TOM TUPPONCE: During the Jim Crow era Indigenous children in Virginia weren’t allowed to attend public schools. In 1952, three boys from the state’s rural Middle Peninsula were put on a train west.
MAC CUSTALOW: It was extremely difficult for our mother and not only for our mother but for the mothers of other children.
TOM TUPPONCE: That’s Mac Custalow from the Mattaponi Tribe. Two of the boys on that train were his older brothers.
MAC CUSTALOW: I mean you can imagine taking a 13 or 14-year-old child who's never been anywhere. Some of them probably, I don’t know, hadn’t been as far as Richmond very, very few times in their lives. And to take that child to Richmond and put them on a train and ship them off to Oklahoma with no adult supervision. I mean they’ve gotta change trains. They’ve gotta get there.
TOM TUPPONCE: There was Muskogee, Oklahoma. Home of Bacone College, an American Indian School. Mac’s two brothers carried a shoebox full of fried chicken and biscuits to eat on the way.
MAC CUSTALOW: Mum cried her heart out, Having to send your children away to a place my mom and dad had never been. Didn’t really know what you were sending your children in to. And particularly at that age. Totally unescorted. Just put them on a train and ship them away.
TOM TUPPONCE: The third child on the train was a member of the nearby Upper Mattaponi Tribe. Wesley Adams told his story during this 2010 recording.
WESLEY ADAMS: I went out the first year with two people. We got on the train together, two people from the Mattaponi Reservation. We got off the train in Muscogee, Oklahoma about two in the morning. Deserted train station. And the furthest I'd ever been was to Richmond a few times. And if I had been by myself, I don't know what I'd have done.
TOM TUPPONCE: Lou Wratchford remembers the day her brother left.
LOU WRATCHFORD: Wesley, my older brother, he got on the train. He never came back home to live.
TOM TUPPONCE: You might ask why parents would put their children on trains, to live far from family and community, knowing some of them would never return to live. But Indigenous parents knew the importance of education being withheld by the state. So, they made hard choices to give their children opportunities.
This chapter is just one in the long history of a colonial play book meant to erase our people. For hundreds of years, education in Virginia has been used as a weapon against us. Sometimes to assimilate us or to change our history. Always to hold us back and take our lands.
At the same time, Indigenous people in Virginia held tight to our cultures and ensured an education for our children.
I’m Tom Tupponce, a citizen of the Upper Mattaponi Tribe and this is Tribal Truths.
Flashback
TOM TUPPONCE: The plot to use education against us starts in 1606. That’s when the Virginia Company of London sent three ships of colonists on a four-month journey across the Atlantic. When they arrived on our shores they began to establish a settlement called Jamestown.
DYLAN RUEDIGER: There are early colonial instructions in the months leading up to the founding of Jamestown, from the Crown to settlers, their need to find just means for bringing Indians to Christianity and converting them to a new religion.
TOM TUPPONCE: That’s Dylan Ruediger, a scholar of Virginia history.
DYLAN RUEDIGER: And this involved making plans to educate people in the English language and in Christian doctrine. So they're starting to talk about that even before John Smith hits the ground and running.
TOM TUPPONCE: Captain John Smith, was an English explorer, soldier, and colonizer. He worked for the Virginia Company and dealt directly with Tribes that were part of the Powhatan alliance. By 1609 he was stealing their food and destroying their towns.
DYLAN RUEDIGER: The Powhatan peoples were not particularly interested (laughs) in the kind of education that the English were offering. In order to find students, the English experiment with different ways of what they call acquiring children. They're interested in young people because they think young people are more malleable and more quick to learn new things.
TOM TUPPONCE: So, colonists invited Indigenous children into their households to live and to be educated.
DYLAN RUEDIGER: This is the way that the English children would have been educated as well. Virginia is not a place where there are schools, education happens inside the family and inside the household.
TOM TUPPONCE: But most Indigenous families were unwilling to have their children uprooted from their communities.
DYLAN RUEDIGER: To be educated in English language and Christianity involves moving into the home of an individual settler, working in a role that resembles servitude and being kind of instructed in the cultural norms and the language as you go.
