The 1619 Project is gaining more traction in the media since its unveiling last year in the New York Times magazine. Its premise – “to reframe American history by regarding 1619 as our nation’s birth year”. The question is “What would it mean NOT to seek a ‘new’ history for our country but to acknowledge the ALREADY existing history pre-1619?”
Why is there talk of reframing history for our country? If anyone has the right to do so it would be the Native Americans of the East Coast of Virginia. The formal beginning of the unborn United States occurred with the establishing of the first colony, Jamestown, VA in 1607. This area was the home of the Algonquian Native Americans of the Powhatan confederacy. It would be twelve years later before the arrival of the first ships carrying enslaved Africans that docked in Fort Comfort, VA. How then is it that The 1619 Project aims to reframe history with claims that the American nation began in 1619?
Virginia Indians told stories of settlers who would not have survived without their help during the long brutal winter of 1609-10. The natives, including the powerful family confederation of Powhatan and Pocahontas, taught the colonists how to plant food and even traded with them during the initial years of their relationship. The colonists survived and founded Virginia democracy with the original governmental template still as the foundation of the VA House of Delegates today.
Obviously, there WAS history in VA before the arrival of the ships at Fort Comfort. I know this history because it is my history as well. I am a direct descendant of Powhatan, a Mattaponi Indian. My tribe, through its oral traditions, knows the demise of own cultural ways that were once strong during the era of Powhatan and Pocahontas, his daughter. In fact, Eastern Native Americans’ history has served as a harbinger of what was to come for our Western tribal brothers and sisters in the loss of their lands and culture some 200 years later.
Yet, in the midst of the loss of a lifestyle of the Native Americans in VA, my people endured well through injustices. My father was refused entrance as a student in the White high school near our reservation. However, he was also refused at the local Black high school. He and his brother would board a train bound to Indian territory in Oklahoma to finish out their education. Perseverance prevailed and they both went on to university.
US history shows clearly that two people groups were subjugated at the beginning of this nation’s history and this subjugating was a grave wounding. But wounds cannot be used to reframe history. Wounds are not healed in changing a storyline. The only narrative open to creating is the one that is in the present.
To propose that 1619 was the beginning of this nation denies the recognition of the Powhatans and their present-day descendants who continue to live on and outside of the Mattaponi and Pamunkey Indian reservations today. How can any group of people reframe another’s history when the descendants of the original people are still alive and can testify to the validity of their history? As Virginia and American Indians, we honor our history. It is sacred – it cannot be changed. If we attempt to change history, then identity, memories and interpreting our present events become clouded, if not obsolete.
Native Americans want to see our history preserved, not altered, as it already has been over the 400 plus years from the first European settlers’ landing. If the idea that US history began in 1619 is accepted, then my people’s collective memory is blotted out – forever. With all due respect, no matter how painful it was for the Africans who came in 1619 and for their descendants today, history itself cannot be changed to accommodate another narrative.
No group, whether cultural, historical or political should be granted a pen to reframe history. Reframing does not erase the wounds that ultimately must be dealt with. The telling of true historical facts helps us all pass down a legacy to our children that history is theirs to make, but never to recreate – no matter how appealing and desired the story might be.
Dawn Custalow is an EL educator and teaches students who do not speak English as their first language. She currently works at William Fleming high school in Roanoke. She enjoys writing as well as public speaking on themes of education, cultural training, and Virginia Indian history – both past and present. Dawn is an alum of VA Tech and an enrolled tribal member of the Mattaponi Indian reservation in West Point, Virginia.
This piece originally appeared in The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press.
