Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia

Front matter

Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia Powhatan People

and the Color Line

Laura J. Feller

Introduction

N MARCH OF 2015, Kevin Brown, chief of the Pamunkey Indians, replied

to opponents of the Pamunkey petition to join the list of federally rec-

ognized Native American tribes: “We met the English and John Smith. Pocahontas was Pamunkey. It’s crazy that were not recognized [by the federal government]. We should have been the first recognized tribe.” The Pamunkey effort succeeded and was confirmed in 2016. In the past, federal officials had argued that because the Pamunkey were party to colonial-era pacts rather than treaties with the United States, they were in the realm of the commonwealth of Virginia, not the federal government.” However, that does not explain why in 2015 the Pamunkey, who have continuously held their reservation lands in tidewater Virginia since the seventeenth century and whose political organization the state has recognized for generations, had some difficulty in the Bureau of Indian Affairs acknowledgment process.

In 2015, public opposition to the Pamunkey petition sprang from multiple bases and biases. Some opponents anticipated that the Pamunkey tribal government might at some point establish a casino. These included investors in a casino not far away in Maryland. A California group warned Virginians that the sovereignties of federally recognized tribes constituted “no taxation and unfair competition” with local non-Native businesses. Some convenience-store owners in Virginia expressed similar fears.’

Opponents also seized upon racialized arguments that the Pamunkey had faced for decades. For years, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some white Virginians argued that because of the history of sex and marriages between Native Americans and African Americans, no one in Virginia should be considered a “full-blood” Indian. Some who opposed the 2015 Pamunkey bid for federal recognition raised again that old argument about Virginia Indians’ “mixed” ancestry. One opposition group emphasized that at least one of the individuals cited by the Pamunkey as a tribal ancestor “was a free black man who didn’t move onto Pamunkey land until he was in his late 20s.”

The argument that a person called a free Black in nineteenth-century government records must necessarily be non-Indian ignores a long history of inconsistent practices and methods that white officials used to ascribe racialized identities to indigenous Virginian individuals. It also ignores the realities of family-making and community-building among tidewater Native people who did not live on reservations. Over generations after 1607, Native American, European American, and African American individuals worked together, lived as neighbors, loved, married, and raised families across racial lines. But in spite of the plural nature of their society, white Virginians attempted to build “race” as a Black-white binary in which everyone was on one side or the other of a single, two-part color line. The existence of Virginian Native Americans, and their connections to African Americans and European Americans, challenged the notion of race as a Black-and-white matter, potentially and sometimes directly. As a result, official records did not always accurately or consistently reflect the cultural identities of indigenous Virginians.

Beneath that 2015 critique of a Pamunkey ancestor as a free Black also lurks the idea that “one drop” of African American “blood” must make a person Black or “colored.” In antebellum years, government records such as census counts often lumped together Native Americans and free African Americans as free persons of color. Jim Crow-era census records might categorize a single individual as Black, “mulatto,” or Indian in different census years. Clearly, one historic document that identifies a Pamunkey ancestor as a free person of color or Black is not necessarily a reliable indicator of the racialized identity ascribed by white officials to that individual over the course of his or her lifetime—and it likely tells us even less about how that individual defined her own identity. We can reject the idea that someone who had moved onto Pamunkey land as an adult was not, could not, and should not be regarded as Indian and part of the Pamunkey community simply because white officials had at some point categorized her or him asa Black person.’

Some opponents of the Pamunkey’s application for federal recognition criticized them for past “civil rights violations” and discrimination against African Americans and women. This critique ignores extreme pressures the Pamunkey faced, before the Civil War and as Virginia’s Jim Crow regime developed, from those who insisted that there could be no “full-blood” Indians in Virginia because of a history of “race mixing.” Those pressures stemmed from whites’ desire to dismantle reservations—and otherwise to buttress the segregation and disfranchisement of all people of color—by denying that any Virginian not white could be other than Black (or “colored”). Claiming Indianness, these whites feared, could be a tool for escaping Jim Crow. Some Virginia Indians responded by denying historic family and community ties to African Americans and excluding them from Native organizations. In the era of segregation, for Native groups this probably looked like a matter of survival.

Thus, in their recent successful quest for federal recognition, the Pamunkey people heard both that they have too many Black ancestors to be Indians—and also that their historic efforts to assert their Indianness by denying ties to AF rican Americans are a barrier to federal recognition. Both critiques echo painful episodes in the histories of the Virginia Indians descended from peoples of the seventeenth-century tidewater Powhatan chiefdoms, whether they live on or off one of the two present-day, state-recognized Pamunkey and Mattaponi Reservations.

