Our tribe is finally recognized by the United States

Courtesy Office of Senator Mark Warner

Senator Tim Kaine (left) Chief Stephen Adkins (Chickahominy), Chief Lee Lockamy (Nansemond) and Senator Mark Warner (far right) share a moment of congratulations. 

"Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine ... have worked for years to get federal recognition for several Virginia tribes.  These include... the Chickahominy, the Eastern Chickahominy, the Upper Mattaponi, the Rappahannock, the Monacan, and the Nansemond.  As Senator Warner explained:

“We and some of the folks who are in the gallery today were not sure this day would ever come, but even here in the United States Congress and the United States Senate, occasionally we get things right. And boy, oh, boy, this is a day where we get things right on a civil rights basis, on a moral basis, on a fairness basis, and to our friends who are representatives of some of the six tribes who are finally going to be granted federal recognition, we want to say thank you for their patience, their perseverance, their willingness to work with us and others,” said Senator Warner.

Assistant Chief Wayne Adkins, from the Chickahominy Indian tribe, interjected a sense of the time involved:

“It was surreal after 18 years of working. It definitely was not a let down, but when you put i[n] so much work after so many years, it was strange [for it] to be such a brief moment,” he said."

Thanks to my blogger friend, an attorney and pagan living in Washington DC, (Hecatedemeter) for posting this above quote.

My ancestors may at last no longer be forgotten.  The Nasamond Tribe of Virginia was part of the original peoples pushed aside by Virginia colonials.

Here are several posts that I gave to my old blog years ago...about our Rogers connection...

No Blue Blood
Sunday, August 11, 2013

No Blue Blood

Genealogists get fired up about...people who published documents which invented relationships. If you can't trust genealogy, who can you trust?

I of course have not read the last 12 years of the conversation which started in 1999 about the Bass families.  There were some emails published under one of these person's listings, and I found it very interesting.

Apparently a Mr. Bell was paid to connect a family with some blue bloods.  Others have said to question the book "Bass Families of the South", by Albert Bell.

"I think that all this controversy in the Bass Genforum is healthy and will help more people to understand that Bell's book is flawed." Mike Crandall, Aug 11, 1999

 From: FredBright

 To: Mike and Ruthie Crandall

Date: Friday, August 20, 1999 

Subject: Bell's Book

Mike-      I enjoyed your email which was forwarded to me by War Chief, Earl Bass. You are correct. There are many incorrect entries in Dr. Bell's book. People can say what they want, but the truth is, he was trying very hard to establish a Huguenot connection for a particular group of people, with Bass surnames.

The interesting thing is that this led to writing to the Native American Tribe of Virginia of which I'd never heard, the Nansemond Nation, which may be my ancestors.

What a headache.  These people have dates and source data attached to them, so there are families there, which are true relationships.  I need to slowly go through and justify the ones that belong to the Bass family which was my grandfather's mother's family.

Earlier information triggered another person to make a newsletter, which unfortunately doesn't have much published. http://www.tbass.com/basse.htm

It was a good idea however and there's a link to http://www.tbass.com/photopage/

The Nansemond Tribe holds its POW-WOW each Fall in the Chesapeake/Suffolk VA area near where they lived when the Europeans came in the late 1500's. They are a part of the Powhatan Chiefdom which included 32 Algonkian-speaking tribes in the tide water area of Virginia. The European part of my family, John Bass/Basse married into the tribe in 1638. His was one of two Christianized marriages between European and American Indians according to Helen C. Rountree in The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries. Their culture is recorded in The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: their traditional culture by the Ms. Helen C. Rountree. I have attended the POW-WOW each Fall for the past three years. I met former Chief Earl "Running Deer" Bass, and present Chief Barry "Big Buck" Bass at their homes at the northern end of Dismal Swamp in the summer of 1993. Chief Barry Bass, his wife Betty, and The Nansemond Association are most gracious host for the POW-WOW each year. I have been to a lot of POW-WOWs over the years, but I must admit that I get much more pleasure out of attending the POW-WOW of my peoples. AHO MITAKA OYSIN, Grandfather I give thanks for the winds which have come an blown the fog away so that I could know who I am. AHO...   {Updated 01/01/13}  

 

 

This sign announces the gathering of people for the Nansemond Tribal Pow-Wow which is held north of Suffolk VA each year in Late Summer or Early Fall. Chief Barry "Big Buck" Bass greets all attendees graciously.

Though it was updated 2013 in January, tbass hasn't posted any pictures since the 2000 pow wow. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But Definitely Red Blood

Monday, August 12, 2013

But definitely RED blood!

I've spent most of this afternoon, when I should have been potting, since I am supposedly a potter, chasing the various Nansemond Indian relatives that I'm pretty sure I'm related to.

