A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  The most revered lineage was that tracing back to John Rolfe and Pocahontas. Their only child, Thomas, also had only one child, a daughter named Jane. She married a rich planter, Robert Bolling, and bore a son before dying the same year, probably from complications of childbirth. Bolling remarried and had seven more children. This meant that some Bollings descended from Pocahontas, and many did not.

  “You have to ask people, ‘Are you a “Red Bolling” or a “White Bolling”?’ ” Sam Tarry explained. His Bolling line was Red.

  “Me too!” a woman chimed in. “Pocahontas is my eighth great-grandmother.” This meant putting eight “great”s before “grandmother” to span the generations between her and Pocahontas.

  Genetically speaking, a family tie this attenuated is almost meaningless: digging ten generations back yields an ancestral pool of thousands. But even a faint connection to Pocahontas has long been revered in Virginia. In 1924, the state passed “An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity,” which segregated anyone with a trace of “non-Caucasian” heritage. Lawmakers inserted a clause known as the Pocahontas Exception, exempting white Virginians with “one sixteenth or less” of Indian heritage and “no other non-caucasic blood.”

  Even more baroque was the Degree of Pocahontas, a group that held an annual “Princess Pocahontas Memorial Day” at Jamestown. Soon after Landing Day, I went to see a local leader of the group at her house twenty miles east of the historic park. A tall, trim, dark-eyed woman in her sixties, Sandra Dye worked by day at a mobile-home park, but spent many nights attending to her duties as “Seated Pocahontas” of Onawa Council Number 38.

  “My father and grandfather were Red Men,” she said, as we settled on a couch in her den. “So I guess Pocahontas is in my blood.”

  Sandra didn’t mean this literally. From the nine-hundred-page book on her coffee table, History of the Improved Order of Red Men and Degree of Pocahontas, I learned that the Red Men were a secret fraternity, founded in 1813 and descended from colonial groups that adopted Indian regalia as a symbol of freedom and defiance (the Sons of Liberty had done so most famously during the Boston Tea Party).

  Only white males belonged to the Red Men. They formed “tribes” and “wigwams” led by a “Sachem” or “Great Senior Sagamore.” In the late nineteenth century, the order spawned a women’s auxiliary, the Degree of Pocahontas, which adopted its own titles.

  “I’m a past ‘Great Pocahontas’ and ‘Great Keeper of Wampum,’ ” Sandra said. This meant she’d served as head of the state council and as treasurer. Other ranks included Great Prophetess and Great Minnehaha. New members were initiated with “Indian” rituals and signs. Sandra couldn’t tell me more. “It’s secret.”

  Until recently, the Order of Red Men and the Degree of Pocahontas had a public face as well. Councils participated in parades and other civic events, the men wearing war bonnets and buckskins, the women clad in deerskin dresses and headbands. Then, in the 1990s, real Indians started to complain. “They don’t like palefaces wearing their regalia, because it has special meaning,” Sandra said. Park officials at Jamestown asked degree members to stop wearing deerskins to the Princess Pocahontas Memorial Day. They now wore white dresses instead.

  “It’s sad, because when we wore our regalia we attracted a crowd,” Sandra said. “Tourists would ask, ‘What kind of Indian are you?’ I’d say, ‘I’m not, I’m of German and English descent.’ But I thought we were drawing attention to Indians’ plight. We weren’t being disrespectful.”

  I asked Sandra if she still had her costume. “Oh, yes.” Her face brightened. “I’ll go get it.” She went upstairs, returning a few minutes later wearing beads, moccasins, and a fringed leather dress slit up the thigh. “I have this beautiful costume and I never get to wear it anymore,” she said, turning in a circle. “When I had longer hair I wore it in a ponytail.”

  Sandra sat on the couch and we resumed our conversation. A bit flustered by her transformation into an Indian maiden, I asked if she identified with Pocahontas.

  “Absolutely. Freedom, friendship, and charity are the Degree’s precepts, and we take those from Pocahontas.”

  “Why do you think she helped the English?”

  “She was fascinated by John Smith, and justly so,” Sandra said. “I’m enough of a romantic to think she didn’t want this handsome stranger to have his head cut off.”

