Meet Our Preservation Partners
- Desiree Dyer
- May 21
- 2 min read
Meet the Partners Working to Protect Powhatan’s Birthplace
Protecting Tree Hill will take many hands, many kinds of expertise, and a shared commitment to preserving places that cannot be replaced.
Virginia Tribes are working alongside trusted preservation, conservation, legal, and cultural-resource partners to support the long-term protection of Powhatan’s birthplace. Each partner brings a different strength to this effort, but all are united by a common goal: ensuring that this sacred, historic, and environmentally significant landscape is protected for future generations.
Preservation Virginia is a statewide historic preservation leader working to strengthen Virginia’s communities and historic places of memory through preservation. In the effort to protect Tree Hill, Preservation Virginia brings deep expertise in historic preservation, public education, advocacy, and the protection of irreplaceable cultural landscapes. Their involvement helps place Powhatan’s birthplace within the broader story of Virginia history and underscores why this landscape deserves statewide attention and care.
Kenah Consulting is a small, women-owned and minority-owned anthropological consulting firm that supports Tribal Nations in cultural and natural resource preservation, federal recognition, land and resource rights, and community-centered development. Kenah brings specialized expertise in anthropology, policy, program development, and Tribal sovereignty. In this effort, Kenah supports the Tribes through research, coordination, cultural-resource strategy, and community-led approaches to protecting places of deep Indigenous significance.
The Indigenous Conservation Council for the Chesapeake Bay is an Indigenous-led intertribal initiative focused on supporting Tribes in Virginia and across the Chesapeake Bay region in rematriating ancestral lands. ICC provides a collaborative structure through which Tribal Nations can work together on land conservation, stewardship, and the protection of landscapes tied to living Indigenous cultures. In the Tree Hill effort, ICC helps center Indigenous leadership, intertribal coordination, and long-term stewardship of ancestral lands and waters.
The Southern Environmental Law Center is a regional legal and policy organization dedicated to protecting clean air, clean water, a livable climate, natural treasures, biodiversity, and healthy communities across the South. SELC brings legal, environmental, policy, and communications expertise to complex conservation challenges. In the effort to protect Tree Hill, SELC supports the work to safeguard the site’s environmental resources, elevate the importance of responsible land-use decisions, and ensure that preservation remains at the center of the conversation.
Working Together for Preservation
Tree Hill is not ordinary land. It is a sacred Indigenous landscape, a place of shared Virginia history, and an important environmental resource connected to the James River.
The partners working alongside the Tribes reflect the full significance of this place: cultural, historical, legal, environmental, and community-based. Together, this coalition is helping build a preservation-first path forward rooted in respect, stewardship, and responsibility.
Some places are too important to lose. Tree Hill is one of them.
This is absolutely one of the most important places in our Commonwealth. If it cannot be preserved totally, it must be fully surveyed archaeologically and developed collaboratively