- I've lived here my whole life, 69 years.

Never thought I'd see a Monacan sign this close to 29.

(bright folk music) - Bear Mountain is our homeland.

My grandfather ran that mountain, too.

- We have given a huge part of ourselves to create history for the state of Virginia.

We are part of that history.

- Many of these tribes, they were deprived of resources.

Really important to right that historic wrong.

The recognition challenges were intense.

- You have to learn to joke about the fact that you have to prove who you are.

You know, we come in many shades these days.

- Oh, yeah.

- I remember I was a little boy, and we were at my grandmother's house, and she said, "We are Indian.

I'm not sure what kind, but we are Indian people, and never forget that."

- The Monacan people are an amazing story of survivance.

- I've been here my whole life.

And people say, "Well if you don't like it, why don't you leave?"

I say, "I was here first."

- Native Americans are not vanishing people.

When I look at myself in the mirror, I feel like I'm this magical entity because people feel like I don't exist anymore.

- That's right.

- But I do.

(folk music) ♪ In the heartland ♪ ♪ We rely on ourselves ♪ ♪ And one another ♪ ♪ Hand in hand ♪ ♪ We must stand ♪ ♪ In the heartland ♪ - [Announcer] Production funding for this program is made possible by... (gentle flute music) - We've always taken care of the land down here.

And it's precious.

I mean, it is.

It is precious.

It's precious because we've had weddings, and funerals, and graduations.

A lot of people call it Falling Rock Creek because the church was built on the rock.

- That little church I go to every Sunday, we could go there and be who we were and didn't worry about the outside.

Where that house is right there.

If you come over that other little knoll, we lived on this side of it.

It's a great big apple orchard there.

And that's where I grew up as a kid, and my grandparents on my mother's side.

- Oh, my gosh, here we go.

As my mom says, I still got the same cheekbones.

So that's me, and that's me now.

(laughs) Then we have a new location of a community center down at the new building, where the federal side is.

But up here will always to me be Monacan country.

(drum beats thudding) (people chanting in Pamunkey language) - I've heard a couple different things.

One is, "You guys have deserved it for so many years, I'm so glad your fight is over and that you have it."

That's a wonderful thing to hear from the community.

But one of the other things is, is that, "Well, you don't look Indian."

We hear that a lot.

We're definitely not the Hollywood Indians.

We're not even the West Coast Indians.

And that's another thing that federal recognition has brought out.

But I will be the first person to say that, you know, we're one of the only groups of people, race, that has to prove who we are.

- You say you're Native American, especially in Virginia, "Yeah, well, you don't look Indian."

Well, what do Indian look like?

You know, people gotta remember, we've been involved with European people for over 400 years.

You go out west, some of those Indians were fighting up to 150 years ago.

Yeah, we're gonna look different.

We've married into the Europeans.

(people singing in foreign language) - One of my favorite pieces is this pot right here in the back there.

And like I said, the energy that I felt when I first handled it.

Don't let fear stand in your way of getting to know people.

That's the biggest thing right now is fear in the world.

The fear of not knowing.

And I've never been a person that feared not knowing.

I wanna know it all.

(people singing in foreign language) The school was active from 1868 until 1964, when schools integrated.

- I'm 79 years old and that sycamore tree was there when I, I guess the first time I would've known what a tree was.

- I used to love these doorknobs as a child.

I used to think of them as big diamonds.

- It was a little bitty piece put right here at that time, and that's where they would store the firewood at for to put in a stove.

- But this is the original school room here, the tiny little school room.

My mom says that she can remember sometimes it'd be like 20 kids.

- In this one room.

They had the bigger ones, and then the next one, then the next one, then the next one on down.

- I come in here quite often and just walk around and just look in amazement.

- My grandparents came here, you know, great-grandparents came here 'cause they didn't have no place else.

- Yeah, they didn't have anywhere else to go.

And I mean, just to think of how many of my ancestors came here time after time after time, yeah.

(gentle music) - It was an overwhelming feeling to know that my great-grandparents and my great-great grandparents, that they sat in this place.

The feeling can't be explained.

It's just, it's a connection to our ancestors.

