Shedding light on Jemison’s legacy
Program honors woman who was adopted by Senecas
Some believe that Mary Jemison — the daughter of white immigrants who was captured by a Shawnee war party at age 15 and lived among Native Americans for 75 years before she died in 1833 on the Buffalo Creek Reservation — never received quite the respect she deserved.
An early biography called her a “white squaw,” and subsequent writers generally treated her as a mere curiosity, notes history buff John Thomas of Castile.
Although Jemison is now remembered as the White Woman of the Genesee, which more accurately reflects her singular role in Western New York history, important aspects of her legacy are still overlooked, said Allan Jamieson, a seventh-generation descendant of Mary Jemison.
“She represents the will to survive, to overcome hardships,” he said. “There’s also the adoption factor: She was adopted by Senecas and treated as a Seneca,” and responded by staying with them to the end.
Shedding light on this legendary woman 251 years after her abduction was the objective of “Remembering Mary Jemison,” a program Saturday at St. Simon’s Episcopal Church in South Buffalo.
Organized by Jamieson, a Cayuga who lives in Fort Erie, Ont., the event included displays of memorabilia, talks by historians, dance performances and an actress portraying Mary Jemison. The program ended with a short walk from the Cazenovia Street Church to Jemison’s first grave in Seneca Indian Park. The Buffum Street pocket park is all that remains of Buffalo Creek Reservation, which once encompassed thousands of acres. The Seneca leader Red Jacket also was originally buried in the park.
“There is a lot of rich history here,” said Jamieson, who in 1992 led a successful campaign to restore a vandalized marker in the tree-shaded park halfway between Cazenovia Creek and the Buffalo River.
Mary Jemison was an eyewitness to, and participant in, much of that history, he noted. She spent years on the move in Pennsylvania and Ohio after she was abducted and her family killed during the French and Indian Wars. She settled in the Genesee River Valley in 1761 — a peaceful time for the Senecas, who called her Dehgewanus, or “Two Falling Voices.”
The innocence ended with the Revolutionary War. The Senecas and several other tribes sided with the British; in 1779, George Washington sent 5,000 soldiers to lay waste to the Senecas and their way of life.
Jemison and her children survived the war, and during the 1797 Big Tree council — in which much of the Seneca homeland was turned over to white settlers — succeeded in setting aside 18,000 acres for the family in what would become Letchworth Park. She fought off attempts by other residents to take away her property, and three of her sons were murdered. In 1823, the Senecas gave up all but two acres of her land, which she sold before moving to Buffalo Creek in 1831. She died two years later.
“Remembering Mary Jemison” included remarks by Thomas, a collector and interpreter at Letchworth Museum in the Wyoming County park where Jemison was reburied in 1874 and a statue marking her grave has stood since 1910; the Buffalo Creek Dancers; a Jemison portrayal by Gretchen Murray Sepik; and talks by Jack Ericson, a Fredonia State College professor, and Jare Cardinal, director of Seneca Iroquois Museum in Salamanca.
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