By Janey Fugate
Natural Bridge has been a national historic landmark ever since 1997. But the federal government has been much slower to accept the local Monacan Indian tribe’s cultural claim to the bridge.
Tom Clarke, the new owner of the 1500-acre Natural Bridge property, has already reached out to the tribe, asking it to help revitalize an interpretive exhibit of a Monacan village on the site. Clarke plans to hand most of the property over to the commonweath as a state park within two years.
But in its own surveys of the site’s significance, the National Park Service has not acknowledged the Monacans’ spiritual and ancestral claims.
That could be traced to another point of friction with the federal government: None of Virginia’s tribes has yet gained federal recognition.
Legislation to change that has been pending in Congress since 2013. Federal recognition would establish tribes as sovereign entities and give them access to health, education and housing opportunities afforded other, recognized tribes.
Vicky Ferguson, a Monacan Indian and interpreter at Natural Bridge, says that the lack of federal recognition also denies her people the First Amendment right of freedom of religion. Without federal recognition, Ferguson says, native people cannot legally obtain eagle feathers, which are symbolic of Indian spirituality.
Federal law ordinarily requires tribes to prove their cultural, political and geographical identity as an “American Indian entity on a substantially continuous basis since 1900.” But in 1924 Virginia created its Racial Integrity Act, allowing only “white” or “colored” as racial distinctions in public records. It also made interracial marriages illegal.
Indians and others have called it “paper genocide” because, they say, it led to the destruction of Native American marriage licenses, birth certificates and tribal land titles. Proving a tribal history before 1900, required for federal recognition, became much more difficult, they say.
Monacan tribal chief Sharon Bryant recognizes a bitter irony in this lack of recognition: Unlike many federally recognized tribes, she said, her people rarely bore arms against whites.
Bryant says the Monacans signed a peace treaty with English settlers in 1677, more than a century before the U.S. government was established.
“We signed a treaty that said we wouldn’t war with the settlers anymore,” she said. “And once we became peaceable, we became irrelevant.”
Top photo: Monacan Indian powwows welcome members of other tribes as well. Photo by Bill Williams, courtesy of the Monacan Indian Nation