Mixed Race Studies

White Supremacists from 1920s Still Thwarting Virginia Tribes

Indian Country Today Media Network
2011-04-26

Tanya Lee

Congress is once again considering legislation that would grant federal recognition to six of Virginia’s 11 state-recognized American Indian tribes—the Chickahominy, Chickahominy Eastern Division, Nansemond, Rappahannock and Upper Mattaponi tribes and the Monacan Indian Nation. Chief Gene Adkins of the Eastern Chickahominy Tribe said, “We have been working on federal recognition for about 10 years. It is hard for me to understand why it has not gone through like we hoped.”

Virginia Democrat Rep. Jim Moran, sponsor of the House bill that would recognize the tribes, said he introduced the legislation to correct a “travesty of justice. The Virginia Indian tribes have been treated as unjustly as any tribe in the country, and that’s saying a lot. These are the tribes that helped the first English settlers in North America survive. Of all the tribes, they should have been recognized.”

There are three routes to federal recognition—administrative, judicial and legislative, explained Wayne Adkins, president of the Virginia Indian Tribal Alliance for Life and second assistant chief of the Chickahominy Tribe. “The administrative route is very expensive. It’s a long process. Tribes gather documents, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) reviews them and tells tribes what other documents they need, then it’s get in line behind all the other tribes seeking recognition. It could take 30 years and cost $1 million per tribe. Most tribes going for recognition just don’t have that kind of money.”

Walter Ashby Plecker, said Wayne Adkins, is another big reason why going through the BIA process would be difficult for the Virginia tribes. “When Native Americans were given the right to vote [in 1924], Virginia adopted racially hostile laws,” Moran explained. The laws targeted blacks—and, by a quirk of logic—American Indians. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was one of the most restrictive in the nation, but it was not the only one—30 states passed similar legislation.

Plecker, registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912-1946, was instrumental in crafting that state’s law. He argued that there were no full-blooded Indians left in the state by the early 20th century; therefore, all who claimed Indian heritage were part something else, and he decided the best thing to do would be to lump them in with blacks, since, by his mandate as registrar, a person could claim only one of two racial backgrounds in Virginia: Caucasian or “Negro.” People claiming to be Indians, Plecker said, were r­eally blacks trying to move their families into a position where they could “pass,” or claim to be Caucasian.

Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 outlawed miscegenation, and its intent, quite simply, was to keep Anglo-Saxon blood pure. Wrote Plecker: “For the purpose of this act, the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.… The [terms] ‘Mixed,’ ‘Issue,’ and perhaps one or two others, will be understood to mean a mixture of white and black r­aces, with the white predominating. That is the class that should be reported with the greatest care, as many of these are on the borderline, and constitute the real danger of race intermixture.”…

…Though Social Darwinism and eugenics originated in England, their real champions at the beginning of the 20th century were Americans. Plecker was a zealous eugenicist, advocating both a­nti-miscegenation laws and sterilization of the “unfit,” while also proselytizing that Caucasians and non-Caucasians should be kept separated. As part of his work in the Virginia Statistics Office, he eradicated records of Indian births and marriages in order to support his directive that all Indians were to be categorized as blacks. These are the very records that Virginia’s Indian tribes now need in order to receive federal recognition. Other records of tribal significance were destroyed in fires….

Read the entire article here.

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