Saturday, November 24, 2012

Thanksgiving “annual rite” with Indian tribes obscures Virginia’s past, the bad in particular


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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