Bill to recognize Nansemonds passes committeePosted in Articles, Law, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Politics/Public Policy, United States, Virginia on 2014-04-04 20:54Z by Steven |
Bill to recognize Nansemonds passes committee
Suffolk News-Herald
Suffolk, Virginia
2014-04-02
A bill that would extend federal recognition to the Nansemond Indian Tribe and five others in Virginia passed the Senate Indian Affairs Committee on Wednesday.
The tribes, which also include the Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock and Monacan, are officially recognized by the state but not by the federal government.
“I just hope we can finally get there,” Nansemond Indian Tribal Association Chief Barry Bass said on Thursday. “It’s been a long, hard road.”
The bill has passed the Senate Indian Affairs Committee before, but a vote in the full Senate has been blocked by senators who believe the tribes should have to go through the Bureau of Indian Affairs as other tribes have done.
But recognition through the bureau’s administrative process requires documentation that current tribal members have a continuous line of descent from the historical tribes. That has been difficult, if not impossible, for Virginia Indians to prove, in part because of Walter Plecker, who was the registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 to 1946. He replaced “Indian” with “black” for the race on many birth and death certificates that passed through his office, ensuring that no official documentation exists for many tribal members to prove their relationship to ancestors…
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