Ridgetop Shawnee

The Ridgetop Shawnee Tribe of Indians is a limited liability company, nonprofit organization, and unrecognized tribe in Kentucky. They are Americans who identify as being of Shawnee and Cherokee descent.

Nonprofit organization
In June 2013, the Pine Mountain Indian Community, LLC, announced that the Ridgetop group would be renamed as the Ridgetop Shawnee, to serve as the heritage arm of this nonprofit organization. Within this new management structure, the Ridgetop Shawnee would concentrate on the preservation and protection of the heritage of the region. The Pine Mountain Indian Community would focus on economic development and community development in Southeastern Kentucky.

William Hayes Shackleford founded the Ridgetop Shawnee Tribe of Indians, LLC, as a limited liability company and nonprofit organization, based in Hazard, Kentucky, in 2009. The organization went inactive but became active again in 2021, with Jeffery R. Morgan serving as its registered agent.

Shackleford organized the Pine Mountain Indian Community, Kentucky LLC in 2013, also a nonprofit limited liability company in Hazard, Kentucky. This organization dissolved in September 2015. Morgan served as this organization's registered agent.

Status, recognition, and identity
The Absentee Shawnee Tribal Historic Preservation Office's Cultural Preservation Department wrote that "in our ancestral settlement areas including but not limited to Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, [and] Alabama. In these areas, there are a number of people who claim Shawnee ancestry, this is not so much the concern as the fact that some of these individuals or groups use this claim to exploit Shawnee culture as a means of gaining opportunities for themselves from a public that is largely unaware of the vast divide that separates our tribal community politically and culturally from those of alleged Shawnee ancestry" and goes on to name the Ridgetop Shawnee among several similar groups.

In 2009, the State House of the Kentucky General Assembly passed House Joint Resolutions 15 or HJR-15. The State House of the Kentucky General Assembly passed House Joint Resolution 16 in 2010 "commending the Ridgetop Shawnee Tribe of Indians for their efforts on behalf of preserving Native American heritage." These congratulatory resolutions acknowledged the civic contributions of the group.

While the State of Kentucky has a Native American Heritage Commission, Kentucky has no state-recognized tribes and "the state doesn’t have a process for them to apply for formal recognition."

Legal advocacy
Since the late 20th century, the Ridgetop Shawnee Tribe contributed to the passage of local ordinances that prohibit digging, or artifact hunting, on county and city lands. One such ordinance was passed by the Harlan County, Kentucky fiscal court in 2006. The only such ordinance in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, it has decreased illegal artifact hunting and helped preserve precontact sites. The Ridgetop Shawnee Tribe of Indians were instrumental in the creation of the Harlan County Native American Site Protection Office. They gained agreement from the city of Ashland, Kentucky, to put a protective fence around precontact earthworks in a park; the site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Indian Mounds in Central Park.