Native @ Virginia Tech Pow Wow 2019

-->

3 of 110

By Biko Agozino

After many years of community organizing, The students, faculty and staff active in Native@VT succeeded in securing an office and community meeting room in the students' Center and got the University administration to pass a resolution honoring the Indigenous Peoples who own the land on which the institution was built. 

During the 2019 third annual Pow Wow, April 6, 2019, the students, staff, and faculty collectively read clauses, one after the other, from the resolution passed by the University to recognize American Indian Native Day every October 1 to honor those who own, heal and protect the land. 

Music is a part of the healing, said the announcer who remarked that some of the dances were known as Indian aerobics. None of the dancers, from little children to adult men and ladies, showed any signs of obesity. Indigenous Peoples came from far and near to mark the event.

I heard the wailing mournful singing and heart-thumping drumming before I reached the Graduate School front court to behold the fancy dancers. Although some of the displays were called Inter Tribal dances, they were not wars or competition to see who danced better than others; they were opportunities to see different dance and dress styles without judging the taste to see which one beats others, the announcer said while insisting that he did not see himself as the Master of Ceremony.

‘To walk in beauty is to celebrate the Sacred Dance of Life, to join the Circle with an open mind and an open heart, and to move at our own pace with clarity, kindness and a sense of calm. To walk in beauty is to understand and to practice the way of right relationship and to appreciate all the beauty that exists both within and all around us.’ – Garrett and Garrett (1996), Medicine of the Cherokee: The Way of Right Relationship, Santa Fe, Beers & Company. One of the vendors sold this book to me and I said that it was priceless.

The maintenance of social equality in styles of dressing, housing, and in Indigenous law, despite having princesses and chiefs, was dismissed by Andrew Carnegie in his ‘Gospel of Wealth’ as evidence that they were uncivilized compared to hierarchical capitalist societies. According to him, it is best for a wealthy man (always a man) to use 'his' wealth to build a library for the benefit of ‘the race’ (his white race, since libraries were for whites only though poor whites did not use them either) while founding a Trust for the modest support of his heirs and leaving slightly more for his widow and heiresses.

A colleague commented as follows: 'It is ironic and fitting that you would mention Andrew Carnegie.  In the 1920s the Carnegie Foundation funded a major eugenic study that targeted the Monacan Tribe.  The investigators (Estabrook and McDougal) came into the community under the guise of friendship, and even though they used thinly disguised pseudonyms, they produced a horrible work entitled "Mongrel Virginians," characterizing the community as a degenerate population as a result of rising races.  When I first came to VT in 1999 it was still in the regular stacks.'

Indigenous nations demonstrate that human beings produced surplus wealth for thousands of years without creating a single beggar nor a single millionaire because all hands were joined together to manage the resources of the society for the equal benefit of all, according to Julius Nyerere. 

When the Indigenous dancers join hands and go round and round in a shifting circular motion that is deliberately kept open, they are not simply building a human chain but demonstrating human unity: there is neither master nor servant and no gender, generational, religious or racial hierarchies.

The music was haunting and there were not many smiling faces among the dancers who trotted at their own paces as if still on the Trail of Tears while the big drum shared by multiple drummers hammered out the rhythm of the march as constant reminders of the oppressive history being commemorated. 

But it was not only sadness that was being remembered, there was also a constant rhetorical question from the announcer to the audience, ‘Are you all enjoying yourselves?’ And the response was always a yell of something between joy and moaning.

I recognized some of the dance moves as those of warriors lobbing off the heads of invisible monsters to the beat of the drums because I come from a culture that also has a warrior dance. The name of one of the tribes, Chikohmimi, also sounds familiar to my Igbo language and their symbol, the turtle, is also symbol of wisdom in my culture where the turtle outlives the predator species by many years through wisdom and not through violence.

Some of the native names near the university such as Ironto, Chilhowie, Shenandoah, and Kanawah have literal Igbo meanings to support archeological and linguistic evidence from Catherine Acholonu that all the world languages originated from one mother language and remain similar to such an extent that there is no language that is not related to others. 

Douglass Chambers documented evidence in Murder at Montpelier that the 'Igbo Africans' were the group most enslaved in Virginia. On the campus of Virginia Tech, there is still a slave plantation now used as a tourist attraction and there are still buildings named after slave holders and after Confederate generals who fought to keep slavery going. Following concerns by students, the administration set up a committee on historical names which resolved to retain the names but proposed to add plaques on the biographies of the individuals honored with such place names.

Gregg McVicar, host and producer of NPR UnderCurrents on Native Voice One wrote that the history of Native American Indian music, Blues music, Jazz and Rock and Roll flows like a great river sharing traditions and styles of tributes by the oppressed Indigenous Peoples, enslaved Africans and the poor working-class men and women in the US and around the world. 

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies and also Affiliated to American Indian Native Studies, Women and Gender Studies, ASPECT, and the Criminology Major programs, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061.