Not 100%.  But partly that's because the Bass family tree got skewed over towards the English nobility.  And partly I find that a certain official in Virginia was really pretty bad to the Indians.

This label on the photo is wrong, since Mr. Weaver was Pakistani, a bit of East Indian, not west!

THE SMITHSONIAN GIVES THIS INFO: This photo shows members of the Weaver and Bass families: William H. Weaver is sitting; Augustus Bass is standing behind him. The Weaver family were indentured East Indians (from modern-day India and Pakistan) who were free in Lancaster County by about 1710. By 1732 they were taxables in Norfolk County and taxable "Mulatto" landowners in nearby Hertford County, NC by 1741. By 1820 there were 164 "free colored" members of the family in Hertford County. In the 1830s some registered as Nansemond Indians in Norfolk County. (Smithsonian Institution, Nansemond Indians, ca. 1900.)

 The Nansemond Indians originally lived along the Nansemond River and were part of the empire ruled by Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas. When the English arrived, the tribe had about 300 warriors and a total perhaps of 1200 people. 

They were initially wary and often hostile toward the English, but by the 1630's some had changed their minds. A family sermon book still in the Chief's possession records the 1638 marriage of John Bass, and a Nansemond convert to Christianity named Elizabeth. Everyone in today's Nansemond tribe is a descendant from that marriage. 

(The chiefs are usually named Bass.) 

Christianized Nansemonds remained on the Nansemond River and became English-style farmers, though they kept hunting and fishing; the other Nansemonds warred with the English in 1644, fled southwest to the Nottoway River, and had a reservation assigned them there by the Virginia colony. By 1744 they'd left the reservation and gone to live with the Nottoway Indians on another reservation nearby; their old reservation was sold in 1792. In 1806 the last surviving Nansemond on the Nottoway Reservation died.

In the 1720's, the Christianized Nansemonds moved to an area just NE of the Dismal Swamp, where game was plentiful and English settlers fewer; some of them live there still. Their neighbors were not always tolerant of their ancestry. In the 18th Century Nansemond people had to get certificates from the Norfolk County Clerks stating that they were of mixed ancestry and loyal to the English of Virginia. In the 1830's, when Virginia enacted repressive laws against non-whites, the Nansemonds got their Delegate to have a law passed so that they could be specially certified as Indian descendants, exempt from the discriminatory laws. 

An anthropologist from the Smithsonian made a census in 1901, the tribe had about 180 people; more than half lived in Norfolk and Portsmouth. In the 1920's the Nansemonds almost managed to reorganize their tribe but in the repressive time that existed then for non-whites, they failed. It was not until the post-Civil Rights Era, when other Indian groups without reservations got formal recognition from the Commonwealth of Virginia, that the Nansemonds finally organized and got recognition as a tribe (in 1984). By that time, most of them had lived successfully for two or more generations in local cities as "whites with Indian ancestry"; the changeover to being "Indians with white ancestry" has not been hard.

Today the Nansemond Indian Tribal Association can be seen as a family as well as an ethnic organization, with members devoted to celebrating and continuing its unique heritage.

Note on Panaky children's photo

Unidentified Family, Bowers Hill, Virginia
Nansemond Tribe
Smithsonian Institution #870

 **************************

The Virginia School system had a lesson plan that talks about racism toward Native Americans.

---------------------------------------

September 13, 1723

Indians at Nansemond Town Petitioned the Governor

  

"This is the perfect short document to discuss the interactions between European settlers and American Indians in colonial Virginia. A group of Virginia Indians appealed to the governor to help them as North Carolina settlers were coming over the border to survey the Indians' land with plans to build houses on it. Further, the colonists had been allowing their livestock to graze in the Indians' corn fields and were eating the Indian's crops themselves. 

 *******************************

The federal government has recognized more than 500 different Indian tribes from around the nation, but Virginia tribes have had a hard time securing the official acknowledgement, because an administrative decision to do so by the Bureau of Indian Affairs would require documentation that the current tribal members have a continuous line of descent from the historical tribe.

That documentation no longer exists for the Virginia tribes because of Walter Plecker, a white supremacist who was the registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912-1946.

Claiming that Indians had become a “mongrel race,” Plecker replaced “Indian” with “black” on all of the birth and death certificates that came through his office. His deeds ensured that no modern Indians would be able to prove their blood connections to their race.

  http://www.suffolknewsherald.com/2011/02/18/senate-house-consider-indians/

_________________________

I have more that I will share with your tomorrow.  Since I've an ounce of Nansemond blood, now they are my tribe.  I dare say I have a few ounces of other races mixed into my mongrel blood as any proud American probably does.