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How Do We Know that Greentown is Native

I recently had a conversation with Cousin Wendel Pop Green at the 2024 Greentown reunion.  He made some points that I want to address.  He made the following points.

1. Cousin Lucy had two dna tests that showed zero Native ancestry. 
2. He was involved in some part of the defense department who facilitated civil rights discrimination complaints.  He said that the law requires that these people have a DNA test to show their Native ancestry.  And that out of 21 cases all of these people came back showing zero Native DNA.
3. He made the point that people who look Native look that way because of their Black and White ancestry and it does not mean they are Native.

First let me say as Chief of the Occoneechee-Saponi-Totaro Indian Tribe of Virginia I have written extensively about all of these subjects to show why the logic behind the three points below are flawed and part of a 500+ year old white supremacy manipulation, con, conspiracy to exterminate Natives so that Native land is free to be stolen and dominated by white people.

Before reading this article if you are one of the cousins that believes that Greentown was not a Native community or that we do not have significant Native DNA and ancestry or that we are not Native then before reading this article it would be good for you to look at this video in order to better understand paradigms.  Everyone sees through paradigms and when looking from one paradigm such as Greentown is merely a mixed community of Black and White people you likely will physiologically not see evidence directly in front of your eyes that prove otherwise.  Evidence can literally be invisible that goes against your belief. The Business of Paradigms.

For the family members who already know or believe that we are Native after reading this article and viewing the photos you will have a deeper and new level of confidence of just how Native the community actually was and just how wide spread Natives were in Greentown.

Yes many Black families have oral history of Native ancestry.  And many of these people may very well have Native ancestry.  And many of these families have been shown with DNA testing to have little or no Native DNA.  I will not debate this one way or the other since Greentown is in a far different category than ALL of these communities and families.  I will say this.  The DNA testing, like all other methods to documented Native identity, since 1492 is biased with extreme prejudice for white supremacy and against identifying Natives as Native.  They have always been 100% about genocide in order steal and maintain possession of trillions of dollars of stolen Native land and resources.  We cannot be naive and silly enough to believe that theirs systems are unbiased and based upon pure science.  They have proven for 500+ years with their actions the lengths they are willing to go in order to keep possession of trillions of dollars of stolen Native land resources and what they have build on it.

THE reason for the one drop rule in Virginia is and was to exterminate Natives.  Why have white supremacists, since 1492, been so passionate and thorough regarding exterminating Natives via mass murder, bounties on scalps, germ warfare, paper genocide, identity genocide, cultural genocide (kill the Indian save the man)?   They have done this in order to steal and maintain possession of Native land.

DNA Testing is only as good as the Native baseline that is used to determine who is Native.  It is not an absolute science floating in mid-air.  It has a foundation.  And if the foundation is a lie so too will the results be.  If the base line for Saponi DNA is mislabeled as African then all people showing Saponi DNA will show up as African.  As uncle Ruckus would say, "why would good, innocent, unbiased white people want to bias the results?"  Because they have built their homes and businesses on are on stolen Native land and they will go to any length rather than lose it--which is what the Maga movement is 100% about.  And if they admit that we Natives are still here, as we are the majority in our homeland (by including Southern Spanish speaking Natives-Hispanics) they have no foundation and can and will eventually be challenged regarding their clear title to the land.  Some would say but the land is a settled issue. 

In democracy nothing is ever settled.  What ever the majority says rules and Native are about to be the majority.  If this were a settled issue why are white supremacists still manipulating the data.  In the 2008 why was the name of the "Free Persons of Color" book in neighboring Mecklenburg county changed to "Free Negro Register".  Seems like an innocent oversight or mistake or norm by unbiased white people right?  But with this simply deed converted hundreds of Native people, Mixed Native people into African with no land rights in the USA with one simple action.  Why if the issue is settled are they still covering their tracks. Read more about this subject here

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The same conversation that Wendel and I were having at the family reunion happens in all tri-racial isolate Native communities.  In 2008 I spent the day with Fred Hedgepeth of the Meherrin Tribe who was born and raised in Hollister NC (home of the Haliwa-Saponi and he spent the entire day telling me the full history of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe in detail.  I spent time with another Haliwa elder who told me in the 1950 a man came to their school and told them they were Indian and not colored and he went home and told his Grandmother and she said no we are not Indian we are colored.  They both told me that there was a decade long very bitter divide where cousins and brothers and aunts and uncles spent arguing for a decade as to whether they were colored (black and white) or Indian.  The result was a permanent division in families with one side claiming Native and the other side Black.  He told me that things were so bad that a cousin would not go into the store if he knew a cousin from the other side was in there.  I missed the entire pow wow but the education was worth it.

