Warren’s Heritage: Native American History-Part 4

The Virginia colonists, as mentioned before, made treaties with Native peoples from the very first attempts at setdement, and the House of Burgesses in the mid-1600s allowed for the creation of
reservations for the Mattaponi and Pamunkey, members of the Powhatan Confederacy living in what is now King William County, Virginia. Other Native groups that did not cease to exist in Virginia through extermination, intermarriage or migration remained sufficiently cohesive and with enough community identity intact to petition the State of Virginia for recognition in the 1980s. State recognition of a tribe’s existence is very different from federal recognition. Whereas a state recognized tribe is accorded official status by the state and is included in all state-level  governmental discussions and divisions of state government concerned with Native American issues and affairs, federal recognition accords a legal relationship more akin to that between two sovereign nations.

While a federally recognized tribe (such as the Cherokee) might be allowed a great degree of fiscal autonomy, exemption from some state codes and regulations and control of lands within a reservation with set boundaries, state recognition does not guarantee any of these protections or allowances. Never-the-less state recognition is acknowledgement of an indigenous group’s identity and official status, and without this recognition a Native group may not enjoy the same level of official awareness and respect by state government and institutions.

There have usually been two sticking points in the creation of state or federal recognition of a tribe, these being, first, whether or not resources (such as land in the form of a reservation or funds in
the form of tax relief or special assistance programs) can or should be allocated by the recognizing government, and second, ultimately who has the power to determine whether or not a Native group deserves official status. This first problem has prevented many state recognized tribes from receiving federal recognition, most notably the Lumbee of southeastern North Carolina with a population of over 40,000 people. The second problem has always been a difficult and tricky one as well, however. Imagine that a group of Native peoples who have maintained their identity for centuries despite all adversity have a petition for recognition denied by state or federal authorities because lawmakers or academics decide that the group is “not Indian enough” for one reason or another. This has happened many times, even here in Virginia, and tribes have little recourse to follow if recognition is denied. Oftentimes throughout their history of oppression and discrimination by colonizers Native peoples have survived only through trying hard to mimic the dominant culture and mask or discard their own, abandoning subsistence strategies, languages, dress and religion along the way.

From the perspective of many Native Americans who find their official status challenged, it is insulting for non-Native Americans to suddenly expect excellent documentation and proof through hundreds of years of a specific group’s Native identity and culture. From the opposite perspective, that of government (state or federal), without some means of regulation any group of people could apply for and receive recognition as a tribe and any benefits that may accompany official status, and therefore it pays to be vigilant and have a formal procedure for the application for tribal recognition. Unfortunately this has lead to occasional misunderstandings and even poor contemporary relations between tribes and governments. Using the Lumbee of North Carolina as an example again, in the 1940s the federal government sent doctors to the Lumbee region to test blood samples of Lumbee to determine “how Indian” they were. The test results, using the technology of that era, suggested to the researchers that these people were not sufficiently Indian, having only a percentage of “Native blood”.

Today anthropologists see cultural identity as composed of a variety of factors, genetics being only one of them, and the science of genetics in the 1940s was rudimentary and simplistic at best. As a result of the 1940s work, however, the Lumbee did not and have yet to receive federal recognition, although they are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River and have been well documented as living in their tribal lands since the mid-1700s. The Lumbee people, infuriated, stopped seeing the federal government as an entity that could help them or that cared about their economic and social plight. Similar stories have been repeated in Virginia and elsewhere.