  The Degree had carried on Pocahontas’s benevolent spirit. At one time, it provided food and clothing to Indian children; now most of its charity went to the Make a Wish Foundation. Members had also contributed to the upkeep of the church grounds in Gravesend, Pocahontas’s burial site.

  But the Red Men and women had fallen on hard times. Since their peak of half a million members in the 1920s, the Order and Degree had dwindled to fewer than twenty thousand. Sandra’s council numbered only thirty-five, down from two hundred when she’d joined in the 1970s. The local Red Men “no longer have a functioning tribe,” she said.

  Sandra blamed this decline on modern domestic life. “We can’t compete with Survivor and American Idol,” she said. “And so many women work and have extra activities at home. No one has any time. The Lions and the other fraternal groups all have the same problem.”

  Sandra pressed her palms against her fringed dress. “At least, compared to the Moose and Shriners,” she said, “we have the prettiest costumes.”

  THE NEXT DAY, I met another woman in a skin dress, one who could actually have passed for Pocahontas. In 1611, eager to establish a better base than fetid Jamestown, colonists founded the City of Henricus on high ground near the head of the James River, eighty miles to the west. They built a large settlement, including the first hospital in English America, and chartered its first college a year before the Pilgrims landed. It was at Henricus that John Rolfe experimented with tobacco and met Pocahontas.

  In 1622, an Indian uprising ravaged the fledging city and it never recovered. All that stands now is a reconstructed fort and Indian village. When I arrived on a cool spring morning, the only person in sight was a beautiful young woman with olive skin, long black hair, and dark brown eyes. Clad in a fringed deerskin and wampum beads, she kneeled in a garden, tending pyramids of dirt.

  “I’m a Creek Indian and we were mound builders,” she joked of the piles. Actually, she was planting crops as Virginia Indians had, in small cones of soil to hold the moisture. She also scattered the mounds, since natives lacked draft animals or plows to form even rows. “I don’t get to smoke this—only men did, mostly ceremonially,” she said, plucking a thumb-shaped tobacco leaf. “But when you harvest it by hand, it gets into your pores and gives you a good buzz.”

  Melanie Wright had grown up near Jamestown, in a family of Creek descent from Georgia. But she felt more comfortable playing the role of a Virginia Indian, first at Jamestown and now at Henricus. “It’s hard to interpret your own history: it’s too personal, particularly the failures,” she said. “Here, I’m someone else, and I have this village all to myself.”

  She led me past mounds of corn and squash and beans, which she tended along with tobacco. Few visitors were very excited by Indian agriculture. “But when I’m scraping the flesh off hides, and get covered in blood and guts,” she said, pausing beside a stick hung with rawhide, “that really turns the guys on. They stand around and drool.”

  Their ardor tended to cool when she tanned the hides, using deer brains. Also, her knee-length skin dress and the fringed mantle covering her shoulders were much more modest than seventeenth-century native attire. “They don’t pay me enough to wear just a little leather apron,” she said. “Anyway, I’m a modern-day weenie Indian. It gets cold here, and I don’t have any bear grease.”

  We ducked inside a yehawken, an oval structure made of boughs, with woven mats covering the dirt floor. Melanie fanned a fire with turkey feathers, the smoke rising through a hatch in the roof. “Welcome to my home away from home,” she said, settling on a fur. “For all intents and purposes I spend my days in t
he seventeenth century.”

  Melanie enjoyed her work, but she didn’t idealize the natives she portrayed, or regard them with solemn awe. “They were really into show and fanfare,” she said. “Powhatan was always trying to impress the English with all his women and possessions. And you had to look great when going into battle—you couldn’t wear the same thing you wore around your yehawken.” She was also amused by natives’ fondness for English mirrors, which had often been found in Indian graves. “I love the vanity of these people! Let’s not turn them into boring, perfect specimens.”

  This unvarnished attitude extended to Pocahontas. Melanie suspected Powhatan’s daughter was drawn to Jamestown by the chance to collect beads and other trinkets. Pocahontas also must have enjoyed the doting attention of the English, who had no girls among them.