TOM TUPPONCE: Three-and-a-half centuries after colonists arrived, children from Virginia tribes were still being separated from their families and culture to be able to get an education. As with their ancestors, they were taken into white families’ homes to work and go to school. Only these schools were far from home in states like Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Bacone College & Michigan: A story of family loss
TOM TUPPONCE: During the early 1900s a small number of schools in Virginia were built and run by Indians. But the state prevented children from completing their education past the 7th and 8th grades.
Instead, the state offered a one-way ticket and stipends to parents to send their children away to private schools. Most of these were out of state.
That was a tough decision for parents. Some refused.
Here’s Rappahannock Chief Anne Richardson.
CHIEF ANNE RICHARDSON: Our people just wouldn't let their kids leave home because they knew the stories and they had had those experiences from other tribes through other tribes and so they weren't letting their kids leave home. They knew they’d never see them again.
TOM TUPPONCE: Our Tribe had the Sharon Indian School, which we’ll talk about later.
The largest school was the Chickahominy Tribe’s Samaria Indian School.
In 1950, the Chickahominy and the Chickahominy Eastern Division Tribes were able to establish a high school with county money. Indigenous teachers were graduates of Bacone College. The school took in some members of other Tribes. Later, the two reservation Tribes - the Mattaponi and Pamunkey obtained state funding for high school courses.
But during the early 1950’s parents continued to send their children out of state.
KEN ADAMS: So, eight members of the Upper Mattaponi Tribe, eight citizens in the 1950s, actually traveled to Michigan to live with families they didn't even know in order to finish school.
TOM TUPPONCE: Ken Adams, is Chief Emeritus of the Upper Mattaponi. His older sister is Assistant Chief Lou Wratchford. They grew up with eight other siblings.
When they were kids, our church had a pastor from Michigan who knew people in the Flint area. So, he made arrangements for some of our tribe’s children to live with families in Michigan.
The children paid for their room and board by doing work. Lou and Ken’s older sister Nora worked as a housekeeper.
KEN ADAMS: My sister Nora, my oldest living sister now living in Sacramento, she's 90 years old. She left home. She lived with the Chickahominy people for one year so she could go to a school with the Chickahominy people. Then she went to Bacone College for one year, then she went to Michigan to live with a family she didn't even know to finish high school.
TOM TUPPONCE: Broken hearted parents often suffered in silence. Here’s Assistant Chief Wratchford.
LOU WRATCHFORD: My mother was one of those individuals, she was very private. And so we would see her tear up and she would go into the bedroom and you know, whatever, she'd come back and you would never know that anything was bothering her. But we found out later how badly it was for her. Because like for instance, Nora left here when she was 13 years old to go to Samaria. And she never ever came home back.
TOM TUPPONCE: In those days the only way to communicate was by letter and telephone.
LOU WRATCHFORD: I can't fathom having to go through all of that. We didn't have telephones back in those days. I mean, other people did, but we didn't have any. And so the only form of communication was a letter. So, and that's all you got, was a letter. I can't fathom what they went through.
TOM TUPPONCE: Children suffered too.
LOU WRATCHFORD: My sister in later years shared with us that she thought she had done something wrong that caused her to be sent away from home. She had no clue why she was being sent away from home.
KEN ADAMS: She went on to become a registered nurse at Mercy Hospital in Detroit Michigan. She never came back to live. We see her all the time but she never came back to live.
The beginning of boarding schools
TOM TUPPONCE: During the Jim Crow Era, Virginia attempted to wipe out Indian cultures in part by keeping Indigenous children out of public White schools.
Virginia was building on the federal government effort of isolating them in boarding schools across the country. This has its roots back to 1613, when the Virginia Company of London began raising funds in England to build a college here to educate Indigenous students.
But that idea fell apart as settlers continued to take lands and encroach on the Powhatan people’s way of life. In 1622, Tribes retaliated and attacked the Jamestown colony, setting off a fierce period of conflict that lasted for the next 24 years.
Still, Dylan Ruediger says, the idea never really died.
DYLAN RUEDIGER: There are traces in the record that suggest that the English were still acquiring children and educating them as part of what increasingly looked like indentured servitude throughout the 1640s and into the 1650s. But there's no longer a real determined central effort to make educating Indians through a school.
