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Archeologist
Julia King stands in front of an abandoned house that was
home to chiefs from the Rappahannock Tribe. The home was built
in the late 1800s and was once occupied by the grandparents
of the current chief, Anne Richardson. (Timothy C. Wright/for
The Washington Post)
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Indian Neck, VA.
From the road, the abandoned chief's house is a shadow, almost invisible
under a cloak of vines and trees on the edge of a corn field. If
you managed to find it, you wouldn't know what it meant the
ragged wood siding, the gaping windows, the shattered plaster.
The front room was where
the tribal council met. The backroom was for Indian school, where
children learned the old ways. Susie and Otha Nelson lived here
beginning in the 1920s, waging a lifelong fight for the survival
of their people, the Rappahannock Tribe.
Today, their granddaughter
carries on, and generations of persistence are beginning to pay
off. Earlier this year, the Rappahannocks were among a handful of
Virginia tribes who finally achieved federal recognition under a
bill passed by Congress and signed by the president.
Now, discoveries are
helping the tribe reclaim something that had seemed irretrievably
lost: its history.
[Trump
signs bill recognizing Virginia Indian tribes]
Recent archaeological
work, driven by 2018 data analytics, has unearthed evidence of the
Rappahannock Tribe's vast range along the river that bears its name.
The findings suggest the Rappahannocks were a powerful tribe with
equal standing to others that got more attention from European settlers.
The emerging story undercuts
what Western historians have asserted for 400 years about the shape
of native culture when the Europeans arrived in America, and it
restores the place of the Rappahannocks, who had nearly been erased
from the record.
"There were voices that
the Rappahannock needed to have that they weren't getting," said
archaeologist Julia King of St. Mary's College of Maryland, who
has led the effort.
Popular understanding
of Virginia's native people comes from early English accounts, and
Jamestown settlers were all about Powhatan, Pocahontas and the Indians
along the James and York rivers.
"Powhatan looms way larger
than life in some respects because the English are there, and they're
writing about him," King said. "And this evidence is really suggesting
that he probably was just a chief like all of the chiefs were in
the area."
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Archeologist
Julia King holds a stone artifact found in a cornfield near
Warsaw, Va. (Timothy C. Wright/for The Washington Post)
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The native people on
the Rappahannock lived just beyond the range of the first colonists
and kept themselves separate. While the nearby Pamunkey Tribe carved
out a reservation in the late 1600s, the Rappahannock lost their
ancestral land and scattered.
[Virginia's
Pamunkey Indians lead push for casino, expansion of gambling]
By the early 20th century,
their descendants struggled to cling to their identity.
Anne Richardson, 62,
the granddaughter of Susie and Otha Nelson, was born in the chief's
house. As a child, she would sit under a table as her father held
tribal council meetings.
In 1998, Richardson became
the fourth generation of her family to serve as chief and
the first woman to lead a Virginia tribe since the 1600s. Until
the new findings, she wasn't sure that a heritage preserved largely
through stories would survive.
"We had had kind of like
tunnel vision in looking at things from a Western perspective,"
Richardson said. "Lo and behold, everything that had been passed
down in actuality was true."
Cutting-edge
technology
On a bluff over the brown
water of the Rappahannock River, King and her colleague, Scott Strickland,
pick their way across a farm field. At their feet, among the remnants
of corn stalks, they scan for artifacts. It doesn't take long to
spot them flakes of quartz broken off by human hands, rocks
cracked and split by the heat of a fire.
These grounds about an
hour north of Richmond have been in the hands of a single family
since before the country was founded. An 18th-century plantation
house presides over a network of fields, barns and rolling gravel
roads. But before that, Rappahannock Indians lived here.
For the past three years,
King has been using federal grants for work based on a map created
by Capt. John Smith around 1608. Smith had explored the Virginia
rivers flowing into the Chesapeake Bay and marked Indian towns and
settlements along the banks.
[The
confusing, impossible mystery of the lost colony of Roanoke
Island]
On the Rappahannock,
all the native villages are clustered on the north shore. The south
is empty. Historians have long asserted that was because the Rappahannocks
wanted to keep a safe distance from the great Powhatan to the south.
But the oral traditions
of the tribe didn't line up with that. Family lore said the tribe
lived on both sides of the river, depending on the seasons
settling on the north but moving to the south for hunting. The central
town of Tappahannock would switch sides as needed.
And Powhatan wasn't a
feared overlord but more of an equal. He once captured John Smith
and brought him to the Rappahannocks to see whether this was the
man who had killed that tribe's chief five years earlier. The Rappahannocks
said no Smith was shorter and hairier than the guilty Englishman.
