We Are Still Here

Virginia was not a wilderness to us, wrote Karenne Wood, a Monacan citizen. It was a known and loved home place. Set that beside every old map that shows this country empty. By seventeen twenty-nine, Virginia's colonial government had been told that all of its Native people except the Pamunkey had left. They hadn't. Some Monacan people stayed, entrenched in their ancestral home in the mountains, a place that became known as Amherst County, and Saponi, Occaneechi and Tutelo people joined them. Others left. Saponi and Tutelo people were admitted to the Iroquois confederacy in seventeen fifty-three, and Tutelo survivors ended up near Brantford, in Ontario, where a man named Nikonha was interviewed in eighteen seventy, and the language was confirmed to be Siouan. Three Saponi tribes are recognized by North Carolina. The twentieth century tried to erase them with paperwork. On Virginia's nineteen thirty census, every Indian listed has an asterisk, and a note that their status was in question. The agency that runs this very road has a term for what those records did. Paper genocide. At the fruit farms in Amherst at harvest, there were three tables at lunch, for white, Indian and black laborers. The Monacan Indian Nation is a federally recognized sovereign tribe, headquartered on Bear Mountain in Amherst County. Local members said recognition meant the government finally admitted their tribe exists. Its first powwow, in nineteen ninety-three, raised the money to buy a hundred and ten acres on Bear Mountain, held in trust for its future generations. Two years later the Episcopal Church returned the deed to seven and a half acres at its mission. The Monacan Indian Nation says it in the present tense. We are still here! We've always been here.