Ticky-Ticky's QUEST

 Part 2 of a Trilogy: 

Travel to *Turtle Island

Copyright by Michael Auld 2024 

Book Cover: The hero Ticky-Ticky wearing his own shell georget necklace, and surrounded by other ancient spider clamshell gorgets which symbolize the power of the arachnid.

 

* a.k.a. The Native American name for North America because the continent looks like a giant turtle from above.

Author’s Note.

This free continuous story blog begins with a synopsis of each chapter of  Part 2 of the Ticky-Ticky story. Starting in National Native American Heritage Month, each week I will add the next chapter's synopsis until we arrive at the end of tis story. (To see Part 1, click here.)

INTRODUCTION

Spider Woman of the Hopi at the Creation. She is one of the people who Ticky-Ticky meets.

The history of spider women and men is ancient. For example, in the Americas the Hopi of New Mexico tell of Spider Woman who was present at the Creation. Her Web of Life connects all animate and inanimate things. Spider beings are in stories from Africa to Europe, and in the Americas. In Ghana and Jamaica it is Anansi. Europe has Aracnia, North America has even more. Here we have Grandmother Spider of the Cherokee, Spider Woman of the Hopi, Iktomi of the Lakota (Sioux), Spider Woman & her husband of the Dine or Navajo, Aunt Nancy of Georgia's Sea Islands, and Great Spider Mother of Teotihuakan, Mexico. Then,South America has a gigantic spider character in te Nasca desert. This story begins as Part 2 of a series in the trilogy of Kweku Anansi the Spider-Man's son, Ticky-Ticky.a quarter spider-boy searching the Americas for his missing wayward father. Ticky-Ticky's mom is a full-blood Yamaye Taino woman.

But,  first, here is the beginning of his journey whch starts in a Jamaican boy's school.
In Part 1, the young teen was forced to leave his Coromanti boys high school by the headmaster for inattention in class. "Don't come. back without your father," the British headmaster warned, instead of giving Ticky-Ticky a caning on the bent-over butt.
So, the spider-boy his was forced to go on a quest in search of Anansi, who had been missing for a year, while on an adventure of his own. This is a continuation of Ticky-Ticky's QUEST which take him to North Arica to meet ancient folkloric Native American spider people. So, come along for the ride!

Ticky-Ticky's search took him to Coabey, the Taino Island of the Dead. There he borrowed Opiel, the Searchdog of the Absent, and a flying, time traveling Bat-canoe. Next stop was HaitiHaiti You can see a synopsis of that story at http://anansistories.com/Ticky_Ticky.html.

PART 2 

CHAPTER 1

Ticky-Ticky's flying Bat-Canoe landed in the Florida Everglades, surprising John Littletree a Seminole who had recently encountered Anansi the Spider-Man's search for his "rich American relatives". Where did Ticky-Ticky's dad go?

  A happy feeling surged through Ticky-Ticky's heart in this first Native American encounter. We will see that he will receive a priceless lesson and a valuable lead about his father from a Seminole Indian, John Littletree. This is the time that Ticky-Ticky began to wear a spider gorget suspended around his neck. This amulet replaced the carved navel designed one from a manatee bone that had been given to him by Cuffy the Obeah-man, back in Jamaica. That navel amulet was supposed to serve Ticky-Ticky as a safety passport while he was in the ghost filled Caribbean’s Coabey, the Island of the Dead. That manatee bone amulet was ripped off his body when Guabancex, the Angry Woman of the Hurricane had snatched Ticky-Ticky from the flying Bat-canoe over Matinino, the Island of Women. The ancient spider gorget, carved from the purple and white quahog clamshell was a good luck charm, intended to smell out Spiders like Anansi and his Turtle Island relatives. 

Ticky-Ticky also learned from John that, "Amerindians of the Americas, outside of the U.S.A., were hot called Native Americans.” This term only applied to indigenous people of continental North America. In Canada, they are called First Nations. In Mexico, Indigina (In-dee-he-nah) and Indio (In-de-oh) were the words used. 

Ticky-Ticky had learned at Coromanti, his Jamaican High School, that Amerindian was a combined term that distinguished the indigenous people of the Americas from Asiatic Indians of India. The next lesson was from John Littletree. 

