Karenne Wood
Monacan Poet

Karenne Wood is an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation and serves on the Monacan Tribal Council. She is Director of the Virginia Indian Heritage Program at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and is currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Virginia, working to reclaim indigenous languages and revitalize cultural practices. She was previously the Repatriation Director for the Association on American Indian Affairs, coordinating the return of sacred objects to Native communities. She has also worked at the National Museum of the American Indian as a researcher, and she directed a tribal history project with the Monacan Nation for six years. Wood held a gubernatorial appointment as Chair of the Virginia Council on Indians for four years, and she has served on the National Congress of American Indians’ Repatriation Commission.

Karenne Wood answers: The response of Virginia Indians to the American Civil War varied from tribe to tribe. We know that several Pamunkey men served the Union Army as gunboat pilots, not fighting directly as soldiers. These men were thrown off the rolls of the local Colosse Baptist Church for aiding the "enemy." It's likely that the Pamunkey people chose to aid the North because they had had to repeatedly defend their small remaining lands from encroachment by Virginia and by local landholders over time. One of these men, William Terrill Bradby, went on to become a Union spy and eventually became an informant for noted anthropologist James Mooney. Other tribes responded differently. An 1896 article in the Richmond newspaper reported that men belonging to the Monacan community near Bear Mountain in Amherst had been "taken" to Petersburg during the recent war to work on fortifications there, presumably for the South, perhaps against their will. These varied responses are indicative of the nation's Indian tribes as a whole, some of whom fought valiantly for the South, while others took the Northern side. Some tribes, such as the Cherokee, were directly involved.

Statistics show that just under 3,600 Native Americans served in the Union Army during the war. Perhaps the best known of their number was Colonel Ely Parker, who served as an aide to General U. S. Grant and was present at Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House. Statistics for the Confederacy are not reliably available, but most scholars of Native American involvement in the actual fighting of the war are well acquainted with the major Southern figure among them: Brigadier General Chief Stand Watie, a three-quarter blood Cherokee who was born in December 1806 near what would become Rome, Georgia. Stand Watie had been one of the signers of a treaty that agreed to the removal of the Cherokee from their home in Georgia to what was then the Oklahoma territory; this split the tribe into two factions and culminated in 1838 in the infamous removal known today as the "Trail of Tears."