Nominations

Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Madam President, I rise today to speak about a really important victory in Virginia yesterday--a victory for the Monacan Indian Nation, and it is a victory that I have had a hand in over the course of many years. I want to describe it and celebrate it.

When the English came to Virginia first in 1607, there were thriving Virginia Native populations. The populations east--in eastern Virginia, east of Richmond--were part of a larger confederacy called the Powhatan Confederacy, and they spoke an Algonquian-based language. There were Tribes in the southern part of Virginia that spoke an Iroquois-based language, and Tribes in the western part of Virginia spoke a Sioux- based language. One of these Tribes was the Monacan Tribe.

John Smith, in 1607, 1608, and 1609, traveled all around the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries and did some very detailed mapmaking of the area, including a town that he called the chief Monacan town named Rassawek. Rassawek is on a point of land in what is now Fluvanna County, VA, where the Rivanna River and the James River combine.

Rassawek was the headquarters, or the chief administrative town, of the Monacan Tribal Nation. The story of the Virginia Tribes is one of triumph, but also one of tragedy. Many of the Tribes made peace treaties with the English in the 1670s. All of these Tribes were discriminated against, and some were driven far from their homes.

The Monacan Tribe was driven by the English settlers from Rassawek, further west into Amherst County, and then many of them were driven even further west into the middle west end and other places. But Rassawek maintained its sacred status to the Monacan Nation for many reasons, including the fact that so many of Monacan families were buried there and their remains are still there.

An aspect of the tragedy of the Virginia Tribes is that: When I was elected to be a Senator in 2012, none of the Virginia Tribes had ever been recognized, even though many still live intact in communities in Virginia. There were over 500 Tribes that had been federally recognized. The Virginia Tribes are part of exhibits at the Smithsonian Museum at the foot of Capitol Hill; and yet they had never been recognized. And they had never been recognized for three reasons.

One, they made peace treaties with the English rather than with the United States. Often, recognition begins with the treaty entered into with the United States. Second, often, recognition is determined by extensive submission of land records and other records. Many Virginia courthouses were burned during the Civil War, and so records establishing Tribal lands, for example, were destroyed.

But, finally, and most cruelly, Virginia had an official named Walter Plecker who served as the State's director of the Department of Vital Statistics from 1920 until the 1960s. And he was a eugenicist. He believed there was no such thing as Indians, that they were all color. And, systemically, he determined to take every record he could find of Tribal communities in Virginia and change the racial designation of those records--birth certificates, marriage licenses, death notices--of Indian members to ``color,'' even to the point of disinterring Indians who had been buried in cemeteries that were primarily cemeteries for Caucasians. This made it, again, very difficult for these Tribes. They refer to this as the ``paper genocide'' for them to assert their claim for Tribal recognition.

I started working with the Monacan and six other Tribes when I was mayor of Richmond on this issue because I became friends with a guy named Steve Adkins, who is the chief of one of these Tribes, the Chickahominy Tribe.

We worked over the course of many, many years--these Tribes coming to Congress and asking for Federal recognition. And when I came into office in January of 2013, this was very, very high on my to-do list, to finally right this historic wrong and correct an injustice and allow these Virginia Tribes--whose stories are so well known and still live in these communities--to finally be recognized.

Now, we have gotten seven Tribes recognized--one through the Bureau of Indian Affairs process, the Pamunkey Tribe, and six through an act of Congress. I thank the Presiding Officer because all of my colleagues joined together at the end of 2018 and, in a unanimous vote, finally did justice by the Virginia Tribes, including the Monacan Tribe.

Now onto Rassawek. The Monacans were driven further west and now have their, sort of, Tribal headquarters in a place called Bear Mountain in Amherst County. The chief of the Tribe is a man named Ken Branham. Ken is a good friend.

In 2014, a local authority, the James River Water Authority in Fluvanna County, decided that strategic location at the merger of two rivers would be a perfect place to build big water treatment intake and treatment facility. It is a growing community. There are more water needs in the community. The facility was needed, but the site they chose for the construction of the facility was Rassawek.

The authority proceeded forward to purchase the land and then undertake engineering studies to build this water treatment facility. At the time, 2014, the Monacans had not yet been federally recognized. They could complain, and they could argue, but they didn't have the clout that Federal recognition would eventually give them. Yet many people rallied to the Monacans' cause and said, ``Look, we preserve other sites all the time.''

Virginia is first in the Nation in preserving, for example, Civil War battlefield sites, and we preserved the ancestral home of the Powhatan of Werowocomoco on the York River, which is soon to be a national park. Should we allow Rassawek to be essentially destroyed and the remains of Monacans buried there for generations to be disturbed?

Armed with Federal recognition, the Monacans attracted even more support. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, in 2020, named Rassawek as one of the most 11 endangered sites in the country. A huge grassroots effort developed because of the hard work of the Tribe that assembled thousands and thousands of supporting individuals--some very nearby Rassawek, but some very far away--to advocate that there has to be a better solution for this water treatment need in Fluvanna County than to disturb and destroy Rassawek.

Yesterday, the James River Water Authority, in a unanimous vote, decided to set aside their plan to do the water intake facility in Rassawek and to donate the land that they have purchased for that facility to the Monacan Tribe. The Monacan Nation, in gratitude, pledges to work together with the James River Water Authority to find a more acceptable site. A number of alternatives have already been identified.

This summer, I was canoeing on the James River. I canoed the entire James River from where it starts, the Allegheny Mountains, to Fort Monroe in Chesapeake Bay--350 miles. It took me 26 days that I spread over the spring, summer, and fall. One day in August, I was canoeing from a town called New Kent to Columbia, passing Rassawek, which was on river left as I went downstream.

So I reached out to Chief Branham, knowing that the fight about the future of Rassawek was underway. I said: Could you and Tribal leaders meet me? I will pull my canoe onshore when I pass by. Meet me and talk to me about the status of this fight and why it is so important to the Monacan Nation to win.

So coming down the river with a friend, my former State director who used to work on this Tribal recognition issue, John Knapp--I want to thank him, as well as other staffers, Evan and Nick and Tyee and Mary and other staffers in my office, who worked on this. John and I pulled our canoe over on the shore in this beautiful spot in rural Virginia where the two rivers come together. We beached the canoe on a sand point, climbed a bluff, and met Chief Branham and other members of Monacan leadership to see the beauty of the site and to share a meal but also to talk to them about the importance of Rassawek and why they really, really needed to win this battle. They don't have a plan to develop Rassawek. They are not going to build anything there. They just want it to be preserved in its natural beauty out of respect for Monacan people who have lived there for nearly 5,000 years. Yesterday, this unanimous vote by the local water authority--a vote of respect, a vote of acknowledgment--recognized that this is a sacred site.

We in Virginia, we love our history. We love our history, and we don't want to lose it. The history of the Monacan Nation, the history of all of our Tribes is worthy of battling. You don't win every battle. The Monacan Nation won a really important one yesterday, and it might not have happened. Ninety-nine of my colleagues joined with me to make sure that the Monacan Nation and the other Virginia Tribes were finally, after hundreds of years, given Federal recognition.

I just wanted to express my congratulations to the Monacan Nation and my appreciation to my colleagues for helping me do something good.

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