Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia

2022·1.8 MB·English

by  Laura J. Feller

Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia

Being Indigenous in Jim
Crow Virginia
Powhatan People and the Color Line
•
Laura J. Feller
University of Oklahoma Press: Norman
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Feller, Laura J. (Laura Janet), author.
Title: Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia : Powhatan people
and the color line / Laura J. Feller.
Description: Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, [2022] |
Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Explores experiences
and strategies of tidewater Virginia Indians, descendants of peoples of the
seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan chiefdom, in maintaining, creating,
and re-creating their identities as Native Americans from the 1850s through the Jim
Crow era. Examines how tidewater Native individuals, families, and communities
positioned themselves as red people, rather than Black or white, in an era when
some white Virginians argued that Virginia’s Indians were ‘mulattoes’ and ‘colored
people.’”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021056426 | ISBN 978-0-8061-9065-5 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Powhatan Indians—Race identity. |
Powhatan Indians—History—19th century. | Powhatan Indians—History—
20th century. | Tidewater (Va. : Region)—Race relations.
Classification: LCC E99.P85 F45 2022 | DDC 975.5004/97347—dc23/eng/20211129
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056426
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To John, and to Lucy Pearman Scott

Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1
“A Home in a Strange Land” 15
Chapter 2
Virginia’s 1924 “Racial Integrity” Law 51
Chapter 3
Constructing Native Identities, 1865 to 1931 90
Chapter 4
White Ethnographers and Salvage Ethnography 126
Chapter 5
The Aftermath of the “Racial Integrity” Law, 1930s to 1950s 158
Epilogue 194
Acknowledgments 199
Notes 203
Bibliography 247
ix