19th Century

During the 1800s most of the Virginia tribes lost the little land that they had either through treaties or through allotment. The Gingaskin reservation on the Eastern Shore survived until 1813 when they were the first tribe to be allotted and terminated in the U.S. The Pamunkeys and the Mattaponi were the only two tribes to keep reservations in Virginia although through the years by various means their land base was reduced. A brash move to take the two remaining reservations happened in 1843 when one Thomas W.S. Gregory and the white “citizens of King William County” presented a petition to the General Assembly of Virginia whereby they stated that

[T]here are two parcels or tracts of land situated within the said County, on which a number of persons are now living, all of whom by the law of Virginia, would be deemed and taken to be free mulattoes, in any Court of Justice; as it is believed they all have one fourth or more of Negro blood; and as proof of this, they would rely on the generally admitted fact, that not one individual can be found among them, of whose grandfathers and grandmothers, one or more is or was not a Negro; which proportion of Negro blood constitutes a free mulatto.^{1J.H. Johnston, “Documentary Evidence of the Relations of Negroes and Indians” The Journal of Negro History Vol. 14, No. 1 (Jan., 1929), 29.}
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The two tracts of land referred to, are each called and known by the name of Indian Town. One situation on Pamunky [sic] River, containing the estimated quantity of fifteen hundred acres, on which persons are now living. The said lands, it is believe were set apart by a law or laws of the Colonial legislature at an early period in the settlement of the Virginia Colony, for the use and occupation o the Pamunky tribe of Indians, then a small remnant. The fee in said lands is not granted away, but on the use and occupation, to them as Indians, without the power of alienating said lands. And on these grounds your petitioners, are informed, that the legislature of Virginia, now possess the power to dispose of said lands according to its own sense of what is required by the public good.

The years before, during, and after the Civil War showed the Powhatans that they would have to pull together among themselves in order to survive; there would always be neighbors who refused to get along with them, however anglicized they became.

[T]he anti-Indian contingent in Virginia took note of the fact that the Powhatans had become so culturally similar to their neighbors that they could be declared no longer to be “real” (that is, pidgin-English-speaking, feather-and-deerskin-wearing) Indians. Once that declaration was carried through legally, the Powhatans would disappear as Indians, bloodlessly, in what a modern scholar has called “genocide through census redefinition.” The group they were expected to “melt” into was the free negro population, and it was those people that the white lawmakers hoped would leave the state, preferably taking the Powhatans with them. ^{2Helen Rountree and E. Randolph Turner III, Before and After Jamestown: Virginia’s Powhatans and Their Predecessors (University Press of Florida, 2002), 196.}

As the Indians married more and more with free blacks, racial discrimination became more and more widespread among the whites. Finally, in the tribal laws passed in 1886, the Pamunkeys forbid intermarriage with any nation except white or Indian under penalty of forfeiting their tribal rights.

In the Reconstruction era, the harsh laws that made people drastically inferior even if they lived cheek by jowl with whites were gone, replaced (for a time) by equal access to jury trials and so forth, and also by opportunities for nonwhites to hold office. White Virginians’ attitudes toward nonwhites did not ameliorate, however; they merely went into abeyance until power could be regained, which happened by the end of the century. In the meantime, there were serious enough differences of opinion, and bitterness about the past on the part of whites, that many institutions became segregated in fact, though not yet in law. ^{3Ibid., 203.}

The late nineteenth century Powhatans lived, worked, went to church, and banded together in times of need primarily within their own communities, while trying to maintain friendly if distant relations with non-Indians. The Anglo-Virginian community had members who were sympathetic with Indian aims and others who regarded the Powhatans as “fakes” for not speaking the language and not wearing feathers all the time. The latter group of whites could be embarrassingly vocal about their doubts, which led to a new response by the Indians. The first half of the twentieth century would in subtle ways prove to be the most racist period that the Powhatans had to endure.^{4Ibid., 208-209.}

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Last updated 05/08/2008