- You know, we knew we was Indians, but it was like, hush, hush, don't tell.

- There has been a struggle here.

I mean, our names were put on lists where even if you tried to go into the town of Amherst to a barbershop, a beauty salon, a grocery store, you were turned away because you had that name, and that stereotype followed your name.

- You know, Branham, Johns, Hamiltons, Hickses.

There were a few Adcox, a few Redcrosses, but if you had one of those names it's like we grew a set of horns once they found that out.

- For a rural people who were forced into isolation their solution was to maintain themselves by keeping out of view.

People look at this map and they say, "Oh my goodness, look at all the names of these towns.

Look how dense all the printing is here.

And then up here it's just mountains."

Oh, well, there's a couple of places.

Well, John Smith, he has icons on the map that say, "To this point, that's what I saw with my own eyes.

And beyond this is by relation only."

He says, Amoroleck said, "And there are diverse others."

If you grew up in Virginia, you know, you read about John Smith, Pocahontas, Chief Powhatan.

And every stereotypical negative trope, every phrase that gets used for one group to the other was applied to the Monacans.

The Monacans didn't want colonists in their territory so they told the English, it's recorded, "We heard you're a people who came from under the world to take our world from us."

- This is the Monacan Indian village site that was lived in on and off for several thousand years.

- The field I was in, I was thrilled to say, was recognizing that we had an obligation to the descendants of the archeological sites we studied.

- You see these posts here form an oval type pattern.

They follow in an arc.

And that's an interesting discovery for us given that the drawings that we have of the Algonquin Indians, the Powhatan Indians of the coastal plain, tend to show that those houses were either square or rectangular.

And this is one more piece of evidence for the uniqueness of the Siouan cultures.

- These communities, these Siouan speaking communities, began in central and western Virginia as part of this Monacan world.

And that Monacan world covered a vast area from, you know basically a line north-south from Washington, DC through Fredericksburg, through Richmond.

That's the Falls.

So everything to the east, in 1607, is Algonquin speaking, the Powhatan chiefdom.

And to the west is - was Monacan territory.

(folk music) There's a well-known Latin term, terra nullius.

If land is unfenced, it's God's wish that land should be productive.

When the English moved west of the coastal plain into the Piedmont they simply don't acknowledge that Indian people...

I mean they don't write negative things about them, but they don't acknowledge them.

And that's a means of erasure.

What Native people today call documentary genocide begins then.

- My great-grandmother would always put Indian on her birth certificates.

She was a midwife.

And I remember one time I was about 10 or 12 and she pulled out this paper.

She said, "Look what I got from them clowns in Richmond."

That was her words.

And they was telling her to quit putting Indian on the birth certificates.

And she laughed and she said, "Until I die that's what's going on, that's who they are."

- 1924, the Racial Integrity Act is passed.

Virginia's the worst, in imposing an absolute, "there can only be two kinds of people," white and non-white And the Monacan people had the particular attention of bureaucrats in Richmond.

This is Walter Plecker.

- It's like she brought all the Plecker paperwork here in a tote and we set it back here and it's like every day I was going through reading all this information on Dr. Walter Plecker, just to try to get a better mindset to this man.

I mean, you take an entire group of people.

and you're like, you guys don't exist.

That's not understandable.

I can't process it.

Just the letters that he wrote, that were signed by him about our people and how they denied them the ability to get their, their paperwork.

- A woman giving birth would be asked what's the child's name and what's the child's race?

But when it reached Richmond, Plecker would cross it out, put an asterisk, and it said, "This person's last name is known to us to be in the lineage that claims to be Indian and they're not.

So we're changing the birth certificate."

- First time I ever got a job, they told me bring in my birth certificate.

(chuckles) Never forget.

Handed the lady my birth certificate.

She looked at my birth certificate, she looked at me, she looked at the birth certificate, looked at me, and she said, "The race?"

I said, "I know."

And these people was looking at me like I've lost my mind.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

Mine was, all of ours was, yeah, the N-word.

- We're not talking about things that happened a hundred years ago or 200 years ago.

We're talking about things that are still happening.