"Turtle Island was the indigenous name for the northern continent of the Americas." John had said. 

This was because, from the air, the North American continent appeared to be in the shape of a gigantic turtle. From ancient times, traditional maps were drawn by two-dimensional thinking sailors. Some Amerindians saw the world in 6-D. These six-“dimensions” we’re comprised of the Four Sacred Directions of the white, snowy North, the yellow of the warm South, the red of the East’s rising sun, and the black of the night and the West’s setting sun. The 5^th-Dimension was Father Sky above, populated by the winged ones. The 6^th Dimension was Mother Earth below, populated by the two and four legged, the crawlers and the swimmers. Sometimes there was the 7^th Dimension with which Ticky-Ticky was familiar; Opiyel’s Spirit World.

As one Maya shaman said, “The world is made up of dualities. As day need night, good cannot exist without evil…they balance each other.”

Author's Note_2: "I had met the late  John Littletree, a military veteran who was a dance circle's Arena Director at powwows in Virginia. I had to honor him in tis story."

To be continued..

 

Kamala Harris’ Jamaica

Kamala’s real Caribbean Heritage via Jamaican Artworks

Copyright 2024 by Michael Auld (Yamaye Taíno)

Much will be written about her because of her many firsts. But what about a different angle to Vice President, Kamala Harris’ Jamaican heritage? 

This article is by a Jamaican expat-artist and a fellow Howard University alumni.

Vice President, Kamala Harris backed by flags of her three heritages.-  Artwork by Jamaican-American artist, Michael Auld.

 

Vice President Kamala Harris, is of paternal Jamaican descent, and will soon become America's first woman multiethnic president. Christened with a Euro-Jamaican surname, she is fittingly, also tri-racial, a descendant of proud Jamaican, Asiatic Indian, and European ancestry. 

She said that she fell in love with Bob Marley early, and knew the lyrics to many of his songs. She was hooked on Jamaican pride. As a Jamaican myself, Africans from many countries burst into Bob’s songs when they find out I’m a “Yardie”, an affectionate term for the island.

Although her birth family is rooted in ancient cultures, as a Jamaican artist with similar genes, I present here aspects of her Jamaican roots, via my researched Yamayeka and African inspired artworks. My genetic background is Scottish, West African, and Indigenous Asiatic Amerindian, a.k.a. the island's Yamaye Taíno ancestors.

What is Kamala’s Jamaica?

 The island is a multicultural society whose name, "Jamaica" is derived from Yamayeka, the indigenous Yamaye Taíno culture whose presence in this Northern Caribbean territory, was via an early colonization by my Amerindian ancestors around 2,124 years ago, around the birth of Jesus the Christ of Palestine. The Taíno were originally an Orinoco Basin's river community who, because of a population explosion, and directed in an ancient mythology by the Supreme Being, Yaya, because of an infraction by his son, Yaya-el to, upon the pain of death, leave the homeland and never return. Following the god’s advise, they left the South American continent to become seafarers, traveling island by island, north up the chain of Caribbean Islands, into Florida, settling in the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic & Haiti, and the western tip of Florida. Along the way to becoming empires, as was true of their Central and South American neighbors, they created cacigazos, or ruling cacike chiefdoms on each territory

They came from an Amerindian Continent familiar with many very ancient and technologically and agriculturally advanced pyramid and empire-building civilizations. For example, how do you turn a poisonous tuber like bitter yuca/cassava/manioc into a nourishing daily bread, or cross-pollinate a grass and invent life-giving majisi/maize/"corn". Via the invading Spanish and Portuguese, they introduced the world to over 60 items, including words like hurricane, sacred cojibi (a.k.a. “tobacco”), hammock, maize, sweet potatoes, aji (capsicum peppers), tapioca, key or cay, and much more words, technologies, and food items now commonly used by Eastern Hemisphere cultures. 

Jamaica's later 1665 arriving British Colonial clergy created our Coat of Arms which honors the Taíno. 