My project focuses primarily on tidewater Indians historically and currently living between the James and Rappahannock Rivers—people historically descended from Algonquian-speaking groups related to that famed Powhatan chieftaincy—especially the Pamunkey, Mattaponi, and Chickahominy of New Kent, Charles City, and King William Counties, and their Indian neighbors in those counties who were not formally part of those organized communities. Other Virginia Native peoples, such as the Monacan nation, of Siouan heritage and living west of the tidewater, also suffered through Jim Crow; they largely conducted their affairs separately from Powhatan and Chickahominy indigenous people throughout the Jim Crow era. So did Nottoway peoples, historically Iroquoian-speaking, who live south of the James River in tidewater country.

The backstory of how tidewater indigenous peoples weathered decades of the ever-stranger career of Jim Crow is long. For centuries, in what is now the southeastern United States, African Americans, Native Americans, and European Americans lived, worked, had children together, and shared cultural riches (even as over those centuries racialized legal, economic, social, and political barriers could cruelly mar those unions and exchanges). Before the early national period, among many Southeastern Native American groups, adoption, marriage, community participation and observance of community norms (and sometimes a period of captivity) could cement group membership and relationships, in the absence of homogeneous “blood” and in the presence of “colored” ancestors, to make someone part of the community in ways not congruent with whites’ ideas about race.’ Parentage mattered and matters, but so did other forms of acceptance by the group. Clan kinship/membership, which among some Native communities derives from the status of the mother, could be a key factor; it could be conferred by adoption.’ In short, European ideas about “blood” and race were foreign to structures of community and individual identity in many precontact Southeastern Native American cultures, whose practices differed from whites’ genealogical and legal norms.

“Race” as Europeans conceived of it eventually gained influence among Southeastern Indians over decades in late colonial and early national times.’ European Americans and the economic systems that they brought to the hemisphere exerted pressures that, in the long run, contributed to the erosion of matrilineal systems and infiltrated race into Native cultural and social life. Native peoples at some times and places came to accept, modify, or acquiesce to European American ideas about race and the status of African Americans.'° That helped to shape post—Civil War efforts by tidewater Indians to separate themselves from their Black neighbors. Yet, as the anthropologist Melville Herskovits acknowledged years ago, significant numbers of African Americans claim some Native American ancestry.” Like Virginias Moble Hopson, quoted in chapter 3, they “live black” but retain memories of ancestors who were Indian or lived among Native peoples.

Creating race fundamentally involved prohibiting “interracial” marriage. Virginia’s first law forbidding such marriages, in 1691, explicitly included Native Americans among those forbidden to marry white individuals.'* Another milestone in the centuries-long chain of Virginia’s laws against interracial marriage was a 1924 Act to Preserve Racial Integrity, perhaps the most drastic in Virginia’s litany of such legislation. The 1924 law also marked the moment when the notion that “one drop” of Black “blood” made a person legally Black (or colored) was enshrined in Virginia law. Remarkably, the 1924 act did that by defining what made an individual legally white. The law read: “For the purpose of this act, the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.”!? It excepted from that standard, making them legally white for purposes of this law, only individuals who had “one sixteenth” or less Indian “blood” and whose other, non-Indian ancestors were white, a standard now satirically nicknamed the Pocahontas exception. Before 1924, Virginia law had generally set the boundaries that put an individual on the not-white side of the color line by defining mixed-race identities in terms of fractions of ancestry—the blood quantum concept.

Behind this 1924 Virginia law was a long history of racialized ideas about personal and group identities, citizenship, sex, and marriage in the European American world: eighteenth-century efforts to explain differences among the world’s peoples using natural history-based classificatory schemes; nineteenth-century “scientific” racism built on that earlier discourse; and late nineteenth-and twentieth-century eugenics. In Virginia’s 1924 law, Jim Crow racism fed on the eugenics movement’s argument that the genetic qualities of the human race could and should be improved by careful attention to the genes of potential parents. Eugenic rhetoric helped justify the 1924 law’s ostensibly absolute “no trace whatsoever” standard for whiteness. But in its “one-sixteenth” measure of the number of Indian forebears allowable in a legally white person, the law referred also to legal traditions that defined race in terms of blood quantum. Thus, this law married that older notion of “blood” to the rhetoric of eugenics. This suggested that enforcement of the law could be grounded in verifiable, quantifiable biological and genealogical facts. Yet the word “blood” connoted not only ideas about genes and genealogy, but also blood as a semi-magical inheritance of racialized “gifts.” Those gifts supposedly shaped essential, inherited racial identities that linked biology and culture. Whites have historically tried to justify and explain race in America as if it were a natural, self-evident concept with unquestionable explanatory and integrative powers. That is the unstable foundation of racialized stereotyping, and supposedly predictive, determinative descriptions and prescriptions about social and economic status, citizenship and mental capacities that still haunt this country today.

