Addressing Greentown Family Members Regarding Native Ancestry
Confidential--do not share or copy please--NOT for public viewing!!
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.
- Cousin Lucy had two dna tests that showed zero Native ancestry.
- 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.
- 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.
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 mislabelled 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 Hedgepath 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-Saoni 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.
"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 is 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 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 Ntaives many of whom are federally recognized cannot do this. Many would be laughed off of reservations for claiming Native.
And this is just a few of the many dozens if not hundreds of Greentown cousins who have undeniable Native phenotype. See more here.
No family in the USA has this many people with undeniably Native phenotype without having SIGNIFICANT Native DNA. That is just not possible.
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 features and not just Brown skin. She pointed out the eyes, the noses, the facial structure. Now this being said I dont think she meant that none of the tribal people from the pow wows, we attended in NC, had Native features. But she said what she said. This was from a person from CA who is surrounded by Southern Native and Western Native people every day.
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,
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. Her spoke poorly of her Grandma Ann who was a 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 Pleckler 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 are many social forces that have caused the our Native ancestors from the Saponi reservation to over the centuries identify as Black or African Americans and in essence become that by generation after generation marrying black people and watering down the Native DNA, I have written extensively about the norm from the reservation to the early 1900's of Natives marrying native and other people who look like them. However, this largely broke down due to the manipulations and social forces created and manipulated by white people so that we Saponi Natives breed ourselves out of existence.
At this point my objective in Greentown is not for people who identify as Black and whose Native DNA has been watered down to the point where there is no Native phenotype, to all of a sudden start identifying as Native and start coming to pow wows and to join the tribe. Though some tribes are nearly 100% white or black that is not the objective of our tribe. Papers and certificates and recognitions do not matter when it comes to reality. If one is Black one is Black--If one is White one is White no matter what a piece of paper or a card or tribal recognition given by some committee. Any thing we want in life takes work. If one desires being a real Native tribe it will take work and generations of planning and effort just like it took white people generations and centuries to deconstruct our tribes and civilizations. And no recognition by Donald Trump or some politician signing your tribal card can change this.
What we at the Occoneechee-Saponi-Totaro Indian Tribe of Virginia are most interested in doing is marrying only Native, producing Native children generation after generation and returning nearly 100% to Native DNA as we grow the tribe for the coming decades and centuries as we reclaim ALL our Native land and our balanced and peaceful Native ways. Yes at the appropriate time we will seek state and federal recognition but we will do so in parallel with other real actions.
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
NOT COMPLETE