This division is not an accident.  White supremacists planned for us never to be able to reclaim and reidentify as Native.  That planned to make it really hard and nearly impossible to prove. They planned conflict and division and us undermining each other in order to prevent reidentifying as Native.  And yet the Haliwa-Saponi and dozens of other tribes have evolved in the past decades and have high standing in the Native world regardless of white supremacists efforts to discredit.

We in Greentown have a solid and tangible hard evidence that no other Yesah-Saponi tribe has and hardly any other east coast tribe has,  Greentown resides on a Native American reservation. No other Yesah Saponi tribe can make this claim.  They are all trying to connect back to the Saponi Reservation with paper, records and documentation.  But we are physically there with houses and family and graves and churches and have been there since the 1700's.  I want to repeat that--Greentown, a community with many dozens of VERY NATIVE LOOKING PEOPLE WITH UNDENIABLE NATIVE PHENOTYPE, AND WITH MANY NATIVE TRADITIONS AND AN ORAL HISTORY OF BEING YESAH NATIVE RESIDING ON THE YESAH SAPONI RESERVATION.  No other Siouan tribe in Virginia or North Carolina and only a couple of tribes on the East Coast has this hard tangible evidence.  And make no mistake this is hard tangible evidence.  People have gone to the electric chair based upon far less evidence.  Let looks at just two pieces hard undeniable of evidence: 1) a significant number of Greentown people have UNDENIABLE NATIVE phenotype and 2) we live on a Native reservation.

For most of the time white people have been on our land in the past 500+ years the absolute norm for determining who was Native and who was not was ones physical appearance--phenotype and fully explained here. There of dozens of court cases in Southside Virginia where Saponi identity was determined by physical appearance.  This was the legal norm for hundreds of years.

"From the time white people set foot in the Western Hemisphere to the late 1700s they were deciding who was Native based upon phenotype.  Imagine Columbus and his crew determining who was Native and who they would enslave, Their assessment was based upon phenotype and empirical evidence and it is 100% guaranteed that they were correct in their assessment 100% of the time.  And this was true from 1492 to the 1800s.  So why did white people change the criteria?

In the 1800s white courts stopped using phenotype.  White people, white judges and white courts shifted to "official" documentation because the courts were freeing too many Native "slaves" who were illegally kidnapped and being held in bondage.  White people were losing today's equivalent of millions of dollars of "property" because of the powerful undeniability of phenotype.  

In the the 1800's the white people shifted to only accepting official documentation to prove that one is Native in court.  This corrupt and manipulative action forced a higher, and most of the time, impossible level to evidence to meet. This was because white people controlled what was documented and they artificially manipulated the records and thus maintained an artificially low Native population.  The quote below is from an article regarding Natives in the 1700s suing for freedom in courts in Yesah territory of Dinwiddie County Virginia..

It does not take a rocket scientists to add 1+1 and get the answer 2. We are the Natives from that reservation.  The last documented Saponi that the white people documented as Saponi was written approximately1780 in Brunswick County.  In the early 1800 Native members of our family such as Sioux Native Matilda Barner, Ann Walker, Becky Jackson are documented as Sioux Native American.  That is a 20 year gap.  So are people saying that the Saponi people left the area and some other Natives took their place and our grandparents were lying.  No, simply not true!!  In science we have a saying--usually the obvious answer is usually the correct answer.  And the obvious answer is we look Native on a the Yesah Saponi Native Reservation because we are Native.  My great grand mother Buleuh Heartwell Rice Travis said we were Sioux Indians and Saponi or Yesah people are Sioux. 

Look at the people below.  This is 100% guaranteed Native phenotype.  There is no Black and White racial mixture that can produce this much Native phenotype in this many family members.  Scientifically it is not possible.  I am an engineer of 45 years and have used science for my entire career to prove and disprove things.  Perhaps out of million or ten million interracial white/black couples one could by accident produce one person with significant Native phenotype but it would not be replicable with this many people in a family without actually being Native.

I have numerous times been on reservations out west where they are very leery regarding wannabe Natives pretending to be Native and they are very unaccepting of imposters and my family and I have always been embraced as Native when on any of the reservations  This is because phenotype does not lie.  Any of the people above or below could go onto any reservation anywhere and be accepted as Native.  However, most VA Natives many of whom are federally recognized cannot do this.  Many would be laughed off of reservations for claiming Native.

