Grant is Big Gift for Mattaponi:

Money for Cultural School Also Will
Help Tribe Preserve Identity

Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch

Publication date: September 2, 2007

By Lawrence Latane Iii,

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.

KING WILLIAM Christine Custalow is no stranger to the hot kilns and wood-fired furnaces that produce the dark, flinty pottery so characteristic of her Mattaponi Indian tribe.

But the 69-year-old potter wasn't prepared for the warmth she encountered recently in the form of a grant to keep the reservation's cultural school alive.

"This is such a blessing," Custalow said of the $5,000 gift the school will receive Sept. 14 from the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church.

The money more than replaces the funds lost when a King William County school system grant dried up last year. It means Custalow can reopen the school this fall after a year's closure.

That's just in time for her 16-year-old granddaughter, Nokomis Custalow, who needs to replace the beaded buckskin she wears while performing with the tribe's dance group at local and regional Indian gatherings.

"I need a new regalia," she said of the handmade outfits that generations of mothers and grandmothers have taught Mattaponi girls to make for special occasions.

Nokomis wore hers, complete with a decorative breastplate made of tooled deer bones and beads, when she met England's Queen Elizabeth II at this year's commemoration of the founding of Jamestown 400 years ago.

She will make new regalia this year over a long course of Saturdays at the school under Custalow's tutelage.

Jamestown's founding in 1607 marked the beginning of the end of eastern Virginia's Powhatan chiefdom, of which the Mattaponi were members. The tribe was decimated by disease and war with the British. More recent history also has been unkind.

Custalow remembers when Virginia law refused to acknowledge the Indian race. Indians shed much of their culture and self-identity in an effort to survive.

"Native Americans had to change their looks, their dress, their speech -- everything," she said.

That's why the cultural school is so important to the tribe, she said. "I want to teach [Indian children] to be proud of themselves," she said. "I don't want them to go through what I went through."

Custalow has taught at the school since it opened as a traditional cultural education center 26 years ago. It is the same building that housed the reservation school she attended during the segregation era, when Indians were barred from the county's public schools.

As always, Custalow's teaching has focused on traditional Mattaponi arts: beadwork, pottery and the leather work necessary to fashion regalia. She hopes to add instruction this year on the Algonquin language, which was the Mattaponi tribe's native tongue.

The grant allows the tribe a chance "to recover from damage done in the past," said the Rev. Karen J. Sandoval, a minister at four Northern Neck churches and chairwoman for Native American Ministries for the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church. "It's all about restoration of identity."

Custalow knows about a dozen Mattaponi children who want to study traditional ways at the cultural school this fall. She plans to invite children from the neighboring Pamunkey Indian reservation and the nearby Upper Mattaponi and Rappahannock tribes.

She's already considering buying a new kiln for the school.

"I'm tickled to death," Custalow said.

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Copyright (c) 2007, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.