U.S. recognition elusive for Pocahontas’ tribe
The towering Varina-Enon Bridge with its cascading cables that carry Interstate 295 across the James River is clearly seen from the acres of corn and wheat grown on the historic Varina Farms in eastern Henrico County.
The farm was once famous for the tobacco crop from which the Varina region got its name. The tobacco, similar to the Spanish Varinas variety, was John Rolfe’s crowning achievement and contribution to the settlement’s survival in the 1600s.
His wife, Pocahontas, had her own hand in England’s first successful colony in the New World, a world already occupied by Powhatan’s Chiefdom, the collection of tribes under her father’s rule. The parkway 7 miles north of Varina Farms bears her name.
Their marriage, credited for seven years of peace between their peoples, turned 400 years old last week. And 400 years later, Pocahontas’ people are not recognized by the U.S. government, cutting them off from federal resources and the same status shared by 596 other tribes across the country.
Though revered among Virginia’s tribes, her achievements do not overshadow the contributions of other historic Virginia Indians as it does in the American consciousness, tribal leaders say.
Still, her legacy has become a defining reference point between her people and the rest of the country.
At the time of their marriage in 1614 at Jamestown, Pocahontas — then a teenager — had been in captivity for a little more than a year.
She had been a frequent visitor and arbiter to Jamestown after the settlers arrived in 1607 and was among the 30 tribes who first made contact with the English.
Relations between the English and Wahunsenacawh, the given name of Chief Powhatan, deteriorated as raids became more common and each side took prisoners.
Shortly after their April wedding, colonist Ralph Hamor wrote an account of her kidnapping after Captain Samuel Argall lured the girl on his ship during her visit to the Patawomeck tribe on the Potomac River:
“And so to James town she was brought … to be kept till such time as (Powhatan) would ransom her with our men, swords, pieces and other tools,” he said in a collection of surviving first-person accounts of the time, “Jamestown Narratives,” edited by Edward Haile.
Pocahontas was later moved to the town of Henricus, just across the James River from Varina Farms, where the Rev. Alexander Whitaker taught her English customs and dressed her in English clothes.
John Rolfe took an interest in the young hostage and wrote Sir Thomas Dale expressing his infatuation with her and his hesitancy in marrying a non-Christian.
Pocahontas, “to whom my heart and best thoughts are and have a long time been so entangled and enthralled in so intricate a labyrinth,” he wrote.
She was soon baptized and given the name Rebecca before their April marriage. Her father agreed to the union and sent two of her brothers to attend the wedding.
Helen Rountree, a professor emerita at Old Dominion University who has specialized in Virginia Indian tribes for more than 40 years, said Pocahontas likely adapted English customs as a way to please her captors — a psychological bond known as Stockholm syndrome.
“She was an unwilling hostage initially. … She was used to going in and out of town doing her work,” she said. “If you are really, really confined and they’re pushing this on you all at once, it’s almost as bad as if they beat you.”
There are no first-person accounts of Pocahontas’ thoughts or the use of force during her captivity. The marriage was heralded as a symbol of peace between the two groups, though short-lived before war broke out.
The wedding was re-enacted in Historic Jamestowne on April 5, complete with cocktails and dinner the previous evening in Williamsburg that ran $95 per ticket to benefit the World of Pocahontas Initiative, a series of public programs, lectures and an exhibit commemorating the anniversary.
Upper Mattaponi Chief Ken Adams said their tribal history is frequently on display across the state and in national museums, yet it has not been enough to gain federal recognition.
“It is sort of ironic that in this day and age that Pocahontas is represented as an enormous piece of American history and the people she came from are not fully recognized by the federal government,” he said.
Indian tribes can achieve federal recognition through an act of Congress, the Bureau of Indian Affairs or a decision by a U.S. court.
Virginia currently recognizes 11 Indian tribes. Six of them — the Chickahominy, the Eastern Chickahominy, the Upper Mattaponi, the Rappahannock, the Monacan and the Nansemond — are vying for federal recognition through Congress.
The Pamunkey tribe, which still occupies land in King William County reserved for them under a mid-1600s treaty with the settlers, is seeking recognition through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Three days before the wedding re-enactment, a U.S. Senate bill that would validate the six tribes left the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, headed to consideration of the full Senate.
The bill is sponsored by Virginia’s U.S. Sens. Timothy M. Kaine and Mark R. Warner, both Democrats. It’s a cause that they and others — who have gone in and out of office since the struggle for recognition began — have tried to move through Congress.
“It’s an amazing story, but it is also a deeply tragic story,” Kaine said Thursday on the Senate floor. “But the tragedy can be redeemed if Congress acts to correct a gross historical injustice that has deprived these tribes of their rightful place.”
The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian has a permanent exhibit chronicling the history of Virginia tribes who shared the Algonquian language, including those under Powhatan’s rule.
“While we recognize the tribes in a museum three blocks from the Capitol, we will not, we have not, we do not yet recognize these tribes in law,” Kaine said in his speech.
The recognition provides tangible and intangible benefits for Virginia’s tribes, Adams said. With a federal nod, the tribes would have access to a pool of money appropriated to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Without it, they are ineligible for educational opportunities afforded to the nation’s 596 federally recognized tribes.
For example, Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas features two buildings named after the tribes’ most famous kin — Powhatan and Pocahontas. Yet children from the Virginia tribes are ineligible to attend.
Wayne Adkins, the president of the Virginia Indian Tribal Alliance for Life and first assistant chief of the Chickahominy tribe, said the main purpose is to gain respect.
“For a lot of us, it’s not about the (access to resources) anyway. It’s about the pride,” he said. Their predecessors were discriminated against, “but they stood up for who they were anyway. We feel like we would be honoring and validating them by being recognized.”
Access to records to confirm their continual existence, rumors about the tribes’ desire to build casinos, and general reluctance to add potential cost to the federal budget have all been obstacles since they chose the congressional route in 1999, Adkins said.
“I had no idea it would take 15 years and it still be unresolved,” he said, adding that the Chickahominy tribe has discussed the goal since the 1920s.
When the tribes are introduced and the bill is discussed, they are still referred to as the people from whom Pocahontas came.
Pocahontas “gives people an immediate connection. … It gives us legitimacy that we might have to struggle to get prior to that,” Adkins said. “It’s always an education process: ‘Yes, we’re still here. No, we didn’t disappear.’ ”
He said she and her father became a rallying point for Virginia’s tribes, too, as tensions with the English mounted and Powhatan’s leadership proved vital.
Yet “the outside world reveres her more than we do,” he said. “If she had not married one of them …who knows? She might have fallen from the history books like many of the other leaders have.”
Recognition of other Indian women became an issue when the Women of Virginia Commemorative Commission selected Pocahontas’ cousin Cockacoeske, who is believed to be the first female chief of the Pamunkey tribe, instead of Pocahontas for its list of 12 Virginia women to be memorialized in a monument near the state Capitol building.
The commission received backlash from admirers of Pocahontas, whose rendering is commemorated on Henrico County’s flag and logo.
Rountree said that even 400 years later, Pocahontas’ legacy means something to the American people and the descendants of her own people. She is cemented in history as a link to life before the colonists and the drastic change Virginia Indians endured.
“Their culture has changed, they drive cars, their young people want to be computer geeks, but they still think of themselves as the people Pocahontas came from,” she said.
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