Jamaica’s Coat of Arms whose top was originally designed by a British Colonial cleric, William Sancroft who was then Archbishop of Canterbury. The "Out of Many, One People" epithet was added later for the island's Independence in 1962. It has a Yamaye Taíno couple, a Jamaican crocodile, a British herald’s crown with a St. Andrew cross and shield, with five endemic pineapples.

My proposed Hope Botanical Gardens monument about our Yamaye Taíno indigenous Amerindian heritage (if the Gardens can get the funding). The sculpted couple are standing on a map of the island, surrounded by endemic pineapple plants and a epithet of flowers. The  Taíno intermarried with the earlier Igneri people, who had migrated from the North (Florida) and the west from Central America (probably the Yucatan) during the Caribbean's Pristine Era.

Genetically, Vice President Kamala Harris, soon to become a US President, is half maternal Asiatic Indian with large percentages of paternal African and European admixtures, a fitting combination for the USA, her multiethnic country of birth. However, in the United States of America’s racist “*One Drop Rule” practice, her paternal Jamaican part African ancestry makes her 100% "Black" in America's eyes. So, what racial category does she belong? Via my artworks, here is an artistic breakdown of the Jamaican groups to which she is ethnically connected.

* That is , before the invention of DNA, in racist America,"One Drop" of strong Sub-Saharan "blood" makes a human being totally Black.

The Trilogy Protectors: As president, Kamala Harris will need my three Guardian Angels styled from Ethiopian angel images (implying Jamaican Ras Tafari's protection).

(L-R).Harriet Tubman (American Protecter holding her iconic gun); Ast or Isis (golden winged Mother of Femininity, holding her staff); and Marcus Garvey (Back-to-Africa proponent from Jamaica, holding a Sword of Justice) -- Welded bicycle rims, inlaid & painted Plexiglass etching, and photographs. 

The Peculiarity of "Race" in the Americas 

Above: An early Mexican painting of Racial divisions in Mexico 

Since VP Kamala Harris' race has become an issue to some Americans, here is one country of the Americas' take on race-mixing. The above painting is Mexican, and represents the Spanish attempt to introduce 16 varieties of racial mixing in this oldest European country in the Americas. Spain was accustomed in its Iberian homeland, to North African Moores (for 700 years), Jews, and white Christians already mixing there. With the added indigenous Amerindian's Anahuac of the Mexica (Me-she-ka) or "Aztec" Tripple Alliance Empire and other local nations, Sub-Saharan Africans, "white" Spanish, and hiding Converso Jews, hiding out from the Spanish Inquisition.

America’s racism has been used in art and now highlighted with Donald Trump in the 2024 Presidential race trying to rewrite a US historical racist agenda. In the past, he attacked Pequots for not being “Indian" enough when they were competitively applying for a casino in Connecticut. Kamala Harris was born enmeshed in American racial history and not in Jamaica's own classification of “Browning”, similar to South African “Colored” designation, as is peculiar to those countries. These are acknowledgments of race mixing. Not so in America, who does not have those racial categories, except "other". 

 

KAMALA's CARIBBEAN PEDIGREE:

 BY ART

She was born in Amerindian America with a bi-racial Jamaican father, and a South Indian mother. She got her light skin color from white British colonial progeny, one named Harris. I will start with my and Kamala's country of Yamayeka a.k.a. Jamaica.

However, to really know Kamala’s deepest island’s mythological background you would also have to see my blog on “Jamaica’s 7+ Storylines”, tales of a fire-snorting Devil-bull apparition called a Rolling Calf, a pirate turned privateer like Captain Henry Morgan, (a Welshman who also owned two slave plantations), a "twice buried" Frenchman, a victim of the Port Royal town-destroying earthquake, a White Witch of the Rose Hall Plantation, next to American Country Singer, Johnny Cash's estate.

Taíno Jamaica (Yamayeka)

My Taíno Creation Storybook. (Click to the YouTube link for my narrated 5-minute story).