    

   

For those who still are not convinced.  Look at Greentown faces in Native clothing,  Go back a few generations and this is what the majority of people in Greentown looked like.  Some of the Green town relatives have 100% Native phenotype.  Some have 90% to 95%.  These relatives are UNDENIABLY Native.  Many fall in the range from 90 to 60% with a few falling below that.  

 

Blanch Green of Greentown Drive

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

 

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

Lucy Wyche Green of Greentown Drive 

   

Agnes Travis Reavis Gin Rd

   

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

Ralph Travis of Travis Drive

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

Nanny Mae Powell of Western Mill Rd

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

Eleanor Sally Travis Carter of Travis Drive

My mom would talk about the Natives in Greentown.  They were not here favorite people in Greentown.  She often spoke of un (Uncle) Sydney who she and her sisters said was lazy.  He would walk his mule to the field and tie him to a post and he would do nothing. He would sleep all day.  Then at the end of the day walk his mule back home like he had been working all day.  He had a cabin on right before you get to Cold Water Creek on Travis drive.  She would say he was a lazy Indian and Indians are lazy.  

My point is even though my mother did not like Natives, and most of the time would not admit that she was Native, she was fully acknowledging that Natives were a norm in Greentown and by default she was admitting that we are Native,

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

Louise Johnson of Western Mill Road

Mabel Green of Greentown Drive

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

Willie Green of Greentown Drive

Herbert Travis - House on Travis Drive

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

Mckinley Banks and his Shinncock wife Norma of Greentown Drive

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

Celest Burrell of Greentown Drive

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

Oscar Palmer of GreenTown Drive

Cousin Oscar looks so Native that the Chickahominy Tribe asked him to join their tribe.  Though they are one of the most Native looking tribes in the state of Virginia they asked Oscar because it would help them look more Native.

Gloria Travis of Reavis Gin Road

Above is Tilla Travis and mother Beulah Heartwell Rice Travis daughter of Sarah Barner (half Native) and Tom Heartwell (white guy from Lawrence) .  She was 3/4 white and 1/4 Native and obvious has nearly 100% white phenotype.  In 1972 Cousin Levi Pearson sat down with pencil and paper and documented what Grandma Buelah said about out family history.  Cousin Levi being an engineer documented what GrandMa Buelah said,  She documented that we were Sioux Native.

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

Rodney Travis GrandMother

Some of the ladies below came from the photo below.  Most people look at the girls in the photo and see African American ladies and girls.  And this is our brainwashing.  The one drop rule has forced our minds to conflate the Native phenotype with the African phenotype.  And white supremacists created the one drop rule to help exterminate the Native identity so that our Native land was free for the taking.  But look at the same you ladies out side of a African paradigm by putting them in Native clothing and what do you see?

You see Native girls!!

Polly Jackson's Grandson Harry Green

Polly Jackson's Grandson Fred Green

George Kingfish Johnson

Censerea Powell of Greentown

Buddy Johnson of Dry Bread Road - Greentown Married to Frankie Travis of Travis Drive

Gwen Green McMillian's mother of Greentown

Gwen Green McMillian of Greentown

And this is just a few of the many dozens if not hundreds of Greentown cousins who have undeniable Native phenotype.  See more here.  White supremacy is a hell of a drug--it will make one not see things directly in front of their eyes.  Many of the Native people above spent their entire lives thinking they were only African while staring at a Native face in the mirror each morning.  

In 1910, the majority or a large percent of the people living in Greentown were classified as Mulatto.  See the page from the 1910 census below. And the Mulatto classification included Natives.  Since the white people wanted to erase Natives in the state of Virginia and the USA, virtually no Natives were classified as Native, The pictures above show a sample of what the "Mulatto" people of Greentown looked like historically. 

The point is simple:  These Natives in Greentown were not a handful of isolated individuals. The majority or a very large percent of the people in Greentown were Native American with strong Native phenotype. This is what our community looked like.  According to my mother this is what the vast majority of people in GT looked like.  So I want you to imagine hundreds of people in Greentown who looked exactly like the photos above.  My point is to drill into the heads of the people stuck in a Black / White paradigm that Greentown was a very large community of Native people historically.

Some people may object to their Greentown ancestors being put into Native clothing like above. And I have intentionally left of some cousins with the some of the most Native phenotype because I know they object to their Native identity. This page is private only for family only and it not a public page.  We have been brainwashed by white supremacists to discount and dismiss our Native American ancestry.  However too much is at stake.  The majority of the state of Virginia is our Yesah Native land (Siouan). 

