‘The land of the free and the home of the brave” — that famous line from “The Star-Spangled Banner” — doesn’t ring true for all people in this nation.
Four hundred years ago, in 1619, the first Africans arrived at Jamestown, the capital of the first permanent English settlement in North America. English pirates had stolen the cargo of a Spanish slave ship and sailed north to the Virginia colony where they traded the Africans for food. Over the course of the next six decades, the concept of chattel slavery slowly entered the law books of the colony, beginning more than two centuries of slavery in this country, an institution whose evil legacy we are still dealing with as a nation to this day.
But the colony those English pirates did business with 400 years ago was a society already in the early stages of what can only be described as a genocidal war with the native peoples of North America, people whom we still call “Indians” because Christopher Columbus mistakenly thought he’d arrived on the Indian sub-continent in 1492.
While it’s difficult to estimate the indigenous population of North American in 1607, when the English established Jamestown, historians and demographers estimate there were between 2.1 million and 7 million people in all of the continent. Some estimates even go as high as 18 million. Today, demographic data puts the number of Native Americans at a little more than 3 million, or 1 percent of the U.S. population.
Central Virginia, from the Lynchburg region up to and past Charlottesville and over to the Richmond region, was the home territory of those we know today as Monacans. The population numbered about 10,000 and had been in this area for more than 10,000 years. Their spiritual and cultural home today is in Amherst County at Bear Mountain, site of the St. Paul’s Episcopal Mission chapel and school, now a museum.
Over the centuries, as the population of European colonists kept growing and their territory kept expanding, the native people, Monacans included, were pushed further and further west. Inevitably there were conflicts, often deadly. As the European culture took hold, inevitably the indigenous culture weakened.
Such was the case with the Monacans, who were almost wiped out — literally by wars and figuratively by racist laws that refused to recognize them as native peoples. Indeed, it was only in 2018 that the Monacan Nation received official federal recognition through an act of Congress.
Read the entire article at Lynchburg News & Advance.
Image: Captain John Smith’s famous 1612 map of Virginia shows the Monacan town of Rassawek, the site of which is now slated for a pump station. Rassawek can be found at the top left of the map, between the Powhatan sketch and the banner proclaiming “Virginia.”LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.