School's 'Redskins' context

James Smart

is a longtime Philadelphia writer who lives in Mount Airy

Bucks County's Neshaminy High School has been in the midst of the widespread fuss about the nickname "Redskins" for sports teams. Whether or not the appellation is racist and insulting, the controversy has a different context at Neshaminy than in the case of the Washington professional team, or even the Roxborough High School team.

Neshaminy High School has an American Indian name. It comes from the Neshaminy Creek, which winds behind the campus. The name is based on the Indian words for "two streams." The nesha means "two," and the miny derives from the same native word as the manay in Manayunk, which is applied to a stream of drinking water.

The Neshaminy High newspaper, which has stumbled into a central role in the controversy, is the Playwickian. Playwicki was the name of the central village of the Turtle clan of the local Leni Lenape Indians. The word is an English distortion of the Lenape name "place of turkeys."

The leader of the Turtle people in William Penn's era was Tamanend, whose name was pronounced Tammany by English settlers, and usually translated as "affable." He became legendary unusually quickly among the early colonists, so much so that in 1772, about 70 years after he died, Philadelphians formed an organization called Sons of King Tammany.

Tammany societies soon sprang up throughout the colonies. The society in New York City became so important that, by the 19th century, it was the city's major political machine.

In the beginning, the Tammany societies were not that serious. May 1 was declared King Tammany's Day, and Philadelphians organized annual festivals. John Adams, while here in 1777 as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, wrote home to his wife, Abigail, about the Tammany celebration. The next year, the Continental solders, who were ending their long winter at Valley Forge, observed Tammany Day. New York had its first Tammany festival in 1787.

Folk legends about Tammany vary (he even makes a guest appearance near the end of James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 novel, The Last of the Mohicans), and alleged facts are often contradictory. He was born about 1625, and died about 1700. His signature appears on early land agreements with the Quaker settlers.

In modern times, the location of his Playwicki village was noted for many years by a small stone marker along Bridgetown Pike between Feasterville and Langhorne, on the edge of a field of the old Snodgrass farm, which abutted Neshaminy Creek before modern development intruded.

In 1993, as Lower Southampton Township moved to take possession of the farm, a team of Temple University archaeologists did some digging and found axes, pottery, and other artifacts, as well as traces of structures and cooking hearths. Today, the area is Playwicki Farms Park, not to be confused with Playwicki Park, another small park up the road, in a bend of the Neshaminy Creek.

In 1995, a statue of Tamanend was erected at Front and Market Streets in Philadelphia. He stands placidly on a large turtle, while an eagle lands awkwardly on his shoulder, bearing a wampum belt like the one traditionally given to William Penn at a 1683 meeting up the Delaware at Shackamaxon. Tradition names Tamanend as one of the treaty signers, and Fishtown history buffs would like to see the statue moved to Penn Treaty Park there.

The text on the statue quotes Tamanend as proposing that we all "live in peace as long as the waters are in the rivers and creeks and as long as the stars and moon endure." His opinion of sports teams' being called "Redskins" is not known.