Wonkette

Everyone knows how the Native American Pocahontas (and her father) helped out the English settlement Jamestown back in the 17th century (and, if they don’t, Disney will be happy to romanticize it for them). Everyone, that is, except for the federal government which insists that the tribes native to Virginia aren’t real enough to qualify as “Indian” under federal law.

Federal recognition of a tribe’s sovereign status enables children from that tribe to qualify for certain college scholarships and for the tribe to qualify for federal funds for housing, health care and economic development. Naturally, there’s a process to obtain recognition — and, naturally, it sucks. The feds require a tribe to submit extensive written documentation of their existence back to the tribe’s first contact with European settlers. This means the tribes in Virginia have some of the largest burdens to meet (being as their contact with Europeans was among the first in what is now the U.S.). Their rallying cry: “First to greet. Last to be recognized.”

Also, it doesn’t help at the federal level that some racist SOB at the helm of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics much of the last century, Walter A. Plekker, decided that Virginia’s native peoples were “colored” instead of Indian and changed all the records, making it almost impossible to prove that there were any Native Americans in Virginia in the 20th century at all. So, they’re trying to get a bill passed in Congress, and (naturally) having difficulty because no one likes tribal recognition bills since that pesky Abramoff scandal.

None of this, of course, has prevented the state or the federal government from using the Native Americans of the unrecognized tribes in Virginia as a political backdrop when it suits their purpose (like in the picture, here, when they helped welcome Queen Elizabeth, or when Bush wants to give a speech about the “real” first Thanksgiving or when the state wants to celebrate the anniversary of the settlement of Jamestown). But, whatever, right? It’s not like we haven’t been screwing them for hundreds of years? What’s another few years here or there? Happy Thanksgiving! Now go buy some crap at the mall.

As Year’s End Nears, Disappointment [Washington Post]