Colonial Williamsburg puts more emphasis on Native aspect of colonial life
Throughout November, Colonial Williamsburg is celebrating Native American Heritage Month with new programming as part of its effort to tell a more accurate story of America’s origins.
Martin Saniga, who supervises Colonial Williamsburg’s American Indian Initiative and helped develop the programs, said that the hardest part is deciding which of the myriad of stories to focus on.
“Williamsburg is especially unique in the fact that it isn’t the story of a single Native community,” he said. “You have probably about 50 modern communities that have dealings in Williamsburg at any given time throughout its history. So it’s trying to balance the stories that are engaging, the stories that we can research well and (balancing) the local tribes who are tributary to the subjects of the crown...and the tribes who are coming here as political envoys.”
The programming includes the “public debut of Colonial Williamsburg’s newest Nation Builder, Oconostota, a member of the Cherokee nation and a part of the Cherokee delegation that came to Williamsburg in 1777,” as well as the American Indian Life Series, which explores the diversity of American Indian nations, and Washington and the American Indians, during which George Washington discusses his experiences with and views of various American Indian nations.
Other programs tell the stories of Sam, a formerly enslaved soldier who encountered the Shawnee, and Methotaskee, an enslaved woman who made a free life for herself as an adopted Shawnee Indian before being forced back into slavery.
A full overview of the programs, as well as the schedule, is available online at www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/explore/special-event/american-indian-heritage-month/.
Williamsburg’s American Indian Initiative has been around since 2002, when it was established with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
For 20 years, the initiative has hosted panel discussions and lecture series, renewed relationships with American Indian descendant communities, facilitated community discussions and created numerous programs featuring the histories of 18th century American Indians.
Over the last two years, the initiative has been “intensifying” the type of programming that they do, including encouraging their coworkers who portray other characters at Colonial Williamsburg to talk about those figures’ experiences with Natives, Saniga said.
Growing up in Newport News, Saniga made plenty of trips up to Colonial Williamsburg for field trips, but back then, there wasn’t as much of an emphasis on the Native aspect of colonial life.
“You had white colonists and the British government, and you had free and enslaved African folks, and that was really it,” he said. “There wasn’t this interesting story of this third group of people, (made up of) dozens and dozens of nations that don’t really fit into the hierarchy of the colonial society. They’re outsiders and insiders at the same time, and that’s a really interesting story.”
One thing Saniga hopes to impart is that American Indians were extremely prevalent during daily life in Colonial Williamsburg.
“Native people are a normal part of the fabric of society,” he said. “My goal for the program is to kind of emulate Thomas Jefferson’s quote, (which says that) not a day goes by in the city that he doesn’t see Indian folks … I want to make it to the point where guests can’t go anywhere here in the city without seeing or hearing about the Indian component.”
Those who are interested in learning more are encouraged to visit the initiative’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/groups/aiiatcw.
Sian Wilkerson, sian.wilkerson@pilotonline.com, 757-342-6616
