Trail Exposes Hidden History of Va. Indians

The guidebook, Wood said, is the first step in what many Indians hope will transform views of them and the way Virginia history is taught and understood. The Virginia Council on Indians, an advisory board to the governor and General Assembly, is planning a comprehensive Indian Heritage Program, funded with $250,000 from the state. It will have an interactive Web site, genealogical data, extensive tribal histories, a K-12 curriculum and lesson plans, teacher training, and grants for research and for tribes to update their collections and museum displays.

"If, in five years, I never hear 'You mean there are still Indians in Virginia?' then we will have succeeded," said Rhyannon Berkowitz, a Creek Indian and anthropology graduate student who served as a trail researchers.

Berkowitz said that although she found lamentable omissions about Virginia Indians, she discovered a few astonishing sites. The Bedford City-County Museum has one of the most complete exhibits about Virginia Indian history, not just in prehistoric and first-contact periods, but up to the present day -- including a wedding dress worn recently by a Monacan at a traditional ceremony.

And down in NASCAR country, the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville is gearing up for the June 30 grand opening of a comprehensive show on Virginia Indians, including displays of one-room schoolhouses that Indians attended until the sixth grade and an infamous book from the early 1900s, "Mongrel Virginians," which dismissed Virginia Indians as mixed-breed and backward.

It is because of their painful history -- of reservation lands lost in the 18th century, poverty in the 19th century and systematic racism in the 20th century -- that Virginia Indians have survived in scattered remote communities, largely unnoticed. In fact, it wasn't until after the civil rights movement of the 1960s that many began reconstituting themselves as tribes, relearning their traditions and reconstructing their identities.

"There's so little known about the Virginia Indians, because the Indians themselves have only gotten interested in their own heritage in the last 20 years or so," said Douglas Cooper, director of the Bedford City-County Museum, who has consulted with Monacan Indians to set up the exhibit. "They weren't preserving it, so museums didn't have a resource to draw from. I think there was a lot of interest in the white community, but there was no place to go."

Now, it seems, people can't get enough of Virginia Indians. Alisa Bailey, director of the Virginia Tourism Corporation, which helped finance the guidebook, said the 40,000 copies of the free Virginia Indian Heritage Trail program that were put in welcome centers around the state are nearly gone.

"This beautiful booklet, it's not promotional, like a lot of things. It's very, very authentic," Bailey said. "We know that's what our high-end traveler wants. They want to be educated, entertained. They want something authentic, something they can't experience in their own town."

But will people follow the winding back roads to places such as the Pamunkey reservation in King William County, one of the oldest in the nation, to see the small tribal museum, the shad fishery and the pottery school?

Sitting on a rock outside the reconstructed 1870s-era log Monacan schoolhouse, Wood, the anthropologist, pondered the question. "You have to want to, I guess. But that's part of our history, too. It's not exactly by accident that we're all so hidden away."