Message to the Tribe

What we currently have is The Occoneechee Saponi Totaro Tribe of Virginia (OSTV), which includes the people that are in this group and some of the people in Greentown who have been actively participating in activities the last 10 to 15 years as shown here. It doesn't include anybody from the Greentown area that has not been involved and has not been participating. In fact we have some people in Greentown who do not agree that we are native and are opposed to what we are doing. See this confidential page. Do not share this page. It is intentionally hidden from the public.

In addition to the OSTV, I have my dad's family / tribe in Boydton, The Occoneechee-Cheraw Coles Band of Boydton which is a separate entity. I also I have an offshoot of both the Occoneechee-Cheraw Coles Band of Boydton and the Occoneechee Saponi Totaro Tribe of Virginia, that is a third band—a combination of the two tribes, which is my nuclear family and its descendants—the Occoneechee Band of Yesah Nation. See this link.

My plans for recognition is with the Greentown group - OSTV. The Boydton tribe has less chance of meeting the criteria. Later after we receive state recognition we could become more inclusive and merge with the Boydton Tribe or include some of the thousands of other Yesah Natives in Southside va. But there is no plan to do that now.

My plan for long term survivability is with the Occoneechee Band of Yesah Nation--my nuclear family and descendants as documented here . This is because I have more control of influencing what my children do than any other people in the OSTV-- Occoneechee Saponi Totaro Tribe of Virginia or Occoneechee-Cheraw Coles Band of Boydton. With this band all of my descendants are expected to marry Native and have Native children. And I have financial and other incentives to ensure that they do this. Over the coming decades this will return my family to 99.9% Native dna. White supremacists tried to exterminate us by breeding us out of existence. Two can play that game and we can bred ourselves back into existence.

Looking at the tribal structure above our ancestors were structured similar to this. Not everyone was part of one giant group with one single leader. There were hundreds of bands, clans, communities spread all over but interconnected and interdependent upon one another,

The way the other tribes in Virginia and North Carolina are structured, I am 95% sure they will not exist in 100 to 150 years. Why?

By the end of this century, the majority of the population of the United States will be made up of Spanish speaking Native Americans. Currently these Natives make up 99.54% of the Native population in the Americas. Over the next 50 to 200 years, white people will become a small minority population in the USA.

The current recognition system was developed to support white supremacy by keeping the Native population low. And when that white-dominated culture is no longer the majority culture, what will exist in its place will increasingly be Native Americas based system. We look at the institutions of the USA as absolute and they are not. Things change dramatically over time. The politicians, voters, taxpayers, and people running the country will increasingly will be real Natives who look 100% native.

Imagine those Brown Mexicans and other Spanish speaking Native people working hard every day, (and we all know they are the hardest working people in the Americas) paying taxes to the government, and then watching the government take some portion of those tax dollars and give it to federally recognized tribes whose members are white people such as some of the VA tribes. At some point, there will be political pressure against that system. A future majority population will decide through the political process, "We Brown Natives are not going to continue working hard each day to give money to white people who committed the genocide against us.” As part of this process they will naturally look at tribes with little to no Native phenotype who they perceive as not as hard working as them and these tribes will lose as well. So DNA and phenotype will matter. And the current recognition system will not sustain indefinitely.

In addition for many tribes government funding is the core thing holding them together. That will be gone because why should Native people be paying other Native people. And once the funding is gone the motivation to stay connected will be gone.

I've heard some of you talk about the fact that, "Well, Barry, the racial makeup of the tribe really doesn't matter because the other tribes up on the East Coast are heavily mixed and they received state or federal recognition--things have changed. The problem with that thinking is that you're looking at the political landscape of 2026, the early 2000s, or the late 1900s. That is going to be a very different political situation than what we're going to have 100 years from now, or even 150 or 200 years from now, when I believe the majority of the United States will be made up of Native Americans.

So I think that's a bad calculation if you're only looking at today. Again, my main focus is the future and the survivability of our people and returning to the people we were before 1492.. I'm not trying to build something that works only under today's political system. I'm trying to build something that can survive the political, demographic, and cultural changes that I believe are coming over the next 100, 200, 300, and even 500 years--7 generations. And reverse the effects of the genocide of our people--read plan here. I am personally determined not to allow white supremacists to have their way and exterminate our 1492 Native people.

That is why I believe tribes that are not focused on maintaining enough Native dna and phenotype and are readily recognized as Native face a serious long-term survival problem. If, 100 or 200 years from now, federal recognition, federal money, grants, and the other outside structures that help hold some of these organizations together are reduced or disappear, some of those east coast groups may simply drift apart.

That is the long-term reality I am trying to plan around as explained here. I am trying to think about what will allow the Occoneechee and Yesa people to remain a living Native people 100, 200, 300, and even 500 years from now--please read.

Therefore my focus is to make sure that Occoneechee Band of Yesah continues and thrives and repopulates our territory, but that it doesn't interfere with my dad's tribe or the larger Greentown tribe. So they are three entities that are somewhat connected together but with perhaps different agendas.

Yesah in the State of Virginia

But also I am working—one of my passions is to help awaken the thousands of people in Virginia who have “significant” Yesah ancestry shown here. And we're doing that through two means. We have the Saponi Descendants Association, who are people who are new to all of this and as they mature and organize they can join the Confederation of Yesah Saponi Tribes and Families.