My wall sculpture of Guabancex, Angry Woman Goddess, Rider of the Winds, whom the Taíno's Hurakan  (hura=wind,  ca’an = center, i.e. center of the wind) is known in English as a hurricane. To the Caribbean's Taíno she came yearly to blow down houses and trees, with two accomplices, GuatauBa! who is the herald thunder and lightening who announced her pending arrival. His twin brother is Coatrisque, the Deluge, who follows them. with floods of water cascading down the mountains. On the sculpture's hands are Taíno women's pottery image of a hurricane, as it was discovered centuries later by satellite photography, as "S" shaped.

Wood and shell sculpture of Ataberia, the Virgin Mother giving birth to Yucahu, the Taíno
God of the Sea and the life-saving yuca tuber.

Composite photo of Itiba Cahubaba our 5th Earth Mother, giving birth to the 4-Fathers of humankind. This concept implies that there were four Earth destructions. The son, Deminan, is the father of the Taíno, while his three brothers ("twins"), are not named.

A wall hummingbird sculpture of welded metal bicycle parts, etched and colored Plexiglass and an inlaid photo of Jamaica's first Prime Minister, Sir Alexander Bustamante. Jamaica's national bird is its endemic swallowtail hummingbird.

Taíno Epic: A print of "Guahayona's Travel to Matanino", the Island of Women. which enticed the Spanish arrivals in the Americas to search for La California, an island of Amazons, whose only metal was gold weapons. (Incorporated rubber ball-court images of Puerto Rican concept of Atabey, Goddess of Childbirth, and Fresh Waters, virgin mother of Yucahu, God of the Sea and the nourishing yuca/cassava tuber).

Next is Guahayona as he leaves Matinino and travels to its twin Island of Guanin (14k Gold). The Taíno used the hummingbird's metallic feathers as a symbol of gold. (incorporated woodcut image of Taínos panning for gold. A technique employed by arriving Europeans, called by them, "panning" for gold). 

The Taíno epic used by a 16th Century Spanish novelist who copied the Travels of Guahayona, the First Shaman, to create La California, a story of an island of Amazons. a Spanish tale taken down for Columbus, by Father Ramon Pane on Hispaniola (Ayti Bohio/Kiskeya), whose manuscript was sent to Spain. The ensuing story by 16th century Spanish novelist Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, was from the Taíno's Guahayona Tale of the Island of Women, and its twin, the Island of Guanin/Gold. 

 Kamala’s African Heritage

Kamala Harris' African heritage in Jamaica, begins with my rendering of this Baga Creation Story sculptural images of a woman, a man and a snake figures. In the myth, the Earth's waters began as a calm item, whose vigorous movements of a primordial snake created movements of rivers and the sea. --Welded handlebars, and etched Plexiglass.

Ghana 

Ghanaian influences in Jamaica are the strongest manifestations of the island's African cultural retentions. This is especially true of the Asanti's Akan Anansi the Spider-Man, whose morality-based stories have been passed down and recorded through the centuries. Jamaicans would automatically dismissively say, "Cho man, yu a tell a Anansi Story!" (Meaning, "You are not telling the truth!"). 

Next comes the Maroons, led by escaped enslaved Asanti (Ashanti) sugarcane plantations escapees. They went to the mountains and formed gurilla bands, twice defeating the British, where they were welcomed by the Yamaye Taíno Cimarrones who had earlier removed themselves from Spanish ranches where they were forced to work and bring in the island's sparse gold reserves. 

Kamala’s childhood photos with her island cousins in Jamaica, reveal that she would have heard AnansiStories or (Anansesem in Ghana’s Twi language,). Anansi, imported from the Akan of Ghana, is a very deeply ingrained moral guide for all Jamaicans. (See my anansistories.com).

My Anansi the Spider (doll) with six of his seven Ghanaian children. Only his wife, Aso, (a.k.a. "Cookie") and his youngest son, Intikuma (Ticky-Ticky in my novel) came to Jamaica with him.

A panel from my Anansesem (AnansiStories) folkloric comic strip, whose stories were published by the Jamaican Gleaner Company's Star tabloid in the 1970s. This last, and unpublished story is about the island/s guerrilla fighter Maroons and the Yamaye Taíno who welcomed them and taught the escapees from plantation slavery, how to survive in the Jamaican forests. 

 

My Anansi and his back-up posse, Me, Myself, and I & I as condoms, all masked for both the Aids and the Corona Virus campaigns.

