Patawomeck Article

The Patawomecks are a little known tribe whose origin is actually within Stafford County, and were one of the first tribes to deal with the white settlers, specifically John Smith and the rest of the future denizens of Jamestown. Robert and Jason Green are both descendants of the Patawomeck Tribe, and Robert is it's chief. The difficulty in having uncovered all this new evidence that the Patawomekcs acutally were a distinguished tribe in pre-Jamestown Virginia, is that they now need federal recognition to recover the bones of their ancestors, and other valuable medals and masks that were almost eclipsed by time. The main reason they haven't attained this recognition is because of the Racial Integrity Law passed in 1924, which caused many of those with heritage connected to the Patawomeck tribe to deny any sort of affiliation with it, greatly muddling up who is and isn't part of the tribe.

With all the resources avaliable today, it isn't surprising that people are discovering their real backgrounds, and in some cases it's amazing history, but the problem is you're not quite sure if they're backing themselves up with real evidence. They provide plenty of reasons, but it seems like there aren't any historical documents they show to back the article up as far as relations between the Patawomecks and the settlers. If the information is really that obscure though, it's no wonder so many things like this slip through the cracks, and you'd never think a second thought about how the Jamestown colony survived when Powhatan denied them food, and they had no rations for themselves to speak of. Rather perturbing to think about when articles like this make you realize that we may have all the major points of history down and all the big events arranged, but are missing so many of the details in between that helped to construct it.