West Virginia
If I’m honest, I really only know West Virginia as a passthrough to friends and family in the Midwest. I’m painfully familiar with riding my car brakes on the winding mountain highways. My kids always love to look at the silverly rock walls speed past before we eventually get to a boring turnpike for most of our road trips. When I worked on this West Virginia piece, I just really liked the imagery of having a Native woman tied to the modern coal country landscape. Obviously, the Indigenous people of the area did not mine or use coal because they respected the land that provided for them.
West Virginia, like so many of the Eastern Woodland States, has retained little of their Indigenous footprint. There are no federally recognized tribes in West Virginia which was “founded” in 1863 during the Civil War. It was branded as Virginia without Slavery - so that’s cool. Upwards of 11,000 people in West Virginia claim Native American ancestry. Pre-colonially, the area was inhabited by Shawnee, Mingo, Cherokee, Delaware, and Saponi peoples. But Native Americans were largely eliminated during the Revolutionary War and then continually pushed out by the US Government. Similar to Virginia, state officials would not recognize Native American or American Indian as a race and forced tribal members to identify as White or Black. Natives could not own property until the Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s. The audacity of the US Government to take this land from its inhabitants and then pass legislation that systematically prohibited them from even buying it back, while not surprising, is continuously disappointing.
In the early 1900s, after archaeologists found several burial mounds across West Virginia land, the government insinuated that they were fraudulently created even going so far to include educational curriculum that West Virginia was empty “hunting ground” before white settlers got there. They did little to protect the integrity of the land and the artifacts. More recently, archaeologists have researched and reported on the “Fort Ancient” people in the Ohio Valley in Southern West Virginia. They were believed to be the original inhabitants of the land but disappeared before colonialization. Scholars have been able to prove that West Virginia was not historically only used as Indian hunting ground but was inhabited by people at least 10,000 years before the Europeans arrived in the Americas.
In 1996, the West Virginia State Senate passed a resolution recognizing the Appalachian American Indians of West Virginia (AAIWV) and affirming that American Indians were original inhabitants of the state. Which is good (I guess?) but does little to protect the lands or allow for any kind of funding of cultural initiatives to reconnect West Virginia Native American descendants with their ancestors or history. While the ancient villages along the state’s major rivers are gone, current farmers and landowners continue to find evidence and artifacts belonging to the tribes that lived there.