Paul,
Did I already mentioned how impressed I was by your website and thank you for sharing this important research? Just in case I didn't, will thank you now. (So many postings lately, and unless I reply to each as I read it, I sometimes get confused about which I replied to, which I meant to, and which I actually did!)
Joanne
Paul Heinegg <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Hi Anita. You wrote, "Plecker identified Indians as, "issue", a derogatory
term. He was not as benign a character as you make him out to be. He knew
nothing about the racial makeup of Native Americans, except what he was
told, and what was in the record. You almost make it seem like he was
performing a public service. This is the same thing Hitler did with the Jews
in Nazi Germany."
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I am sorry if I gave the wrong impression in my posting. Plecker was a
monster. But he had a boss who had a boss who had a boss who was the elected
governor of Virginia and all were obviously pleased with what he was doing
or they would have fired him. He did not pass the laws he enforced.
The Racial Integrity act and the Sterilization act were passed by the
legislature and signed into law by the governor who presumably had the
support of most Virginians. Eugenics was taught at a number of Virginia
universities and UVA was one of the leaders on the subject in the country.
The main target of the movement was not Indians but African Americans, Jews,
mental patients and poor whites. Concentrating on Plecker's changing birth
certificates obscures this.
See http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002/05/02/virginia-eugenics.htm
and http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay8text.html
The fact that "Indians" thought the term "issues" was derogatory means that
they resented being categorized with African Americans who had been free
before the Civil War and that they preferred the three caste system of
white/ Indian and African American because it insulated them from some of
the effects of Jim Crow. They were not responsible for instituting Jim Crow
or the caste system, but I get the impression that many of their modern-day
descendants are horrified that their "Indian" ancestors were treated like
African Americans. We need to be mindful of the fact that millions of
African Americans were treated like African Americans.
The history of most of the "Indian" families Plecker attacked are on my
website. Like many tribes recognized by Virginia as Indians, most of the
families bore the names of African Americans who had been free since
colonial times and lived among the English, owning land, paying taxes,
appearing in court, etc. One of these tribes, the Monacans, have no evidence
of a single Indian ancestor. The Nansemond tribe does have one single Indian
ancestor: the Nansemond Indian woman who married John Bass in 1638. Tribes
like the Pamunkey, Mattaponi and Chickahominy have well documented ties with
the free African Americans who lived in the communities surrounding them,
but they vigorously deny this.
In 1843 the white neighbors of the Pamunkey and Mattaponi sent a petition to
the legislature saying, "Now the Pamunkys form only a small remnant of the
population, having so largely mingled with the negro race as to have
obliterated all striking features of Indian extraction. Their land is now
inhabited by two unincorporated bands of free mulattoes in the midst of a
large slave holding community." The Pamunkey submitted a counter-petition in
which they claimed that they were generally of at least half Indian
extraction. No Indian reservation in Virginia had a large enough population
to have been self-sustaining, and they mixed so freely with the African
American population, both free and slave, that it appears they did not share
white Virginian's ideas on race--at least before the threats to force them
to sell their reservations. Also, well before 1800 nearly all the Pamunkeys
were related to each other, so they had little choice but to find marriage
partners outside the reservation.
It is good that Virginians with some Indian ancestry are proud of it, but
they should also be proud of their African American ancestry as well.
I have some photos of Virginia Indians taken by the Smithsonian about 1900.
http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/photos_Indians.htm
Paul
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