That's evidence that
the tribes had a rapport, Richardson said.
Working with the tribe
and landowners along the river, King and Strickland set out to investigate
which view was correct using a powerful new approach. Strickland
is an expert with GIS, or geographic information systems, a way
of analyzing points of data to understand a landscape.
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A
farm road weaves through an area that once supported a Rappahannock
settlement. (Timothy C. Wright/for The Washington Post)
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With a bounty of environmental
and historical data and even the locations of amateur archaeological
finds, Strickland assembled a map that plotted the most likely places
for settlement at the time of Jamestown and before.
What he found lined up
neatly with Smith's map. That suggests that it was environmental
concerns, not political fear, that put all the villages on the north
shore, where the soil was rich, fishing was accessible and fresh
water ample.
The south shore, with
its different topography, was the hunting ground.
The way King and Strickland
see it, the Rappahannocks were right and the English historians
were wrong. All that emphasis on Powhatan as the only native leader
of significance that's because he was the most familiar to
the settlers, who tended to aggrandize their own experience, King
said.
The findings, though
untested, have thrilled Virginia historians as a new window into
the pre-Colonial world. And because the Rappahannock River basin
is not heavily developed, the work hints that there's far more to
discover about the tribe's extensive range.
"Their use of predictive
modeling with GIS is really innovative," said Martin Gallivan, chairman
of the anthropology department at the College of William & Mary
with expertise in the native cultures of the Chesapeake area. "There
really hasn't been as much attention on the archaeology of Native
Americans in Tidewater Virginia as there has been attention on the
Colonial past. It's really exciting to see somebody like Julie bring
all these best practices to bear on the deep past of Native Americans
in the area."
Coming home
For the tribe, King and
Strickland's work has been profound.
Field surveys at several
sites along the river have produced hundreds of artifacts. Some
pottery fragments are from thousands of years ago; others could
be contemporary with Jamestown. Many bear decorations delicate
patterns made by sticks wound with rope or even by the striated
edges of a shark's tooth.
When Richardson and other
tribe members first held them this year, they wept.
"It's very emotional
to hold these things," Richardson said. "Yet there's an excitement
because we can uncover and preserve these ancient designs we didn't
even know existed, which brings us closer to them and their time
period."
Being able to visit sites
where ancestors lived, she said, "it's like you've finally come
home. You walk on these lands I don't know how to describe
it other than it's a great satisfaction in being able to return
there and put feet on the land and hear what it has to say to you."
Richardson views the
progress through the lens of her family's suffering. Her great-uncle
had to reconstitute the tribe after its members scattered during
the Civil War. He officially incorporated the Rappahannock Tribe
in 1921.
Her grandparents faced
what was in many ways the worst foe of all Walter Plecker,
who as head of Virginia's Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 until
1946 championed race laws designed to eliminate Native American
categories.
[Death
of 'a devil:' The white supremacist got hit by a car. His victims
celebrated.]
The Rappahannocks fought
back every way they could. Otha led the tribe to hire lobbyists
to propose laws to the General Assembly. Susie kept her own tribal
birth records, then marched to Richmond and insisted that Plecker
record them. Still, many Native American documents disappeared from
state archives.
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Chief
Anne Richardson discusses tribal history at the Rappahannock
Tribal Center. (Timothy C. Wright/for The Washington Post)
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When the tribe, like
others, began to seek state and federal recognition in the 1970s
and '80s, it had to demonstrate "cultural continuity" but
found that difficult because of the systematic destruction of tribal
practices and records.
Richardson's father,
Captain Nelson, won state recognition in 1983 but didn't live to
see the federal government finally acknowledge the tribe early this
year. He did see his daughter help the tribe establish a cultural
center on more than 100 acres a dozen years ago.
When someone asked him
how it felt to walk into the tribal center, "he broke down and cried,
which was unusual for him," Richardson said. "His words were, 'I
thought I would never live to see the day this would be here.'?"
Having a central property
helped anchor the tribe. Its numbers had steeply declined, Richardson
said. Today, about 120 members still live in the area near Tappahannock,
and another 120 or so are in other parts of the country. But more
have fallen off the rolls, and the chief hopes the new efforts will
give them a home to which they can return.
King plans to have shovels
back out at sites in December.
Just down the road from
the cultural center, the tribe has purchased the chief's house and
filed for historic landmark designation. Ultimately, Richardson
would like to restore the property, which dates to the late 1800s
and was where she lived until she was 11.
She'd like to re-create
the farm and start an herbal center the old house emerging
from the vines, the tribe's history coming back to life.
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