1314 Mattaponi Reservation Circle, West Point
The former Mattaponi School House, a white building with a red tin roof, sits adjacent to a row of children’s swings on the Mattaponi Indian Reservation.
Virginia’s colonial legislature created this reservation in 1658 on land long occupied by the Mattaponi. Due to continual white encroachment, the size of the present-day reservation is much smaller than the original law established. While the state of Virginia formally recognizes the tribe, it does not have federal recognition. Federal recognition is a long and costly process made even more difficult by the state’s efforts to deprive Virginia Indians of documented state proof of their existence as Indians, since they were forbidden to list their race as Indian on official documents like birth and marriage certificates for many years in the twentieth-century.
Virginia began public schooling in 1870, but access was racially segregated from the outset. Virginia Indian children could not attend local white schools, and they often chose not to attend Black schools to maintain their separate identity as Indians. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white officials frequently denied the existence of Virginia Indians, falsely arguing that due to racial intermixing with Black Virginians, no “true” Indians existed. In the 1890s, the Mattaponi asked the state to fund a teacher for the tribe, which the government did not provide until 1916. The tribe built the school featured here in 1929. It offered first through eighth grades, usually in one classroom. In 1950, the school was significantly renovated, and as a result, the Pamunkey Indian School located on the Pamunkey reservation closed, and this school became the joint Mattaponi-Pamunkey School. If students wished to attend high school, they had to leave the state since Virginia never built or funded a secondary school for Virginia Indians.
With the end of legal segregation, the state stopped funding schools for Virginia Indians. The Mattaponi-Pamunkey School closed in 1966. Its closing marked the end of a hard won campaign for educational rights on the part of the Mattaponi. Today, the space is preserved and used for tribal council and community gatherings.
To learn more:
- Wood, Karenne, ed. The Virginia Indian Trail Guide. Charlottesville: Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 2008.
- Woodard, Buck and Danielle Moretti-Langholtz. “Mattaponi Indian Reservation: King William County.” Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2017.
Image: Mattaponi Schoolhouse. Courtesy of Kim Lee Schmidt, 2020.