 

My story illustration of Anansi and the Yam Hills. created at my Howard University class for a children's book illustration assignment.

My Anansesem comic strip panel telling the story of Asantehene, Osei Tutu, and the Golden Stool of Asanti, and how he came to power in the 17th Century in Ghana. Here at a gathering, Anokye, the priest, brought down a golden stool in a clod of white dust. The stool, cementing his power, gently landed on Osei Tutu’s knees, anointing him as the Aantehene or ruler of the Asanti Empire.

My Anansi rag doll, books, and comic strip panels.

The Yoruba gods series in Jamaica 

There are many people of both Yoruba and Ibo descent in the island. Some have retained many aspects of their Nigerian culture.

Olokun, Yoruba God of the Sea. with mudfish for his legs, next to my photo in a Howard University faculty exhibition. An ode to the Caribbean Sea.-Welded steel.

   

My Obatala, the Yoruba's Father God wall sculpture -- Welded and woven metal, etched and painted Plexiglass

(Top): Wall sculpture of  Ogun the Yoruba God of Metallurgy & War; (Middle) Enlargement of his sword with his icon, a dog; (Bottom) His head and a cast bronze bumblebee cap. -- Welded bicycle rims, ans cast bronze.

    

DC’s Vanished Indians?

Case of the Disappeared

Copyright 2024 by Michael Auld

The issue of Native American survival in the USA is fraught with disappearance stories. Murdered and Disappeared Native Women is not covered in the media.  This phenomenon is not unusual, since, because of educational avoidance,  Americans are totally oblivious of its Indigenous people and ignorant of their history. So, it is not rocket science that the District of Columbia’s residents don’t know anything about its Indigenous Dogue (also called Tauxenent), as well as the leading nation in the DMV’s Powhatan Paramountcy, the Pamunkey, who also have America's oldest reservation. 

Most Americans are schooled by fairy tales of a "Princess Pocahontas" without being told that, as a Pamunkey,  her father, "Powhatan's" actual territorial domain included Washington. DC. Some, however, may be aware of the only other historic tribe from Southeast DC neighborhood's *Nacotchtank of Anacostia who Captain John Smith said upon arrival in 1608, were "once a part of the Powhatan Paramountcy." Unfortunately, they were driven out in 1688, of what became the Federal City, by an attack by the Patawomeck of Stafford County, Virginia and their British allies' bombardment of their town. The English invaders in Jamestown envied the Nacotchtank's thriving beaver pelt industry. Incidentally in England, warm beaver hats from Russia were all the rage. It is recorded that their remnant survivors moved to the Tauxenent's Roosevelt Island in the Cohonkaruton or Potomac River, for one year, then they moved on to disappear in Ohio.

The prevailing belief is that DC’s “Indians” became extinct. Sorry to burst the ignorance bubble, but here are some Pamunkey and Dogue/Tauxenent members, who were born in DC, graduated from all grades of the DC Public Schools (and even taught there), as well as from three of its universities. (See a DC teacher-administrator, and mother from a family of 18+ city's siblings, and her daughter below).

THE SURVIVORS

Pamunkeys in DC:  (L-R) late Pamunkey Chief Willian (Bill) "Swift Eagle" Miles (stooping). 
Back row: Bill's late wife, Ann Miles; Bill's late cousin, DC-born Georgia Mills Boston Jessup (Pamunkey) an artist, DCPublic Schools teacher/Administrator; Georgia's daughter, DC-born, resident Rose Powhatan  (Tauxenent/Pamunkey); a woman representative of the Islamic Center of Washington, DC. Bill and Ann were visiting from the Pamunkey Reservation, and stayed with Georgia in her Maryland home while on an official 1980s tribal business with the Islamic Center who had offered medical care for the reservation.