TOM TUPPONCE: By the 1700s, Indigenous captives of wars with colonists were being enslaved and shipped to sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, some warring Tribes traded their captives into enslavement as well.
DYLAN RUEDIGER: And so, if you're an Indigenous community, and in particular if you're a relatively small Indigenous community, it's a time when there's danger from lots of different directions.
TOM TUPPONCE: So, these Tribes signed a treaty in 1713, in exchange for land and protection. But Governor Alexander Spotswood saw a military opportunity. He built Fort Christanna also called Christianna, at the latest frontier of westward expansion.
At the same time he struck a deal to establish the Virginia Indian Company to control all Indian trade in Virginia. He also built an Indian school.
DYLAN RUEDIGER: At the school at Christianna, the students live with their families who also live in or around the Fort. They are attending essentially kind of a day school where they come and they go from school as they please.
TOM TUPPONCE: But in his letters, Spotswood refers to Indian students as “hostages” who will be educated and converted to Christianity as part of a military strategy.
Around the same time, another Indian school was being established in nearby Williamsburg. It was called the Brafferton Indian School.
The Brafferton Indian School
DYLAN RUEDIGER: The Brafferton School, which is a place where individual Indigenous youths come to live on campus. And so they are separated from their communities and from their families in what look more like boarding school kind of environments.
TOM TUPPONCE: At Brafferton, Indigenous students got a full liberal arts education with math, literature, reading and writing, mechanical arts, and of course, religious studies. But the school has a dark beginning.
ASHLEY SPIVEY: There was a massive domestic slave trade in the eastern portion of the country, especially the southeastern portion, where you had Indigenous people who were being enslaved, you had Indigenous people who were enslaving to sell on the market because they were capturing their own enemies and like, well, this is something that we can profit from by selling them.
TOM TUPPONCE: Ashley Spivey is an anthropologist and member of the Pamunkey Tribe. She earned her doctorate at William & Mary. More than 300 years ago, members of her Tribe, including her 6th great-grandfather John Sampson, attended William & Mary, too, at the Brafferton Indian School.
She says the school’s first students were purchased from Tribes who dealt in slave trading.
ASHLEY SPIVEY: We don't know what communities these boys were from but they were enslaved and sold to the College of William & Mary.
TOM TUPPONCE: But Brafferton needed more students. So, Governor Spotswood turned to the tributary tribes. The Mattaponi and Pamunkey.
These were tribes that had negotiated and signed treaties with the colonists. Spotswood went to their chiefs and great men to convince them to send their sons to Brafferton.
ASHLEY SPIVEY: The Queen of Pamunkey at the time was like, I'm not sending my sons to you or the sons of my great men to you. And she was like, because you're going to enslave them. Our people were smart, tactful individuals. They knew what was happening. And they, because they were witnessing it and it was happening to the children in their communities.
TOM TUPPONCE: So, the governor had to negotiate.
ASHLEY SPIVEY: Okay, well, if you send your kids, we're not going to enslave them. We promise you that. And we will remit tribute while you have students at the Brafferton.
And that is kind of the push to get some of the kids from the tributary tribes to start attending the Brafferton.
TOM TUPPONCE: And as an added measure of security, the Tribes negotiated for tribal escorts.
ASHLEY SPIVEY: And so you had, for example, from Pamunkey, I think it was two or three boys that were sent initially in 1712 with an escort that would live with them and stay with them in Williamsburg at the Indian school.
TOM TUPPONCE: Other Tribes in the region that sent their children included the Chickahominy, Nansemond, Nottoway, Meherrin, Saponi and Tuscarora.
ASHLEY SPIVEY: Brafferton set the stage in the tone for how again, the United States was going to handle its Indian policy, which included boarding schools.
TOM TUPPONCE: Brafferton closed in 1790, after the Revolutionary War.
Sharon Indian School
TOM TUPPONCE: While the federal government was establishing boarding schools across the country to isolate and assimilate children of other tribal nations, Virginia was working hard to erase its Indigenous citizens. Instead of boarding schools, the state sought to force its tribal citizens to drop their culture and be labeled as Black. This would prevent them from an education equal to Whites. So, Tribes built and operated their own schools.
FRANK ADAMS: When I said that the old school was just out back I meant it because see those steps there? They were the steps going into the old school. They just left them there...
