Columnist Jamala Rogers
Britain’s monarch recently visited the United States to commemorate the founding of her country’s invasion of North America. The “new” world English settlers found was the “old” world to the indigenous people in the area. If the U.S. was serious about writing/righting the real history of Jamestown, it would take this opportunity to set the record straight. It would also include the long-sought federal recognition and funding by the six Virginian tribes of the Eastern Chickahominy, Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock, Monacan and Nansemond.
We must talk about the annihilation of a culture and its people during the 400th anniversary celebration of the first English colony. Otherwise, we stand to perpetuate the historical mistruths of Captain John Smith (especially that of his mythical wife Pocahontas) just as we have done with the “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus.
When the English colonists landed in what would be called Jamestown, it was just the beginning of the empire-building of Great Britain. English conquest into other peoples’ lands continued for several centuries until the “sun never set on the British Empire.” At its height in the early 1900s, the British Empire included over 20 percent of the world’s land area and more than 400 million people. This made it the single largest empire in the history of the world since time began.
The native peoples that the colonists found at Chesapeake Bay included the Piscataway nation. Dr. Gabrielle Tayac, a Piscataway Indian, is a historian at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Dr. Tayac says the consequences of Jamestown for her Piscataway ancestors were disastrous. Her tribe was among many others “who lost all of their land, their traditional culture and even most of their lives within a few decades of Jamestown’s establishment.”
Within the above timeframe, African slaves began to arrive at Jamestown – in 1619, to be exact. So began a complicated confluence of two peoples whose histories are inextricably linked to the racist conquest of land and the enslavement of human beings. Their joint legal segregation continued under the Virginia state law that allowed only two racial categories-white and colored. Until as late as 1967, Native Americans could be jailed for identifying themselves as such and were labeled as colored along with blacks. The discrimination and disenfranchisement of the two peoples continues today making their eligibility for reparations a powerful demand.
Tayac has pushed for the 400th anniversary to be a time for reviewing the ugly past and forging an “honorable history” of the first Americans. It is a constant refrain shared by descendants of African slaves forcibly brought to these shores.
The history of the United States will never be complete without the honorable histories of the red, black, brown and yellow peoples. Until then, there will always be a parallel and opposing history by the people of color whose buried contributions and muted sacrifices in the development of the U.S. remain as unearthed as the artifacts of Jamestown.