Today, hundreds of descendants of Native Americans who have been Indigenous to the DMV for thousands of years have "disappeared" from public records. Some have direct descent from the leaders of the Powhatan Paramountcy. DC also had Queen Cockacoeske of the city and of Pamunkey (See the Washington Post's article by Rose Powhatan about her ancestral cousin, Cockacoeske). The disappearance of DC's "Indians" is directly the result of the 1924 Racial Integrity Act's racist attempt, to destroy all vestiges of Native Americans in Virginia. The Act was imported in DC from Richmond, Virginia. It had great governmental influence over DC’s Indigenous families since most of their origins were centered in Virginia’s Powhatan Paramountcy. One Delaware Indian, Sacagawea Harmon of a store-owing Georgetown family, fell victim to suicide when fired from the Federal Government because she placed "Native American" on her intake form.

The Powhatan Paramountcy stretched from North Carolina, through Eastern and Northern Virginia, Southern Maryland, into Washington, DC. Interestingly. the only Powhatan Paramountcy's member school children know, is one of Wahuncenachaw's minor daughters, Amonute or Matoaka, popularly known by her pet name and Disney's fictitious Pocahontas cartoon and The New World movie. Factually, she was a little girl of 11-years old when 27-year-old Captain John Smith arrived in the Powhatan Paramountcy in 1607.

The DC Newcomer Phenomenon

There is a scramble by outside tribes to claim Washington, DC. This Metropolitan Area has the distinction of being a portion of the Nation's Capital within the historic Powhatan Paramountcy. And is also very attractive to Native Americans from other parts of the country who come here for jobs. According to the Maryland Government, their Piscatawy tribe which was created in 1706, was forced out of the state by arriving English Catholics. "In 1701 they signed a treaty with William Penn and moved to Pennsylvania under the protection of the Iroquois".  After the Washington Redskins football team out of shame, changed their names, a group of Southern Marylanders whom sociologist called "Tri-racial Isolates" (meaning, a remnant of its citizens mixed with White, Black, and Indian survivors in the state), have had their sites on becoming "DC's Indians." This is a disrespect for DC's true Indigenous family's and their history and is the most egregious attack on the city's Native American story.

Some of these new arrivals attempt to lay claim on DC since they are ignorant of the actual local indigenous families of American Indian descent who are mainly those from the original Powhatan Paramountcy. This DMV conflict is as old as before the formation of the Powhatan Paramountcy itself. Its creator was Wahunsenacawh’s father, the first Powhatan (meaning “Principal Dreamer”). Wahunsenacawh’s dad had organized the eight original Algonquian nations to join him in Virginia's Chesapeake area, to defend themselves from tribal outliers. The need was for his son's expansion to over 32 Algonquian nations (from North Carolina to Washington, DC) ended before 1607, and began again in 1609 with the First Anglo-Powhatan War of Homeland Security against the British, formally under Captain John Smith. However, the need for its protection continued for 68 years, after three Anglo-Powhatan Wars which began in 1609, and ended with Queen Cockacoeske signing of the Treaty of Middle Plantation (Williamsburg, Virginia) in 1677. These wars had begun just two years after the English first set foot on Powhatan territory. However, the battle over DC continues with newly arriving Native Americans, both from next-door Southern Maryland's Piscataway and other tribal newcomers from distant states.

For the past centuries, moving in and out of the city proper by DC's Indigenous families, to live, work, or for schooling on all levels, was the norm. Local and Federal Government jobs were later obtained, starting with the hard work in local DC stone quarries (one in the National Zoo off Quarry Road, NW) whose stones were used in building DC structures like the interior of the Washington Monument, Smithsonian buildings, the eves of the Capitol Rotunda, canals, and even Georgetown's "Exorcist steps". After the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, these Indigenous families, because of racial discrimination, learned to keep their heads down, but still passed on their indigenous pride to the next generation through family stories, poetry, the visual arts, movies, and area powwows.

PART 1: (Below)
A DC Indigenous family's Native traditions continued.

Above: [Top;] (L-R) Georgia Mills Boston Jessup (Pamunkey) in front of Powhatan Museum's "Still Here:" and Pamunkey logo T-shirts.; Daughter, Rose Powhatan (Pamunkey/Tauxenent); Her son, Kiros Auld (Pamunkey/Tauxenent/Yamaye Taino) as a warrior in a Jamestown Festival Park movie.