  “Powhatan had eighty children. They always say Pocahontas was his favorite. But gee, until when? Next week?” Melanie shrugged. “When the English kidnapped her, Dad didn’t seem too upset. She must have thought, ‘Whatever, I’ll stay with the white folk. They think I’m special and give me lots of stuff.’ ”

  This wasn’t an ennobling image: more Paris Hilton than Mother Pocahontas. But it seemed as plausible as the romantic imaginings of groups like the Degree of Pocahontas, or the many theories that scholars had spun from slim historical evidence.

  For all Melanie’s irreverence, though, there was one thing she couldn’t abide: visitors who asked, as they often did, “Are you a real Indian?”

  “I tell them, ‘No. I’m completely plastic.’ If I say yes, then they always ask if I’m a ‘full blood.’ I feel like telling them, ‘No, I donated a pint last week so I’m a little short right now.’ ”

  Melanie’s grandmother was a full-blood, but told neighbors her family was Cuban, which carried less of a stigma than being Indian. “Now people want you to be real, not a mix like everyone else in America. No one ever goes to the fort here and asks one of the colonial interpreters, ‘Hey, are you a full-blooded Englishman?’ ”

  She poked at the fire. “When I have to fill out a form and they ask for my race, I put ‘human.’ ”

  A school bus pulled up outside and Melanie composed herself. As we walked back past the garden, she stooped to pick up a soda tab. “I’m Indian, we love shiny things,” she said, smiling again. Then, as I headed for the fort, she warned, “Don’t let those filthy English cough on you!”

  FROM HENRICUS I wound along backcountry roads, in search of Pocahontas’s true people. That any of them remain is as miraculous as the survival of early Jamestown. Soon after Powhatan’s death, in 1618, his brother Opechancanough became ruler, and in 1622 he led the uprising that destroyed Henricus and killed 350 English across Virginia, almost a third of all colonists. But the balance of power had tipped since 1607, when the first setters lay starving and sick in Jamestown’s fort.

  New colonists quickly replaced those killed in the uprising, and they hit back hard at the Indians. The settlers’ appetite for tobacco (a crop that quickly depletes soil) and the introduction of roving livestock also encroached on Indian fields and hunting grounds. When Opechancanough led another large-scale revolt in 1644, it ended with his death and the destruction of the empire he and his brothers had ruled.

  “Upone pain of death,” Virginia’s assembly declared in 1646, Indians were barred from the territory between the York and the James Rivers. Dispossessed of much of their land, and depleted by warfare and disease, Powhatan’s former confederacy dwindled to bands, outnumbered and encircled, as Jamestown’s occupants had once been. In the early 1600s, John Smith recorded the names of some forty tribes he encountered during his travels. A century later, a colonist named Robert Beverley found remnants of only eight. “The Indians of Virginia are almost wasted,” he wrote. His rough census of Indian villages included notes such as “a small number yet living,” or “much decreased of late by the small pox.” He listed many of the tribes visited by Smith as “extinct.”

  Among those that survived was the Pamunkey, the core tribe of Powhatan’s domain and the one he’s believed to have been born into. In a 1677 treaty with the “Dread Soveraigne Lord Charles the II,” the Pamunkey secured the right to remain unmolested on the land they still held, as well as the right to gather wild oats, rushes, and other plants “not usefull to the English.” In exchange, Indians pledged amity and subjection to the king, and agreed to an annual rent of twenty beaver skins, to be delivered by tribal leaders to the colony’s governor.

  This tradition has continued ever since, though the Pamunkey now substitute deer for beaver, presented to Virginia’s governor on the steps of the state capitol. The Pamunkey also still occupy their remnant of riverside land, in an oxbow twenty miles east of Richmond. To reach the reservation, I followed a country road until it ended at a settlement of modest houses. Apart from a small museum, there was little to distinguish the Pamunkey enclave from hundreds of other rural communities in Virginia. Nor did the first people I met—blue jean–clad, with lightly tanned skin and soft Virginia drawls—seem much different from their non-Indian neighbors.

