In a touching Thanksgiving Day “annual rite,” Gov. Bob
McDonnell and first lady Maureen McDonnell accepted a buck presented by Chief
Carl Custalow, leader of the Mattaponi Indian tribe, and a deer and Canadian
goose from Chief Kevin Brown of the Pamunkey Indian tribe.[1]
This annual rite supposedly dates back to a 1677 treaty in
which Virginia’s tribes present gifts to the governor of the commonwealth in
place of paying taxes. In the 1677 treaty, Virginia’s Indian leaders
acknowledged the rule of the King of England while the latter acknowledged the
rights of Indian tribes.
During the ceremony, McDonnell announced that as soon as
2013, a new monument in tribute to Virginia’s Indians will be erected on
Capitol grounds.
The problem with these pleasantries is that they obscure the
brutality through which most of Virginia’s Indian tribes were subjugated from
the beginning of the colonial period of the North American continent until
quite recent times.[2]
According to one source, “By 1722, there were no longer records of many of the
tribes previously noted, although their people still lived together in one or
more enclaves.”[3]
While it’s nice that the colonizer and the colonized wish to
let bygones be bygones, Virginians in particular have a tendency of reducing
past brutality to an unfortunate period that should only briefly detain our
attention, as if those scars of the past do not resonate in our own times.
But Virginia’s past does still shape our present and our
images of ourselves as Virginians, which is why we pick ‘positive’
episodes/interactions from the past.
While this generation did not commit the atrocities of some
of our ancestors, we do Virginia’s Indian tribes the ultimate disservice by
cherry-picking from the past only those episodes that are most congruous with
who we want to view ourselves as: tolerant, peace-loving, multicultural, etc.
Virginians Indian tribes, like so many Indian tribes on the
North America continent, were nearly exterminated by a thirst for more land,
more wealth, and so forth. This is the true “annual rite” that should be
remembered, these egregious ‘mistakes’ of Virginia’s past.
It may be cliché, but it is no less true for being so: those
who forget their past are bound to repeat it. So while we remember what went
right, we should also remember what went wrong so as to better ensure that it
never happens again to any group of people for any reason.
[1] http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/latest-news/governor-accepts-game-from-va-indian-tribes-in-rite-that/article_9084572a-340b-11e2-8ef1-0019bb30f31a.html
[2] http://virginiaindians.pwnet.org/history/today.php
[3] http://virginiaindians.pwnet.org/history/1700s.php
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