Feds Won't Recognize the Tribe of Pocahontas

Pocahontas and her son, Thomas Rolfe, for whom the 1965 Preakness Stakes winner and champion 3 yr. old male, out of the race mare Pocahontas, was named.

Pocahontas was captured by the English as a teenager in perhaps 1612 in what is now Virginia and married two years later to Englishman John Rolfe. Her everlasting fame is because she supposedly saved the life of John Smith who was about to be decapitated by native warriors. Although she was an international celebrity during her own lifetime, passing away in Gravesend, England in 1617, the tribe to which she and her father, the chief Powhatan, belonged is unrecognized by the US to this day, according to  this article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Somehow the federal government has assumed the right to determine if a person does or does not belong to a smaller group.