Skip to content

Booksellers & Trade Customers: Sign up for online bulk buying at trade.atlanticbooks.com for wholesale discounts

Booksellers: Create Account on our B2B Portal for wholesale discounts

Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia: Powhatan People and the Color Line

by Laura J. Feller
Save 4% Save 4%
Current price ₹3,139.00
Original price ₹3,283.00
Original price ₹3,283.00
Original price ₹3,283.00
(-4%)
₹3,139.00
Current price ₹3,139.00

Imported Edition - Ships in 12-14 Days

Free Shipping in India on orders above Rs. 500

Request Bulk Quantity Quote
+91
Book cover type: Paperback
  • ISBN13: 9780806193892
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
  • Publisher Imprint: University of Oklahoma Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 286
  • Original Price: GBP 25.95
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 422 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Indigenous / General, United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV), and Modern / 19th Century

Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 recodified the state's long-standing racial hierarchy as a more rigid Black-white binary. Then, Virginia officials asserted that no Virginia Indians could be other than legally Black, given centuries of love and marriage across color lines. How indigenous peoples of Virginia resisted erasure and built their identities as Native Americans is the powerful story this book tells. Spanning a century of fraught history, Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia describes the critical strategic work that tidewater Virginia Indians, descendants of the seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan chiefdom, undertook to sustain their Native identity in the face of deep racial hostility from segregationist officials, politicians, and institutions.

Like other Southeastern Native groups living under Jim Crow regimes, tidewater Native groups and individuals fortified their communities by founding tribal organizations, churches, and schools; they displayed their Indianness in public performances; and they enlisted whites, including well-known ethnographers, to help them argue for their Native distinctness. Describing an arduous campaign marked by ingenuity, conviction, and perseverance, Laura J. Feller shows how these tidewater Native people drew on their shared histories as descendants of Powhatan peoples, and how they strengthened their bonds through living and marrying within clusters of Native Virginians, both on and off reservation lands. She also finds that, by at times excluding African Americans from Indian organizations and Native families, Virginian Indians themselves reinforced racial segregation while they built their own communities.

Even as it paved the way to tribal recognition in Virginia, the tidewater Natives' sustained efforts chronicled in this book demonstrate the fluidity, instability, and persistent destructive power of the construction of race in America.

Feller, Laura J.: - Laura J. Feller holds a PhD from George Washington University. She is retired as a staff historian in the Washington, D.C., Office of the National Park Service.

Trusted for over 49 years

Family Owned Company

Secure Payment

All Major Credit Cards/Debit Cards/UPI & More Accepted

New & Authentic Products

India's Largest Distributor

Need Support?

Whatsapp Us