The idea with that is people like Imani Clark with her Manahoac people, we're able to recognize them and they recognize us as Native people, as well as other groups and communities and families around the state of Virginia. The point of that is to build a larger network where we are recognizing one another and we're working together. This gives us more political power and it stakes out our territory, the majority of the state of Virginia, and holds it for us

And one of the reasons I have established these different entities is for everyone's protection. We live in a pretty crazy Native world, in addition to just living in a crazy world in general, and people do and say a lot of things and are attacked for lots of reasons.

For example I’ve had people approach me and complain about xxxxx and ask is she a member of your tribe because she is saying and doing crazy stuff? And my response is no, she's not a member of our tribe. The confederation allows us to work with people without getting tangled up in the drama they create because they don’t listen to advice that we give.

So people are going to do what they want to do, even if they are advised to do something different. What we don't want to do is have our OSVT or my OBYN tribes pulled down and pulled into some conflict, into some reputation-damaging stuff because other people do crazy stuff and won't listen and just want to do what they want to do.

There are many people in VA that stayed solo for many years because they didn't want to get connected to any one group because people do crazy stuff, and they didn't want to be associated with any of that drama.

So I guess the main thing to think about, just to provide clarity, and I want to repeat again:

The Occoneechee Saponi Totaro Tribe of Virginia is specifically Greentown, but it's not everybody in Greentown. It's only the people that have been involved for the past 10, 15 years or who have significant Native phenotype as shown here.
The Occoneechee-Cheraw Coles Band of Boydton is my dad side of my family see below.
The Occoneechee Band of Yesah Nation is my nuclear family.
The Yesah-Saponi Descendants Association is for new people just waking up with zero organization.
The Confederation of Yesah-Saponi Tribes, Bands, and Families of Virginia is an organization formed to recognize one another as Yesah people and to ally and organize tribal efforts and bands together, just as our ancestors were allied and worked together.

Again, a lot of people can come in with a lot of craziness. I have seen it too many times and at my age I really don't have time for too much drama, confusion or politics.

And I'm not planning to do very much with our tribe until we get our money straight with our business, where I can donate some of that money towards the tribe and getting some things done FAST! We live in a world where it just takes money to get things done. Last year things should have blasted off but the Trump tariffs almost killed us. This year we had a 36 million dollar deal per year but the guy sold his company for $210 million. We have lots of things going right now including 500 vehicles to SpaceX and lots of data center contracts. We got a call Friday for $1 million dollars in vehicles to build data centers in PA and NJ.. So we are close but not quite there yet.

Avoiding Getting Discredited

If we go far enough back in time, the Native descendants of the reservation had a very unified worldview. If we go back even further, to 1492, we had a completely coherent, unified worldview—a common understanding of who we were, where we came from, and where we were headed.

With the onslaught of the holocaust and genocide of the last 500 years, our vision, our worldview, and our thinking about who we are has dramatically diverged in many different directions. In the last 20 to 30 years, this has accelerated dramatically.

One of my objectives is to somewhat unify our vision of who we are and where we came from so that we have more of a common understanding of this. Today, if you look at Greentown, most people consider Greentown a Black community. I don't. I consider Greentown historically Native and see why here.

At the same time, there are people among the Greentown descendants, including some people in this group, who have a very different worldview. Some have expressed to be a multicultural worldview and the way things are absolutely going to evolve. Their view is that the world is going in that direction, we're going to go along with the multicultural world, and eventually our Native identity will simply be lost.

Other people in our family have expressed the belief that Black people are the original Natives and we are Siberians and some that have stated on line that Black people were already here when the white people came in 1492--In 1492 Native came in all skin tones and all hair textures.

There are other people outside this group who go even further and believe that the people we perceive as Native are not actually Native—that they are Siberians, and foreigners and imposters and that the real Natives are the people we perceive today as African Americans.

My point is that we have a lot of diversity in our vision and confusion of who we are, where we came from and where we are going.

There are other people in the group who believe that it really doesn't matter if we have a mixed Native tribe—mixed Black, mixed Native, mixed white. Their view is that it really doesn't matter since other mixed tribes are getting recognition. So there is a tremendous diversity of vision about who we are and where we're going.

Where we get into serious problems, and go over the line, is when what we are saying publicly is going to create hostility toward us in the Native world and put us in the middle of a war with virtually all Native people in the USA..

What goes over the line is when we start saying publicly that Black people are the original Natives or that Black people were here in 1492 and saying that Natives pre-1492 came in all skin tones and hair textures says this. Those statements are going to create tremendous hostility toward us and could get us cancelled at some point in the future by tribes all over the country.

There are people out there for whom researching these things is their hobby and, in some cases, essentially their life's work. They will dig up old posts, old statements, old websites, things individual tribal members have said, and anything else they can find. They will conduct detailed research specifically to challenge and discredit us.

The question is what do we do about this? I think we have to have an honest and open conversation about how to reduce this risk.

The way we're getting around that with the confederation is very simple. We say that the person making outlandish statements is not a member of our tribe. When somebody asks me about xxxxx, my answer is simply: She's not a member of my tribe. That's it. It's real easy and it's real simple.