Group keeps ways of Indians

Rosemarie Tullio sat at a large round table at a meeting of the Red Hawk Cultural Society. Held in the small basement meeting room of the Coitsville Township Administration building, it attracts a mix of Native Americans and non-native.
Wyandot and Cherokee, with a little Irish, Tullio is a founder of the group.
"You don't look like a Native American," I said, commenting on her curly hair and light skin.
"What does an Indian look like?" she asked. "I can show you people on the reservation who have blond hair and blue eyes!"
Tullio is 71 years old and proud. It has not, however, always been easy being an Indian, she said.
Tullio meets with the Red Hawks twice a month to prepare for powwows (large gatherings of various tribes or Indian cultural groups) and to learn about and practice traditional crafts and ways.
Activities
The Red Hawks have tanned hides, made flutes, listened to lectures, studied herbs and more. They are working on snowshoes for next year and a powwow for August. Thirty members regularly attend meetings; an additional 40 live too far away for anything but major events.
"Our mission is to share the native culture with our community," said Darlene Bosela, Red Hawk president. To this end, the group gives lectures, has fund-raisers and invites the public to powwows.
Keeping her culture alive is important to Tullio. "My great-grandmother was on the rolls," she said, referring to the official U.S. census list of Cherokees at the end of the 19th century.
Tullio spent part of her youth in West Virginia. "Many Cherokees were there. My people had walked the Trail of Tears and hid in the hills," she said.
In 1838 and 1839, 13,000 Cherokees were rounded up by the U.S. government and forced to walk across Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. This Trail of Tears cost almost 4,000 Cherokee lives.
Her youth
"When I was young, I lived in a teepee. I was on a reservation in Wisconsin," Tullio said. "If [an Indian] went to town, [he or she] had to be out of town by dusk." These are memories that stretch back decades to when Tullio was 4 years old. Even a stroke has not taken them away from her.
Eventually her family moved east, where her father got a job in a pottery. "Then he worked in a coal mine," she said. "We eventually rented a house in Ohio."
After a time, Tullio's brother moved back to the reservation, where poverty was a greater risk. But, said Tullio, while conditions were worse, "he was treated better."
"That's why we left West Virginia," she said.
Prejudice
Discrimination and prejudice were prevalent. One example was the school bus, which Tullio was not allowed to ride as an Indian.
"There were a lot of different things. We were different," she said. "We ate differently. We hunted and used everything. We made blankets and clothes out of the deer hides. Well, we still do it today."
To Tullio's parents, coping with the differences meant hiding them. "We weren't allowed to talk about the Indians or to tell people we were Indian," she said. "We were considered dirt. My mother wanted to protect us from that."
Even now, some Indians prefer life on the reservations, Tullio said. She visits friends in upper New York who live on the Cattaraugus reservation. "It's hard for the Indians out in the world; they are living two lives depending on how long they have lived [on the reservation]," she said.
Blended in
Tullio attributes her family's adjustment to life off the reservation to her mother's pressure to intermix with non-Native Americans. "We had relatives off the reservation, and that made it easy," she said.
Tullio eventually married and had three children.
Now, every other Sunday, she joins the rest of the Red Hawk Club members in studying and doing crafts. Since 1987, when she, Bosela, and Ted and Donna Wynn started the Red Hawks, she has been helping to spread the Indian culture -- her culture.
murphy@vindy.com