B2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, JUNE 9 , 2022
Plus, he said, the “renaming of
this highway has mixed support
amongst our membership.” Some
were offended by the term “Indi-
an Head,” he wrote, while others
were “concerned that the name
change will erase references to
‘Indian Headlands,’ a term which
was used in historical records to
identify the Southern Maryland
region where our people resid-
ed.”
To further complicate matters,
historians and tribal members
say there are different versions of
how the area came to be named“Indian Head.”Beheadings or a geography?
Some Piscataways and histori-
ans cite the bloody past, while
others point to the region’s geog-
raphy — a promontory jutting
into the Potomac River.
The area was once the main
territory of the Algonquian Indi-
ans, which include the Piscat-
away tribe, and they can trace
their roots to the land back
10,000 years. The name “Piscat-
away” in the Algonquian lan-
guage means “where the watersreturned to classes in the late
summer, according to the data
obtained by The Post. From Jan. 1
through June 2 this year, police
responded to nine assaults, three
weapons offenses and one aggra-
vated assault at the same loca-
tions, the data show. Alexandria
police spokesman Marcel Bassett
noted that multiple offenses
could stem from the same inci-
dent.
Assaults at the Bradlee Shop-
ping Center or immediately
nearby also increased, from one
in the first five months of last
year to 12 so far this year through
June 2, according to the data.
Luis Mejia’s stabbing is the only
homicide recorded so far this
year at the shopping center;
none were reported in 2021,
Bassett said.
Alexandria public school offi-
cials referred questions about
security to the city police depart-
ment. A police spokesman said
ensuring school safety is among
the department’s “highest priori-
ties.”
Police arrested a 16-year-old
student last week in Luis Mejia’s
killing. Authorities have not
named the teen because he is a
minor. The state has charged him
with second-degree murder and
is seeking to try him as an adult,
according to information re-
leased by the Alexandria Juve-
nile and Domestic Relations Dis-
trict Court.
The investigation into the mo-
tive for the stabbing and the
cause of the group fight is on-
going, police said.
ALEXANDRIA FROM B1 In a presentation from the
school board’s March 10 meeting,
Alexandria City Public Schools
officials noted that “we regularly
collaborate with state and local
safety officials (EMS, Police, Fire,
Emergency Management, Health
Department) to ensure our
schools are well prepared in case
of an emergency.” The presenta-
tion said that “each school has a
Crisis Management Team with
members who have been trained
on the appropriate response dur-
ing an emergency.” Cameras and
after-hours security staff mem-
bers provide surveillance inside
and outside all facilities, and
access to the schools is tightly
controlled, the presentation add-
ed.
Hundreds of family, friends,
teachers, school officials and stu-
dents attended Luis Mejia’s fu-
neral last week. Many wore black
T-shirts emblazoned with the
teen’s name and photo. A Go-
FundMe account set up to assist
his family with funeral costs had
raised $22,405 as of Wednesday,
more than twice the goal. School
officials awarded Luis Mejia a
posthumous diploma on Satur-
day.
His aunt, Sara Mendoza, said
her nephew was a conscientious
teen who loved soccer and exer-
cise and whose “dreams were cut
short.”
“We can’t describe the pain we
felt when we saw the videos,
everything that happened, when
we saw he was flat on the ground
and no one helped him,” she said,
describing cellphone videos tak-
en by some witnesses that have
circulated online.
In the restaurants, liquor
stores, and nail and tanning
salons at the shopping center,
the stabbing took some employ-
ees and managers by surprise.
But others said they have noticed
more tussles recently and were
rattled by a shooting in Septem-
ber that left another teen wound-
ed. The shooting came after a
fight at the McDonald’s, authori-
ties said.
Jason Ward, an employee at a
Korean fried chicken restaurant,
said that he usually sees police
when he drives into work and
that their presence is especially
noticeable around lunchtime,
when the students are most like-ly to be congregating.
“It seems like any incident we
have involves high-schoolers,”
said Mason Fiedler, a manager at
a battery shop. After the shooting
in September, he said, the Mc-
Donald’s posted an armed secu-
rity officer and refused indoor-
dining patrons on Tuesday and
Thursday afternoons. Those
measures have since been re-
scinded, Fiedler said.
