Their treaty predates the Constitution. Now the Mattaponi want recognition

RICHMOND – Mattaponi tribal Chief Mark T. Falling Star Custalow parked his white Chevy Silverado in front of the Virginia Executive Mansion and, with the help of his son and brother, unloaded a deer carcass onto the brick pavement.

Tied by the legs to a cedar pole, the nine-point buck was a tribute from the Mattaponi to the state governor. For all of Custalow’s life, and his father’s life, and his grandfather’s and on back 347 years, the tribe has made a ceremonial offering of wild game just before Thanksgiving to honor the 1677 Treaty of Middle Plantation between Indigenous people and Virginians.

But despite having a tribal reservation that predates the U.S. Constitution by more than a century, the Mattaponi do not officially exist in the eyes of the federal government. Virginia’s “paper genocide” of the 1920s eliminated the demographic category of “Indian” and many records that went with it, leaving the Mattaponi and other tribes in the state facing an exceptionally difficult task of qualifying for federal status.

Earlier this month, the Mattaponi (pronounced mat-uh-puh-NYE) finally moved to change that situation, filing an application to seek formal U.S. recognition. It was a massive effort decades in the making and three years in execution, and it will take still more years to play out.

The tribe wrestled with some questions along the way – most fundamentally, why should a people with such deep heritage have to prove their identity to anyone?

But the answer became apparent during the process. Not only would recognition qualify the Mattaponi for federal assistance with housing, health care and education, but the act of seeking it also created something the government once tried to eliminate: a permanent historical record, thousands of pages, culled from attics and closets and dusty old boxes around the reservation and beyond.

“Now we’ll keep that,” Lois Morning Glory Custalow Carter, 71, said, “for my grandchildren and their children and for the future.”

The Mattaponi pondered seeking federal status for a long time. A debate that began in the late 1970s eventually led to a letter of intent, but not until 1994. Chiefs came and went – elected, though many were Custalows – and tribal councils changed. Not everyone agreed that it was worth the time and expense.

Other Virginia tribes were in the same position. The Pamunkey finished the process first, winning federal status in 2015. Six others were recognized in 2018. The Pamunkey almost immediately sought a casino, which has been mired in delays in Norfolk, something the Mattaponi say they have no intention of copying.

The “sister tribes” of Mattaponi and Pamunkey were Algonquin-speaking, with roots going back more than 10,000 years, and were part of the Powhatan confederacy that interacted with the first English settlers at Jamestown.

Their treaties with the royal colonizers originated in the mid-1600s. After Nathaniel Bacon led an ill-fated rebellion seeking to eliminate all Indians from Virginia, those tribes signed onto the treaty of peace in 1677.

That pact required an annual tribute from the native people, a form of taxation. In return, the “tributary tribes” were granted fishing and hunting rights, and if any members were the victim of a crime, the laws of the day promised the offender would be “punishable as if the Sufferer were an English Man.”

The Pamunkey and Mattaponi reservations created then are generally thought to be the oldest in what’s now the United States. They are about 10 miles apart, each on a river that bears the tribe’s name. Those two waterways join at the town of West Point to form the York River.

The Mattaponi reservation once stretched for thousands of acres in King William County less than an hour east of Richmond. After the Civil War, the state decided the tribe didn’t need so much land. Today’s reservation is about 100 acres of the original tract, set in a bend in the Mattaponi River, across from an undeveloped marsh.

Homes in the reservation are a mix of 1960s ranchers and older bungalows, with the oldest farmhouse dating to the mid-19th century, according to the chief. Residents still hunt, fish and trap without needing licenses under their relationship with the state – though they hold jobs like anyone else, the chief likes to point out. He, for instance, is a director of operations for a facilities management company.

While a little more than 60 tribal citizens live on the reservation, hundreds more are nearby, throughout the state and beyond. A few years ago, the Mattaponi counted about 1,000 in the tribe, though the number on the official roll submitted to the federal government is 381. Not everyone wanted to participate.

“Proving who we are, that’s what’s amazing to me,” said Jacob Custalow, 65, a hairstylist who lives in Chesterfield County. He supports the effort despite what he calls a deep irony. “We’ve been here for hundreds of years.”

