CNN
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The Rappahannock Tribe, a Native Tribe in Virginia, has reacquired 465 acres of sacred land at Fones Cliff.
Secretary of the Inside Deb Haaland and US Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams celebrated the tribe’s reacquisiton of the land Friday, based on a press launch from the Division of the Inside.
“We’ve got labored for a few years to revive this sacred place to the Tribe,” stated Rappahannock Tribe Chief Anne Richardson, based on the Chesapeake Conservancy. “With eagles being prayer messengers, this space the place they collect has at all times been a spot of pure, cultural and non secular significance.”
Fones Cliff is the ancestral house of the tribe, situated on the jap facet of the Rappahannock River in Virginia. The realm, situated contained in the Rappahannock River Valley Nationwide Wildlife Refuge, shall be publicly accessible and positioned in belief with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Tribe plans to coach the general public about their historical past by developing a duplicate Sixteenth-century village and broaden their “Return to the River” program, which trains Tribal youth in conventional river information and practices.
“The Division is honored to hitch the Rappahannock Tribe in co-stewardship of this portion of their ancestral homeland. We look ahead to drawing upon Tribal experience and Indigenous information in serving to handle the world’s wildlife and habitat,” Secretary Haaland stated within the assertion. “This historic reacquisition underscores how Tribes, personal landowners, and different stakeholders all play a central function on this Administration’s work to make sure our conservation efforts are regionally led and assist communities’ well being and well-being.”
The cliffs play a central half within the historical past of the tribe. In 1608, the tribe first encountered and defended their homeland in opposition to English settler Captain John Smith, who performed an essential function within the first everlasting English settlement in America at Jamestown, Virginia. Within the 1660s, the tribe started to be forcefully displaced from their homeland on the Rappahannock River by the English, based on the Chesapeake Conservancy.
Along with their cultural and historic significance to the tribe, the cliffs are additionally essential to wildlife: The positioning is house to one of many largest nesting populations of bald eagles on the Atlantic coast, based on the Division of the Inside..
The tribe’s reacquisition of its land was made attainable by the household of William Dodge Angle, who offered the funds essential for the Chesapeake Conservancy to buy the 465 acres and donate the charge title to the Rappahannock Tribe. Further funding additionally got here from a grant from the Nationwide Fish and Wildlife Basis via Walmart’s Acres for America Program, based on the conservancy.
The acquisition follows a rising motion of Indigenous folks preventing to reclaim their land.
In 2019, the Wiyot tribe efficiently reclaimed their ancestral homeland of Duluwat Island on the northern coast of California after over a century of displacement. And earlier this 12 months, greater than 500 acres of California forests had been returned to a bunch of Native American tribes.