TOM TUPPONCE: That’s my chief, Frank Adams of the Upper Mattaponi Tribe. He’s walking directly behind the Sharon Indian School to the site of our original schoolhouse built in 1919 in King William County. The county tore it down in the early 1960s.
FRANK ADAMS: The footprint of the school is right here. Actually, I guess maybe it went back to this concrete. I'm not sure. It was one of those old school buildings where they had those little posts that held it up off of the ground. And this was one of them right there. Other one is right over there and it went straight there.
TOM TUPPONCE: Both the Sharon Indian School and the original site are on the National Register of Historic Places. Today, the sound of children has been replaced by tractor trailer trucks rumbling and screaming by.
FRANK ADAMS: It is a lot of truck traffic. This road ended up in West Point, and there's a paper mill down there, so, all the trucks and logs on them are going to the paper mill. But most of the trucks now are going to a kitty litter plant that is only a mile down the road right behind our property where we have our Pow Wow. It's a Purina kitty litter plant, it’s a mega plant.
TOM TUPPONCE: The two concrete steps that lead up to a partial brick foundation are all that’s left of the original schoolhouse. A modern heat pump sits on top of the brickwork bringing air conditioning to the newer schoolhouse built in 1952. It’s now a meeting room with a showcase of tribal artifacts. Chief Emeritus Ken Adams remembers attending school in the new building, when the old schoolhouse was used as a cafeteria.
KEN ADAMS: So, I started attending school in 1953 it was a brand new school. You had to go outside and to get into that building. I remember standing on the steps and the winter when it was mighty cold and we were all waiting to get inside the lunchroom. All of the kids had lunch in there and some of the tribal ladies actually prepared the lunch for the kids.
TOM TUPPONCE: In 1870, Virginia mandated public schools but they were segregated. We built our schools to reinforce our cultures and sovereignty in Virginia. But state officials made sure we couldn’t graduate from our schools and we couldn’t attend White public schools. During the 1940’s and 50’s, our school only went as far as the 8th grade.
KEN ADAMS: Nobody ever graduated from Sharon Indian School. No one ever graduated from Sharon Indian School. And then years later I would think to myself, “I wondered why.”
LOU WRATCHFORD: We did not go to public schools. Because of the Racial Integrity Act in '24, it was like two races in Virginia were recognized and they were white and colored.
TOM TUPPONCE: The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was devised as part of the Eugenics Movement by White men to keep their race pure. It made it illegal to identify as Indian. Before that were Jim Crow laws.
From 1919, when the school was built, all of Ken Adams and Lou Wratchford’s family attended the old or new Sharon Indian School, including their mother.
LOU WRATCHFORD: And our families wanted to retain our Native American identity. And so they refused to send our children to public schools because we would of course had to go to the colored schools.
TOM TUPPONCE: Those schools, like the Indian schools, were purposely underfunded by the state and, in our case, by the county.
For Indian children to get an education, their parents had to build them a school and provide a teacher. Some received help from local churches. We used our own money and skills to build the original Sharon Indian School.
LOU WRATCHFORD: And at that time, it was a small building. It was like a slab, you know like wood. One room. In addition to the school being used as a school, the tribal citizens also attended church there before the church building was built in the 1940s.
TOM TUPPONCE: Stories about the old school were passed on to the younger kids.
KEN ADAMS: It was heated with an old wood stove. There are people that I know of today that would say, there were cracks in the floor, there were cracks in the floor of the school. And I remember one person talking about if you dropped a nickel in the floor you better grab it quick because it's gonna go through the cracks.
TOM TUPPONCE: Mrs. Helen Hill, who taught there, said her wedding ring fell through one of those floorboards to the ground below. And one of the children crawled under the school to get it.
As with Mrs. Hill’s wedding ring, stories of how segregation laws affected Indigenous communities in Virginia fell into a crack.
We endured the same racism as African Americans. Ken remembers what happened to his older siblings when the old school became overcrowded.
KEN ADAMS: Four of them. They went to school in the woodshed, there was no room. They went to school in the early 1950s, before the new school was built, in a woodshed.
TOM TUPPONCE: Our tribe also couldn’t afford salaries to attract highly qualified teachers.