Peter Wallenstein has detailed that laws forbidding interracial marriage have colonial roots, and that after the Civil War, they became a cornerstone of Southern segregation, though not all states of the former Confederacy acted at the same time or in the same way to renew or reinforce legal prohibitions on “miscegenation.” By 1924, such laws were widespread across the United States; most states, at one time or another, have had laws restricting interracial marriage. Massachusetts’ version of such laws, for example, was in effect until 1843. California’s stood until 1948, when it was struck down in state court. Across the country, these laws varied in their targets and their definitions of what constituted forbidden interracial unions. In some states they applied to racialized groups other than African Americans, using terms like “Mongolian” and “Malay” to describe Asian peoples.'* For Mississippi Choctaw people, when the state legislature passed laws against interracial marriage from the 1880s on, those laws did not embrace Native Americans, likely because removal-era federal treaty language about the Choctaw who stayed in Mississippi and related state law of the 1830s ostensibly made them citizens on par with free whites in Mississippi, and also because of their small numbers, their social cohesion, and their relative obscurity in post—Civil War state politics.’ In Louisiana, a state supreme court ruling in 1810 implied that since American Indians were “persons of color,” they could not marry whites. The 1870 revision of the state’s civil code did not include provisions forbidding interracial marriage. In 1894, interracial marriage again became illegal in Louisiana, and Indians remained persons of color within the legal lines that defined such marriages. In 1920, a Louisiana law declared “the union of an Indian and a person of the ‘colored or black’ race as miscegenetic.” In 1932, Louisiana’s attorney general opined that “marriage between white persons and Indians was not prohibited in Louisiana.” Louisiana’s legalities of the 1920s and 1930s throw into relief the fact that in that era, indigenous Virginians were not forbidden by the state to marry Black partners, while legally they could marry a white person only ifthey met a spurious “Pocahontas exception.” Shortly after statehood, Oklahoma established in effect that if an individual was not Black, he or she was white for purposes of marriage law—and situated Indians on the not-Black side of Oklahoma’s color line.!” As Sarah Deutsch put it, to do otherwise—that is, to identify the state’s Indian peoples as not-white—would have raised the possibility that “whites could not only alienate large groups of Indian voters who knew quite well the status blacks held in white eyes, but whites could also shoot themselves in the foot in terms of access to [Indian] land through marriage.”*

In early twentieth-century Virginia, indigenous Virginians had less influence and leverage, in numbers and control of land, than Indian people in Oklahoma, and so Virginia’s 1924 legal standards for interracial marriage reinforced efforts to place Native Americans on the not-white side (whether Black, colored or “mulatto”) of a color line. Legal enslavement of Indians in Virginia had ended in the distant past.” In eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Virginia, some enslaved Virginians had even sought their freedom in court based on having Indian forebears.” Yet in antebellum years, Virginia’s non-reservation Indians were generally officially labeled free people of color, with the legal disabilities that that status entailed. After passage of 1924’s Act to Preserve Racial Integrity, opportunities for Native Virginians to establish their identities as Indian, not Black and not white, were as problematic as ever, as proponents of that 1924 law used eugenic rhetoric to justify their segregationist campaign.

By 1924, eugenics was embedded in American media and thought. Some eugenics advocates, in this era, had professional credentials and therefore some credibility in presenting eugenics as scientific. Writing about 1920s trends, Elazar Barkan noted that while some scholars like Franz Boas raised possible “alternatives to biological determinism,” it took time for such alternatives to gain credibility not just in the general public but also within academic institutions. He argued, “Castigating these racist positions as pseudo-science is therefore anachronistic.””! But we can acknowledge that race and class bigotries were fundamental to the worldview of eugenics advocates.

