St. David's Islanders are planning to host the first ever Reconnection - Native American Indian festival this June to celebrate the Island's rich and unique ancestry.

The Islanders have formed a committee to organise the festival which will be at least two days long, The Royal Gazette has learned.

The committee will be inviting members of the different American Indian tribes who were shipped to Bermuda against their will as slaves for a period of some 200 years to come to the Island and participate.

“We plan to have Native American Indians in their full regalia dancing and singing,” said committee member St. Clair (Brinky) Tucker yesterday.

Mr. Tucker said the committee is also planning to integrate a Native American languages revival component to the festival and to organise educational talks at various Island schools.

“It will be a first for St. David's and for the entire Bermuda public,” said Mr. Tucker.

The Department of Cultural Affairs has already been informed of the plans for the Festival and Mr. Tucker said the bulk of the events will be held outdoors so the public can come down with their families and revel in the rich heritage of St. David's Island.

The festival is an integral part of a spiritual and educational reconnection process between St. David's and the native communities in the Eastern United States, which was well underway over the past two weeks as Mr. Tucker hosted Mashantucket Pequot/Wampanoag Native American researcher and educator Tall Oak (Everett G. Weeden Jr).

Tall Oak has been researching the connections between Bermuda and Native American Indian tribes at Bermuda's National Archives since he arrived on the Island last Friday.

Tall Oak told The Royal Gazette that his spirit has been uplifted by the rich connections to the Pequot tribe that he has found in Bermuda and the spirit of survival that his people in Bermuda have exhibited.

“It exceeds my wildest dreams,” he said. “I call it my Bermuda high.”

Tall Oak said he first met a descendant of the Native American Indians enslaved in Bermuda last summer in Rhode Island.

St. David's Islander Dora Hollis was visiting his cousin there at the time.

“When I saw her, I saw our people,” Tall Oak said. “I had to go up and give her a big hug.

“That was a moment I will never forget for the rest of my life.”

And Tall Oak said the richness of the history of the American Indian descendants in Bermuda has surprised and delighted him as it will many of his people. “I've been researching Native American heritage all of my life but I have had to revise a lot of my ideas since Brinky and I first came into contact and through what I have learned here,” Tall Oak said.

“Like most of my people, I knew that Native Americans were brought here as slaves but I sort of saw that as the end of the story.

“Most people think “slavery was the end” for the group (sold as slaves) - that those people lived through a horrible experience and then they died.

“I think that was probably the intention of those that shipped (the slaves). “Certainly it was their intention to have the Pequot disappear entirely.

“So it has been most gratifying to find that not only have American Indians survived 350 years of intermixing with other groups in Bermuda but are also aware of the specific tribal memberships that made up their backgrounds.”

Tall Oak said the Bermuda National Archives have also been a boon to his research. While Pequot and members of other Indian tribes were also forcefully transplanted to some of the Caribbean Islands, the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands, in many places the history is not well documented.

While Bermuda has better records than some areas, Tall Oak said tracing specific family connections can still be very difficult.

“The people that ran the slave trade didn't care which tribe slaves belonged to,” he said. “To them it was just a labour force. They didn't even have names they were just put down as a dollar value. Records only indicate ‘one Indian male two (pounds)'. It was one of the dehumanising methods used to reduce slavery to the status of an industry.”

North American Indian slaves were first forcefully transplanted to Bermuda in the 1630s.

Tall Oak said Pequots were a particular target of the slavers because they were the dominant tribe in the four northeastern North American colonies of the time - Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Connecticut. There are no certain accounts but it is estimated there were roughly 400,000 Pequots living in the Colonies in the early 1600s. Today there remain only two communities in the United States - the Mashantucket Pequot reserve and the Eastern Pequot reserve.

Tall Oak said the relationship between the Pequots and the early American settlers was initially a friendly one but greed soon led the settlers to view the Pequots as a threat and the Pequot War broke out.

“The end result of that war was the massacre of 300 old men, women and children in Pequot fort on May 26, 1636,” Tall Oak said.

While the Pequot continued to resist valiantly, many were hunted down and killed or sold into slavery and shipped out as quickly as possible.

An 1838 treaty even dictated that the name Pequot “would never be spoken again” as the settlers tried to erase the tribe even from memory, Tall Oak added.

Pequot males over 14 years were expelled hastily in order that a new warrior group would not arise in the colonies.

This was the manner in which the first groups of Pequots found their way to Bermuda.

Over the next 200 years till emancipation in 1834, Mr. Tucker - who has also done extensive research on Native Americans in Bermuda - estimates that roughly 2,000 North American Indian slaves landed in Bermuda.

“Coincidence more than anything,” resulted in the bulk of the Indian slaves being settled in St. David's, he added.

“A lot of slave owners at the time settled in St. David's, and when slaves were set free they stayed there and inter-married and survived as best they could.

“Indians married into the English and black groups and that is why you have so many different skin complications, hair colours and eye colours there.”

While, the distinct St. David's appearance has always been attributed to the “Mohawks”, in fact Mohawks were never brought to Bermuda as slaves.

The Indians in Bermuda were given this mistaken tribal name by English settlers and it unfortunately stuck.

As ties grow between the Pequot and other American Indian tribes which were brought to Bermuda through events such as the upcoming festival, however, it is hoped that the language, traditions of the correct tribal names and identities will come to be tied to the East End.

Men like Tall Oak and Mr. Tucker are working determinedly to make it so.