Wayne Newton advocates for Virginia state recognition of Patawomeck Indian tribe

By Fredrick Kunkle, Washington Post Staff Writer

RICHMOND — When Capitol Hill rolls out the red carpet for celebrity lobbyists, it gets Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. On Tuesday, Richmond got Las Vegas crooner Wayne Newton, who blew into town on behalf of his Native American tribe.

The Virginia-born tenor, wearing a highflying pompadour and a pair of alligator-skin cowboy boots, set the town aflutter as he argued for the state’s official recognition of the Patawomecks — a tribe whose name, in slightly different form, now belongs to the river flowing by the nation’s capital.

Playing in the General Assembly building — what had to be one of the smallest venues of his career — Newton, 67, described hearing stories from his grandfather about his Native American heritage and absorbing his appreciation of the culture. Both of Newton’s parents were half Native American: His father was Patawomeck and his mother was Cherokee. Newton also displayed a picture of his grandfather in full-feathered regalia and passed around a heavy green sash that bore what Newton called a peace medal his ancestors received from Gen. George Washington.

Speaking in a husky voice, Newton also said that when he told his 7-year-old daughter of their heritage, she replied: “Does that mean I’m half Indian and half human?”

“I realized I had let her down,” Newton told reporters after the brief appearance, saying more must be done to preserve the tribe’s place in history.

When Capt. John Smith and other English colonists sailed into Chesapeake Bay and its inlets, expecting to find wilderness, they discovered that another civilization had already beaten them to it. The first Virginians had cleared fields, created trade routes among tribes and devised a political system ruled by Powhatan.

The Patawomeck, who also were known as the Patawomeke or Potomac tribe, defied Chief Powhatan’s command to cease trade with the Jamestown colony during a period of starvation and continued to feed the colonists. But later conflict with the colonists all but wiped out the tribe in the 1660s.

The recognition resolution, sponsored by House Speaker William J. Howell (R-Stafford), would effectively bypass the process that eight other tribes followed before gaining state recognition.

In the 1980s, the General Assembly created a procedure for obtaining state recognition, which involves petitioning the Virginia Council on Indians and documenting the tribe’s heritage and operation in specific ways back to the time of first contact with Europeans.

Newton’s cousin, Patawomeck chief Robert “Two Eagles” Green, blamed Virginia’s state-sanctioned racism for the tribe’s inability to document an unbroken link to their ancestors, referring to the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which required residents to destroy existing census records and reclassify all nonwhites as “colored.”

“People were unwilling to come forward,” Green said.

But some Native Americans are cool to the idea of granting the Patawomecks recognition without following the procedure used by other tribes.

“I don’t doubt any of these tribes in what they’re saying. But I don’t want to set a precedent where anybody could come in and say, ‘I’m an Indian tribe,’ ” said Stephen Adkins, chief of the Chickahominys, one of the eight state-recognized tribes. “I would like it to stand the test of time, that people don’t second guess.”

The committee voted unanimously to send the resolution to the full House.

As Newton headed out to catch a plane, most of the hearing room went with him, seeking autographs and photographs or calling out “Mr. Newton” and offering cheeks to buss. He insisted on only one thing: that people call him “Wayne.”

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Posted on February 3rd, 2010 by hunwut
Filed under: Interesting