Bottom row: (L-R) A Chickahominy dancer with Kiros' infant son, Ashkii at their annual powwow/festival, Virginia; Middle-schooler, Ashkii, (Navajo/Pamunkey/Tauxenent/Yamaye Taino), at another powwow, next to the Powhatan Mantle's panther totem. His older brother. Nat'aa'ni (Navajo/Pamunkey/Tauxenent/Yamaye Taino): Young Kiros at President Bill Clinton's Inauguration Parade, representing Washington, DC's indigenous Native Americans on the city's float, January 20, 1993.  

PART 2: (Below) THE MOVIES

The New World movie set with Colin Farrell as Capt. John Smith & Rose Powhatan as a Native American (Pamunkey) clan mother.

Rose Powhatan with actor, Colin Farrell to the right, a New World movie producer at a Chickahominy powwow near the movie set located next to the Chickahominy River, Virginia. They are next to her Powhatan Totem poles.  

PART 3: (Below)

Some Accomplished Family Artists

 Photos (Top) Georgia Mills Boston Jessup (Pamunkey) with her painting, "Rainy Night Downtown", Permanent Collection of National Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.

(Middle) Bernie Boston (Tauxenent Councilman), White House photographer for the LA Times, with his Pulitzer nominated Vietnam Era photo "Flower Power".

(Bottom) Back & front book cover of a novel by Rose Powhatan's son, a Lawyer for the Arts,  podcaster & author, of 13 novels, Alexei Auld (Pamunkey/Tauxenent/Taino), born and educated in Washington, DC, a Columbia School of Law graduate. He is also a Howard University graduate like his grandmother, Georgia Mills Boston Jessup, mother Rose Powhatan, aunt Marsha Jessup, father, Michael Auld, and his two brothers, Ian and Kiros.

Another Chief's Family of Indigenous DMV Descendants

All were proudly aware of their descent from the Dogue/Tauxenent, Wampanoag, and Pamunkey, the leading nation in the Powhatan Paramountcy with America's oldest reservation in King William County, Virginia, three counties in Southern Maryland (the current township of Pomonkey, MD). The Pamunkey counted Wahunsenacawh, his brother, Opichancanough, the War Chief, his niece Cockacoeske (the Queen of Pamunkey & DC), and Pocahontas as tribal members. Their Paramountcy fought thee Anglo-Powhatan Wars of Homeland Security, signing pivotal treaties with the spreading British Empire.

 Like many surviving Amerindians one must know the names common to certain tribes, like Begay of the Navajo. or Mills/Miles and Cook of the Pamunkey, or Custalow of the Mattaponi Reservation, and more. And Washington, DC is no different. Arriving in DC for university in 1962, I met many Indigenous descendants and became a part of one of these extensive families with over 18 siblings with over 29 practitioners in the visual and performing arts. So taken by the arts accomplishments of these related families, I wrote a manuscript titled "29 and Counting", documenting many members who had accomplished great national, international, and local heights in music, opera, drama, podcaster, author, arts education, the visual arts, biomedical communication, arts law, and art therapy.

Above: A photo of the late Tauxenent’s Chief Keziah Boston, also a musician, who had 91 living descendants, and was elected to that position along with two Assistants to the Chief, Billy Payne and Rose Powhatan. She, her assistants, and the tribe's council were the first installed since her ancestor, the recorded weroansqua, Keziah Powhatan and her Fairfax County warriors burned down the county’s courthouse around 1744. Chief Keziah Boston was of Dogue, Pamunkey, and Wampanoag descent, marking the revival of Northern Virginia’s tribal nation, the northernmost national member of the historic 32-34 members of the historic Powhatan Paramountcy. These nations continued to intermarry over the centuries, creating multiple kinships.

Above: Son of the Chief, an Assistant to the Chief, Billy Payne (Tauxenent/Pamunkey).

Assistant to the Chief, Rose Powhatan (Tauxenent/Pamunkey)

The Tauxenent/Dogue Weroansqua, Keziah Powhatan was memorialized by her descendant, Rose Powhatan. She stands next to her totem and the National Gallery of Art's Washington, DC's exhibition banner, in a 2023-2024 Native American art exhibition, her hometown and ancestral territory, the northernmost segment of the historic Powhatan Paramountcy.

