As mentioned earlier today, chief adams serves on preservation virginias board of trustees. It was at his urging that this symposium came to be. The chief served as a strong advocate for the federal recognition of the upper mattaponi. In the lead up to 2007, chief adams actively participated in the Jamestown Committee and activities associated. I can say we spent a lot of time together. At various events around the state. His leadership and persistence ensures that commemorative events reflected the respective Indigenous People, their culture, and governments long before the ships arrive to jamestown. He brought the lack of a permanent memorial on virginia capitol grounds, as did other cabinet leaders, to the attention of governor kane, resulting in the formation of the virginia Indian Commemorative commission, in 2018. Chief adams has generously dedicated himself to numerous causes and organizations across the commonwealth. It is an honor to introduce chief adams. Chief adams thank you for the kind words. It is an honor to be here today and to be a part of this event. We started this about 15, 18 months ago, when we briefed each other on what the possibilities were for us to have such an event as this. We are fortunate to have it in this special location today. I will give you a brief history of the upper mattaponi tribe in virginia. As indians know well, the doctrine of discovery are still very well alive in the United States. In some cases, it is well alive in virginia here. Indigenous people continue to suffer from the effects of the doctrine of discovery which came about in 1452, 1453, from the Catholic Church through the popes edict, to claim that all people across the planet were available to be taken, were available to be killed, were available to be annihilated, and so it happened. When the first british ships came to virginia in 1607, they knew full well by planting the flag of great britain, they were claiming this land for the united kingdom. And today, some of us still suffer from the effects of the planning in 1607 and jamestown. Well when the british first came, they were hungry. They did not have any food so they started going out and locating the small indian towns and stealing their corn, stealing their fields of corn. The ones that they did not steal, they destroyed so the indian people that were living there became hungry themselves. As steve mentioned, shortly after the british came, on one of those trips, they went to a town on the james river, just below jamestown, looking for food, and the goal was to take the corn from those people, which they did, and burn what was left. As they were going to jamestown, the children they had captured were thrown into the water. And as the articles read, their heads were blown out, their brains were blown out. They were taking the wife of the king back to jamestown with them. They took her for sure. Ran her through with a sword, because they had had enough fighting for one day. They alluded to the fact that she would be burned at the stake. So instead of doing that, they ran through her with the sword. They basically annihilated the tribes. That process of annihilation, that process of stealing from the indians, that started in jamestown in 1610, 1607 through 1610, that process continued from virginia all the way to the west coast. In other words, in the 100 years after landing, 90 of the population of Indigenous People in virginia, was gone. 300 years after landing, 90 of the entire indigenous population of this country was gone. 90 . Imagine what would happen today if 90 of a population of a nation was destroyed, annihilated. We would be shouting from the rooftops. There was not much shouting then except for what came from the indians. They eventually ended up at a place that is a place name, a place for chiefs, on the york river, not far from jamestown, but that was the place where pocahontas and john smith and the chief came together and you know this fable, that pocahontas saved john smiths life and therefore, the colony was saved. Is that true . Not many people believe it. She was only 10, 11, or 12 years old at the time. It is doubtful she had the authority to save the life of the governor of the colony but that is perpetuated from films and other stories. My tribe, were up the river from what was the north and west, divide into two rivers. The one in the left his monkey people. The monkey, the same rivers in the same names today. Possibly the oldest reservation in the country. The reservation was affirmed by the assembly in 1568. One of the oldest reservations in the country. In 1670, the largest concentration of indians in the entire commonwealth of virginia was a little town where people live today. On the map in 1670. But in some ways we got there because of removal. After the second uprising against the british, all of the local indians were moved west and north to king william county, where the two reservations are today. At one time, there was another reservation around the 1670s to the 1690s. They eventually moved back to their original place they reside today. That reservation, the large concentration of 1670 one the map for u. S. Historians, it shows the largest concentration of indians in the commonwealth of virginia. Years later, i myself lived to witness his separation of my family as they were forced out of the commonwealth of virginia to get a High School Education. Three of my family members went to oklahoma. In college right there. I served on the board for years. My family members had to leave the commonwealth of virginia to get a High School Education in the 40s and 1950s. Several family members of mine are forced to go to michigan to complete high school. Another piece of the whole puzzle is this racial integrity act. This also caused a serious