(gentle flute music) - We worked in the orchards, apple orchard, peach orchard.

We was paid in paper strips and we'd carry it over to Amherst.

That's how we got our money, through paper.

But not through money, real money.

I don't know - - Really?

- Yes.

- I didn't know that.

- Yeah.

- (people chatting) - Virginia has never atoned for these three decades of crimes against Native humanity.

Never really attempted to address or repair any of the damage that Plecker's policies caused, that Virginia's leaders allowed to happen on their watch.

Plecker's work was even cited at the Nuremberg trials.

He corresponded with Walter Gross, the director of Germany's Bureau of Eugenics, and was a popular speaker at international white supremacist conferences.

Imagine that?

The policies of this Commonwealth used as templates for the Holocaust.

(people singing in foreign language) - We were beginning to dig up into the history of the Monacans for federal recognition.

And some of the stuff I was finding wasn't very flattering, but I had to remember who wrote that.

It was the victors.

(singing in foreign language) Quite frankly, until I got into the 10th, 11th year of my life, I thought I was the only Indian left in this country.

And then I found about the Pamunkey and I love going over there because every time I go I see a little something they're doing that we can do and, and vice versa.

So what's good for one of us is good for all of us, I think.

- Sixteen, sometimes longer, to do.

- Do you know what this is?

(people chattering) Now I can add texture to the piece, you see that?

- The fact that we're here today on traditional Pamunkey native land, I'm feeling a lot better.

And I think as we're gonna move forward in life, these type of opportunities we'll continue to increase.

We all heard for many years that the monuments were all about history not hate, but all of us brown, Black, red, and other allies, we felt them looking down on us telling us that we're less than and that this is their land.

(drum beats thumping) - When we got state recognition, you know, it's great.

But I joke, you know, back then if you gave me a dollar and that piece of paper, I could get me a cup of coffee.

- The tribes started to seek federal recognition in the 1990s.

Hundreds of tribes had been recognized, but no Virginia tribe had been recognized when I came into the Senate in 2013.

- There was eight tribes that started the process, went to Washington, DC to Bureau of Indian Affairs.

He looked around at us and he said, "None of you chiefs will be alive to see your tribes recognized."

You can take it through the House and the Senate and get them to sign off on it.

The president will sign it.

You become a sovereign nation just like everybody else.

And we started lobbying and talking to congressmen, to senators, and you know, basically we had to teach 'em Virginia history.

- From 1989 to 2018.

That's a long road to resubmit a bill over and over to get denied over and over and over.

- Sometimes one house would be okay and the other wouldn't.

We had times when the House was supportive and the Senate wasn't.

And we had times when the reverse happened.

- If you don't get a bill passed in two years, you start all over.

- At this moment in time the question is, do we have the leaders, do we have the political will, and the courage to move forward?

This means action based on the legal, political, and moral reality that the seven recognized nations are sovereign entities entitled to exercise self-determination.

(chanting in foreign language) - We're kind of feeling our way in Virginia.

So when a tribe gets recognized, they're recognized as a sovereign, and that means that they can have their own laws and customs and we have to respect those.

Now they also, they need to respect the laws and customs of Virginia and of the United States.

And so there's sort of a dual sovereignty.

- The Pamunkey and the Mattaponi, the two reservation tribes in Virginia, they went their way and they were still working behind the doors and everything.

- And then the Bureau of Indian Affairs, of course sets a standard for every other tribe to follow.

- Pamunkey was the first in 2015.

And then six other tribes followed with federal recognition in 2018.

So once Congress passed that act, federally recognizing those Indian tribes, Monacan Indian Nation was a part of that.

- The chief, Dean Branham, called me up and I was at home and he said, "We got it."

And I knew where he was.

I said, "You got what?"

(laughs) And when I hung up, my exact words was, "Now what?"

(reflective music) - We prayed for federal recognition for many, many years, but we never had a plan in place for it if we did receive it because we never expected to.

- We're on the 1,300 acre farm that we just bought back a couple months ago.

And this is where we had our powwow back in June.

So I guess we've had it probably about eight months now.