Here are just some from this family's over 30+ other arts practitioners.

(Above) DC's lyric soprano Madam Lillian Evanti (Lillian Evans 1890-1967) was an  international opera singer.

David Mills (Pamunkey) was a journalist for both the Washington Times, and NewYork Times, He was also a writer for HBO miniseries "NYPD Blue", 'The Corner", "Kingpin", and "Treme".

 

Top: Juaquin Jessup (Pamunkey) was the lead guitarist for the Mandrill band's  Mohamed Ali album, (He is in the photo with the band at the bottom left.
Bottom: (L) Kiros Auld (Tauxenent/Pamunkey/Taino) a writer, with his uncle, (R) musician Juaquin Jessup (Pamunkey).

Washington, DC residents (Middle and Right): Michon Boston (Tauxenent) and older sister Tequena Boston (Tauxenent) drama graduates of Howard University and Oberlin University, podcasters of the "Boston Sisters" show.

Painter, James Whitley III (Pamunkey) with his artworks which include a large painting on the right, of his Aunt Georgia Mills Boston Jessup (Pamunkey).

Dr, Phoebe Mills Farris (Pamunkey) art therapist, Native American journalist, and photographer in front of the Pamunkey Reservation's Tribal Office, King William County, Virginia.

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NOTES:

(1) "Surviving Document Genocide" an article by Rose Powhatan) to read a blog on an Indigenous DC resident on her experiences with trying to make her a disappeared DC Native American. 

(2) Cockacoeske: The Queen of DC and Pamunkey

An illustration of the Queen Cockacoeske of Washington, DC and Pamunkey with her signature. Made by Michael Auld (Yamaye Taino) using the likeness of her family descendant Georgia Mills Boston Jessup (Pamunkey).

(3) Fairfax County: The Royal Gift

Above: Land belonging to the Right Honorable Thomas Lord Fairfax Baron Cameron, bounded within the Bay of Chesapeake and between the Rivers Rappahannock and Potowamack [Potomac] in Virginia.

 DAR Plaque about the burning of the Fairfax County Courthouse

D.A.R. Plaque, Tyson's Corner, Vienna, Virginia commemorating the act of Werowansquaw
Keziah Powhatan and her warriors as "Indian hostilities".

(4) Document Genocide: (https://yamaye-mike.blogspot.com/2019/10/surviving-document-genocide_31.html) The systematic governmental erasure of Native American links to contemporary Virginia families. The practice was codified by the 1924 Racial Integrity Law enacted by the Virginia Government under the influence of Dr., Walter Ashby Plecker, Director of the state's Vital Statistics. The law, upon the pain of imprisonment, forbade the documenting of Virginia Indian's racial designation as "Indian". The Eugenics Movement copied by Plecker and Germany's Nazi Party was responsible for the denial of genetic descent from Virginia's Amerindian people. The victims off the reservation were deemed Non-Indian or "colored", a designation which led to "Negro" then "Black". Plecker's influence reached beyond Richmond, Virginia into the surrounding states and the District of Columbia.

(5)  Place of the Caucus

A composite image commemorating Powhatan's love for the Tiber Creek on today's Capitol Hill in the territory of the Tauxenent/Dogue, where he loved to caucus with the surrounding nations. Next to him is one of his totems. a black panther which is reputed by guards to appear in the halls of the Capitol  as a gigantic "black cat" during troubled times.

(6) Maps of the Virginia Territory and the Powhatan Paramountcy:

[a]. Captain John Smith's map of the Powhatan Paramountcy.

John Smith's Map of the Virginia Territory includes Powhatan's domain of 32-34 nations known historically as a Kingdom, Confederacy, or "Chiefdom", along with the "tribes" of the area.

[b] Washington Post's 2007 maps

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  Enlargement of the Washington Post's 2007 map of the Powhatan Confederacy's Dogue or Tauxenent Territory that included parts of today's Northern Virginia and Washington, DC.

1607: Powhatan Land and Water Areas which equals over 18,000 square miles [Note: The Washington Post map was by mapmaker Gene Thorpe dated December 13, 2006, showed that the above land and water areas were between 18,700 to 19,250 square miles.]