Fiedler said teenagers began
meeting up regularly at the shop-
ping center after the coronavirus
pandemic began and schools
shifted to virtual learning. After
schools reopened, the teens kept
trekking over during their lunchhours, he said. Fiedler and an
employee at his shop recalled the
shooting, the stabbing and a
strange episode in which teens
began to hurl large rocks in the
alley behind their row of shops.
“The nail salon people were
scared of going out there,” Fie-
dler recalled.
“We’ve all been in high school.
We can tell when there’s tension,”
Ward said when asked about
Luis Mejia’s stabbing. “I think
the school dropped the ball.”
City officials have been debat-
ing for months whether and
what kind of police presence is
required in public schools. The
city council voted to removeschool resource officers in May
2021, then reinstated them in
October. The reversal came after
a run of incidents in which police
were called to Alexandria City
High School for fights, and a
student was arrested with a
handgun at the entrance, forcing
the school into lockdown.
The school resource officers,
who are not involved in disci-
plinary matters or patrolling the
shopping center, take action only
when a student is thought to be
engaged in criminal activity,
such as threatening peers with a
weapon or having drugs or alco-
hol at school.
The city in April established
the School Law Enforcement
Partnership Advisory Group to
propose changes to the school
district’s partnership with po-
lice. The group has not held its
first meeting, a spokeswoman for
the city’s schools said. After Luis
Mejia’s death, the school transi-
tioned to mostly virtual learning
for a week.
“We must turn away from the
‘easy’ answers, and work collab-
oratively with parents, educa-
tors, human-service agencies,
non-profits and police to protect
our children and equip them to
resolve conflict without vio-
lence,” Alexandria Mayor Justin
Wilson said in a statement post-
ed on Twitter after Luis Mejia’s
death.
Mendoza, the victim’s aunt,
called on school officials to be
more watchful.
“It’s very painful for parents to
lose their children,” she said. “It’s
not the first time something
happens at that school.”In Alexandria, debate over presence of police o∞cers in schools is ongoing
FAMILY PHOTO
Alexandria City High School senior Luis Mejia Hernandez, seen in a family photo, was fatally stabbed
in an off-campus melee in May.merge” and is a reference to the
area where the Piscataway Creek
and the Potomac River converge,
according to Tayac.
In the early 1600s, the Piscat-
aways numbered around 12,000
and included several intercon-
nected tribes, whose land
stretched from Point of Rocks,
Md., along the Potomac River
and around the Chesapeake Bay.
But because of attacks by colo-
nists and tribes from the north
who saw them as “aligned with
the colonial government,” the
Piscataways suffered a period of
massive violence and loss, said
Julia A. King, an anthropology
professor at St. Mary’s College of
Maryland who has studied the
Piscataways.
Owen Lourie, historian for the
Maryland State Archives, saidSouthern Maryland Heritage
Area, which covers Calvert,
Charles and St. Mary’s counties
and areas that are home to the
Piscataways. “I think people in
the government wanted to recog-
nize the First People. The prob-
lem was the process.”
‘Bad for our tribe’
For starters, Jesse Swann — an
enrolled member of the Piscat-
away Conoy Tribe who identifies
himself as chief and who mus-
tered support for the name
change — did not have the back-
ing of some tribal leaders.
Swann and a group of support-
ers got nearly 5,000 signatures in
an online petition. He said he
had tried for seven years to
change the offensive name but
had no luck until Del. Jay Walker
(D-Prince George’s) heard about
his effort and decided to sponsor
the bill. (Jay Walker and Lucille
Walker are not related.)
“A lot of people just thought
the name was wrong,” Swann
said. “It’s just bad for our tribe.”
Other proposals had been
made in the past to rename the
highway after President Barack
Obama or Supreme Court Justice
Thurgood Marshall, but those
efforts also failed. This time, Jay
Walker gauged support for it at
town halls and constituent fo-
rums and felt it would succeed.
“When I said maybe we should
honor the Native Americans,
they were all like ‘That’s a good
idea, let’s do it,’ ” he said.
Plus, he said, the murder of
George Floyd “changed the dy-
namic.”
“The millennials, like my
daughter, her generation — they
don’t stand for stuff like that,”
Walker said. “The timing was
there.”
The bill had support — includ-
ing from the Maryland Commis-
sion on Indian Affairs and Prince
George’s County Executive An-
gela D. Alsobrooks — but Piscat-
aways were split on the renam-
ing.