It is the birth right of our children, grand children, great grandchildren and our descendants and is not the birthright of the white, conning, thieving, mass-murderers who stole if for their anchor babies.  I am talking about trillions of dollars worth of our family's property.  People may object but photos of our people in character is the best tool that I have too open closed eyes of relatives and people who are blind.   And I am moving our people towards 100% "Land Back" within the next 100 to 200 years is the goal. 

Many of our people look in the mirror each day and do not see themselves as the are but see what white supremacists have brainwashed them to see.    

This brainwashing came through a lot of behind the scenes as well as overt manipulation by white supremacist.  Natives are lazy, undesirable, poor, dumb and ignorant.  There was shaming that went on and to be Native east of the Mississippi was illegal and one could be killed.  My mother shown below shunned her Native identity for the reasons above.

This is a common trick of white supremacists.  Walk up to any random Mexican guy and asked him if he is Indian and you will get a sharp NO!  I have done is many dozens of times.  And it is for the exact same reasons--Natives are lazy, undesirable, poor, dumb and ignorant.  They would rather be an immigrant and deported or put in a concentration camp than admit they are Native.

Anyone who has studied the science of paradigms knows that paradigms can be very powerful.  When one believes a paradigm actual tangible evidence directly in front of a person cannot be perceived--in literally becomes invisible.  The brain will actually block out evidence where the person does not see it. 

My purpose with the photos above is to make the evidence so powerful that there is no option but to see it.  If we walk into the woods and see a bear we know it is a bear, or a tree or a rock or a human.  By putting some of our people in Native clothing you are forced to see beyond your paradigms to see that yes there was and is a large percent of Native Americans in Greentown.  And that Greentown was a Native American community.

People may say well take anyone and put in Native clothing and they will look Native.  No this is absolutely not true.  Check out the link. 

And this is just a few of the many dozens if not hundreds of Greentown cousins who have undeniable Native phenotype.  See more here.

Greentown Natives have been participating in the Native world for decades. Many times, we are mistaken for other state- and federally recognized Natives. Because many of our people from the Saponi Reservation have strong Native American phenotype and frequently participate in public Native events, we often become the subject of articles that make assumptions about our tribal identity—sometimes directly or indirectly supporting other tribes in their recognition efforts such as the Lumbee below. Lumbee are a mixture of Eastern Siouan (Yesah) and Tuscarora.

Celest Swann—pictured above, front and center—is a Yesah Saponi Native from the Saponi Reservation in Brunswick County, Virginia--click to see video.  Celest's family has been living in the Greentown Community, located on the Saponi Reservation in Brunswick County, Virginia, since 1712—going back to her mother, Celest, and her grandfather, Hezekiah Green, to her ancestors Fred Green, Willie Green, Lucy Wyche, Blanch Green, Harry Green, and Polly Jackson (pictured here) (Saponi Natives), along with hundreds of others of their descendants born and raised in the Greentown Community on the Saponi Reservation land.  Here this news program has Celest's face front and center and Natives from the Lumbee tribe cover their faces because the don't look as Native.  Why does a 40,000 person tribe pick a person from Greentown to be the public face of their tribe.  While the chief of the Lumbee, show in the video, looks like a leprechaun from Ireland.  The same thing happened with the Occaneechi Band of The Saponi using Barry's family representing their tribe at pow wows and events for years helping them get recognition.  See full webpage on OSTV recognition here.

In regards to Cousin Wendell's point that white people and black people mixing produce Native looking children and people.  I will show why this is not the case relative to Greentown.  Yes it is true that you can produce brown children and people by mixing white and black and many could pass as Native.  And if you attend pow wows in the South Eastern USA you will see much of this.  When I married my Mexica Native wife and she came to Virginia from California and I took her to pow wows in NC she said, "they don't look Native, they look black and white mixed."  She said, "it is different with your family in Greentown".  They actually have native phenotype and not just Brown skin. She pointed out the eyes, the noses, the facial structure.

After 11 years living in Virginia and attending numerous pow wows, Native events, language classes and other native events and seeing thousands of Virginia and NC Natives, she said she has seen three Native people in VA and NC that she would consider Native if she saw them walking down the street somewhere.  Two males and one female.  The rest just appear Black and White mixed or just White or just Black with some Native features or just White or just Black.  This was from a person from CA who is surrounded by Southern Native and Western Native people every day.

