Adding voice and meaning to Clifford Twp.’s historical display

BY JON O’CONNELL
Times-Shamrock Writer

With a plume of feathers tied around his back and bells jangling from his ankles, Frank “LittleBear” Burke invited the crowd to rise and dance.

“It’s not every day you get to dance with Indians,” the Cree Nation descendant said from his stage at the Clifford Community Center. “Unless you live with me.”

With his son, Thomas “Little Thunder,” at his side, Mr. Burke weaved lessons about equality, humility and appreciating human imperfection, all tenets of the Indian way of life, into his presentation Sunday on Native American culture and history for the Clifford Township Historical Society.

Guests at the free event held and inspected moccasins, knife sheaths and belts decorated with beads and colors that tribes used to identify one another and assert status.

With a little persuasion, Mr. Burke taught the crowd to whoop and holler like his ancestors mimicking the eagle and the coyote, cries they used to communicate and express themselves in times of victory or loss.

He explained how the Crow Nation in Montana would dance for days on end without food or drink before hunting buffalo, a sign of respect and sacrifice for the animal that provided them with food, clothing and tools.

The historical society sought out Mr. Burke, a lecturer on Native American culture, to record his voice for a description of its museum centerpiece, a dugout canoe discovered in a private pond in the 1970s.
Little is known about the canoe’s origin, but Mr. Burke commended the historical society for preserving the piece of Native American history.

After 40 years, the canoe finally came to rest in 2008 with the historical society, where it was encased in glass before a backdrop mural by local artist Michelle Jocania McLain depicting what life may have been like for Native Americans near the pond.

Mr. Burke’s recorded description will be added to the canoe display in the historical society’s museum inside the community center on Cemetery Street off Route 106 — another addition to its efforts to preserve the township’s history, society President Sandy Wilmot said.

The historical society is still working to complete several displays before the museum project is finished. The organization already has restored an old one-room schoolhouse and has started on an old cider mill and an agricultural museum in town, Mrs. Wilmot said.