Virginia Commonwealth University
EN-10: Community Partnerships

VCU’s Rice Rivers Center is engaging with the federally recognized Chickahominy and Pamunkey Tribes, conducting two major projects in which it is dedicating the center’s resources and expertise in support of the Tribes’ work to protect and preserve their ancestral lands.The institution provides material support including capacity and training of relevant technologies such as LIDAR, remote sensing applications, geodetic surveys, and drones. The center plans to work with both tribes long-term with the goal to “help them stand up their own internal environmental management programs and then continue to act in an advisory capacity.”
For the Pamunkey Tribe, the Rice Rivers Center is working with the U.S. Geological Survey to identify critical water resources — and threats to those resources, such as sea level rise and invasive species — for the Tribe’s reservation, a 1,200-acre area located on a bend of the Pamunkey River in King William County.
The project for the Chickahominy Indian Tribe is an environmental analysis of its recently re-acquired ancestral property called Mamanahunt, located in the lower Chickahominy River watershed in Charles City County. A large part of the property is tidal forested wetland with some pockets of tidal freshwater marsh. Mamanahunt is culturally significant to the Tribe because it is one of several village sites along the Chickahominy River where they were located when Jamestown settlers first visited in 1607.

URL: https://news.vcu.edu/article/2022/07/vcu-rice-center-provides-environmental-expertise-to-pamunkey-chickahominy-tribes-to-help