What struck me throughout these readings was just how unstable race was—across place, time, and even individual lives. In a place where that 1691 law to prevent “abominable mixture and spurious issue” gave way to the “one-drop rule,” both clearly premised on notions of essentialism insisting that whiteness would degenerate as a result of any “impurity,” we nonetheless see that carve-out for those claiming minimal Indian blood in order to protect their white identities—an exception we could argue is in fact another form of the “white privilege” those elite Virginians already possessed. There were no real material resources at stake in this claim that conflated Indian ancestry and identity; instead it was social capital—status—these alleged descendants of Pocahontas sought. It does seem like a strange step, so I’d urge us to consider this a bit more—why would white elites claim Native identities, and why in particular tie them to Pocahontas (and in the broader American culture, to the Cherokee)? Meanwhile, the same minimal percentage of non-Indian ancestry threatened Virginia Indians’ claims to a unique status in what the US—and Virginia in particular—constructed as a biracial society. That biracial system was unusual—other countries had far more varied categories, while historically even in Virginia other categories had existed, and of course we’ve reintroduced greater variety in more recent decades. Still, that “recognition anxiety” Woodard describes makes sense for a number of Native communities whose autonomous existence was so precariously balanced on that divide between white and black—become too white and they’d cease to be accepted as Indians (and in some ways were—in 1957 the Jamestown commemoration initially turned to the Iroquois and the Lakota to perform Indian roles at its celebrations), become too black and they’d be subjected to segregation and other disadvantages, as nearly happened with the World War II draft. That brings us to Arnell Nelson, who appears linked to various racial categories in our set of documents, and I think it’s worth considering what changes that assessment. Overall, we’re posing questions of ancestry v. identity, DNA/genetics v. heritage—a theme we saw in Catte and we’ll see again in a few weeks when we consider First Families of Virginia and a bunch of other “heritage” movements.
Random question: can we figure out why Col. Mills F. Neal was so insistent that draft boards didn’t have authority to determine race, and kept challenging directives? Possible explanations for this?
