You can read the years in Webster Custalow's crooked fingers 
  like lines in a tree trunk.

  Time was he struck a formidable pose, Custalow will tell you, 
  hauling railroad ties off the saw mill or hoisting 100-pound bags 
  of salt around the cucumber-pickling plant during the Great 
  Depression. Now he stands about chest-high to a door knob, 
  coiled under as if all 85 of his birthdays were in a sack tied around 
  his shoulders.

  Even the shad and the terrapin in the river out back don't fear 
  him much anymore. These days, Custalow says, strength comes 
  from his family.

  That family is Virginia's Mattaponi tribe of American Indians, of 
  which he is chief. And it's so strong that a $200 million development 
  project could derail because of it, thwarting the King William 
  County government and the Newport News City Council.

  Citing a 1677 treaty, the Indians who live on Virginia's Mattaponi 
  reservation are challenging plans for a 1,400-acre reservoir nearby. 
  They say it would kill the fish spawning in tribal waters and violate 
  a guarantee from England's King Charles II that nothing would be 
  built within three miles of their land.

  Government officials are investigating the claim, and they aren't 
  sure what to make of it.The treaty had always made for nice 
  Thanksgiving Day storytelling, but no one hasever tried to enforce 
  it as a matter of law. The courts might ultimately have to decide 
  whether it can still be enforced. 

  If the 20 families on the Mattaponi reservation succeed, they 
  will have won a battle their ancestors forever lost. And they 
  will do it armed only with a 320-year-old pact with the King 
  of England and a few thousand years of heritage.

  ``I've been thinking about it a long, long time,'' Chief Custalow 
  said Friday,standing in a corner of the 150-acre reservation, on 
  the banks of the Mattaponi River.

  ``I'm a person that from my youngest days God always showed 
  me visions, and I have had a vision on that reservoir. I see 
  terrible things.

  ``I'm sure you've read in books that wind and water are the most 
  powerful things on the face of this Earth. We know that from living. 
  And when you try to cage that up, man has no method of stopping 
  what can happen.''
 
  King William County officials are planning to build the reservoir 
  about two miles from the edge of the Mattaponi reservation. With 
  a peak capacity of 75 million gallons a day, the reservoir would 
  supply the city of Newport News with drinking water through 2040.

  The benefits to the surrounding rural county of 11,000 could be 
  enormous. Newport News would pay $150 million or more over 
  the next 50 years. King William could draw as much water as it 
  needs, assess acres of new waterfront property and get five 
  recreation centers and boat landings for its residents. 

  For a government with annual revenue of about $20 million, the 
  deal is like finding a diamond mine. County officials have worked 
  on the project since 1987, and are willing to buy all the land 
  around the small Cohoke Creek.

  They hope to have a permit from the Department of Environmental 
  Quality soon after the public comment period closes April 15. The 
  Army Corps of Engineers would be next. The new lake won't yield 
  a glass of water until 2005 at the earliest.

  ``Nobody involved in this project expected it to be a free ride,'' 
  King William Administrator David Whitlow said. ``But this is a 
  tremendous opportunity. It's not like it's going to be an eyesore 
  and a detriment to property values.'' 

  The Mattaponi don't care so much about eyesores. The reservoir 
  won't flood any of their Reservation, but they dispute government 
  claims that increased salinity won't affect fishing on the 
  Mattaponi River.

  And property values aren't even worth discussing. Their property 
  has value because the Mattaponi have lived there 1,000 years or 
  more.

  ``All through the years, this is how we lost our land -- because we 
  don't have the numbers, or the political clout,'' said Assistant Chief 
  Carl Custalow, Webster Custalow's son and the manager of most 
  tribal affairs.

  ``But just because you're small, you don't have to let indian walk 
  all over you. For years we've never exercised our treaty rights. 
  Well, now we've had enough.''

  Virginia has eight recognized Indian tribes, but only the Mattaponi 
  and the Pamunkey have designated reservations. The Pamunkey 
  reservation is a few miles from the Mattaponi, but its boundaries 
  would not be encroached by the reservoir.

  The tiny Mattaponi reservation is two miles of wooded backroad 
  from Route 30, a main artery through King William County. It is 
  marked by a faded, plywood sign reading ``See Mattaponi Indian 
  Museum. Stone  Age Relics 1,000 Years Old.'' The community is 
  a cluster of old cars and picnic tables around trailers, brick houses 
  and rickety wooden shacks with rusty tin roofs.

