{"id":30735,"date":"2013-05-01T01:06:03","date_gmt":"2013-05-01T01:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30735"},"modified":"2014-09-19T21:16:22","modified_gmt":"2014-09-19T21:16:22","slug":"we-are-not-going-to-go-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30735","title":{"rendered":"We Are Not Going To Go Away"},"content":{"rendered":"

We Are Not Going To Go Away<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cColonial Williamsburg\u201d Journal<\/a>
\nSpring 2013<\/a><\/p>\n

Andrew G. Gardner<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Virginia\u2019s Pamunkey Indians Greeted the Jamestown Settlers, but They Are Still Waiting for National Recognition<\/em><\/p>\n

Beyond Virginia\u2019s<\/a> borders, the Pamunkey Indians<\/a> are remembered, when they are remembered at all, mostly for a princess named Pocahontas<\/a>. England\u2019s Queen Elizabeth II<\/a> probably knows more about the tribe than the average American: in 2007 she met a Pamunkey delegation during celebrations of Jamestown\u2019s 400th anniversary.<\/p>\n

When the 1607 colonists landed, the Pamunkey\u2014 1,000 warriors strong\u2014were the most powerful of the thirty-two tribes in the Powhatan paramount chiefdom<\/a>, the loose association of Native Americans that dominated the Chesapeake region<\/a>. Hunter gatherers, they looked to the woodlands for meat, clothing, and the stuff of shelter, fished the rivers, and grew such crops as maize, beans, and squash. Fifteen to twenty thousand people, the Powhatan commanded more than six thousand square miles, a territory that ranged leagues inland from the bay, all its tribes tributary to the Pamunkey chief Wahunsonacock<\/a>, Pocahontas\u2019s father. Now the Pamunkey domain amounts to a 1,200-acre King William County<\/a> reservation twenty-five miles east of Richmond<\/a>. There, thirty-four families\u2014fewer than eighty people\u2014make livings from renting out land for farming and duck hunting. About 120 more Pamunkey are scattered across the country.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, they are \u201ca people who refused to vanish,\u201d as historian Helen Rountree<\/a> says. One of eight tribes Virginia recognizes, only they and their neighbors the Mattaponi established reservations, each secured by seventeenth-century treaties with Charles I<\/a> and Charles II<\/a>. In a 1677 compact, the Pamunkey agreed to pay to the governor a rent of \u201ctwentie beaver skinns\u201d each autumn, a fee later amended to \u201cFin, Fur, or Feather.\u201d They say that in 350 years they have not missed a payment of fish, wild turkey, or venison, these days ceremoniously delivered to the steps of the governor\u2019s mansion in Richmond…<\/p>\n

…The next century would bring them a new challenge\u2014 one that would have profound repercussions\u2014 repercussions felt today.<\/p>\n

Walter Ashby Plecker<\/a> was a medical doctor by training. Born ten days before the Civil War<\/a> began\u2014his father fought for the Confederacy<\/a>\u2014Plecker became Virginia\u2019s first state public health officer, eventually administering its new Vital Statistics Office for more than thirty years. Plecker, a white supremacist, was an enthusiast for the popular late nineteenth-century pseudoscience eugenics<\/a>. Eugenicists believed in the racial inferiority of all non-Caucasians, and promoted strict segregation to forestall the procreation of whites with African Americans and others.<\/p>\n

In 1924, Virginia adopted the Racial Integrity Act<\/a><\/em>, a statute that decreed but two possible racial classifications: white or \u201ccolored.\u201d Plecker, who lobbied for the measure, wrote in 1925 of \u201cthe considerable number of degenerate white women giving rise to mulatto children.\u201d Keeper of the state\u2019s births, deaths, and marriages records, he used his office to advance his beliefs and the state\u2019s stringent racial codes, enactments that outlawed black and white marriages. Plecker embraced an extralegal \u201cone drop rule,\u201d<\/a> which held that anyone with so much as a drop of \u201cblack blood\u201d in his or her veins should be classified black\u2014which he did.<\/p>\n

Virginia\u2019s Indians were not the primary targets of the racial restrictions\u2014they were classified with whites\u2014but they, Pamunkey included, became the law\u2019s and Plecker\u2019s victims anyway. In Plecker\u2019s mind there was no longer such thing as a \u201cpureblood\u201d Virginia Indian. To him, all were descended of unions with free blacks. Suspecting that blacks were trying to pass<\/a> as Indians to gain white status, particularly in the Chickahominy tribe<\/a>, he ordered the state\u2019s records of Indians revised to classify them all as \u201ccolored.\u201d The legislature, however, adopted a \u201cPocahontas exception.\u201d Realizing that prominent Virginians claiming Indian descent, including from the Pamunkey princess, would be now be classified as \u201ccolored,\u201d the lawmakers excused individuals of one-sixteenth or less Native American ancestry.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Plecker\u2019s mind we simply just did not exist,\u201d Chief Kevin Brown says. \u201cIt was paper genocide pure and simple. Administratively, he was wiping us off the map.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1969 the Supreme Court of the United States threw out the Racial Integrity Act<\/em>. But for the Pamunkey and the other Virginia tribes, Plecker\u2019s obsession still has a sting in its tail…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We Are Not Going To Go Away \u201cColonial Williamsburg\u201d Journal Spring 2013 Andrew G. Gardner Virginia\u2019s Pamunkey Indians Greeted the Jamestown Settlers, but They Are Still Waiting for National Recognition Beyond Virginia\u2019s borders, the Pamunkey Indians are remembered, when they are remembered at all, mostly for a princess named Pocahontas. England\u2019s Queen Elizabeth II probably […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,1467,8,3015,20,693],"tags":[14584,14586,1857,14585],"class_list":["post-30735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-usa","category-virginia","tag-andrew-g-gardner","tag-pamunkey-indians","tag-walter-ashby-plecker","tag-colonial-williamsburg-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30735\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}