3rd Annual Coming Together
Saturday, August 11, 2001

Welcome

<

Hugh Harrell, III

Brothers and Sisters, Aho! Ashé!

Just a few words, if you will, to help set the tone for this event.

Many of us have heard about the "courageous" and "long-suffering" colonists who settled the first permanent English colony in North America at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Few of us, however, have heard about the Weyanoke, the Paspahegh, and that era's only surviving people who still have recognized status in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Chickahominy.

The Chickahominy were affiliated with the Powhatan Chiefdom of Algonquin-speaking cultures who lived for over 12,000 years in the region currently referred to as the Virginia Tidewater, which includes Jamestown Island.

When the British colonists first arrived in the area looking for gold and land, the Chickahominy were living in what is now Charles City. At that time Charles City was the largest of the original eight shires, or counties, and included what is now not only Charles City County, but also Prince George, Surry and Isle of Wight counties. In fact, Mr. Richard Bowman, Charles City historian who has honored us by being here today, has just told me that Charles City originally extended to what is now Ohio.

The Chickahominy, along with other tribes in the Powhatan Chiefdom, at first extended their hospitality and civility to the Europeans. If they hadn't, the fledgling colony would probably have suffered the same fate as Sir Walter Raleigh's colony on Roanoke Island in what is now North Carolina. Those colonists "disappeared," and their settlement has become known as "The Lost Colony."

British colonists repaid the friendliness and cordiality of the native peoples by burning their canoes and villages; by destroying their crops; by killing their men, women and children; by kidnapping some of those they did not kill, including Pocahontas, daughter of Chief Wahunsanacock, head of the Powhatan Chiefdom; by subverting their religious and cultural beliefs and replacing them with "superior" British culture, including Christianity, the English language, British Common Law and the concepts of class status, racial inferiority and the privatization of land; by making them servants and slaves; and by introducing the world's first germ warfare when they realized that the indigenous population had no resistance to measles, tuberculosis or their various poxes. The similar calculated free distribution of alcohol to a people with a genetic intolerance for it has wreaked its intended devastation, the consequences of which we live with to this day.

The colonists did not find the gold they were seeking, and so invented a "golden" export crop, tobacco. They needed lots of land and labor to exploit this addictive substance. They stole both. Having found that Native labor was not as productive as they wished, they imported Africans into the colony, starting at least as early as 1619. These Africans, who were the first bondspeople or indentured servants in the colony, were settled on "the governor's land," Governor Yeardley's 2,200-acre tobacco plantation on land that was home to the Weyanoke people, in what is now Charles City County.

The use of Africans to labor on tobacco plantations was so cost-effective that by the 1650s the British had begun enacting chattel-slavery laws that trapped both Africans and Native peoples in what was to evolve into the most brutal form of slavery that had ever been practiced on the face of the earth. Thus the Native and African peoples, who held many similar religious and cultural beliefs, were forced to work and live together.

They continue to do so today, despite a history of governmental policies and laws developed to disrupt their alliance. In fact, it has been estimated that more than 90% of those known today as African Americans have significant Native ancestry.

We don't usually talk about these things, but that's exactly what we're here to do today. Let's get started.

Thank you.