WILLIAMSBURG, Va. _ Several years ago as debate raged over whether two feathers stuck in the College of William & Mary logo was racist, anthropologist Danielle Moretti-Langholtz began getting phone calls from tribes out West.
But the callers weren't asking about the logo _ they were asking about the Indian school that hasn't existed at the college for more than 200 years.
"We used to be there," the callers said. "Can we come back?"
For Moretti-Langholtz, director of the college's American Indian Resource Center, the requests were puzzling. The Brafferton Indian School stopped taking students in 1779. Today, even the institutional memory of that school is murky. The building is still there. There's a marker.
She was compelled to learn more.
"Everything I found about the school's history was very, very minimal," she said. "Basically, here's when it opened, here's when it closed, it wasn't very successful _ whatever that means. And I thought there's clearly memory in indigenous lands that's quite different."
So Moretti-Langholtz and Buck Woodard, then director of the American Indian Initiative at Colonial Williamsburg, set out on a painstaking odyssey over more than a decade to flesh out the complex story of the Indian school, the Native boys who attended _ some more willingly than others _ and what became of them.
"Nations, they choose what they remember and they choose what they forget," said Woodard, today a lecturer in the anthropology department at American University. "And there's been a forgetting about the role of Williamsburg in the more hemispheric relationship with Native nations."
Much about the Brafferton Indian School was forgotten over the centuries, and much of what was remembered was wrong.
"The story ... for a long time was that there was an Indian school here, it never could get very many students, and it closed after the Revolution and that's the story," Woodard said.
"But we found documents scattered on two continents that told a different story. And one that was very interconnected to centers of power, individuals of prestige and power, the nation states to indigenous powers. The Brafferton was a key point of articulation."
Brafferton alumni were linked to colonial icons from Patrick Henry to George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, to battles spanning the French and Indian War to the Revolution.
Based on what they discovered, the researchers have dubbed the Brafferton "America's Indian School."
From a Native standpoint, it's just as important _ if not more so _ to flesh out that shared narrative, said Ashley Atkins Spivey, a Pamunkey tribal member and associate anthropologist who assisted with the research and now serves as tribal liaison for the college.
"It's a part of this long history of colonial powers, and then what becomes the United States, engaging, warring against, creating genocide against, trying forced assimilation against and negotiating with, via treaties, the indigenous populations of this country. And it starts here in Virginia."