KEN ADAMS: And my brother Wesley said to me, when he got on later on in years, he said to me, “The school the teacher that taught me in that woodshed didn't know a lick about what he was doing.” He said, “I had to go and repeat the ninth grade because I didn't learn a whole lot with this guy.”
TOM TUPPONCE: But some made great efforts to teach us, like Ken and Lou’s cousin Rudy, who went on to become a pharmacist. Rudy taught for a brief time when the school needed a teacher.
Mac Custalow recalls a story from his father about a teacher at the Mattaponi reservation school during the early 1900’s. He told this story while out fishing near his home.
MAC CUSTALOW: My dad said that there was a schoolteacher who lived down the river probably a mile and a half and in the winter he built a sled with a sail on it. And he would actually go down in the morning to the river, push it over, run the sail up and sail up here to the reservation to teach school and at the end of the day go down to the river, push a sled out, run the sail up and sail back home. Mr. Edwards was his name.
TOM TUPPONCE: Because the state refused to help us, Indigenous schools also couldn’t afford books and other teaching materials used in White public schools. Or to buy school buses.
Then in 1925, the King William County School Board offered to take over administration of our school. Our people thought this arrangement might put our school on equal footing with White schools. But there was a catch: we had to transfer the title for our land to the county for the life of the school. A modern land grab.
In return, the county gave us used books from the White schools. Both Chief Frank Adams and Chief Emeritus Ken Adams remember the condition of those books, even when they attended during the 1950s.
FRANK ADAMS: Yeah, yeah, they were, all had names written in them, dog-eared pages and all kinds of stuff.
KEN ADAMS: I don't ever recall getting any new books the old books that we received some of them you know you can see where they had put their name in the book and sometimes those three or four years worth of names in that one book and then we would get the hand me down books from the from the White school. But we still did well.
TOM TUPPONCE: The county paid our teachers well below what they paid teachers at White schools, even into the 1960s.
And getting to school could be a challenge too. At first they gave us an old panel van kids called the bus.
FRANK ADAMS: For years we didn't have a school bus. Most of the kids would either walk, when I was coming, ride a bike to school or something like that but there wasn’t any school bus. But then we got a bus that my mother started driving, picking up kids.
The story of Hampton University
Secretary of Interior DEB HAALAND: For more than a century, tens of thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their communities and forced into boarding schools run by the U.S. government, specifically the Department of the Interior and Religious Institutions.
The languages, cultures, religions, traditional practices, and even the history of Native communities, all of it, was targeted for destruction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8jcBxie3HI
TOM TUPPONCE: That’s former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland. Beginning in 2022, she oversaw the release of two reports on investigations into federal Indian boarding schools.
It has taken more than a century for U.S. and Canadian governments and churches to begin to lay a path to heal the wounds inflicted by those schools.
Here in Virginia, that painful legacy began in the late 1800s.
There’s a famous quote, "kill the Indian, save the man" attributed to Richard Henry Pratt, a former brigadier general in the U.S. Army.
In the spring of 1878, he took 70 Indigenous men and women to what we now know as Hampton University in Eastern Virginia. They were prisoners of war.
Brought from tribes outside Virginia, they were the first class of Native American students at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a school for African American youth.
ASHLEY SPIVEY: And there they were basically educated, educated, right? And I just said "educated" in quotes. (laughs)
They were taught to read and write, and general Pratt was like, "Hey, I think we've got a model here." The model had already been built and it was the Brafferton. So, literally hostages.
TOM TUPPONCE: The new school was one of many Indian boarding schools that were established around this time in the U.S. and Canada.
One year after the Hampton Indian School was founded, the Carlisle Industrial Indian School was established in Pennsylvania. Indigenous children there were abused, overworked, and underfed.
The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs founded 24 more American Indian boarding schools after Carlisle.
ASHLEY SPIVEY: It's all connected, and it's all based in this idea of violence, right?
These were hostages, these were prisoners of war, and then of course, the violence of ripping you away from your communities and your culture and your language and placing you in a setting to learn how to be different, so that you can then take that back to your people and teach them how to be different, and not to be Indigenous.
TOM TUPPONCE: During the 40 years the Hampton Indian School existed, some Virginia Indians tried to enroll.
