Records of a Paper Genocide

My research at the Library of Virginia has focused on the ways in which Virginia Indians have been recorded on government records. I have found documents demonstrating the ways in which Virginia failed to accurately record Indigenous identities, as well as examples of Indigenous Americans pushing back against these rigid systems.

The U.S. Federal Census, for example, is not an entirely unbiased tool of data collection. Enumeration instructions shift and change alongside the politics of any given decade, particularly for Indigenous Americans. In the earliest years of the Federal Census, Indigenous Americans were rarely recorded. It wasn’t until the 1860 Census that any enumeration instructions were provided on how to record Indigenous Americans. After 1860, these instructions would continue to evolve and change.

Federal Census data tells a complicated story of Indigenous identity, especially in Virginia. The 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act asserted that Virginia Indians no longer existed, and that any individual claiming Native ancestry was actually Black. Walter Plecker, the Virginia state registrar, campaigned for the erasure of Native identities throughout the state. He retroactively changed the identities of Virginia Natives by rewriting decades of records.

Cora Almond, a Mattaponi Native, was originally registered as Indian on the 1940 census.¹ However, the three letters denoting her identity (Ind) were scratched out and replaced with the number two, meaning “colored.”

The birth certificates for several of her children have letters taped to the backs.² These letters provide scant details as to why Cora and her husband Lucian are not truly Indian. Why their identities should be erased from the local history and replaced with “colored” or “mulatto.” The letters, usually signed by the state registrar in the 1940s, were a direct consequence of the Virginia Racial Integrity Act.

In a letter written on the back of a 1913 birth certificate, the State Registrar asserts that Cora Stewart is not Indigenous because she is listed as “colored” on an 1893 birth record.

However, the birth register in question only had two options to choose from under race: “white” or “colored.”

How then, could this be evidence against Cora’s heritage if there was no option to record her identity accurately in the first place?

Although Virginia’s system of racial classification was rigid and exclusionary, it was also fallible, due to human error and individual changes. Local records often tell an especially complicated and exceptional history.

One of the first anomalies I found during my research was a local birth record for a child named Alice P. Sweat.³ Her parents, Carrie Pearl Banks and John J. Sweat, are Native peoples of the Chickahominy tribe. However, they are not registered as such on this record. Instead, they are both listed under “Color or Race” as American.

This birth certificate was filled out long before the term “American Indian” would have been popularized, so it is likely not shorthand for Indigeneity. But what does it mean?

The answer could lie in who filled the record out.

If it was a non-Indigenous person working for the county, then perhaps this was their first time filling out a local record for an Indigenous family and they simply didn’t know how the parents should be recorded. But after delving deeper into the document and other county records, I found that the midwife for this birth was illiterate. If she was unable to read or write, someone else must have been filling out the information.

John J. Sweat, the father, had signed the certificate underneath the county registrar. Was this meant to signify that he was the one providing or filling out the information? Sweat had also signed many other birth certificates in the local area. From what I could find, he was only signing certificates for Indian and “mulatto” children.

According to census records, Sweat was a preacher and a farmer.⁴ So perhaps he was a trusted figure in the community who reported birth information for Indigenous families. Or perhaps he simply worked for the local government.

If this was purposeful, was Sweat trying to protect his daughter from discrimination? Were Sweat and his family American citizens who wanted to emphasize their citizenship during a time when few Indians had it? Whether this record is a testament to courage, fear, or simple negligence, I can’t be sure. But what it does make clear is that the recording of Indigenous identities in Virginia is a complicated web of history.

Another surprise I found was the small number of Virginia Indians who were recorded as white on official documents. On his 1917 draft card, Mantly Langston registered himself as Indian.⁵ Twenty-five years later, on a 1942 draft card, forced to make a selection rather than write in an answer, he registers himself as white.⁶

How do we interpret such documents with seemingly conflicting information? A mistake? An expression of mixed heritage? A way to hide one’s identity? Resignation in the face of limited options? Virginia’s history of attempting to erase Indigenous identity made honesty dangerous. If an Indigenous person could pass as white, it may have been safer for them to do so.

However, not every attempt to assimilate was quite so successful. John Branham and Ella Beverley, both Monacan Indians from Amherst County, were registered under a white marriage license in 1900.⁷ Decades later their records would be retroactively changed to claim that they were not in fact white but were “colored.” Attached to the upper right of the document is an excerpt from Walter Plecker’s writings, which asserts that Native Americans have “descended from the colony” by mixing with other races. The couple in question made no claim to be Indian on this document, but even so Plecker must make it clear that they are not. If Ella and John Branham are not considered to be white, they certainly cannot be Indian.

However, despite the decades of erasure that Indigenous Peoples have experienced in this state, Virginia Indians continued to assert their identities. On November 9th, 1918, a Chickahominy couple in Charles City County gave birth to their daughter Clarese.⁸ On their daughter’s birth certificate, under questions 10 and 16, the record asks for their parents’ race. In capitalized letters it reads, WHITE or COLORED. Only two choices. Only two things that any Virginian could be. Written under these two sections, in what may have been the script of Chickahominy preacher John J. Sweat, is the word Indian.

Even when Virginia natives were only given two choices in denoting their identity, many still chose to write their own histories.