Occoneechee Village
Occoneechee Village is the life long vision of Occoneecchee-Saponi-Totaro Tribe of Virginia Chief Barry Carter. For much of his life he did not know it but the vision for Occoneechee Village and The Network of Indigenous Communities, that he was destined to create, was a gift given to him at birth. Looking back on it virtually everything that had happened to him in his life had him moving towards that vision.
Barry has always been very closely connected to the land and nature. In his second year in college he decided that working and living in the modern world was not for him and put in place a plan to join the corporate world, make money, buy land and live naturally homesteading off of the land. He joined IBM directly out of college getting one of the top prized jobs in the country.
For the entire five years, although IBM had been a wonderful experience he never waivered from his vision and stuck to his plan and left IBM after five years. In the late 1990s Barry began re-organizing the Occoneechee-Saponi-Totaro Indian Tribe of Virginia.
Over the years Barry's vision continuously became clearer. Barry was giving a seminar in 2000 at East Carolina University on the subject of a book that he had written titled Infinite Wealth--A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era. In the book he describes a new way of human organization that was evolving, because of information technology, as we shifted into the Information Age.
Dr Paul Browning a business professor at ECU asked the question, "Isn't the new system that you are speaking of the same networked tribal system that Native Americans had in place before 1492. Yes it was the same system. Information technology is pushing humanity full circle back to the most natural way of human organizing as we transition into the Information Age. The world is naturally returning to the Indigenous tribal way of organizing void of authority but through horizonal connections.
The re-organizing of his tribe and his work in business regarding human social organization and his plans to return to living naturally on the land and his activist work to end the destruction of the Indigenous World were all connected. His ancestors had been guiding him all along towards to same thing in all that he was doing. His plan for a homestead was not just about his nuclear family but was about extended family and tribe and connections to other tribes.
Though in the early 2000s he knew that his business plans, tribal plans and homesteading back to nature plans were call connected he still had problems. There were many setbacks and delays over the decades.. Most family and tribal members had been colonized away from the Indigenous ways. Having been colonized, most had no interest in going this deep into their culture. Pow wows, history and genealogy could all be done mostly be from sterile and comfortable environments. Thus Barry made Occoneechee Village a sub-organization to the tribe and opened the community plans up to others. Over a decade he invited other Indigenous people to join the effort from 2002 through 2012.
By 2006 Barry had a family of 10 and a couple of Indigenous people living at Occoneechee Village. They started a business and began looking for land. In 2009 they acquired 123 acres in Lunenburg County, the ancestral territory of his people. Barry had written a 29 page Occoneechee Village Covenant regarding how the community worked. The document had evolved over several years. By 2012 a dozen or so people had moved to Occoneechee Village and participated in community life. There was one huge problem that Barry had not anticipated.
When the 1492 invasion occurred there was a genocidal effort lasting hundreds of years to completely erase all vestiges of Native civilization as part of an effort to dispossess Natives of our land. One critical element of Native civilization was the lack of ego--or oneness. It was the thing that allowed Natives to live lovingly and collaborative in peace in large extended family units without laws, jails, borders, wars. In 1886 J.D.C. Atkins, Commissioner of Indian Affairs said, The Indian must be imbued with the exalting egotism of American civilization so that he will say "I" instead of "We," and "This is mine" instead of "This is ours."
We were intentionally infected with ego so that we would never be able to comeback together and cooperate and collaborate and live in extended family units as our ancestors had done. Barry being an engineer put in an engineering change to his plan. He excluded all but nuclear family in future community plans. He had more children raising them outside of the system to be void of ego.
Starting in 2014 and beyond the focus is to build Occoneechee Village via Barry's children. In addition to this Barry decided to grow his business to a $100 million dollar+ business and use money from this to grow Occoneechee Village and the Network of Indigenous Communities as well as to organize the Occoneecchee-Saponi-Totaro Tribe of Virginia.