Tidewater Native Peoples and Indianness in Jim Crow Virginia

Constructing and Contesting Color Lines: Tidewater Native Peoples and Indianness in Jim Crow Virginia By Laura Janet Feller B.A., Westhampton College of the University of Richmond, 1974 M.A., The George Washington University, 1983 A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 31, 2009 Dissertation directed by James Oliver Horton Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Laura Janet Feller has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of December 4, 2008. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. Constructing and Contesting Color Lines: Tidewater Native Peoples and Indianness in Jim Crow Virginia Laura Janet Feller Dissertation Research Committee: James Oliver Horton, Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History, Dissertation Director Teresa Anne Murphy, Associate Professor of American Studies, Committee Member John Michael Vlach, Professor of American Studies and of Anthropology, Committee Member ii Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank the committee members for expert guidance that was probing and humbling as well as encouraging. Each of them handled the challenges of working with an older student with grace and aplomb. Another of the great pleasures of this dissertation process was working in a variety of archives with wonderful facilities and staff. It was a privilege to meet some of the people who are stewards of records in those repositories. Constance Potter of the National Archives is not only a long-time friend but also an expert guide to the complexities of U.S. census records. Brent Tarter, Sandy Treadway, and Patricia Ferguson Watkinson help make the Library of Virginia as welcoming as its facilities are well appointed. Many thanks also go to Regina Rush and others at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, to Robert S. Cox of the American Philosophical Society, to Darlene Slater Herod of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society, to Leanda Gahegan of the National Anthropological Archives, and to the staff of the manuscript department at the William R. Perkins Library of Duke University for their commitment to preserving the remarkable collections in their care and for making research in those collections so much fun. The author expresses deep gratitude to Marie Tyler-McGraw for her unfailing humor, expert advice, and willingness to take long walks in the midst of her own packed life, and to Walter Feller and Judith Miller Feller for their generosity and interest in this project. As anyone who has been married while a graduate student knows, the greatest debt of all is owed to a spouse; John Fleckner was and is endlessly patient, wise, and enthusiastic about this project, and he deserves more thanks than words can express. iii Abstract of Dissertation Constructing and Contesting Color Lines: Tidewater Native Peoples and Indianness in Jim Crow Virginia Indian peoples in the United States have faced many challenges to their group and individual identities as Native Americans over centuries of cultural exchange, demographic change, violence, and dispossession. For Native Americans in the South those challenges have arisen in the context of the idea of “race” as a two-part black-white social, cultural, and political system. This dissertation explores how groups and individuals in tidewater Virginia created, re-created, claimed, re-claimed, retained and maintained identities as Indians after the Civil War and into the 1950s, weathering decades of the ever-stranger career of Jim Crow. They did this in the face of varied pressures from white Virginians who devoted enormous political and social effort to the construction of race as a simple binary division between black and white people. In the era after the Civil War, tidewater Indians coped by creating new tribal organizations, churches, and schools, presenting theatrical productions that used pan- Indian symbols, and maintaining separations from their African American neighbors. To some extent, they acquiesced in whites’ notions about the “inferior” racialized status of African Americans. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tidewater Virginia, while contending with, and sometimes adapting, popular ideas about “race” and “blood purity,” organized tidewater Virginia Indians also drew from a sense of their shared histories as descendants of the Algonquian Powhatan groups, and from pan-Indian imagery. This project explores how popular ideas about “race” shaped their world and their efforts to position themselves as red rather than black or white, while whites worked iv to construct “race” along a black-white “color line.” v Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………iii Abstract of Dissertation………………………………………………………………..iv Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………...vi List of Tables…………………………………………………………………….……vii Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter One: Not Black and Not White: Contexts for Constructing Native Identities in the South from Slavery to the 1920s……………… ……………28 Chapter Two: Making the 1924 “Racial Integrity” Law: Defining Whiteness, Blackness, and Redness in a Modernizing, Bureaucratizing State……….66 Chapter Three: Constructing Native Identities in Tidewater Virginia between 1865 and 1930: Reservations, Organizations, and Public Ceremonies…...................140 Chapter Four: “Conjuring:” Ethnologists and “Salvage” Ethnography among Tidewater Native American Peoples………………………………………………...206 Chapter Five: In the Aftermath of the “Racial Integrity” Law……………………….275 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………358 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….364 vi List of Tables Table One ……………………………………………………………….283 Table Two………………………………………………………………..285 vii Introduction The challenge is not only to recognize the fluidity of race, but to find ways of narrating events, social movement, and the trajectory of individual lives in all their integrity along the convoluted path of an ever-shifting racial reality.1 Matthew Frye Jacobson One narrative that illuminates the “ever-shifting racial reality” in America is the story of how individuals and communities in tidewater Virginia created, re-created, and publicly claimed and re-claimed Native American identities after the Civil War and into the 1950s, weathering decades of the ever-stranger career of Jim Crow. They did this in the face of varied pressures from white Virginians who devoted enormous political and social effort to the construction of race in Virginia as a black-white binary system. A 1924 Virginia “miscegenation” law, an “Act to Preserve Racial Integrity,” exemplifies those efforts. That law demonstrated how racialized justifications for segregation could be joined to national eugenic debates of the 1920s. It also punctuated decades of efforts by white individuals to deny that anyone in Virginia was “really” Indian, based upon the notion that all Virginians who said they were Indian were at best racially “mixed” and had some white or African “blood.” Thus, in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Virginia, the popular “one drop” idea of what makes one an African American came together with ideas about “blood quantum” and “purity” of racialized “blood,” at a time when tidewater Native people were constructing, re-constructing, and maintaining identities as Indians in the aftermath of emancipation and in the era of Jim Crow. While sometimes contending with, and sometimes adapting for their own purposes, popular ideas about “blood” purity and 1Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 275. 1 racialized identities, organized tidewater Virginia Indians also drew from a sense of their shared, localized histories as descendants of the Algonquian Powhatan groups, and from pan-Indian symbols. This project explores how popular ideas about “race” pervaded their efforts, even as they worked to position themselves as “red” rather than black or white, while whites worked to construct of “race” along a black-white “color line.” The organized tidewater Indian groups persisted in their fight for acceptance of their Indian identities despite their lack of distinctive languages and the fact that for more than a century they had been perceived by outsiders as having lost most of the material culture that many whites regarded as markers of “real” Indians. Organized tidewater Natives’ campaigns, institutions, and representations of Indian identity illuminate a part of the story of the construction of “race” in America, but also some of the complications raised by questions about how “ethnic” groups form and persist in the United States. How can we best talk about the histories of “race” and ethnicity in America? How can a shared sense of a common history contribute to construction of ethnic or racialized boundaries, compared to other factors such as a shared land base, parentage, or language? How is it that for Native Americans, whites so often have assumed and even imposed the notion that the only valid Native tradition is one that, if not totally static, has a documentable track stretching “unbroken” back through many generations? For American Indians nationally, part of this dynamic has been that

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