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Federal recognition for Virginia's Indians?

LET'S FACE IT. Without them, we probably wouldn't be here. Those "first contact" Indian tribes, like the Patawomecks from our area [see our two-part series, "A Tribe's Tale," Oct. 1-2], gave us much more than interesting place names. They provided early colonists with food and local knowledge and helped Jamestown survive when that English beachhead was first established in 1607. But the relationship between American Indians and the European colonists was an on-again, off-again affair, sealed on occasion by intermarriage, trading, and a mutual need to survive, yet more often marred by mutual distrust, outright hostilities, and eventually, legal discrimination. Four hundred years down the path, we've learned a bit more about living together and today, some of the commonwealth's Indians are seeking federal recognition for their tribes. Is this a status due our first residents?

The answer is not easy. On the one hand, honoring the contributions and the distinct ethnicity of Virginia's Indians is simply right. On the other, federal status opens a Pandora's box of problems.

There are two paths to federal recognition: the first, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the second, through an act of Congress. To pass muster at the BIA, Indians must prove "substantially continuous tribal existence" and that they have "functioned as autonomous entities throughout history until the present." There are seven specific criteria that must be met, a high bar that is difficult to surmount, especially in Virginia. In 1924, the state's registrar of vital records insisted that Indians be designated as "colored." To avoid that classification (which led to much discrimination), some Indians simply dropped their heritage. In other cases, records have been destroyed, for example, when courthouses were burned in the Civil War, making it impossible to prove Indian descent.

Some tribes in America, notably the Mashantucket Pequots of Connecticut, bypassed BIA and achieved federal recognition directly from Congress. Sen. George Allen introduced legislation to do the same for six Virginia tribes in 2005, but it languishes in committee.