A rhetoric of eugenics was on full display, when in 1924 and 1930, the state of Virginia passed laws to re-articulate who would be considered legally white and Black and to define whiteness in more restrictive ways.” When the 1924 act allowed an exception for marriage between whites and individuals “with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian,” this blood-quantum language derived from legislators’ desire to accommodate elite white families who proudly claimed descent from Pocahontas. But as chapter 2 demonstrates, that exception’s “one-sixteenth” benchmark prompted the law’s promoters to argue that all indigenous Virginians were really “colored,” having African Americans in their family trees. They argued that potential marriages of Native Virginians to white partners were a serious eugenic threat to the “racial integrity” of the white citizenry, because if African American “blood” existed outside the recognizably Black population, it might easily spread unless marriages and official racialized identities were stringently policed. Given centuries of Black/indigenous/white relationships in Virginia, enforcement of the 1924 law was bound to collide with the realities of Indianness in Virginia and to expose complications and absurdities inherent in the Black-white dual racial divide that Virginia officials worked so hard to build and maintain. That 1924 law became a centerpiece in a campaign by Walter Plecker, head of Virgini’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, to ensure that no one in Virginia could escape Jim Crow by claiming to be Indian rather than Black.

Narratives about tidewater Indian families and groups in the wake of this 1924 law may seem obscure tales from small places, but their stories illuminate American conceptions of race, racial and ethnic identities, community, family, and marriage. As a law against interracial marriage, the 1924 statute exemplifies how in the United States racialized identities have been integral to contests about class, sex, and reproduction. As Matthew Frye Jacobson observed, “The policing of sexual boundaries—the defense against hybridity—is precisely what keeps a racial group a racial group.”” It is no coincidence that in 1924, Virginia also passed a law allowing for sterilization on eugenic grounds of Virginians living in state institutions who appeared “feeble minded” or “defective,” a law that the U.S. Supreme Court notoriously upheld in its 1927 Buck v. Bell decision. (Virginia was far from the only state with a program for eugenic sterilization or institutional segregation of the eugenically “unfit.”)

The 1924 Act to Preserve Racial Integrity arose in a world of racialized segregation, but also in the context of the rationalizing, modernizing ambitions of post-World War I state governments; of long-running contests about the meanings of citizenship in the wake of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments;

and of eugenic ideas applied to immigration. In 1924, the U.S. Congress authorized a round of yet more restrictive immigration quotas—restrictions based in racist, eugenic ideas and supported by advocates like New York lawyer Madison Grant. Grant helped popularize the eugenics-based argument that years of large-scale immigration by people who were not “Nordic” or “Anglo-Saxon” would damage the white racial “stock” of the United States. In Virginia, advocates of the 1924 racial integrity law sought Madison Grant’s support, to put eugenic thinking in the service of Southern segregation. Many eugenicists in the United States at that moment were concerned about immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, as sources of genetically “inferior,” somehow not-quitewhite-enough racial “stock.” As Dan Kevles put it, in the United States between 1900 and 1930, “the biological distinctions that mainly obsessed eugenicists were not those between whites and blacks but those then believed to divide whites.”** In contrast, white Virginians who promoted Virginia’s “racial integrity” law of 1924 (and a follow-up law in 1930 that further defined Blackness and Indianness) were mainly fighting for a Black-white divide. Elazar Barkan has argued that the success of federal anti-immigration measures of 1924, along with America’s relative isolation and prosperity in the mid-1920s, decreased some of the popular fear that fed eugenic thinking nationally in the United States.” In Virginia, though, proponents of the 1924 racial integrity law used eugenic-sounding appeals in their campaigns against Virginia’s Indians precisely to stoke those fears, as outlined in chapter 2.

As the U.S. Congress in the 1920s mandated increasingly restrictive measures to limit the numbers of immigrants of certain ethnicities on eugenic grounds, in 1924 it also declared, as a blanket matter of law, that all individual American Indians born in the United States are citizens of the United States, which was welcomed by some indigenous people but also reflected the assimilationist goals of those who felt indigenous Americans must adapt to white society.”°

Facing this national focus on race and assimilation, tidewater Indian people pursued varied strategies to maintain, retain, construct and reconstruct their identities as Native Americans. Their actions expose the instability of the construction of race as a Black-white divide. They were creative and persistent, while constrained and influenced by what Grace Elizabeth Hale called the “culture” of segregation.” At times, tidewater Virginia Indians in the Jim Crow era echoed some of the racialized ideas of the larger society in which they lived, as did other Southeastern Indian groups. For example, as Katherine M. B. Osburn observed, Mississippi Choctaw people labeled themselves “full-blooded” from the late nineteenth century in ways that they had not done earlier, and formally took up “blood quantum” language by at least 1934. However, their rhetoric suggesting a “lack of race mixing” in the community did not necessarily mean that the Mississippi Choctaw at that moment shared white Americans’ ideas about race, phenotypes, Choctaw citizenship, or Choctaw identity.” A Black-white binary notion of race may not have fit Choctaw historic, lived experience of the “mixing” of indigenous, white, and Black people any more than it did the lives of Native Virginians.