disruption in virginia among serious communities. General assembly approved a law indicating you are not white. What it did was it just ripped the hearts out of people and said basically, you cannot even document on not even your records. Birth certificates, marriage license. You cannot document you are a native american in this state. Because of that, my uncles and grandparents and great uncles documented on the draft certificate, the draft certificate, they were documented as indians. When they went to join the service, the service said no. So they actually left the state in order to register as indians when they were drafted. That is a brief piece of history. This is the same for others in virginia, but my time is up. It is my pleasure. Chief atkins, you need to step this way, please. [applause] chief adam i am just bringing him up on stage because i have other work to do. I will introduce chief hoskin as our really special speaker this afternoon. Chuck was elected to serve as the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation with more than 300,000 citizens in 2019. He served as the Cherokee Nation secretary of state. He has increased minimal wage at Cherokee Nation and Cherokee Nation businesses and secured the largest language investment in the tribes history to expand the cherokee preservation. That he will also test is also pointed as the first delegate to u. S. Congress. For career tech, education, and established housing jobs and Sustainable Community act to repair hundreds of homes for cherokee elders as well as Public Community buildings across the tribes 14 county jurisdiction. Best cherokee of state, he worked to secure funding to work as a billiondollar joint venture. He has served his Cherokee Nations strongest advocate of sovereignty protection. I like it. He formerly served as a member of the security nation. And he served his two final years as Deputy Speaker and he worked with fellow Council Members to bill home for sheridan aikins nations, sponsored legislation to expand Health Care Service through casino dollars. The chief haschief hoskins has served on multiple boards, including the health and Human Services secretary tribal advisory committee. Chief hoskin is from a community where he lives with his family. He and his first lady, in january, are parents of two children, tristan and jazmine. He graduated from the university of oklahoma and university of college of law, and is a member of the Cherokee Nation and oklahoma bar association. Chief hoskin, we welcome you to this stage and to this community. [applause] i have one little controversial word i have to say. As i was researching the history of virginia many, many years ago, there was one brief Little Corner way down in southwest virginia that, it appeared, i am not going to disagree with anyone, but it appeared that there were cherokee people who lived in that one little small area of virginia. Very small. But chief hoskin, since the cherokee did live in virginia, according to my little recognition, welcome home. [laughter] [applause] we have a gift for chief hoskin from the virginia indians and the preservation of virginia. [applause] chief hoskin hello to the chiefs and to virginia. What a wonderful opportunity it is to be before you. I am so honored that the Cherokee Nation has been asked to be a part of this. I think it speaks highly of the History Association and Virginia Preservation that you would include the indigenous aspects of the history of this great state and this great country. So i do thank you all for being here. She was mentioned, but i do want to recognize in the audience a lady that i would not be here without her, and that is the first lady of the nation, Cherokee Nation, january. It is one thing to be talking about cherokee history and law and front of noted historians, including jack baker and lindsay robertson. So next month, a symposium will be on everything chief hoskin got wrong on history and law. [laughter] it should take the most of the day. And being in the audience and then being in front of professor robertson, it kinda feels like old times, although there will be no test. Now he is saying there will be a test. [laughter] we will get through it. I am going to pick up where jack baker left off, and i am going to attempt to get the right slide, the great seal of the Cherokee Nation. 1839. We will talk about that in a moment, of course on the cherokee, we say we have existed from time immemorial, but there is a date on that, and there is a reason. That is when we got back together. We talked about removal. One worth talking about one thing worth talking about, before the trail of tears, there was an earlier migration, and when we got our new home, there was a lotta fighting and controversy. You hear people talk about being at each others throats, well, jack baker talked about that, we were quite literally at each others throats, but John Marshall and his decision might be the reason i exist, because who knows what wouldve happened to the cherokee people in my ancestors, but i certainly would not be here had it not been for that decision, which is a bedrock of federal indian law that stays with us today, so i am so honored to be here with you for that reason. So the dark chapter of American History leading up to and including the trail of tears is something that this country ought to remember, and i think jack baker did a great job in talking and very personal terms and how it affected his family and other charities. We ought to remember that in this country. It was a time in the country where the governor of the United States thought it was a good idea to round people up into cages. That was not a good idea then, it is not a good idea today. But we ought to always take those lessons from our history. You think about what