Francis Gray, who identifies
himself as the tribal chair of the
Piscataway Conoy council, told
The Washington Post the council
did not support the way the bill
was introduced and passed be-
cause he felt it was “fast tracked”
and no one reached out to him or
the tribal council leaders until
the last minute.
“Within our tribal community,
it is very concerning that this bill
was not fully vetted and that no
outreach to Piscataway tribal
leadership was attempted prior
to [the bill] being introduced,”
Gray wrote in a March 30 letter.
HIGHWAY FROM B1 the earliest map he has seen with
the word “head” is from 1861.
Lourie said 19th-century maps
named the area for its large
concentration of Native Ameri-
cans and used the word “head” to
describe the land where they
lived because it “sticks out into
the Potomac River.”
“They’re using the word ‘head’
in the name as a synonym for a
coastal feature,” Lourie said. An-
other map from the late 18th
century calls the area where
Piscataways lived “Indian Land.”
In the 1890s, people moved to
the town during the post-Civil
War depression to work at the
newly established Naval Proving
Ground. The town of Indian
Head was incorporated in 1920,
and the first parts of Indian Head
Highway were built in the 1940s
to give better access between the
naval facility and Washington.
In 2012, two groups of Piscat-
aways — the Piscataway Indian
Nation and the Piscataway Conoy
Tribe — received recognition
from the state of Maryland as
official tribes.
While some Piscataways sub-
scribe to the geographical expla-
nation for the name of the town
and highway, others adhere to
the oral history that elders
passed along for generations, as
Tayac’s father had shared with
her.
“It’s something he carried with
him,” said Tayac , who was a
curator for 18 years at the Nation-
al Museum of the American Indi-
an in D.C. “It was a memory he
had, and I always knew that
story, and it always stuck with
me. It’s been like a background
noise. It’s like the name of the
Washington Football Team. It
becomes a dreadful little hum.”Rename vs. ‘designate’
Weeks after the legislation’s
passage, Swann and his support-ers were surprised to learn the
highway, which is also called
Maryland Route 210, was not
being renamed after all.
The bill did not call for a name
change but instead said officials
should “designate Maryland
Route 210, as the Piscataway
Highway,” the Maryland Depart-
ment of Transportation wrote in
a March 11 letter to the House
Environment and Transporta-
tion Committee, adding that the
legislation did not “clarify the
exact meaning of ‘designate.’ ”
In other words, the road will
still be called Indian Head High-
way, although it will get two signs
along part of it with the addition-
al name of Piscataway Highway.
Jay Walker, the bill’s sponsor, was
disappointed with the outcome.
“I don’t think anybody expect-
ed it to be that way,” he said. “The
will of the legislative body was to
rename Indian Head Highway to
Piscataway Highway, and that
has not changed.”
Changing the name of the road
and the signs on it would have
been a cumbersome, drawn-out
and costly process, MDOT said,
warning that it would involve
replacing signs, reprinting maps
and changing mailing addresses.
A name change would also make
it hard for emergency rescuers to
find the road and would cause
“confusion and potential costs
with legal or real estate docu-
ments that reference a road
name that no longer exists.”
MDOT said there was no esti-
mate for the cost to rename the
highway because no one had
asked for it.
The bill moved forward with
no amendments, passing both
the House and the Senate unani-
mously.
In a letter to Maryland legisla-
tors, Swann said he and his
supporters felt “bamboozled and
defeated” that the name was not
being changed. He vowed to push
state officials to “get this hiccup
taken care of.”
Hogan, in a May 24 letter to
Swann, said the legislature had
“declined to call for a renaming
of this roadway” when it passed
the bill, so officials from the
state’s highway department will
put up two signs that “designate”
it as Piscataway Highway. The
governor also outlined a few
ways to get the roadway officially
renamed: The General Assembly
can submit a bill to formally
rename the highway and pass the
law in future legislative sessions,
or go through the lengthy stan-
dard process of submitting a
request directly to MDOT.
Officials said the signs, which
cost about $400 each, would go
up this fall.E≠ort to rename Md. highway did not turn out as planned
PHOTOS BY JULIA NIKHINSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
For Gabrielle Tayac and others of the two Piscataway tribes in Southern Maryland, the name of Indian
Head Highway h as long conjured horrific images of a violent time for the Native Americans here.A sign along Indian Head Highway last week. Two signs will be
erected with the additional name of Piscataway Highway.Subscriber ExclusivesMusic to our ears: Free tickets to Tash Sultana on June 25 at The Anthem
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