Battles for Indian identities and communities in Virginia, as in the rest of the country, involved not only marriage law, but also dispossessing Native people of their lands. Over decades of effort by whites to classify Virginia Indians as free people of color, mulattoes, or Blacks, Virginia’s reservations ultimately were disassembled as tribal lands, for practical purposes—except for those of the Mattaponi and Pamunkey that remain today. At times, whites justified their efforts to take Indian lands and dissolve reservations by arguing that intermarriages with Blacks made those Indian communities no longer Indian. And non-reservation tidewater Natives who did not join with reservation people or other organized tidewater indigenous groups (like the Chickahominy) also faced tricky choices about when and whether to identify themselves as Indians in legal situations and official documents.”

Michael Omi and Howard Winant have argued that since the early 1940s, many “Americans have come to view race as a variety of ethnicity;” that is, race may be seen as a social category in which culture and ancestry both contribute to personal and community identities. At the same time, “explicitly racial (and racist) perspectives on race, rooted in the formerly dominant paradigm of the prewar era, have lived on in the South (and to some degree in the Southwest).”*° Even after World War II, tidewater Native people did indeed deal with that “formerly dominant paradigm.” Virginia’s 1924 Act to Preserve Racial Integrity remained in effect until the Supreme Court’s 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision, which struck down laws against interracial marriage across the entire nation.

Since many white Virginians viewed Indianness as a racial and so largely biological category, would it have been possible for Virgina Natives to construct Indianness as an ethnicity in early twentieth century Virginia? If in that era some indigenous peoples in New England re-fashioned their identities by emphasizing ethnic over racial underpinnings, that strategy would seem more difficult for Southern Native groups in their Jim Crow setting.’ Southern federally recognized tribes have had a long history with federally fostered, racialized methods of determining tribal membership based in blood-quantum concepts.** And for Southern indigenous peoples who are not federally recognized, the legal codification of race as a Black-white divide historically has had crushing power to place Natives on the Black side of that color line. Karen Blu suggested that the Lumbee people in North Carolina have a history of viewing themselves in terms “essentially ‘ethnic’ (rather than ‘racial’) at a time when only a few social scientists used the term,” while asserting their indigenous status.” The Lumbee, a relatively large group, had remarkable success in gaining state recognition despite their Jim Crow circumstances. For smaller, non-reservation Native communities in tidewater Virginia, the road to state recognition was harder and longer.

Whether or not “ethnicity” was a viable option for Virginia Natives in Jim Crow times, that should not cloud the fact that First Nations (to borrow a Canadian term) have particular legal status and claims on the United States government. For Southeastern indigenous groups in general, there is and has been a looming question of how their sovereignty, if only as “semi-sovereign’” or “domestic dependent” nations, intersects with their cultural and social distinctiveness. Did reservation Virginia Natives pursue nationalistic strategies to assert Indian identities, given their seventeenth-century treaties and their reservation lands? Some scholars critique nationalisms as tending to foster static, essentialist models that can contribute to rigid conceptions of racialized difference. On the other hand, “strategic essentialism,” as Omi and Winant have labeled some kinds of responses by “subordinate racial groups” to a dominant society’s power and prejudices, can provide unifying tools to resist racist moves by powerful outsiders.” For Native peoples, “strategic essentialisms” such as the use of pan-Indian imagery can be productive strategies. In chapters 3 and 5, we will look at tidewater Indians’ uses of pan-Indianisms.

A question perhaps more salient for Jim-Crow era tidewater indigenous people is how group and individual cultural and social identities can draw on a sense of a shared historical experience. If some tidewater Natives at times accepted aspects of racialized ideologies to delineate themselves, they also drew on a common history that included the well-known narrative of their contact with the English colonists in early seventeenth-century Virginia to affirm their indigenous identities. As they contended with racialized concepts such as “blood,” organized tidewater Virginia Indian groups announced their shared, local, and group-specific histories as descendants of famed seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan peoples. Such historical grounding can undermine static, monolithic notions about ethnic/racialized identities.

