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4. Danny Gear
- The University of Alabama Press
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4 Danny Gear I am Danny Pultz Gear.My great-grandparents were John and Sarah Clark Pultz. My grandparents were Rufus Coolidge Pultz and Beverly Shifflett Pultz.My parents were Rufus Coolidge Pultz Jr. and Elizabeth Wilhelm Pultz. My mother, Elizabeth,was a Mississippi Choctaw.I knew there was Indian blood on my dad’s side, too, but I didn’t know which nation. My parents had moved to Maryland from Irish Creek in Rockbridge County, Virginia,when I was still a young lad.I knew George Branham in Maryland,and after he moved to Amherst he began urging me to visit him and meet with the Monacans. George said, “I have learned my people need help. Please come and help.” While I was visiting George, I learned I was also related to the Monacans on the Pultz side. I’ve been in Amherst several years now. My wife, K. Lynn, and I are buying a house and we’re expecting a son to be born any day now. I didn’t become involved in research or leadership roles until some of the leaders invited me to do so. I now sit on council and I’m one of the drummers. I am spending every moment I can spare on research. Research is very difficult. Our language is Tutelo. It’s Siouan based. This language doesn’t mean we are Lakotahs or Dakotahs.We aren’t a branch of the Sioux out west. Siouan based is like putting a group of Latin-speaking people in a room together. Just because their language is Latin based doesn’t mean the South Americans, Mexicans, Spaniards , and the Italians are going to understand each other’s language, because they aren’t. Siouan based just means that some of our words are very similar. For the most part, words are not of particular Indian nations, but instead are regional to each tribe according to locations. I’ll give an example: two words may have the same spelling, yet contain a different meaning from one another, depending upon the stressed syllable—for instance, TAH-pah means ball; tah-PAH means buffalo head. 24 / Danny Gear There are actually very few Indians of any nation who can speak their complete tongues anymore. Many years ago the United States Government forbade the Dakotahs to speak their particular tongue.Is it any wonder dialects are all but dead? The Monacan Indians are part of a group of Indians that make up a Confederacy of five consisting of the Mowhencho, Massinack, Rossawek, Monasukapanough , and Monahassanugh. These five groups spoke Tutelo; therefore, the United States Government, using the European method of configuration, lumped these five nations together forming one Confederacy.When I first began researching Monacans, I was able to find very little information, but when I recalled how the Europeans grouped Indian nations together according to their dialects, I began looking under Tutelo and boom! I found ceremonial histories, all kinds of useful information. I have received from Kansas (which is a Siouan name) and Philadelphia museums some copies of recordings recorded onto beeswax saucers on which our ancestors were singing in Tutelo. Curators from these two museums were kind enough to make cassettes of these recordings for me. I mention these few examples to help you understand that Monacans didn’t exist according to European history, but Tutelos did exist. When I first came to Amherst County there were some residents who told me,“These people around here who claim to be Indian don’t know the first thing about being Indian. Most of these so-called Indians have never been out of this county, much less this state.” Once upon a time we occupied land in West Virginia and into both North and South Carolina. Not just Monacan Indians, but many, many Indians inhabited American land before Europeans even knew this land existed.God chose Indians to be the caretakers of this land he created. The reason he chose us to be his janitorial caretakers is because Indians have always had a sense of kinship, an understanding of the relationship between earth and mankind. We feel this kinship far more deeply than do Europeans and we don’t take advantage of the land in a destructive way as they soon began to do after their arrival. When the Pilgrims first arrived in what, to them, was this New World, we shared our food with them. We taught them which wild-growing plants were safe...