ASHLEY SPIVEY: Pamunkey, for example, petitioned, petitioned General Pratt, to have students go to the Indian school. At that time, education was seen as a way for our people to economically survive. So, they wanted to pursue education to benefit their people. And so, they only had one avenue open to them at that time. So, they petitioned to try and send students, young folks, from Pamunkey to Hampton.
TOM TUPPONCE: But the federal government wouldn’t allow Pamunkey students into the Indian School. Space in the school was reserved to assimilate tribes the U.S. government had been at war with.
Still, the Pamunkey Tribe persisted.
ASHLEY SPIVEY: There were three Bradby brothers from Pamunkey, and again, pursuit of education was considered something important to Pamunkey parents and to Pamunkey leadership. So, one went to the Normal School at Hampton, and then for whatever reason, I don't know why they were separated, the other two brothers were sent to Carlisle.
So, they did attend Carlisle, and one was able to graduate and ended up staying in Pennsylvania. And the other one, for whatever reasons, I can't even begin to imagine, was not able to stay there. He kept running away.
TOM TUPPONCE: Some never left Carlisle. The remains of more than 180 Native American and Alaska Native children are buried there. Hampton University has a cemetery where 38 Indigenous students are buried. None are from Virginia Tribes.
Jim Crow
TOM TUPPONCE: Fast forward to 1954 and the landmark case of Brown versus the Board of Education that banned segregation. But it wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act in 1964, desegregation was enforced and schools were integrated.
In Virginia, racism had woven itself tightly into most European-American cultures. Sue Branham is a citizen of the Monacan Tribe in Amherst County, Virginia. In the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Tribe built a private school with help from the Episcopal church.
SUE BRANHAM: We are here in the Monacan Indian Schoolhouse. It is a historical landmark. It was built in the 1860s and remained our school until 1965 was the last school year here.
One of the things that I recall my brother and sister being lined up outside of this building by the county and they would say,
"Okay, you look white enough.”
“You look too Indian.”
“You look white enough.”
“You look too Indian.”
So, they took a handful of the students out here and allowed them to go into the white school in '63. And the school continued to run with the darker ones. And for the first, in my mind, the first time in our tribe, we started looking at each other differently.
Then they were like, "Well, why does so-and-so get to go, and I have to stay here?
Why can't I ride the school bus?
Why can't I go to that big school?"
You know, “that's because you're darker.”
So, it created a rift within our own people for the first time.
Over color of your skin.
TOM TUPPONCE: Rappahannock Chief Anne Richardson said her Tribe had schools in Caroline and Essex Counties and at Indian Neck.
All were run by tribal members. None were supported by the state.
ANNE RICHARDSON: Our school closed before the Civil Rights Act. We were considered an unaccredited school and I guess accreditation must have come about around that time and so they closed our school and my dad had to go to the governor because there was no school for us to go to and he did an executive order that allowed us to go over to Upper Mattaponi School and our county bussed our children over there.
TOM TUPPONCE: Getting an education could be piecemeal. Chief Anne remembers attending multiple schools outside her community until schools were fully integrated in 1965. Even that was hard.
ANNE RICHARDSON: Chief Frank and I went to school together. And then we were able to go into the public school and so we went to Marriott Public School, which was not an easy thing to do because it was prior to integration. So that was that was a difficult thing. And then they integrated schools and then we went to what was the Black high school almost an hour away on a bus, and so school was difficult for us in our generation.
TOM TUPPONCE: Chief Frank Adams started 6th grade at a white school.
FRANK ADAMS: I remember first year, or second year, we drew names for Christmas, so everybody had to get somebody a Christmas present. So, I got a bar soap for my Christmas present, from the student in school. I guess they wanted me to take a bath, I wasn't clean enough for them. The first Black student that came out of the Hamilton-Holmes School, Dorothy, she was in my class also, and she got a worse gift than that. It was pony manure. One of the kids had a pony so he boxed up some and gave it to her as a Christmas present.
I ran track, and I would be running around the track doing a track meet, and all the kids, so-called classmates, would be sitting up there going, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, "you know, run Indian run," things like that, which didn't feel good, but it just happened. But, you know, growing up Indian you have to have a very thick skin.
