VALDOSTA STATE MAGAZINE 89 evidence that’s so hard. It’s tons of data. One critique of the federal government and this process is that tribes like this have no resources. It’s an almost insurmountable process.” But surviving against the odds is the Native American way. They have had no choice. When European colonists first set foot in North America, they brought deadly diseases that wiped out entire Native communities. They brought wars that ravaged their lands and homesteads. They even captured Native Americans and sold them as slaves to the Caribbean, providing the foundation for the African slave trade. Haggard said early United States policy toward Native Americans was simple: Take their land and assimilate them. Forced removal and maltreatment was the norm, and the dying continued. Researchers estimate that there were around 10 to 15 million Native Americans in North America in 1492. In 1900, there were 250,000. Discrimination is woven throughout the stories of the Pascagoula River Tribe, from generation to generation, changing forms but remaining visceral. Polk, 49, has read letters sent to her grandmother in the mid-1900s that denied her access to both the white and the black schools because of her race, leaving her confined to a small school for Native Americans that did not go past the eighth grade. Polk, who has some features of a Native American but a lighter skin color, said her grandmother carried such shame about their heritage and the discrimination it brought. Her grandmother would touch Polk’s little pointed nose and say, You need to get all the education you can, and just be thankful you’ve got that pretty little face, that pretty little nose. Then she would touch her own nose and say, Be thankful that it doesn’t look like this mug and that you don’t have this pug nose. Polk was a grown woman before she knew anything about what her grandmother and other ancestors had endured. “I watched my dad struggle on an eighth-grade education to provide for five kids, and he did a fantastic job,” said Ealy, who is currently the chairperson of the tribe’s council. “As he grew older, he had illnesses because of the types of jobs he had to take. He did work with tractors and heavy equipment. Now they put you inside the heavy equipment and you get filtered air. But when he was doing that job, he pretty much dealt with the diesel fuel fumes. He struggled with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease because of that. I think that he might have had better opportunities if he had had more education.” The tribe has been denied economic opportunity over and over again, Haggard said. “They couldn’t get the better jobs because the better jobs went to whites,” he said. “Anything left over went to African- 89 VALDOSTA STATE MAGAZINE