Va. Indians will journey to England in anticipation of Jamestown's 400th anniversary
Gravesend, on the Thames River southeast of London, is where the Indian princess Pocahontas died in 1617 and was buried after beginning her return voyage from a visit to England as wife of Jamestown settler John Rolfe.
Government officials in Kent have led efforts to hold Jamestown commemorative events in England, and have raised private donations covering most of the estimated $160,000 cost of the Indian visit.
"We thought it would be a good idea, given the Pocahontas connections, and it grew from there," said Alex King, deputy leader of the Kent County Council and chairman of the Jamestown UK Foundation. "It's really quite a special event."
The visit was originally planned as an add-on to the Virginia Indian arts-and-crafts festival to be held as part of an annual Gravesend event known as Big Day Out. But discussions between the British Jamestown committee, the federal Jamestown commission in Williamsburg and the Indians led to a more ambitious agenda.
Although the schedule includes Indian dance and crafts demon- strations next Saturday and Sunday, it also features a symposium at the University of Kent on July 17 with presentations by Indians and American and British scholars. On July 18, the chiefs will participate in a cultural diversity seminar, and groups of Indians will visit Kent County schools on several days.
"It's substance," said Adkins. "We wouldn't go for just fluff."
The seminars will allow the Indians -- and scholars including Helen Rountree, a retired Old Dominion University anthropologist, and Warren M. Billings, a historian recently retired from the University of New Orleans -- to discuss the sweep of Virginia Indian history from contact with English settlers in the 1600s to modern times.
Ken Adams, chief of the Upper Mattaponi tribe, said it's important to understand that the development of modern North America came at the great cost to the Indian people and culture that preceded it.
"Within a very short time [after English settlers built Jamestown], the entire way of life for the Virginia Indians changed, and it affected every Indian in the United States eventually," Adams said.
"Four hundred years later, we have an opportunity to return to England at the invitation of the people of England," he added. "I consider this sort of a new beginning for the Virginia Indians and a new relationship with the people of Great Britain."
British officials raised enough money to pay the expenses for 40 Indians, so organizers decided they would take five representatives from each of the eight tribes, Adkins said.
In the end some tribes decided to bear the expense of sending additional members, he said. Some tribes are sending fewer than five members, Adams said, but all eight tribes are represented by at least two members.
Joyce Krigsvold grew up on the Pamunkey reservation in King William County and took up traditional pottery when she returned there in 1990 after living in other states. She will go to England, she said, hoping to teach people that modern Indians are in many ways like everyone else.
"We live in houses and have doctors and lawyers, and we're not savages," she said. Krigsvold works two days a week in the Pamunkey Indian Museum. "People come to the reservation expecting to see teepees."
It's possible that Virginia Indians will prove more interesting to the British than Jamestown's anniversary.
Laura Brown, education officer at the American Museum in Britain in Bath, said an annual exhibition of Indian dances, performed by non-Indians, is one of their most popular events.
She predicted that people who live in Kent County and nearby will be thrilled at the chance to meet real Indians and learn about their lives and history. The British know of Indians not only from movies and television shows, she said, but from a national school curriculum that includes lessons about indigenous peoples including American Indians.
"There is a fascination here, as there is all over the world, with the real thing," Brown said.
For Indians in the delegation, a private ceremony has been scheduled in Gravesend's St. George's Church, where Pocahontas is buried.
"That's something that has never happened before," said Adams, the Upper Mattaponi chief. "I'm sure that this will be a tremendous spiritual moment."