Look at the Native nose and profile in the photo below.  This is the stereotypical side profile that has been used thousands of times across the USA to depict what Native Americans look like.  This is 100% the stereotypical Native profile as shown here.   No white and Black couple is going to make that face. 

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

Look at Cousin McKinley Banks photo.  No white and black couple is going to make that Native face, eyebrows and eyes.  And these are only two examples.  Greentown has dozens of examples.  But most importantly no one community will have this much Native phenotype unless they are actually Native, 

You don't get these Native eyes, eyebrows and cheek area like Cousin McKinley unless you are actually Native.

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

You have seen these faces before.  You have seen them in the movies.  The Greentown Native above, Willie Powell, looks like Gram Green below.  

And below Cousin Chester Green looks like Wes Studi.  You don't get this much Native phonotype as Cousin Chester Green, unless you are actually Native.  Greentown has some of the most Native phenotype of any tribe in the states of VA and NC with the exception of perhaps the Cherokee of NC.

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

And below Art Kenner husband to Yvonne Travis Kenner of Travis Drive also looks like Wes Studi.

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

Yvonne Travis Kenner of Travis Drive wife of Art Kenner pictured above.  It was a norm and very common since the 1712 Saponi reservation for Natives to married other Natives as with my mother and father below.

While we are on the subject of Natives marrying other Natives this Greentown norm was followed by my mother Eleanor Travis Carter who married Charles Carter from neighboring Mecklenburg where Occoneechee Island resides.

UNDENIABLY NATIVE

Back to the subject of Greentown Natives having enough Native phenotype to be cast in movies as Natives I have been asked by two full blood Lokota women if I were in movies because they thought they had seen me as a Native character in some movies.  

In the early 2000s I took my Mexica wife to Cousin Oscar's house.  She had a 3 year old toddler.  He kept hanging around Oscar like he knew him and he kept asking where are the toys.  When we left his mother told me that he thought Oscar was his Mexican uncle because they look so much alike and he thought he was at his uncle's house with a lot of toys.  It is normal for Oscar, Ralph and myself to have Mexicans speak to us in Spanish.  It happens to me almost daily.  Mexico is a Native nation with 90% of the population being Native.  They think we are Mexican because we look Native like they look Native,  

Keeping the Blood Thick

My mother told me that cousins marrying cousins was the norm in Greentown. To understand why that developed, you have to look at what happened to our people over several centuries with the invasion and American Holocaust..

In 1491, based on the original sources, one can extrapolate that there were roughly 2 million Native people living in what is now Virginia. By 1601, estimates had fallen to approximately 6,000 people. By 1712, when our reservation was established, our population had been reduced to approximately 600 people. We were literally on the verge of extinction.

Under those circumstances, a norm developed of reproducing within the remaining tribal community. That eventually broke older traditions our people had followed for centuries concerning who could marry whom and who could have children together. With the population reduced to a tiny fraction of what it had once been, cousins ended up marrying cousins.

This was not unique to Greentown. Similar patterns occurred in other small and increasingly isolated Native communities in the Southeast. The Haliwa-Saponi, for example, have historical accounts connecting an inherited eye disorder with generations of marriage among relatives within a small community.

My grandparents on my mother's side were cousins. I am not going to characterize whether they were second, third, or fourth cousins. They were cousins, and according to my mother, this was the norm in Greentown.

My mother told me there was even a name for it: “keeping the blood thick.”

Think about what those words meant in the historical circumstances our ancestors faced. Our population was dwindling toward nothing—from 1492, through 1601, through the establishment of the reservation in 1712. “Keeping the blood thick” meant keeping our Native people alive. It meant marrying, having children, and maintaining families within the surviving Native community rather than allowing that community to disappear through death, dispersal, and assimilation.

What began as a response to catastrophic population loss became a cultural norm. That norm remained strong in Greentown for generations—ultimately surviving for centuries and continuing into the 1900s.

The Evidence Is Overwhelming

• No family in the United States has dozens of people with an undeniably Native phenotype without having significant Native ancestry and being Native.
  
  
• No family has dozens of people with an undeniably Native phenotype while also living for hundreds of years on a Native reservation without being Native American.
  
  
• No family has all of the above while also maintaining an oral history identifying themselves as the EXACT Native people whom the historical records say lived on that reservation land.  In other words our great grand parents said we are Sioux Indians and we are living on a Sioux Indian reservation.
  
  
• And to top all of this off, no Virginia or North Carolina tribe has as much Native phenotype, per capita, as the people shown above, perhaps with the exception of the NC Cherokee.
  