What got the tribe moving was winning a $1.4 million grant in 2021 from the federal Administration for Native Americans to pay for the application process. The tribe hired a consultant – Michelle Kiel – who guided the work, and who had done the same for the Pamunkey. But this case, she said, was unusual: The bulk of the labor was handled not by outside experts, but by tribal members themselves, led by Lois Custalow Carter, the chief’s sister.

That level of involvement was a boon, Kiel said, because of the intensely personal nature of the research.

“It is a far more intimate process than it probably should be, in terms of having to really demonstrate to the federal government all of these things in such a very, like, laid-bare way.” Kiel said. “It is a lot of history.”

Custalow Carter feels that history every time she rounds the bend where Indian Town Road dips along the river bank toward the reservation, filling her with a sense of home.

The taste of her grandfather’s baked rockfish with onions and ketchup. The thrill of zigzagging down the path to the water, legs covered in prickly burrs. Sounds of men trading stories around the wood stove in the little tribal museum.

Visiting the reservation was her anchor as she and the chief grew up in Richmond. Schools were segregated then by Black and white. Indigenous people didn’t fit in either place, but Custalow Carter said they were more welcome in Black schools in the city. The tribal school on the reservation had closed some years before.

In those days the reservation had a museum, a trading post, a church and a fish hatchery. Today only the church is still active, though groups can make appointments to tour the museum – itself a time capsule of the 1960s.

For federal recognition, that recent history was more important than the tribe’s deep roots. To qualify, they would have to show a continuity of family, society and culture dating back about 100 years. Kiel set up training for Custalow Carter, three other tribal women and one student from the College of William & Mary who joined the team.

Then they reached out to everyone connected to the tribe, looking for supporting material. Newspaper clippings, journals, family photo albums, letters – anything could help.

“We found out things just by interacting and having meetings and talking to different people,” Custalow Carter said.

One big prize was a copy of the long-lost tribal law book, which her grandfather used to settle disputes when he was chief. After his death in 1969, it disappeared.

Custalow Carter can’t say where it turned up – the whole fact-gathering process assured anonymity for tribal sources.

The group also found extensive minutes taken at tribal meetings, which contained some eye-popping revelations. During Prohibition in the 1920s and ’30s, for instance, the chief really disapproved of alcohol. If someone was found to be operating a “tipping house,” Custalow Carter said, they would get a lashing. If they violated again, they’d be banished.

All told, the working group assembled 7,000 separate pieces of information about the tribe. That was condensed into a narrative of about 1,000 pages with another 1,000 pages of documentation.

On Nov. 7, a delegation traveled to Washington to formally submit the application to the Office of Federal Acknowledgement at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It included letters of support from other Virginia tribes and from Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R).

Now there are public comment periods and an extensive review process. So they wait.

A big crowd turned out for this year’s tribute ceremony in Richmond, held Tuesday amid sunshine and falling willow oak leaves in front of the 1813 governor’s mansion. Like the Mattaponi, the Pamunkey tribe also brought a deer (the meat will feed people in need through the Hunters for the Hungry program). Youngkin received them formally under the terms of the treaty.

“We are not just affirming a simple agreement,” Youngkin said. “Rather, we are affirming a long-standing relationship that is interwoven into the story of Virginia and the story of America.”

Chief Custalow wore a turkey-feather headdress and deerskin suit, decorated with beads in a traditional floral design. Around his neck hung a bony plate from a massive river sturgeon caught long ago by his grandfather. As he played a drum and sang, Lois Carter Custalow and other women from the tribe danced a slow procession around the deer – completing a ceremony all had witnessed or participated in their whole lives.

On the sidelines, Mattaponi citizen Trey Lester, 36, a construction contractor from Mechanicsville, looked on with his 2-year-old son on his shoulders. “I’m proud of our tribe,” he said. And that won’t be any different if they return in a few years with federal recognition.

“It’s a lot of history, you know,” he said. “And whether or not it’s acknowledged on a federal level, we’re still here. And we still honor our treaties.”