happened, the greatest great destruction that took place against the Cherokee Nation. We lost a quarter of our population, 4000 women, children, grandbabies, and necessarily it ripped our economy apart. Before removal, remember what was happening. It was touched on before. We had adapted and strengthened ourselves as a nation to deal with what was happening, in terms of the encroachment of settlers. Because you know what the government of the United States commanded a fairly rapid period of time, sequoia, the great genius, he gave the charities something that was more powerful than any shield or any sword we could have wielded, communication, and then translating and communicate with the world. We were not simply removed because of the president of the United States says so or because a majority of factions of cherokees signed a treaty. We stood our ground. John roth stood his ground, went to washington, d. C. To plead his case, and it was ultimately defeated, and i think that that period of time and the period that followed, which i will get to, did something, shape something, built something in our National Character that stays with us today. People of tremendous grit and determination, who have resisted, who have overcome, and as we got to our new home in what is today northeast oklahoma, we had a lot of work to do, so we had to rebuild. Keep in mind what we were rebuilding. We were rebuilding the great cherokee democracy that existed before removal. We come again, had a system of laws, we had a system of justice based on the rule of law and constitution could i think it says something about the cherokee people, that when we were removed and we were rebuilt, and you saw that date in 1839, that is when we got back together, the active union of the cherokees that had been moved out before and the treaty party and the rock parties all at odds with each other, but we found it within ourselves to rise above that after some lives were lost but we still rose above it and got our Government Back together. It strikes me that even though justice in this country let us down, we still believed in it. We still thought that is what we ought to do, and that would be what would be best for a society. We still believed in in democracy, and we invested in this, and look what else we did, this is the cherokee female seminary, the First Institution of Higher Learning for any woman of any race west of the mississippi in the history of this country, and it happened because the cherokee people believed in education, and we did not just believe in that form of Higher Education, a free system long before there was an oklahoma. 1841, we passed an act establishing free public education. Why did we do it . For the same reason i think the rest of society does it, because you want to invest in the future, but i also think that our people and our possessions we had lost so much blood and treasure that we knew this was going to be our home forever. It was promised to us. It was going to be our last stand. We ought to make the most of it. How do you do that . You look beyond what is happening right in front of you, and you look toward the horizon. Investing in education is a good way to do that. People were rounded up in stockades at the hands of an unjust article, at the hands of a federal government that ignored its own Supreme Court and had its economy, the cherokee economy ripped apart our way of life ripped apart, lost so many people. You would think it would take years and years, perhaps generations, before we could rebuild, if we ever did. In fact, you might believe that people would not sustain themselves. I suspect there were people in this country that figured the cherokee problem would be soft, not just by moving them, but by moving them to their demise. I think people probably thought that some people did. And what is remarkable to me, and this is why i think the chapter that happens after removal is something that people in this country ought to know, really as much as they ought to know about removal, this is why i think it is amazing, and people ought to know about it, is we did all of this within about a decade. So in a decade, we are saying there ought to be a system of free public education, there ought to be a system of Higher Education for men and women, we ought to rebuild a system of commerce, so we can build up our economy again. We were saying these things. We were saying that we ought to invest in a system of government that was a democracy and was based on the rule of law, and we ought to have a constitution for we did all of this within a short period of time. I think it is remarkable, and again, i think it is what fuels leaders of the Cherokee Nation today, thinking back to what our ancestors day. As rough of a day that i might have as chief of the Cherokee Nation, it is not as bad as what john ross went through. I have to think about that from time to time. I mentioned reunification feud i cannot stress enough the division between the Cherokee Nation. It is not just that we were removed and we had to pick ourselves back up, it was that we were removed, and we were split apart. John ross had been over overrun because can you imagine if that happened today, if the president of the United States does not like the way negotiations are going on with france, and he says forget about the french, we will deal with the other french, and we will strike a deal, and everyone will think it is ok. That is what happened 100 some odd years ago. 100 years before, we are governing ourselves out here. We have our own government. How they came together is remarkable, and every time i read about it, i am still struck by the level of compromise. I think it is a lesson for cherokees today. From time to time, tribal elections can get pretty raucous. They can