Last week, as part of its Indigenous Perspectives Exhibit, the Library of Virginia asked four leaders from Tribes in Virginia to discuss the consequences to their cultures of the Racial Integrity Act put in place to preserve white supremacy in the state 100 years ago.
Virginia’s history of enacting laws to separate people by race goes back to the 1600s. In 1924, the same year Indigenous communities were recognized as U.S. citizens, Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act. This began decades of legislation and campaigns to prevent race-mixing and efforts to wipe out Indigenous cultures in Virginia.
“One of my oldest sisters said she can remember going places during that time and it had on the doors, white, colored and in some instances said, ‘no Indians allowed,’” says Upper Mattaponi Assistant Chief Lou Wratchford, who talked about just one of the many consequences to Indigenous people in Virginia. Indigenous cultures were silenced; their ability to live a normal life, repressed. Some left the state.
“Well, there was numerous decades in the 20th Century where a lot of that history was lost because the Tribes just kind of stayed hunkered down and in hiding," says Pamunkey Chief Robert Gray. "Losing some of their cultural activity. Losing some of their people, where the diaspora of people going up to Philadelphia and other areas.”
And, while there are 574 federally recognized Tribes, some of the Tribes first encountered by colonists in Virginia are still fighting for federal recognition. Walter Plecker who headed the state Bureau of Vital Statistics led a very personal crusade against Tribes, wiping their cultural identities from birth certificates. This “paper genocide” complicated federal recognition says Wayne Adkins, First Assistant Chief of the Chickahominy Indian Tribe.
“The Bureau of Indian Affairs reached out to the various states and when they reached out to Virginia, Plecker said, ‘there’s no Indians here.’ Theoretically, we probably would have been recognized in 1934 as federal Tribes," Adkins says. "But because of Plecker’s thinking, it didn’t happen.”
But there were those who did fight back. Mason Keyser, a graduate student specializing in environmental history at Virginia Tech was digging through documents at the Library of Virginia when he found a letter written in 1930 by Wratchford’s grandmother Molly Adams asking then-Governor John Garland Pollard for help.
Adams writes, “I cannot see what they have against the Indian race so much that they’re always hammering on them.”
Upper Mattaponi Assistant Chief Wratchford reminded the audience at the Library of Virginia gains made since the Act was removed in 1967 can still be lost.
“A leader in the Department of Education made the comment that Virginia Indians were the first immigrants," Wratchford says. "For that statement to be made by someone today lets us know what we have obtained, we can lose.”
After the program, Nottoway Chief Lynette Allston noted yet another consequence of the Racial Integrity Act.
“Generational trauma follows generations. So, here we still have people who are very insecure, and they want to find that connection with the Indigenous part of their background, but they lived in another world that was not Indigenous," Allston said. "So, it’s hard sometimes to connect with your ancestry.”
The library exhibit runs until August 17th. The next program on April 24th is a lecture by Pamunkey Citizen Ashley Spivey, an anthropologist who will discuss her Tribe’s role in the Civil War.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.