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." ----------- 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