In looking at how tidewater Virginia Natives adapted to prevailing European American ideas about race, and retained, maintained, affirmed, invented and reinvented their Indianness after the Civil War, I draw on excellent historical literature on the development of ideas about race in the Southeast over centuries.” As that literature shows, some indigenous peoples in the Southeast eventually adapted or adopted European notions about race, and participated in the racialization and enslavement of African Americans. Also, many southeastern Indians eventually found themselves lumped with “free people of color,” as white Southerners took legal steps, especially after 1830, to disfranchise and marginalize all non-whites.*° As whites’ conceptions of race accompanied increasing Anglo economic and political power, whites’ ideas about “blood quantum” as an essential maker and marker of racial identity could be accepted by, adapted by, or imposed on, Native communities. This eroded other, more traditional, ways of defining who was, or was not, part of a Native community or polity.’ For Native people who lived among and with African Americans, that could lead to cycles of denial of Black ties to Native families and groups. Toni Morrison’s character Susan Byrd put it this way in Song of Solomon: “You know colored people and Indians mixed a lot, but sometimes, well, some Indians didn’t like it—the marrying, I mean.” Thus, in the Southeast, when ideas about blood quantum as applied to Indian peoples intersected with the “one-drop” notion of what makes someone Black, the results were especially pernicious to Native social life and tribal sovereignty. I argue, with other historians, that meaningful and realistic ways of defining Native identities reflect not blood quantum, but rather group participation and relationships of reciprocity among members of a community; shared language, history, and other cultural assets; and ideas about kinship—such as clan membership and adoption—that can transcend biological parentage.**

To ground this argument concretely in individuals’ lived experiences, chapter 1 tells of the extended family and descendants of Lucy Pearman Scott and her second husband, William Scott. When Lucy and many members of her family left Virginia for Canada in the 1850s, at least two of her grown daughters stayed in Virginia. Probably only a handful of the descendants of those two daughters ever lived on Virginia reservations in King William County, though they had many links to indigenous families in New Kent and Charles City Counties. Census and other records treated their Indian identities in contradictory ways, exposing the vagaries of official racialized designations in Jim Crow Virginia. Yet in some of these non-reservation families descended from Lucy Pearman Scott, traditions of Native ancestry persisted over decades and generations despite official denials of their Indianness. Those of Lucy’s descendants who stayed in Virginia showed that living near and marrying within other Native families were among key strategies for claiming and maintaining Indianness among non-reservation indigenous families after the Civil War and into the twentieth century.

To underscore what organized non-reservation groups like the Chickahominy, and families like the Pearmans, were up against, chapter 2 looks at contexts and motivations for the passage of Virginia’s 1924 Act to Preserve Racial Integrity, and subsequent efforts to refine legal definitions of race in Virginia in 1928 and 1930. How was it that state officials came to focus on Virginia’s Indians in their efforts to enforce that 1924 law? In doing so, those officials added to general pressures on non-reservation Indians to marry and live within clusters of other Native families, and they harassed Native individuals and families. Such harassment dramatizes the painful day-to-day, immediate, direct consequences of Jim Crow-era efforts to deny Indian identities to Native Virginians.

Chapters 3 and 5 look mostly at reservation and other organized Native groups, in contrast to chapter l’s emphasis on when and how non-reservation individuals asserted Indian identities in the Jim Crow era—and when they did not directly challenge a Black-white color line.

Chapter 3 examines trends before 1924, to explore how tidewater reservation-dwelling and other organized indigenous people had publicly been working to maintain, proclaim, reclaim and reimagine their identities as Indians after the Civil War. As whites entrenched a Jim Crow regime, Mattaponi and Pamunkey Reservation people maintained their tribal lands and organization. Some other non-reservation tidewater groups—the Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, and Rappahannock, for example—created new formal tribal organizations and built new community institutions, such as separate churches and schools. To some degree these tidewater Native groups did carve out a third category in the face of efforts to place them on the Black side of a binary color line, but they managed this at the cost of taking some measures that were exclusionary on racialized grounds. When organized tidewater Indian groups affirmed their separation from their Black neighbors, they implicitly accepted whites’ notions about race. The reservation groups also demonstrated their Indianness in public performances that linked them to seventeenth-century Powhatan history. (As Kevin Brown’s 2015 comment shows, the Pamunkey still emphasize their role in colonial encounters between Powhatan and English peoples more than four hundred years ago and point to the celebrity of Pocahontas.) Those performances embraced pan-Indian imagery. This, I argue, signified not a loss of cultural “authenticity,” but rather the ability of reservation groups to connect their Southern experiences and history to a national history of Native persistence, colonialism, and whites’ appropriations of Indian lands.