TOM TUPPONCE: And remember how King William County took over Upper Mattaponi land and our school in 1922? That was so we could get teachers and books. Our Tribe’s agreement with the county was our property would be returned to us if the school ever closed.
But after integration, when Sharon Indian School was closed in 1965, the county maintained their ownership and refused to acknowledge our agreement. At one point our school was being used by Virginia Tech as an Agricultural Extension office.
So, began yet another fight to get our land back.
FRANK ADAMS: The whole time the school belonged to the county, when really the sacrifice was made by the Upper Mattaponi people who struggled to feed their families but also realized that education was so important to the success of the Tribe they decided to build their own school.
TOM TUPPONCE: For 20 years our leaders asked the county to return our school. In December 1985, we asked again. Here’s Professor Helen Rountree speaking before the King William County Board of Supervisors on our behalf.
HELEN ROUNTREE: I’m a cultural anthropologist specializing in American Indian history from Old Dominion University. The school building we’re discussing is the third non-reservation Indian school in the state and the only one which has a prayer of being returned to the involved Tribes. The eldest was a Nansemond and that’s been demolished. The second was a Chickahominy and it’s still in service as a county school and the Tribe has very little chance of getting it back. You have a chance of returning a building that is not only historically significant, but also extremely, emotionally significant to the people because it was a public recognition of their Indianess in a time when they were under a great deal of fire from Richmond. I think that in the name of justice you should also consider that, please. Thank you.
TOM TUPPONCE: Mattaponi Chief Webster Custalow also spoke.
WEBSTER CUSTALOW: I’m the father of Dr. Linwood Custalow, who is Chief of the Upper Mattaponi Tribe. The one we are speaking of tonight. And tonight, I speak in behalf of the Upper Mattaponi Tribe and our interests in the relinquishing of the old Sharon Indian School back to their personal possession. I feel this relinquishment can be honorably and peacefully executed by the government of King William County.
TOM TUPPONCE: Finally, on that December evening the Board voted unanimously to return Sharon Indian School and two acres of land.
Seven generations
TOM TUPPONCE: Today, it’s late July. It’s steamy after raining off and on. But under a pavilion at the Upper Mattaponi Tribal Center, our kids are in the middle of a week-long tribal youth camp. Gourds they’ve painted are hanging to dry along the pavilion roofline like brightly decorated bells. Standing above the tiny, eager crowd is my 24-year-old cousin, Connor Tupponce.
CONNOR TUPPONCE: They're doing stuff like archery, they're learning traditional games, they're doing pottery, a lot of traditional skills but also a lot of team building activities, a lot of community building activities. The biggest goal here is for kids to get to know each other.
TOM TUPPONCE: He’s trying to herd the kids into a circle to watch a girl from the Tribe demonstrate a dance they’ll learn for a mini-Powwow on their last day.
Next door at the Tribal Center Chief Frank Adams knows there’s hard work ahead.
FRANK ADAMS: We understand the struggle of getting teenagers and youngsters to do things. So we work extra hard to try to get them involved because invariably, if they’re not involved when they’re a teenager, when they get 30-years-old they’ll say, “Oh, I wish I had been more involved.” And then, “Can I still learn?” And I say, “Sure you can, but you’re going to sit in a class with teenagers. (laughs)
TOM TUPPONCE: Since federal recognition, the Tribe has been purchasing former lands and slowly bringing back those members of our communities who moved away to survive. Our cultures traditionally look ahead to the next seven generations. Connor and other tribal youth are helping us to build that future.
CONNOR TUPPONCE: In a time right now where the Tribe is so spread out we have a small community, small number of people living within the community but we have kids that just live everywhere and one thing that we've missed out on for generations is keeping that community together and letting kids come up together.
So, it's opportunity to take these folks and build a cultural identity in them, let them all get to know each other so these are going to be our next generation of tribal leaders and community leaders.
Credits
Tribal music is written by Rose Hill Singers and performed by Red Blanket Singers of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribe of New Jersey and features The Jingle Dress Song.
Tribal Truths is reported, written and sound designed by Pamela D’Angelo. Kelley Libby is editor. Additional editing by David Seidel and Tom Tupponce.
Support is provided by Virginia Humanities and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture’s Commonwealth History Fund presented by Dominion Energy.
Additional support is by Radio IQ. Other music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions.