WASHINGTON – In the history books, there is the story of Pocahontas, the lovely Indian maiden who became a Christian, married an Englishman in Virginia and sailed away with him to England. Beyond that, there is little mention of the Virginia Indians who greeted the first settlers.

It is as if an entire Indian nation that had lived here for thousands of years had simply vanished.

And so it was with a measure of astonishment to some onlookers that the chiefs of Virginia’s eight remaining tribes and many of their members gathered Wednesday at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington in a “departure ceremony” to bless their trip to England – the first major delegation to make the trip since that day, centuries ago, when Pocahontas sailed.

“I thought these people were annihilated, that they’d died of smallpox or were moved,” said Kimberly Harris, expressing a common sentiment, as she watched a parade of dancers in fringed buckskin, turkey feathers, porcupine headdresses, beaded bolo ties, breastplates of bone and necklaces of cowry shells and seeds.

Virginia’s American Indians are still here, though in greatly diminished numbers from the 40 tribes that were around in 1607 when settlers established the first permanent English colony at Jamestown. And if awareness of the Virginia Indians is all that comes of this historic trip to England as part of Jamestown’s 400th anniversary festivities, to Stephen Adkins, chief of the Chickahominy tribe, the trip will have been a success.

“People like to say that post-mid-17th century, there were no Virginia Indians,” Adkins said. “We’re going to dispel that notion. We’ve been kind of the best-kept secret in Virginia for 400 years.”

The Virginia tribes have been so invisible, Adkins said, that although they were the first tribes the colonists encountered four centuries ago, they have yet to be officially recognized by the federal government – unlike 562 other tribes, primarily in the West, that are considered sovereign nations. Those tribes are offered federal health, education and housing benefits.

Six of the eight Virginia tribes are lobbying Congress for that federal recognition. Their motto: “First to welcome. Last to be recognized.”

Not only were they neglected in history books, but in 1924 a “racial integrity policy” virtually erased Virginia Indians. That policy, born of the eugenics movement, declared that Virginia had only two races, white and black. The policy was not overturned until a 1967 Supreme Court decision.

It is time, Adkins said, to take the story back from the historians and Hollywood directors who have portrayed his people alternatively as ignorant savages or idyllic dwellers in a simple Garden of Eden. It is time to acknowledge that without the Chickahominy and other Virginia tribes, the early settlers at Jamestown would surely have died of starvation.

“We consider Jamestown the cradle of American democracy,” said Sen. George Allen, R-Va., who, along with Rep. James Moran, D-Va., attended the ceremony Wednesday. “And that cradle was tended to by Virginia Indians.”

Allen and Moran are sponsoring federal recognition bills in Congress to right an old wrong, they said.

“It is time not to rewrite history but to set it straight,” Adkins said.