalization movements among remnant Southeastern Native American communities, including the Lumbee, Nanticoke, and Powhatan Indians of the Atlantic coastal plain. Their efforts were curtailed by the Great Depression and World War II. In an era when Native Americans were increasingly regulated by blood quantum outlined in the Indian Reorganization Act, Turkey Tayac organized a movement for Native American peoples that privileged self-ascriptive forms of identification. Tayac's innovative, self-deterministic leadership led to the issuance of Native American identification cards by the Piscataway themselves rather than having tribes apply to and rely on state and federal bureaucracies to issue them on their behalf.
Tayac's efforts were especially courageous given the centuries long struggle by numerous tribal nations east of the Mississippi to be legally and legislatively accorded indigenous status.
October 2007