by James A. Bacon

The City of Virginia Beach is crafting a statement to “acknowledge” the Native Americans who lived there before the English settlers. Last week a draft presented to City Council proclaimed: “We, the City of Virginia Beach, acknowledge that the present-day land on which this city exists is situated on lands that have been inhabited by Indigenous peoples since time immemorial.” So reports WHRO.

You’d think City Council would have better things to worry about, like fixing public schools, making housing affordable, coping with rising sea levels, or making sure taxpayers aren’t ripped off by madcap development schemes. But, no, in modern-day America, such practical matters are of far less interest to educated elites than symbolic issues that will have no discernible impact on anyone’s life.

So, here I go, rising to the bait, engaging in a symbolic issue of no use to anyone…

The land acknowledgement plays into the grand narrative that “white settler colonists” displaced the local inhabitants. The implication is that the English presence in these lands was coercive and illegitimate, and by implication that the institutions erected by those who followed are tainted.

The Native American population in Virginia in 1607 is estimated to have been around 50,000. Of those, 15,000 in the Tidewater region belonged to Algonquian tribes led by Chief Powhatan in what is called the Powhatan Confederation. The logical question is, who occupied the land before the Powhatan Confederation?

Despite what you might have gleaned from Disney movies, the Algonkians did not all live in peace and harmony with each other, much less with other Indian tribes. Here are excerpts from Encyclopedia Virginia:

By the time the English arrived in 1607 … the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Tidewater Virginia had organized into chiefdoms of one or more towns and a paramount chiefdom ruled by a strong, but not absolute, central authority.

Among the key forces driving the consolidation were competition for prime town locations and an increase in warfare and long-distance trade.

A reliance on agriculture led to an increase in population and the need for better farmland. The Little Ice Age, meanwhile, shortened growing seasons, especially in the north, making good land more difficult to obtain. This led to instability, especially among the Iroquoian-speaking Indians in present-day New York. The Susquehannocks lost that competition for land and were pushed south, raiding the upper Potomac River and the Shenandoah Valley. The Indians in Tidewater Virginia largely escaped the conflict, in part by banding together into chiefdoms and, eventually, paramount chiefdoms.

Internal factors, in addition to or instead of outside incursions, may also have played a role. In the mid- to late 1500s, Powhatan inherited control over the core six tribes of Tsenacomoco: the Powhatans, the Youghtanunds, the Mattaponis, the Pamunkeys, the Arrohatecks, and the Appamattucks. (The Indians of Tsenacomoco are sometimes called, simply, the Powhatans, after the paramount chief and the tribe or group from which he hailed.)

Over the next few decades, Powhatan expanded Tsenacomoco by a combination of diplomacy and force.

From his original six tribes (including the Mattaponis and Pamunkeys), Chief Powhatan ruled over some 28 to 32 tribute-paying tribes by 1607. There is no reason to believe that he would have ceased his expansion had he not encountered a stronger force in the English.

Virginia was sparsely populated, and land was abundant enough for Powhatans and English to co-exist peacefully. But the two mutually uncomprehending cultures with different ways of life and different worldviews often came into conflict.

In the early days, when the Powhatans outnumbered the English and could have overpowered them, Chief Powhatan likely saw them as potential tributaries. As English numbers grew, the calculus changed. Upon Powhatan’s death, his younger brother Opechancanough succeeded him as paramount chief. In 1622 he launched a surprise attack on farms and settlements, wiping out an estimated third of the English population before the rampage could be stopped. The Native American way of war entailed exterminating one’s enemies. Ironically, although Europeans are often accused of “genocide,” in Virginia it was the Native Americans who initiated the first large-scale massacre.

Essentially, the history of the Powhatans and English was the history of all mankind until the modern era: the strong conquered the weak, either displacing them or making them tributaries. As it happened, the English were more numerous and won the contest. But today, the moral onus for what we moderns would consider reprehensible behavior falls upon the English only.

Many questions relevant to a moral reckoning go unanswered. In subduing neighboring tribes before the English made contact, how many of his enemies did Powhatan slay? How many women did his warriors abduct, rape and force into domestic servitude? How many settlements did they burn? How many weaker tribes did he force to flee? How punitive was the tribute he extracted from those who remained?

We don’t know the answers because the Powhatans were a pre-literate society and did not compile the kind of records that would inform us. Unless we are to argue that indigenous people were exempt from human nature, however, it is overwhelmingly likely that they exhibited the same power dynamics seen in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East in which clans and chiefs, warlords and feudal lords, and monarchs and emperors warred incessantly, conquered one another, and displaced one another.

Now come the woke solons of Virginia Beach who wish to proclaim that some 400 years ago, the land within the county’s boundaries belonged to a vague, undifferentiated group of “Indigenous peoples since time immemorial.”

In central and western Virginia, land acknowledgements speak not abstractly of “indigenous peoples” but of the Monacan Indians — crediting a specific tribal group. Why doesn’t the Virginia Beach formulation identify the Powhatan Confederacy, or at the very least the Algonquian cultural/linguistic group? Perhaps because to do so would raise the question of who came before the Powhatans…. and those who lived there before them. By referring to “indigenous peoples” generically the authors of the land acknowledgment are saying that the only disruption in history’s long chain of displacements and replacements that mattered was the one when Englishmen, the bearers of Western Civilization, arrived.

Only one displacement warrants implicit moral reproach.

Ironically, the Virginia descendants of the Powhatans today enjoy the same rights as all Americans. Indeed, given the privileges associated with state and federal recognition of their tribal status, they arguably enjoy more rights.

Hey, Virginia Beach, acknowledge this: thanks to America’s system of governance that extends equal rights to all under the law, the endless chain of dispossession and dislocation of peoples has come to an end.