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