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.
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