  The government has been consistent in honoring one aspect of the 
  Indians' treaty rights: Residents don't have to pay real estate tax for 
  their land, or personal property tax for their vehicles. But they also 
  don't actually own their land; It's kept in trust and passed down to 
  new generations. The houses are modest because no one can get 
  construction loans without a deed for collateral. 

  There are other privileges still extended the Indians. They can hunt 
  and fish without a license, and hook into community power lines and 
  phone lines tax-free.

  If they make a living on the reservation they are exempt from 
  income tax. If they buy and sell goods among themselves, they 
  are exempt from state sales tax, too.

  But reservation life is not one of luxury. The village is nearly 
  indistinguishable from any low-income community in eastern 
  Virginia. Only the scattered tepees -- largely for the tourists 
  -- stand out.

  Few Indians earn a living on the reservation any more. Carl 
  Custalow, who still makes some money fishing the river, works 
  for an insurance agency in Mechanicsville, for instance. His two 
  children have moved away. He hopes they'll come back. 

  But the river doesn't yield barrels of terrapin or a net full of cat-
  fish from shore to shore anymore. And the state's restrictions on 
  shad or rockfish make things even tougher. Some residents sell 
  art or beadwork, a tough way to make a buck when you're miles
  from the nearest ATM.

  ``All my life, I've fished out there. From a little boy on up,'' said 
  Chief Custalow. ``You had to eat the fish, you had to get out here 
  and dig in the earth to get what you needed to live. We couldn't go 
  to a place and buy fancy stuff.

  ``A lot of that's changed, I know, but I saw something with these 
  two eyes I hope I never see again. I saw indian starving. Children, 
  little ones, that looked like old indian the way the skin was hanging 
  on their bones. We wouldn't be here today without that river.'' 
  The reservoir -- and whatever it does to Indian burial grounds, 
  campsites or to the water on the river -- is just the latest of 
  government's indignities, tribe members say.

  ``We always look seven generations ahead,'' Carl Custalow said. 
  ``You take somebody like Newport News, they're looking right now 
  -- for the business. For the dollar.'' Two months ago, the Mattaponi 
  sent a letter to the state attorney general's office announcing their 
  intention to invoke colonial treaty rights to block the reservoir.

  State lawyers have been looking into the issue, but don't know 
  when they'll have something to say.

  ``This touches on at least three areas of law and several state 
  agencies,'' said Don Harrison, spokesman for Attorney General 
  Jim Gilmore. ``It deals with treaty law,historic preservation, water 
  rights -- this is fairly complex.'' According to a peace treaty 
  between 12 Virginia Indian chiefs and King Charles II, signed 
  May 29, 1677:

  ``Noe English shall seate or plant nearer than three miles of any 
  Indian Towne, and whosoever hath made or shall make any 
  encroachment upon their lands shall be removed from thence.'' 
  The Mattaponi and Pamunkey are descendants of the chiefs who 
  signed the pact. The three-mile buffer was created so colonists 
  and Indians would stop killing each other, the treaty suggests.

  In return, the Indians swore allegiance to the British crown. 
  And they promised to return the children and horses they'd taken, 
  to stop killing cattle and hogs and to refrain from any other 
  injustice ``which hath involved this Country into soe much 
  Ruine & misery.'' Their annual payment, ``in Liew of a Quitrent,'' 
  would be three Indian arrows and 20 beaver pelts.

  That tradition has continued. Every Thanksgiving, members of the 
  Mattaponi and Pamunkey tribes leave some turkeys, some beaver 
  pelts or a deer or two outside the governor's mansion as payment 
  in full.
 
  The attorney general might weigh in soon, but the issue could take 
  years to resolve if the Indians take it to court. They have little 
  money, but are trying to build a coalition of native Americans 
  throughout the country to pitch in.

  ``The indian, the heritage have been there since before this country 
  was even founded. Why would anyone want to take that away?'' 
  asked Thomasina Jordan, head of the state Council on Indians, a 
  governor-appointed committee that oversees Indian affairs.

  ``It's not so much the treaty that matters, it's beyond that. There's 
  so little left of the American Indians that to take away any more 
  would be a real tragedy.''

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