  One of them pointed me to the home of Warren Cook, the tribe’s deputy chief, a handsome, strongly built man with graying black hair and long-lashed green eyes. “This reservation is different than most,” he said. “It wasn’t given to us—it’s a place that was never taken from us.” In this respect, the Pamunkey resembled the Zuni: the rare tribe that still inhabited land it had occupied when Europeans arrived.

  Speaking with Warren, I sensed another parallel. Like the Zuni, the Pamunkey maintained a certain distance from both non-Indians and other tribes. Their relative isolation, geographic and social, was one reason the Pamunkey had survived. “We pretty much keep to ourselves,” Warren said, “and these days, the rest of the world leaves us alone.”

  It seemed clear he wanted me to do the same. But when Warren said he had an errand to run, I asked whether I could tag along and see the reservation. He shrugged and said, “That won’t take long.”

  We drove past well-spaced weatherboard houses and fields of knee-high wheat. Residents owned their houses but not the land, which reverted to the tribe on their death. Only eighty-five people lived on the reservation, about a tenth of the total number of Pamunkey. “That’s not counting all the folks who think they’re one,” Warren said. “The world’s largest tribe is the Wannabes.”

  People wrote to the Pamunkey from all over the world, claiming that they descended from Pocahontas and were therefore eligible for tribal membership—often because they thought it came with some economic benefit. The Pamunkey, however, had no casino and received only modest state aid. Also, to join the tribe one had to prove a recent forebear was Pamunkey.

  Warren stopped beside an old monument to Pocahontas, inscribed with the words “Gentle and humane, she was the friend of the earliest struggling English colonists whom she nobly rescued, protected, and helped.” A bas-relief depicted a long-haired woman with a headband. A local artist had modeled her face on a 1920s studio photograph of Warren’s grandmother Pocahontas Cook.

  “I like the artwork, but personally I would take the monument down,” Warren said. “Pocahontas was an exceptional young woman, intelligent and adaptable, but she got carried away with the English.” He said most Pamunkey shared his ambivalence. Some considered Pocahontas a traitor for helping the invaders and then marrying one. “Mostly, though, we’re just tired of hearing about her all the time,” he said, “instead of figures more representative of our people.”

  Warren drove me down by the river, to a grassy mound that was decorated with feathers and a leather pouch of tobacco. Here the Pamunkey believed Opechancanough had interred the bones of his brother Powhatan, and later been buried himself after being captured and then shot in the back at Jamestown. One colonist described Opechancanough as “a Man of large Stature, noble Presence, and extraordinary Parts.” But in 1644, he was so old and weak when he led the uprising that he had to be carried into battle on a l
itter.

  “It’d be nice if all the visitors to Jamestown paid more attention to Powhatan and Opechancanough,” Warren said. “They weren’t on the boat to America—they met it, and did everything they could to drive the English back out to sea.”

  The legacy of their defeat was all too apparent from our secluded perch by the river. It had taken Warren twenty minutes to show me what remained of Powhatan’s once mighty realm: a twelve-hundred-acre pocket, most of it uninhabitable wetland. “You have to get out on the water to really get a sense of the reservation,” he said.

  We sat quietly for a while, before I asked about the boat I’d seen parked in his yard. For the first time Warren smiled. “You’re hard to get rid of,” he said. “Just like those damned English.”

  A FEW DAYS later, at the wheel of his nineteen-foot skiff, Warren started to open up, and so did the scenery. It was late May, when Virginia’s woods and scrub begin to close in, turning much of the state into a muggy, buggy inferno. But as we motored into the Pamunkey River, the woods gave way to a breezy expanse of placid brown water. Warren coasted swampy islets, pointing to long-stalked wild rice and a water lily called spatterdock. A plant that bloomed later in the year was marshmallow, from which Indians used to extract sugary goo, the forerunner of today’s confection.

  An osprey rose from its nest, arching massive wings and hovering over the water before diving in to catch a fish with its talons. There were also egrets and eagles and Canada geese swooping overhead. “Fish, fowl, plants, fields, game—everything Indians needed to live well,” Warren said. “If land had been given to us by the government, like it was to most tribes, we’d never be in a place this nice.”