It gets a bit frustrating when some of my riders tune out as I work to pump a little knowledge of history into their heads. I am amazed that anyone can be bored with history. Properly taught, history is simply old reality. Old reality is the key to understanding current reality.
Here is a little bit of my current reality. I was seven years old when the United States Supreme Court took away any potential question as to whether, under Virginia law, I was a full fledged human being equal in every civil right to every other Virginian.
Let me make this very clear. I have absolutely no indication that Dr. Plecker hunted any member of my family the way that he hunted so many others who were Virginia Indians or had close ancestors who were. Such people were declared by the Commonwealth of Virginia to be "colored" and as such were legally barred from using white public accommodations, attending white schools, and marrying white people.
Dr. Plecker headed up our state's equivalent of a bureau of vital statistics and made it his life's work to keep track in his card system the location of every person of Indian descent in Virginia in order to make sure that they were not able to 'pass'. If such a person moved to a new locality Plecker would promptly notify the authorities in that jurisdiction in order to make sure that the full force of Jim Crow laws were applied and such people were kept legally segregated from pure whites. He scoured the wedding announcements of Virginia newspapers to make sure that no one in his card system was engaged to a white person. He congratulated the Nazis for their forced sterilization of children that resulted from unions of African soldiers that fought for the French during the first World War and the German women who married those soldiers.
It was a felony for one of Plecker's prey to marry a white person. A felonious marriage is treated by the law as void. As a matter of law, all children born of such marriages were illegitimate. For a long period of time every marriage in my family of my relatives who descended closely from the Pamunkey/Mattaponi/Chicohominy from which we came was an illegal marital union and the products of some of those marriages would have been barred from all the rights and privileges given whites under Virginia law at the time.
Some Indians flew under Plecker's radar. They went under assumed names and followed a range of other strategies to keep official Virginia from knowing why they tanned so well in the summer.
I do not know if my people were Pamunkey, or Mattaponi, or Chicahominy. I do not know the last name of my Indian relatives. Such information was once dangerous to know and was not preserved. I was in law school before I realized why it was that everything else about my dead relatives was remembered by the old people, but nothing was known of the Indians. Now I understand why. They were making survival adjustments to a wicked society that deemed the superiority of whites to be obvious,proper, and worst of all, intended by God.
In 1967, in the case of Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court struck down the felony convictions of Richard Loving and his wife, a women of Rappahannock and African descent. They had been given a one year suspended jail sentence and banned from living in Virginia because they had committed the crime of falling in love and getting married.
I do not at all begrudge those who proudly announce that they are part Indian. If asked directly I explain my lineage. My reticence is certainly not because I am in any way ashamed of that lineage. It is because being a descendant of the people of the land of Tsennacomacah, the people of the Powhatan, the people of Pocahontas, the people of who were among the first Americans to defend our shores against foreign invaders in 1608, has cost me absolutely nothing.
I was not hunted by Plecker. He died years before I was born. I have no hint that any of my relatives were victims either of Plecker or suffered under the laws of the Commonwealth.
But this is not ancient history. I have known people that were hunted by Plecker. I have known Indians that were harassed by the Ku Klux Klan. They suffered for the offense of having been born alive. I was born after it became cool to be part Indian.
This is not ancient history. Mildred Loving died in 2008.
Here is a hint that your relatives suffered under the laws of the Common wealth: You do not know who your ancestors were. They were afraid to tell their descendants because it would be dangerous for them to know.
ReplyDeleteWhat a horrible way to have lived. How sad for you and the rest of their descendants today who have had a branch of their family tree pruned away.
Yes, the loss of one's past is a real loss.
ReplyDeleteMy paternal line traces back to a New York state tribe, and retained an Indian identity through the 1890 census, at which time all 14 people living under my great-grandfather's roof were identified as "B" in the race column of the census (you were either B or W in those days, there was no other option).
B and W could not intermarry legally. If a census worker ever recorded both B's and W's under one roof, that would be proof that a crime was being committed. Whoever answered the door when the census worker knocked would know that, of course, and carefully provide the information necessary to keep the family out of trouble.
Therefore, even the Irish immigrant who married my great-grandfather was identified as "B" though she was white (we can assume she was not the one who answered the door that day). Their bi-racial daughter married a German immigrant who is ALSO identified as "B" in the race column in 1890. Then my great-grandfather, who was one of the last full-bloods identified by the US Govt, died. In the next census, in 1900, at the same address, with all the same names (except my great-grandparents who had died), now everyone at that address was identified as "W."
In short, between 1890 and 1900, my family quietly made the transition from B to W. Amid the millions of people living in New York state at that time, no one was paying close enough attention to census records to notice that the family living at 1234 Maple Avenue (not the real address) had changed its race between the 1890 and 1900.
It may seem unfathomable to young people today to understand why my family would want to leave behind its proud Indian heritage. Well, read up on the Dawes Act and hundreds of other atrocities in our historical record, and you will know why. My grandparents made the transition in order to provide their offspring with more opportunities for a better life.
The price we pay is that we know nothing about our Indian ancestors. I know my great-grandfather's name. But in his tribal culture, like so many Native American cultures, heritage is traced through the female line. My great-grandfather's sisters would have been the caretakers of the family history.
We only know their names pre-marriage, not after. Their last names would have changed to their husbands names upon marriage (per the US dominant culture) and since our "gone white" side cut all ties and kept no records that could incriminate us, we are totally cut off from our family's Indian history.
I feel the loss of that knowledge like a pain in my heart, every day. Somewhere out there, I've got kin -- a whole lot of kin, perhaps -- who I will never know.
Diane is right, Steve. You have suffered a loss. A very real loss. It is a very American story, with a deep sadness at its core. Cut off from our ancestors, we are like trees without roots.
But we cannot blame our kin for doing what they did, which they did in order to provide us, their children and grandchildren, with better lives, free of the persecution they themselves lived in fear of.
Deb in California
It is good for this post and these ideas to resurface at this point in history..
ReplyDeleteI hate to bring the mess that our political process has become into this forum, as it is my refuge from such...
What we witness right now today is a strong resurgence of the kind of ignorance, petty fear and unreasoning hate that led to nasty social constructs such as Jim Crow laws and Mcarthyism...
History repeats itself constantly...and those who cannot recognize that are doomed to fall into that trap...the obvious repetions of sociopolitical patterns in this country today mirror those of early 1900's Scandinavia, and 1920's and 1930's Germany and Italy...
I am loathe to mention it, but I do, as a major point of Mill Swamp is to teach the simple fact that history can and does affect the present and the future....consider the core lesson we teach about how capable these little horses are...but how unfashionable they became...to the detriment of both horse and man...there is a bigger picture.
Fellow named Robert Heinlein is considered the Dean of American Science fiction...but there is much wisdom, and much seeming prescience in his writing...which was not prescience, but simple recognition of the fact that history is often written on a spinning wheel...it will come back around.
Dig up a copy of Heinlein's "Revolt in 2100" and read it. I have never read a more terrifying piece of fiction...because all of the conditions exist for the story to be prophetic....simply because history repeats. And people are often incapable of seeing it.
In the long run...sparking the i terest of young peoe in historical detail may be the most important service that Mill Swamp provides...
-Lloyd