Virginia Beach Style

Some locals tidbits bout Virginia Beach Virginia

Several Indian tribes have lived in Virginia since before the English landed in 1607. The Nansemond originally lived along the Nansemond River but now live in the Norfolk, Chesapeake, Virginia Beach and Portsmouth area near their ancient hunting grounds around the Great Dismal Swamp. When the English arrived, the tribe had about 300 warriors and a total population of 1,200 people. The Nansemond is a remaining tribe of the Powhatan empire, the father of Pocahontas, and has been officially recognized as a tribe by the Commonwealth of Virginia since 1984.

The Nansemonds were initially cautious and often hostile toward the English, but by the 1630's some had changed their minds. A book still in the Chief's possession records the 1638 marriage of John Bass, and a Nansemond convert to Christianity named Elizabeth. The modern Nansemond tribe is descended from that marriage.

The Nansemonds split later in the 17th Century- half were Christianized and remained on the Nansemond River and became English-style farmers and the others warred with the English and then fled southwest. The members that fled were assigned a reservation by the Virginia colony on the Nottoway River. But by 1744 they had stopped using the reservation and went to live with the Nottoway Indians on another reservation nearby; their old reservation was sold in 1792. In 1806 the last surviving Nansemond on the Nottoway Reservation died.

Meanwhile, in the 1720's, the Christianized Nansemonds moved to an area just northeast of the Dismal Swamp, where game was more plentiful and English settlers fewer; some of them live there still. Several times in the 18th Century Nansemond people had to get certificates from the Norfolk County Clerks stating that they were of Indian and English ancestry and loyal to the English of Virginia.

In 1850 the Methodist Church established a mission for the Nansemonds. A county school was later added there in the 1890's. That mission is now Indiana United Methodist Church in Bowers Hill, home of an Indian and white congregation and a meeting place for the modern Nansemond tribe. The late 19th Century Nansemonds joined their non-Indian neighbors in moving away to nearby cities. An anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institution made a census in 1901 and found the tribe had about 180 people, more than half of whom lived in Norfolk and Portsmouth. It was not until the post-Civil Rights Era, when other Indian groups without reservations got formal recognition from the Commonwealth of Virginia, that the Nansemonds finally organized and got recognition as a tribe (in 1984). By that time, most of them had lived successfully for two or more generations in local cities as "whites with Indian ancestry"; the changeover to being "Indians with white ancestry" has not been hard.