The Shadow
CLIFTON FORGE – Dabney S. Lancaster Community College will host a special presentation in honor of Native American Month entitled “Who Owns the Past? Siouan Indian Peoples in Virginia and West Virginia” on Wednesday, November 16 at 12 noon in the Moomaw Center.
Guest speaker is Karenne Wood, director of the Virginia Indian Heritage Program at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Wood is an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation.
She directs award-winning Virginia Indian Programs at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and is a Ph.D. candidate and Ford Fellow in anthropology at the Unversity of Virginia, working to revitalize indigenous languages and cultural practices and to revise American Indian content in statewide educational resources. She has worked at the National Museum of the American Indian as a researcher.
Wood held a four-year gubernatorial appointment as chair for the Virginia Council on Indians. She is the author of “Markings on Earth”, which won the North American Native Authors Award for Poetry in 2000. She is the editor of “The Virginia Indian Heritage Trail”, now in its third edition; and she recently contributed a chapter on Southeastern Indians for National Geographic’s “Indian Nations on North America”. In 2009 she spoke at a United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues event on “The Politics of Writing”.
Wood’s speech will address the mountain and piedmont regions of what we now call Virginia and West Virginia, the traditional homelands of Siouan-speaking tribes that lived there from several thousand to a few hundred years ago. The presentation introduces the archaeological presence and the known history of those peoples, their cultures and their languages.
Unlike the tribes of the coastal plain, the Siouan speakers had few interactions with English settlers before the 18th century. Protracted conflicts with Iroquoian tribes, and then with European settlers, caused many Siouan tribes to relocate from their homelands, which led early historians to believe that parts of the region were empty of human habitation.
Many Native groups remained in the area, however, continuing traditional practices. While Eastern Siouan languages are no longer spoken today, one important language, Tutelo, was documented by anthropologists. Today, tribal members are reclaiming this language and telling the stories of their people.
This event, sponsored by the DSLCC Student Activities program, is free and open to the public.
Karenne Wood