  
• Greentown Natives have more than one situation where state and federally recognized tribes have used Greentown faces to help their recognition efforts.  Did any of the 21 cases that cousin Wendel observed have this.
  
  
• The fact that our Greentown Native phenotype is so strong that Lakota and other Natives confuse Greentown Natives with Natives like Wes Studi and Graham Greene.. I guarantee you that no black white mixed people have ever had that happen.
  
  
• Greentown Natives have been invited by other federally recognized tribes to be members of their tribe with zero evidence that we are of that tribe and in fact knowing that we have no connection to that tribe.
  
  
• The fact that we have demonstrated that Greentown people can go onto any reservation in the USA, including areas hostile to wannbes and wabos and be immediately accepted as Native.  And only a faction of the people from East coast tribes can make this claim.
  
  
• The fact that we are welcomed in pow wows who card people and we go and dance with no questions asked. Card means if you don't have a card from a government recognized tribe then you cannot dance.
  
  
• The fact that the Buffalo Head Nickle, America's symbol of a Native American, literally has the profile of one of our Greentown family members on it.
  
  
• Where did the Saponi people go between 1780, when white historians last recorded Saponi Natives living on the reservation land, and approximately 1800–1820, when Beulah Hartwell Rice Travis says her Sioux grandmother was born? Did those Sioux people disappear into thin air in 40 years and some mixed Black / White people who looked exactly like the Sioux appear out out of thin air.  Make it make sense.  No we are those Sioux Indians.

ALL of these facts combined are overwhelming evidence that we are Yesah-Saponi Natives of Virginia, descendants of the Saponi people of the Saponi Reservation on which our people still live.

It is simply impossible for all of these things to be true and for us not to be Native.

Cousin Wendell must understand that none of the 21 cases that he witnessed had anything close to the unique situation that we Occoneechee-Saponi-Totaro Natives have in Greentown.  Does this mean that everyone today in Greentown is Native?  No! Absolutely not!  Significant racial mixing has occurred, particularly over the past three generations. As a result, some cousins now have so little Native ancestry and now for all practical purposes, it is not reasonable for them to identify themselves as Native.

Human beings determine what is real by thousands of times each day based the empirical evidence before them as perceived by their five senses. Every day as we walk around this world, humans look at other humans and conclude with absolute certainty: that is a Black person, that is an Asian, and that is a White person from Europe. We do this with all kinds of decisions regarding everything.  Do I stop or do I go at a traffic light.  Is this food rotten or is in good to eat not based upon 100% proof of anything,  By what our five senses tell us based upon the empirical evidence.  We do it every single day. We make those determinations based upon the empirical evidence directly in front of our eyes—the physical characteristics we call phenotype. Phenotype is evidence.

Courts operate on the same fundamental principle: evidence is examined, a standard is applied, and a conclusion is reached. When a jury finds a person guilty of murder and the judge sentences him to death he does not say, "You are probably guilty,” or “There is an exceptionally strong case that you are guilty.” He says we are going to kill you because you are murdered someone.  It is said with ABSOLUTE certainty.  Once the evidence establishes the conclusion, the statements are absolute.  However, when it comes to classifying oneself as Native all of a sudden the rules that we use in ALL other aspects of life go out of the window and people say oh you cannot do that.  There is this new higher standard that must be met.  I reject that and call it what it is--RACISM.  It is racism against Native people and white supremacy talking.  Even if you are a Black or Native person saying it, it is still racist and white supremacy.

We apply that same standard of  evidence to ourselves. Our phenotype is evidence. Our ancestors' phenotype is evidence. Dozens of related people displaying Native phenotype across multiple generations is evidence. Our genealogy is evidence. Our oral history is evidence. Our continuous connection to the land is evidence. Our families living for generations on the historic Saponi Reservation lands is evidence. The historical record identifying the Saponi people with these lands is evidence. These are not isolated coincidences. They are multiple independent lines of evidence all pointing to the same conclusion.

I reject the idea that Native people must somehow prove themselves to an impossible standard that society does not demand before reaching conclusions about virtually anything else including killing people.  It is racist against Native people to attempt to use some different standard to determine Native identity.  Yes Black people can be racist against Natives even within their own family..

We are the Occoneechee Saponi Tutelo Tribe of Virginia. We are Yesah people. We are Native descendants of the Saponi people of these historic Saponi Reservation lands. We do not say “probably.” We do not say “possibly.” We do not say there is merely a “strong case.” We state our conclusion exactly as a court states its verdict after examining the evidence: WE ARE YESAH NATIVES JUST AS Grandma Beulah said. That is our conclusion, and we state it absolutely, concretely, and unequivocally.

