OUR NATIVE NATIVES How many full-blooded native American Indians do you know?
Less than one, perhaps? That's about the average with most Virginians.
Then, we have and advantage over people from other states because there come sweeping back over our memory screens all the stories about the beautiful Indian princess Pocahontas, her papa Powhatan who was chief-chief of all of the noble redskins in or around the troubled Jamestown colony. You have a special treasure if you actually recall those stories and the actual history which set such events before us. Today's knowledge is based almost exclusively on those wonderful, colorful, convenient, abridged, abbreviated eviscerated,condensed encapsulated and ruthlessly romanticized versions produced a la Disney. I am grateful for them, I hasten to insert this point, because, without them all may well have been totally lost.
Our tribes were located mainly in the east end of the colony - east of the Blue Ridge mountains. The actual number varies on how one counts them. Even such familial units as they were, disagreed at times and broke into short-term fragments. Today the Chickahominy Tribe, for instance, for instant, is the largest tribe about a thousand members. They live in the Charles City County between Richmond and Williamsburg with several scattered "colonies" elsewhere in the estate. In nearby New Kent County, twenty-five miles east of Richmond, we find the "Eastern Chicahominy Tribe". Total population about 150.
The Chicahominy Tribe was not a member of Powhatan's Confederation. They were the ones who captured John Smith and held him prisoner for Pocahontas, who "lived with the Flunkey's Tribe. The tribe today consists of about a hundred persons. In Powhatan's time it was the most powerful. His remarkable confederation consisted of from 32 to 34 "tribes" from the Carolina border to DC with about an estimated ten thousand persons under his leadership.
We will be hearing more about the Virginia tribes in the next few months because they were approved for Federal Recognition and eligibility to many benefits because of this nationwide recognition. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has been dragging its moccasins in implementing the classification procedures for nearly three years and tribes are growing restless.
A.L.M. February 15, 2005 [c376wds]