This is a beautiful spot and I would almost go to say this probably, if not the prettiest in Amherst County, it's the prettiest one that I know about.

You know, might be other sites is just as pretty, but we don't own those.

(laughs) (bright folk music) - Being a sovereign nation, of course, is, to me it's more in focus once you put your land in trust.

Your sovereignty actually becomes a little more active, so to speak.

And that's when you actually become a nation within a community.

- This is our bird's eye view of where the clinic's going.

This is going to be the Indian Health Service.

The construction company say it will be under roof by Christmas.

I'm still got my fingers crossed for that because it look like a lot of work.

There was gonna be one health clinic in Virginia, it was going to be other side of Richmond.

And I talked with Ms. Cotton, she's in charge of Indian Health Service.

And I said, "Why are we, the largest tribe of the federal recognized tribes in Virginia, driving three and a half hours one way to go to the doctors.

Why don't you put another one up here?"

We already got the land for it, I said, you know.

I'm not very patient when it comes to government anyway.

- Only thing about the government is they could flip a switch and you don't really trust them.

I mean, they've never upheld a United States treaty.

That's not an organization I have a tendency to want to ease and cozy up to and do warm fuzzies with, you know, it's just not me.

(laughs) We do trust Senator Kaine and we trust Warner, because they are truly involved in helping our people.

It is building a trust with those individuals, but not the entire organization.

- There's no way, there is no way we can reel things back and ever do enough to compensate or make even what was taken from these tribes, it's impossible.

- I got a little small house, pickup truck sitting over there in the mud, and I didn't need federal recognition for me.

But I wanted it so my grandmother and my mom and dad could be proud of who they were.

And instill this pride in our grandchildren.

Nobody should be ashamed of who they were born.

(singing in foreign language) - Over the last few years Virginia has made significant progress in transforming relations with communities of color.

We have to accept that our lives and our faiths are irrevocably, if tragically, intertwined, and make a conscious choice to move forward together with full knowledge and respect.

- We have lived through it.

We don't want to see our kids and our grandkids and everything go through this.

We gotta take pride in our elders.

They have so much knowledge, and if you can take just a little bit of that knowledge and pass it down through the generations, our people have stories to tell.

(folk music) - I was raised literally by a village, you know, being able to eat at one grandma's house and run across the street and eat dessert at the other, you know, in the same community, you know, was awesome.

The Laurel Cliff property, the 1,300 acres that we purchased, I want to see us to be able to rebuild the community in my past, in my mind, on that land.

I have no doubt in my mind that I'm supposed to be here and do the things that I've done within the past two years since I've returned back to the museum here.

These elders getting together and being able to come together like they once did at the Indian Mission School.

They're able to come together in a community room and sit for hours and just talk and drink coffee and play games.

And when they all show up, they all show up smiling and they're greeting each other with hugs.

That is the community that I grew up in and I'm trying to re-implement that in our youth now.

We've focused so much on our elders.

We got them where we want them to be and they're happy.

Now it's time to focus on our youth.

- When you talk about your people, you got children, you got the middle-aged people, which I call the workers, and then you got the elders, and you know, you need to take care of the elders because that's the history.

The children is the future.

And you know I tell people I'm quickly becoming one of those elders.

So anything I do now to help them will be helping me down the road.

We try to help our people seven generations down the road.

And this is part of what we are trying to do right here.

- Knowing that the blood that runs through our veins from our ancestors and all that they had to overcome is the very reason that we're here today.

Despite every effort to take Native people out, we have been built through resilience and perseverance.

(singing in foreign language) - It took us so long and such a hard fight to be able to hold onto this.

And if we were to lose that main office this is the only thing we will continue to have is what's right here.

So it's my job to protect that and keep that here.

- There's a lot of things we've planned on doing with this property, but you know, that'll come with time, and right now we're just going to enjoy the beauty of it and try to preserve what we got here.

- [Announcer] Production funding for this program is made possible by... - It's called a double beat.

So we start out on edge.

- You gotta spell it like you're from (indistinct).

- It's a double beat.

(laughing) (drum beats thumping) (singing in foreign language) (logo chiming)