The Sound of Music was on television earlier this week – it is frequently aired during the holiday season – and this article made me think of one song from this show. In the song Do-Re-Mi, Julie Andrew sings “Let’s start at the very beginning – a very good place to start.” This article reminds us that, although American history textbooks often identify the 1607 settlement at Jamestown as the “very beginning” of American history, indigenous people were here first – over 15,000 years ago. Anthropologists aren’t certain about the exact date or the exact route they took to get here, and recent evidence suggests a longer history and more complicated migration route than people used to believe, but it’s still safe to say that indigenous people have been here a Long Time.
This article in today’s newspaper reminds us that the Native Americans in our part of Virginia didn’t go away, although their numbers dwindled and official state and national records often did not record people in a manner that correctly reflected their ethnic identity. The state of Virginia, for example, passed the Racial Integrity Act in 1924; this act required that all birth certificates and marriage certificates include the person’s race as “white” or “colored.” The Act classified all non-whites, including Native Americans, as “colored.” Interestingly, this was the same year that Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, finally awarding birthright citizenship to Native Americans. I haven’t explored the relationship between these two events, but I’m guessing there is some connection.
By focusing on a nonprofit organization called “Just Harvest” – a program that teaches food sovereignty (controlling and producing what you eat) in the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula of Virginia — the article gives readers both the historical background and current efforts associated with these initiatives that bring together local community members, the College of William and Mary, and Colonial Williamsburg.
The people interviewed for this article are descended from indigenous tribes that had once populated this area (generally referred to collectively as “Tidewater”) but which were either relocated or absorbed into a broader “white” or “colored” ethnic identity.
This map of the same part of Virginia identifies the tribes that were displaced by English settlement in the 17th century.
I wrote about Native Americans on May 23, 2023, in connection with another Virginia Gazette article. Take a look if you’re interested.
The people interviewed in today’s article say that food sovereignty was “one of the first weapons of war used against us. They burned our fields. Starved us. Changed the planting methods. Sole our land. Most of our first-contact tribes in the area were almost wiped out.”
This project builds on the fact that tribes around Virginia, particularly in Tidewater, are working to promote the benefits and need to restore food sovereignty by encouraging a return to more traditional foodways – cultivating traditional crops through traditional cultivation practices and teaching traditional cooking methods.
The Global Research Institute at William & Mary is working on a part of this program, led by a descendant of the Chickahominy tribe, Troy Wiiponwii, who is a lecturer at the college and the incoming director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Conservation at the college. His team is developing software and an app to identify tribal lands that are best for growing crops and to estimate how much food can be produced from Indigenous food systems.
The Eastern Chickahominy tribe in the nearby community of Providence Forge has received a USDA grant to partner with local farmers for food. Another tribe, the Nansemond in Suffolk (in the region called “southside,” across the James River from The Peninsula, has an ongoing oyster restoration project, because oysters were a significant part of the Powhatan Confederacy diet. This project and others like it will be able to use the technology developed by William and Mary to provide data for future grants to continue their current projects and begin new ones.
In October of 2023, about 200 people gathered at the college for an Indigenous Peoples Feast. This event brought together 26 tribes. They spent the day learning about food sovereignty while eating and learning about traditional and contemporary Indigenous dishes.
Colonial Williamsburg is playing a role in this initiative as well. The Colonial Garden on Duke of Gloucester Street, where gardeners use 18th-century tools and techniques to grow herbs, vegetables, and plants that represent the plots tended by the three peoples that populated Williamsburg in the 18th century – the enslaved, the Native Americans, and wealthy households. In this garden, visitors can see the “three sisters” – corn, beans, and squash – that were grown by Native Americans in harmony. The beans provide nitrogen for the corn; the cornstalks support the beans, and the squash grows on the ground, helping the soil retain moisture and preventing weeds from sprouting. This trio of crops constituted about half of the Powhatan diet.
According to a legend of the Tutelo people (who lived in central Virginia, a little further west and north from Tidewater), corn represents a woman and bean represents a man. The corn woman was looking for a partner to marry and found a bean man. They got together and grew well. The Colonial Williamsburg gardeners experimented with growing the crops separately and then together. They concluded that the corn woman grew better with her bean man. There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere, but I’m not going there this morning.
Love this post. What we white folk did to the Native Tribes of Virginia was awful, and I'm always so glad to see ways that we are trying to make things better today, and to recognize that "they" were here first.
If you ever get to Austin, TX be sure to visit the Texas History Museum. It litteraly begins with the formation of the land and then moves on to the indigenous people of Texas. Fascinating, but really caught my attention (20 years ago) for including their first people, well, first.