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Archiver > NATIVEAMERICAN-DELMARVA > 2000-03 > 0952921224


From: Thomas F Brown< >
Subject: Re: Lumbee, Pamunkey, and Wesorts
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2000 23:20:24 -0500 (EST)


>I would like to refer you to a brief read, The Piscataway Indians of Southern
>Maryland by Alice L. L. Ferguson & Henry G. Ferguson.
>
>The Piscataway Indians first contact with colonizers was in 1608 and have
>continued in tribal customs to present day. There was a split which has
>resulted in the Piscataway Indian Nation and The Piscataway/Conoy Confederacy
>& sub Tribes. Both of these are considered indigenous tribes of Maryland.
>Both have petitioned the state for recognition. The Piscataway/Conoy
>Confederacy's petition has been approved by the Maryland Commission of Indian
>Affairs and now sits in the Secretary's office of the Dept.. of Housing &
>Community Development. It has not been sent to the Governor's office as yet.
>The Wesort genealogy is a part of the Piscataway/Conoy history. There is a
>continuous history of Indian bloodlines from 1608. This is for both tribal
>groups since they are all cousins.
>
>The Piscataway Indian Nation also has a petition into the Commission,
>however, we can, by law, deal with one petition at a time. They too have
>applied for BIA recognition. Both tribal groups are represented on the
>Maryland Commission on Indian Affairs (MCIA).
>
>Cassandra H. Marshall
>Commissioner on Indian Affairs (MCIA)


There are some errors in your post. Ferguson notes--correctly--that the
Piscataways do not appear in Maryland records after 1705, because they
had moved out of the state. There is no evidence of any Piscataways remaining
in tribal relations in Maryland after 1700 or so.

The people who claim to be Piscataways today cannot be linked genealogically
to any ancestor identified as Piscataway in the colonial era. The ancestors
of the contemporary group did not begin to claim Piscataway identity
until the 20th century.

There are no surviving tribal customs, language, or any other form of
Piscataway culture that would distinguish the contemporary group from
their non-Indian neighbors. The Indian culture they have at the present
has been borrowed, quite recently, from pan-Indian traditions.

They do not have a continuous history of Indian bloodlines. The contemporary
group traces back to people who identified as white, black, or mulatto.
There is not a single data point identifying any of their colonial
ancestors as Indian.

Their ancestors seem to have invented the notion that they are descended
from an Indian tribe sometime in the late 1800s or early 1900s, in order
to distinguish themselves from darker-skinned people of color. By
adopting the Indian identity, they were able to get privileges that
were not accorded ordinary blacks during the Jim Crow era.

The moral here is that you can't take oral traditions of Indian ancestry
at face value. For some reason, Americans love to claim Indian ancestors,
whether they have them or not. Among the Piscataways, members of the Tayac
family have been especially notable for their willingness to make outrageous
distortions of their family history.

On this mailing list, we've repeatedly observed a person named Andrea
Cramblit posting exhortations for people to lie about their ancestry
to the Census, for what she shamelessly admits are purely monetary
motivations. This is nothing new. People have been fabricating and
hoaxing their family histories for centuries.

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