|
|
Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900
Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 recodified the state's
long-standing racial hierarchy as a more rigid Black-white binary.
Then, Virginia officials asserted that no Virginia Indians could be
other than legally Black, given centuries of love and marriage
across color lines. How indigenous peoples of Virginia resisted
erasure and built their identities as Native Americans is the
powerful story this book tells. Spanning a century of fraught
history, Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia describes the
critical strategic work that tidewater Virginia Indians,
descendants of the seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan
chiefdom, undertook to sustain their Native identity in the face of
deep racial hostility from segregationist officials, politicians,
and institutions. Like other Southeastern Native groups living
under Jim Crow regimes, tidewater Native groups and individuals
fortified their communities by founding tribal organizations,
churches, and schools; they displayed their Indianness in public
performances; and they enlisted whites, including well-known
ethnographers, to help them argue for their Native distinctness.
Describing an arduous campaign marked by ingenuity, conviction, and
perseverance, Laura J. Feller shows how these tidewater Native
people drew on their shared histories as descendants of Powhatan
peoples, and how they strengthened their bonds through living and
marrying within clusters of Native Virginians, both on and off
reservation lands. She also finds that, by at times excluding
African Americans from Indian organizations and Native families,
Virginian Indians themselves reinforced racial segregation while
they built their own communities. Even as it paved the way to
tribal recognition in Virginia, the tidewater Natives' sustained
efforts chronicled in this book demonstrate the fluidity,
instability, and persistent destructive power of the construction
of race in America.
In this book the territory of Pechenga, located well above the
Arctic circle between Russia, Finland and Norway, holds the key to
understanding the geopolitical situation of the Arctic today. With
specific focus on the local nickel industry of the region, Lars
Rowe explores the interaction between commercial and state security
concerns in the Soviet Union. Through the lens of this local
industry a larger historical context is unravelled - the nature of
Soviet-Finnish relations after the Russian Revolution, Soviet
international relations strategies during the Second World War and
the nature of the Stalinist economy in the early post-war years. By
presenting this environmentally focused history of a small corner
of the Arctic, Rowe offers the historical context needed to
understand the current geopolitical climate of the Polar North.
I looked around and people's faces were distorted...lights were
flashing everywhere...the screen at the end of the room had three
or four different films on it at once, and the strobe light was
flashing faster than it had been...the band was playing but I
couldn't hear the music...people were dancing...someone came up to
me and I shut my eyes and with a machine he projected images on the
back of my eye-lids...I sought out a person I trusted and he
laughed and told me that the Kool-Aid had been spiked and that I
was beginning my first LSD experience...
|
|