Cousin Wendell having not grown up in Southside Virginia, like many of my cousins, lacks the deep connection to the land and knowing that can only come from growing up and living here.  Since I was a children spending hours alone walking, hiking, canoeing, horseback riding this land and waters there is a knowing that can only come from living it.  The land is made of the blood, bones and DNA of our ancestors of tens of thousands of years and I feel and have always felt the permanent connection to them and it.

There is an historic bias that has been manipulated by white people for people in Greentown to not identify as Native.  My mother, Eleanor Travis, who was born and raised in Greentown, on Travis Drive, less than a 1/4 mile from Greentown Rd, Like cousin Lucy was opposed to identifying as Native.  In fact at times my mother was passionately opposed to identifying as Native.

Her view was that Indians were lazy, poor and backwards.  She said that the people in Greentown who were more Native were lazy, poor and backwards.  She often referred to her uncle Sydney Travis as an example.  It was a running joke in the family that Un-Sydney would take his mule to the field in the morning tie it to a tree, pretend to work all day and come back home after doing nothing.  Cousin Hezekiah Green conveyed this same sentiment to my Uncle Ralph Travis and I one days when we stopped by his house and talked to him.  He talked about the lazy Indians in Greentown.

My mother had two Grand Mothers Ann Walker who was a Sioux Native medicine woman and poor by European standards and Beulah Heartwell Rice Travis.  She was 1/4 Native and 3/4 white.  She live largely like the Europeans in the area.  My mother spoke of her white table cloth and how her table would be set with nice dishes and silverware.  My mom spoke of the herself and her Grandma Beulah routinely eating at the whites only lunch counter in Lawrenceville.  She spoke poorly of her Grandma Ann who was a Sioux Native medicine woman who by European standards was poor and ignorant.  Over the years I was able to shift her opinion of Natives and our family being Native and for 20 years she enjoyed attending pow wow and hearing about our Native ancestry.  I told her look at Mexicans.  They are the hardest working people in the USA and they are Native.  Over the years I converted her but once in a while she would revert back to the anti-Native thinking.

The White supremacists manipulated bias against identifying as Native extends not only across the USA, in places like Greentown, but also into Mexico and beyond.  Virtually all Mexicans have the same identical distain for Indios that my mother had and for the same reasons.  Indians are lazy, dumb, backward and poor.  Walk up to 100 Mexicans randomly on the street, who look 100% Native, and ask if they are Indian or Native and all 100 are guaranteed to say NO!.  I know this because I have done it dozens of times.  It is just a coincidence that people in Greentown (who are undeniably Native) deny being Native exactly like virtually all Mexicans 2,000 miles away?  Or is this something that has been manipulated by white supremacists as part of an identity genocide, to manipulate us into abandoning our Native identity and thus our Native land rights.  We have been brainwashed to deny being Native because Natives are dumb, poor, dirty, backwards and lazy so that there are no more Natives and white people have free and clear title to the land in perpetuity.  They are smart enough to think of their descendants and their inheritance hundreds of years into the future and we are dumb enough to walk away from trillions of dollars of inheritance for our descendants for hundreds of years leaving them to flounder in homelessness in their own homeland--hell NO!!!.

The Yesah people must have our land back.  It is our children's birthright and we are not freely handing it over to thieves and mass murderers who planned for and their descendants to have this stolen perpetuity.  Yes it was planned for the white people of today to be able to claim innocence's while knowingly being in possession of stolen property.  Other's may be willing to give away their children's birth right by breeding your Native DNA out of existence but I am not going out like that--Yeash today-Yesah Tomorrow-Yesah Forever on our homeland of ten thousand years.

The more we follow the white supremacist con and move further away from this Native identity by marrying other than Native the more watered down our land rights become, as our Native DNA is watered down, until at some point their are no more land rights.  My mother says Natives marrying other Natives in Greentown was a norm and was called keeping the Blood thick.  I have an article written on this subject for Greentown where in order to keep our Native people from going extinct cousins were marrying cousins just like in ALL South Eastern Native communities.  The norm from the 1700s was to marry people that look like you so that your children look like you and the Yesah people do not go extinct..   Here is the question that we must asked ourselves:

Why are we so easily manipulated?

