Indian tribes threatened by white supremacist
VIRGINIA’S Indian tribes have faced numerous obstacles in their decades- old quest for federal recognition. But one person has long stood in their way — and he’s been dead for 68 years.
Walter Plecker — a physician, eugenicist and avowed white supremacist — ran Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics with single-minded resolve over 34 years in the first half of the 20th century.
Though he died in 1947, Plecker’s shadow still lingers over the state, a vestige of a vicious era when racist practices were an integral part of government policy and Virginia officials ruthlessly enforced laws created to protect what they considered a master white race.
For Virginia’s Indians, the policies championed by Plecker threatened their very existence, nearly wiping out the tribes who greeted the country’s first English settlers and who claim Pocahontas as an ancestor.
This month, the legacy of those laws could again help sabotage an effort by the Pamunkey people to become the state’s first federally recognised tribe.
Obsessed with the idea of white superiority, Plecker championed legislation that would codify the idea that people with one drop of “Negro” blood could not be classified as white.
His efforts led the Virginia legislature to pass the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, a law that criminalised interracial marriage and also required that every birth in the state be recorded by race with the only options being “White” and “Coloured.”
Plecker was proud of the law and his role in creating it. It was, he said, “the most perfect expression of the white ideal, and the most important eugenical effort that has been made in 4,000 years.”
The act didn’t just make blacks in Virginia second- class citizens — it also erased any acknowledgment of Indians, whom Plecker claimed no longer truly existed in the commonwealth.
With a stroke of a pen, Virginia was on a path to eliminating the identity of the Pamunkey, the Mattaponi, the Chickahominy, the Monacan, the Rappahannock, the Nansemond and the rest of Virginia’s tribes.
“He told us we had no right to exist as people,” said Powhatan Red Cloud- Owen, a Vietnam veteran who belongs to the 850member Chickahominy tribe. “He tried to destroy a people like Hitler did. It was a genocide inside of this great country of ours.”
Plecker. For Virginia Indians, the name is an expletive.
“I would call him the villain in our sacred story,” says Karenne Wood, 55, a member of the Monacan, the largest of the Virginia tribes with more than 2,000 members. “As soon as you raise his name, people make bad faces.”
Standing in the graveyard adjacent to the Chickahominy Tribal Centre, Steve Adkins, the 69-year- old chief of the tribe in Providence Forge, about 20 miles south- east of Richmond, Virginia, says he is pained by what his people endured as a result of the Racial Integrity Act.
“It forbade giving your child an Indian name,” Adkins says. “And it caused people like my mom and dad to have to go to Washington, to be married as Indians.”
Others simply left Virginia rather than stay where they could no longer call themselves Indians.
“It caused separations of families,” Adkins says. “It was devastating.”
The devastation lasted decades. Plecker directed registrars around the state to change birth certificates, to cross out Indian and write in “Coloured.” He had Indian children removed from white schools and Indian patients removed from white hospitals.
He pushed back against Native Americans who tried to maintain their tribal identity, and he rejected federal efforts to acknowledge the existence of Indians in the state.
“Plecker saw Indian identity as dangerous, because he believed it would simply be used as a way station by people who ultimately just wanted to be classified as white,” says Mikaela Adams, assistant professor of Native American history at the University of Mississippi. “Of course, there were many reasons that white classification in 20th century Virginia was extremely beneficial.
“It meant access to better schools, homes. It meant, essentially, freedom.”
Instead, Indians lost freedoms and very nearly lost their identity. That was Plecker’s goal, as he explained in a 1943 letter that he addressed to “Local Registrars, Clerks, Legislators, and others responsible for, and interested in, the prevention of racial intermixture.”
“Public records in the office of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, and in the State Library, indicate that there does not exist today a descendant of the Virginia ancestors claiming to be an Indian who is unmixed with negro blood,” he wrote. In other words, Virginia was rid of Indians.
Virginia would eventually repudiate the Racial Integrity Act. The law was effectively cancelled out in 1967 when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of an interracial Virginia couple’s right to marry in Loving v. Virginia. And in 2002, then- Governor Mark Warner, a Democrat, officially apologised for the commonwealth’s role. But some of the damage has been irreparable.
“Plecker participated in an official disappearance of these tribes,” says Senator Tim Kaine. “So he might be discredited and the official policy might be to apologise for him, but since the tribes haven’t been recognised, he still has accomplished something that has not been reversed. He’s still winning.”
Walter Ashby Plecker was born into a prosperous slave- owning Virginia family on Apr 2, 1861, just 10 days before the onset of the Civil War. His father joined the Confederate Army in the South’s fight to preserve slavery.
After graduating in 1880 from Hoover Military Academy in Staunton, Virginia, Plecker attended the University of Maryland Medical School where he earned his medical degree in 1885. He worked as a public health doctor in Virginia and Alabama before being appointed registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics in 1912. The seemingly functionary title was misleading.
It was in that office that Plecker would implement some of the most unapologetically racist government policies of the past century.
At the time, eugenics, a pseudoscientific philosophy espousing racial purity and white genetic superiority, was gaining favour in parts of the United States, not just as a privately held view, but as a matter of public policy. Virginia was a stronghold of this nascent eugenicist movement.
He told us we had no right to exist as people. He tried to destroy a people like Hitler did. It was a genocide inside of this great country of ours. Powhatan Red Cloud-Owen, a Vietnam veteran who belongs to the 850-member Chickahominy tribe