What’s in a Name?: The Connection Between the Native Americans and the Streets of Buffalo, 1802-1857

The Exposition, Jan 2015

This article focuses on how the street names of Buffalo, New York, have evolved over time in response to shifting sentiment toward the Native American population. Though the street names in Buffalo started off as primarily Germanic and Anglo-Saxon, as tensions rose between the white inhabitants of Buffalo and the Native population, more street names were named with tribal words. This was played out against the dramatic backdrop of Native American legal battles against the city of Buffalo and other land companies for the right to stay on their ancestral lands. In 1857, the Seneca Nation won a landmark case which allowed them to keep their reservation lands in perpetuity. As the Native Americans of the area fought to have their claims recognized, the city noticeably increased the number of streets named after Native words. Though on the surface this appears to honor the original inhabitants of the Buffalo area, in actuality it helped to further marginalize the Native tribes and push them further into obsolescence. As the Natives receded from the public mind after their legal victory, these diverse and vibrant tribes were systematically marginalized, as knowledge of them became nothing more than a name on a sign and a lingering impression of “Native-ness.”

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=exposition

What’s in a Name?: The Connection Between the Native Americans and the Streets of Buffalo, 1802-1857

2-1 8 5 7 Deirdre Reynolds Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/exposition Part of the Social History Commons Recommended Citation Reynolds, Deirdre (2015) "What's in a Name?: The C onnection Between the Native Americans and the Streets of Buffalo, - Article 2 N ative A an the Streets of B uffalo, accepted for inclusion in The E xposition by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons at Buffalo State. For more information, please contact . What’s in a Name?: The Connection Between the Native Americans and the Streets of Buffalo, 1802-1857 By Deirdre Reynolds On 25 July 1797, Theophile Cazenove, the General Agent of the Holland Land Company, wrote a letter to his agent in the Philadelphia, Joseph Ellicott. Its purpose was to inform Ellicott of his instructions for the upcoming treaty with the Seneca Indians regarding the sale of their lands to the company. Instead of being worded generally, asking to make advantageous deals in the neutral legalese expected by modern corporations, Ellicott was instructed to “obtain [the] Indian title of the greatest quantity of [the] best lands,” and to “[liberate the land] from the Indian claim.”1 Cazenove’s instructions left little room for doubt: the agent wanted the prime land holdings of the Seneca Indians in order to develop what became known as the city of Buffalo. Though this was a common attitude for land companies of the time, it foreshadowed the future relations between the Indians and the city of Buffalo. What started off as seemingly friendly relations soon deteriorated into mutual hostility and distrust, with both sides struggling fiercely for the right to live on the disputed lands. As this fighting continued over the course of 55 years, various streets in the city were named after Native American names and words in the attempt to both mask the cooling of relations between the two groups and strip the Native Americans of their cultural indigeneity. Street names are an important link to the history of an area, its values, and what it wishes to emphasize as its heritage. Street names serve as a memorial to the “official” version of history, and as soon as they no longer represent the values the city wishes to highlight, the names are changed for those which do. The evolution of the street names in Buffalo indicate an attempt to 1 Theophile Cazenove to Joseph Ellicott, July 25, 1797, Reports of Joseph Ellicott, Buffalo and Erie County Research Library, Buffalo, NY. mask the tense diplomatic relations between the Native American tribes and the city of Buffalo, and to make the Native Americans irrelevant to the white-dominated world, as seen through the city’s formative period of 1802 to 1857. When discussing the evolution of the city of Buffalo, most specifically in the discussion of street names, the location of an end date is problematic. As the city was founded in 1802, the beginning date is logical, and certainly in the case of street names makes sense. The first logical c ut off point is 1830 , when the city was incorporated. This is when the city plan was approved by the federal government, and major changes to the city plan rarely occur. However, in discussing the evolution of street names, this end point is rather early on in the historical narrative, and does not take into account the changing government or the effect of the Erie Canal, implemented in 1825 and highly influential until approximately 1880. Also integral to the narrative of the relations between Native Americans and Buffalo and their effect on street names are the Seneca. The Seneca had a tumultuous relationship with the city of Buffalo, and as such there are a number of important dates for them. However, the most important date in terms of land claims is 1857, when the Senecas successfully won a court battle to stay on their reservation, rather than be shipped off to Kentucky and have their reservation appropriated for use by the city. This is the lowest point in the relations between the two groups in Buffalo’s early period, so it stands to reason that this is the impetus for many of the street name changes. As such, it will be used as the ending date for the period in question. Although memorials and street names have existed for many years, only recently have historians begun looking at the correlations between memorials, street names, monuments, and other forms of public commemoration in any serious depth. The objects chosen, in any form, are used to remember or celebrate a specific part of the society’s past. However, although historians throughout the last hundred years have informally addressed this topic, only in the past ten years has there been a more serious interest taken in these topics. The consensus among most historians is memorials and monuments are named with the needs and desires of the present society in mind, rather than straight history. The editors Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer in their collection of (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=exposition

Deirdre Reynolds. What’s in a Name?: The Connection Between the Native Americans and the Streets of Buffalo, 1802-1857, The Exposition, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 1,