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“As time went on I could see that Karen understood him and tried to give him what he wanted and not what she thought he needed,” wrote Mattaponi Chief Carl Custalow in the foreword. “She truly cared for him as a person and elder, and he could sense that. . . I sensed that during their visits, they both learned something from each other, and both understood each other.”

The Chief and I demonstrates Tootelian’s growth from her first days of working with the Chief to the time when she witnessed the Mattaponi Indians’ fight against a reservoir that would’ve been built near their reservation, Custalow’s passing and the tribe’s ups and downs in the reservoir fight following the Chief’s death.

As Tootelian writes April 11, 2002, “I come to sit in the forest, . . . to lose myself from the world. Yearning for a world untouched by man’s need to order, to control, to erase the rhythms of nature. Geese are calling.”

One of the aspects of the Mattaponi and Chief Webster Custalow’s ways that impressed Tootelian was their generosity and working with nature. Tootelian explains that Custalow offered her vegetables from his garden and fish from the Mattaponi River that he had in a cooler.

Throughout the book, Tootelian’s words allow the reader to feel as though he or she is having a conversation with Chief Webster Custalow as the she describes her conversations with him.

The author tells of Chief Webster Custalow’s life – he was a musician, an inventor, a businessman, a leader, and a caregiver of the earth. Tootelian writes, “Chief spoke of the sun heating the whole world and ‘To tell you the truth, man has hurt the earth. He has not taken care of it, and caring for it is why we are here,’” she quotes him as saying.

In The Chief and I, Tootelian tells a story of a woman questioning so much injustice in life by telling narratives of the first gardeners, the first growers in a land we now call Virginia, a land we now call the United States.

In expressing these thoughts, Tootelian uses nature metaphors and imagery. At the beginning in April 2002, she questions the river, “What were you 100 years ago?” as she communes with the river, understanding its natural power as opposed to man’s desire for power.

By Jan. 21, 2004, Tootelian writes, “In the cold of winter, bundled in hat, sweater, jacket, scarf, and gloves, I think of tiny seeds to plant for my spring garden.”

The tiny seeds represent the strength of the Mattaponi over the centuries of abuses in order to survive.

Tootelian refers to the Mattaponi Indians as creative gardeners, writing on June 13, 2005, “My garden this summer is just okay, not like the pretty reservation gardens. They are garden artists! Garden angels!”

Rebecca L. Adamson, founder of First Nations Development Institute and president and founder of First Peoples Worldwide, says Tootelian’s work “not only shows the way for today’s new leaders but takes the reader into the Native world view to understand the deeply profound qualities of just such egalitarian leadership.”

Published by Brandylane Publishers, Inc. in Richmond, The Chief and I allows the reader to walk along the riverbank of the Mattaponi and gain an understanding of the experiences of Pocahontas’ descendants.

By Bobbie Whitehead

“What were you a hundred years ago? Two hundred, four?”

Those questions stand out at the beginning of the book The Chief and I by author Karen Tootelian, whose powerful words convey such detail about her journey to learn about the Mattaponi Indians and the river along which their reservation rests.

In 2002, Tootelian agreed to help care for Chief Daniel Webster “Little Eagle” Custalow, then 89, who needed assistance.

But what Tootelian never expected was the friendship and near kinship of souls she’d gain in the year she spent with Chief Webster Custalow.

Tootelian, a writer and environmentalist, says she had kept journals for years, and in this journal, she chronicles her relationship with the Chief and increased closeness with nature.