Native American people have lived in the area today known as Virginia for centuries, predating the arrival of the first colonialists to Jamestown in 1607. At the beginning of the colonial era, Indians belonging to the Powhatan autocracy lived on the eastern shore and Siouan Indians of the Monacan and Mannahoac tribes lived in the piedmont and mountain regions of present-day Virginia. But arrival of the colonialists led to protracted conflicts with Virginia’s Indians, as the colonialists demanded food and land from Indian people, while also failing to understand their cultural practices.
During the colonial period, white settlers displaced Indian people from their land and, through the late 18th century, engaged in the enslavement of Indians. By the early 19th century, the U.S. government was using treaties to displace Indians from their tribal lands. And in 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which further strengthened the dispossession of Native lands in the southeast. This act forced the relocation nearly 50,000 Native people from their homelands in the southeast, particularly from present-day Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, to new locations west of the Mississippi, where they lived on property, known as reservations, under the protection of the U.S. government.
From the colonial period through the 20th century, Native people in Virginia were pressured by white settlers – underpinned by the authority of the state and federal governments – to assimilate to American cultural practices and convert to Christianity. Native people, along with Black people and other people of color, were also subject to legislated race codes that sought to systematically categorize people by race and to govern racial identity. For example, in 1866, the Virginia legislature declared that "every person having one-fourth or more Negro blood shall be deemed a colored person, and every person not a colored person having one-fourth or more Indian blood shall be deemed Indian." These race codes and the creation and maintenance of racialized hierarchies were used to shore up white superiority and white supremacy and to justify Black enslavement and the dispossession of Native land.
The development of eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in which the University of Virginia became a leading institution, established the role of universities, and reinforced the role of state and federal governments, in questions of Native identity. Passage of the Racial Integrity Act by Virginia’s General Assembly in 1924 was shaped by the race science of eugenics. In addition to prohibiting interracial marriage, it also divided Virginia's population into two racial categories - white or Black. These racial categories were defined and policed by the Bureau of Vital Statistics, which was led by Walter A. Plecker, the State Registrar of Vital Statistics. Plecker demanded of town clerks throughout Virginia that anyone claiming to be Indian be classified as Black. This erased Native people in Virginia from official records, including the census. Although Virginia repealed the Racial Integrity Act in 1967, Plecker's policies to legally reclassify Native people in Virginia continues to impact Native peoples' claims to legal rights, land and tribal recognition.
Even as Virginia’s Native people were forced from their land, pressured to assimilate, and marginalized, they worked to maintain their own practices and ways of knowing and living, and to protest racist laws like the 1924 Racial Integrity Act. In so doing, Virginia’s Indians sought to resist the structural violence and cultural genocide of settler colonialism.
Monacan Indian Nation: Our History
Encyclopedia Virginia: Indians in Virginia
Angela Gonzalez, Judy Kertesz, and Gabrielle Tayac, Eugenics as Indian Removal: Sociohistorical Processes and the De(con)structure of American Indians in the Southeast
Christian McMillen, UVA and the History of Race: The George Rogers Clark Statue and Native Americans
