Opinion: Native Americans still overlooked in debates about U.S. history - The Virginian-Pilot - The Virginian-Pilot

Opinion: Native Americans still overlooked in debates about U.S. history - The Virginian-Pilot - The Virginian-Pilot

Opinion: Native Americans still overlooked in debates about U.S. history

By DAWN CUSTALOW

FOR THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT |

SEP 26, 2020 AT 6:05 PM

Virginia Indian chiefs gather at a pow wow. From left: Chief Anne Richardson of the Rappahannock, Chief Kenneth Branham of the Monacan, Chief Ken Adams of the Upper Mattaponi, Chief Barry Bass of the Nansemond and Chief Steve Adkins of the Chickahominy. (Steve Earley)

Dawn Custalow, an English language learner teacher who lives in Roanoke, is a tribal member of the Mattaponi tribe whose reservation is located in West Point. (HANDOUT)

The 1619 Project is gaining more traction in the media since its unveiling last year in the New York Times magazine. Its premise, “to reframe American history by regarding 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” The question is “What would it mean not to seek a ‘new’ history for our country but to acknowledge the already existing history pre-1619?”

Why is there talk of reframing history for this country? If anyone has the right to do so it would be the Native Americans of the East Coast of Virginia. The formal beginning of the unborn United States occurred with the establishing of the first colony, Jamestown, in 1607. This area was the home of the Algonquian Native Americans of the Powhatan confederacy. It would be 12 years later before the arrival of the first ships carrying enslaved Africans that docked in Point Comfort. How then is it that The 1619 Project aims to reframe history with claims that the American nation began in 1619?

Virginia Indians told stories of settlers who would not have survived without their help during the long brutal winter of 1609-10. The natives, including the powerful family confederation of Powhatan and Pocahontas, taught the colonists how to plant food and even traded with them during the initial years of their relationship. The colonists survived and founded Virginia democracy with the original governmental template still as the foundation of the Virginia House of Delegates today.

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Obviously, there was history in Virginia before the arrival of the ships at Point Comfort. I know this history because it is my history as well. I am a direct descendant of Pocahontas, a Mattaponi Indian. My tribe, through its oral traditions, knows the demise of own cultural ways that were once strong during the Powhatan and Pocahontas era. In fact, Eastern Native Americans' history has served as a harbinger of what was to come for our Western tribal brothers and sisters in the loss of their lands and culture some 200 years later.

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Yet, in the midst of the loss of a lifestyle of the Native Americans in Virginia, my people endured well through injustices. My father was refused entrance as a student in the white high school near our reservation. However, he was also refused at the local Black high school. He and his brother would board a train bound to Indian territory in Oklahoma to finish out their education. Perseverance prevailed and they both went on to university.

U.S. history shows clearly that two people groups were subjugated at the beginning of this nation’s history and this subjugating was a grave wounding. But wounds cannot be used to reframe history. Wounds are not healed in changing a storyline. The only narrative open to creating is the one that is in the present.

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To propose that 1619 was the beginning of this nation denies the recognition of the Powhatans and their present-day descendants who continue to live on and outside of the Mattaponi and Pamunkey Indian reservations today. How can any group of people reframe another’s history when the descendants of the original people are still alive and can testify to the validity of their history? As Virginia and American Indians, we honor our history. It is sacred — it cannot be changed. If we attempt to change history, then identity, memories and interpreting our present events become clouded, if not obsolete.

Native Americans want to see our history preserved, not altered, as it already has been over the 400 plus years from the first European settlers' landing. If the idea that U.S. history began in 1619 is accepted, then my people’s collective memory is blotted out forever. With all due respect, no matter how painful it was for the Africans who came in 1619 and for their descendants today, history itself cannot be changed to accommodate another narrative.

No group, whether cultural, historical or political should be granted a pen to reframe history. Reframing does not erase the wounds that ultimately must be dealt with. The telling of true historical facts helps us all pass down a legacy to our children that history is theirs to make, but never to recreate — no matter how appealing and desired the story might be.

Dawn Custalow, an English language learner teacher who lives in Roanoke, is a tribal member of the Mattaponi tribe whose reservation is located in West Point.