• After all of the lying, cheating, stealing, murder, torture, conning, kidnaping, raping that white supremacists did why are we so easily trusting of them and so easily manipulated by them?
• In the face of overwhelming evidence of you and your descendants being the rightful of trillions of dollars of land that has been in your family for perhaps 10,000 years, why would you be advocating to give this to some white supremacists who killed your family to steal this land a few centuries ago?

I know the answer.  It is not that we are dumb.  The answer is that we have been manipulated and brainwashed for centuries to think the way they want us to think and we are just following the road they laid out for us. 

By the end of the current century Natives will be the majority in the USA and can merely vote our land back but if we are so watered down that we cannot reasonably be counted as Native we get nothing.  

Our native Phenotype is so strong that Oscar Palmer was asked by members of the Chickahominy tribe to join their Chickahominy tribe even through he has no connection to them. 

I have been asked by two Lakota women if I played any Native roles in any movies. I knew who they were talking about but I just answered no. They said that my face looked so similar to a Native they seen in movies. 

When I first saw Celest i saw her from a distance at the Occoneechee State Park pow wow and I did not know who she was.  My first thought was wow, we have some Lakota lady from out west at the pow wow today.  You cannot get that shape face from mixing a black and white person.  

My family has always been accepted as Native through VA, MD and NC and out west on several different reservations.  In fact we have been embraced and welcomed into the Native world--east and west coast.  And the Native world is very guarded to the point of paranoia as to who they let in.

Below is a picture of the re-construction of a Yasah Saponi Native lady who's remains were discovered on the Dan river in our territory.  She has the same facial structure as my daughter.  As well as my sister.  And Cousin Celest has a similar structure

Some white people who own 23andme says that some Greentown people are not Native but my Great Grand mother Beulah Travis says that we are.  She identified people in Greentown who were Native.  Who should I believe--my own mother or a white supremacist who has stolen my wealth and has a vested interest in saying that it is his and not mine.  Of course I am going to believe my mother.   The empirical evidence directly before me with my own eyes tell me I am Native and Saponi Native but I am suppose to believe the opposite and what Donald Trump or some Maga says or 23andme says so.  Hell NO!!!  I believe my eyes and my mothers

We believe what white people tell us over what the evidence shows and our own family because we have been brainwashed to do this.  White people get control of the narrative, the positions of power as judges and decisions makers we, and present themselves as the abature of fairness most of our people will tend to believe white supremacist over their own blood relatives and the empirical evidence-even knowing their lying and stealing track record  This is foolishness.

In the 1920 census nearly all Greentown citizens were NOT identified as Black.  Well over 90% were identified as Mulatto.  Is was the near absolute norm in Virginia for Natives to be identified as Mulatto. Because of Walter Plecker and his paper genocide movement by the 1930 census all of these very same people were identified as Black.  

Walter A. Plecker (1861–1947) was Virginia’s first state Registrar of Vital Statistics (1912–1946) and a leading eugenics advocate. He pushed through and strictly enforced the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which forced every Virginian to be recorded as either “white” or “colored.” Plecker then forbade clerks from writing “Indian” on birth, marriage, and death certificates (except for a narrow “Pocahontas” exception for certain white families). He rewrote and reclassified records, threatened local officials with prosecution, and kept lists of targeted surnames—actions that erased Native identity on paper for many communities (often called “paper genocide”). His policies harmed Native families’ ability to claim their identity, access schools and services, and later prove tribal continuity. The effects lasted for generations and help explain why accurate, inclusive record descriptions in Virginia are so important today.

There is more evidence to show.  This is just part of the case.  I will expand to show how our ways of living, things we do and say, our oral history, our ancestry lineage leads back to SaponiTown on the Saponi Reservation

The Land Is Why White People Want Us to Forget We Are Native

White people are motivated to get us to forget that we are Native American because of the land. Since 1492, since their arrival here, they have murdered, genocided, produced the Holocaust, had bounties on our heads, “kill the Indian, save the man,” did paper genocide, changed birth certificates, changed death records. They've done all kinds of manipulation to get Native Americans to disappear one way or another.

Trillions of dollars of land are at stake. The entire foundation that the United States is built upon—the land mass of the United States—is what is at stake. If all of a sudden there are 100 million Natives here, we have claim to the land. So of course they want us to disappear one way or another.

This is why the vast majority of Mexicans and Hispanics do not identify as Native. They have been manipulated the same way, not to see themselves as Native.

It's all about the land. It's all about greed. It's all about theft. It's all about white supremacy domination in Native land.

NOT COMPLETE