The Indians were right, the English were wrong: A Virginia tribe reclaims its past
By Gregory S. Schneider November 21 at 5:21 PM
INDIAN NECK, Va. — From the road, the abandoned chief’s house is a shadow, almost invisible under a cloak of vines and trees on the edge of a corn field. If you managed to find it, you wouldn’t know what it meant — the ragged wood siding, the gaping windows, the shattered plaster.
The front room was where the tribal council met. The backroom was for Indian school, where children learned the old ways. Susie and Otha Nelson lived here beginning in the 1920s, waging a lifelong fight for the survival of their people, the Rappahannock Tribe.
Today, their granddaughter carries on, and generations of persistence are beginning to pay off. Earlier this year, the Rappahannocks were among a handful of Virginia tribes who finally achieved federal recognition under a bill passed by Congress and signed by the president.
Now, discoveries are helping the tribe reclaim something that had seemed irretrievably lost: its history.
Recent archaeological work, driven by 2018 data analytics, has unearthed evidence of the Rappahannock Tribe’s vast range along the river that bears its name. The findings suggest the Rappahannocks were a powerful tribe with equal standing to others that got more attention from European settlers.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/the-indians-were-right-the-english-were-wrong-a-virginia-tribe-reclaims-its-past/2018/11/21/2380f92c-e8f4-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html
