Author: Ashley Spivey

Ashley Spivey, Ph.D., is an historical anthropologist and member of the Pamunkey Indian Tribe who serves as the Executive Director of Kenah Consulting, an anthropological and cultural heritage management firm that works in service to support Tribal sovereignty and the institutions that tell the histories of Virginia's Indigenous peoples.
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Virginia Indians and U.S. Citizenship

Virginia Indians and other Indigenous peoples in the United States did not receive widespread U.S. citizenship until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. Prior to that date, citizenship for Native people in the United States was complex in that their status as “Indians not taxed” or “noncitizen Indians” was codified in the U.S. Constitution, which did not count them among the voting population. This status referred not to exemption from taxation but rather to Indigenous people who were deemed not fully assimilated because they were still living as members of their respective tribes and within reservation boundaries. However, some Indigenous people could become eligible for citizenship if they were deemed fully assimilated, were no longer living among their tribes, or—following the Dawes Act in 1887—were allottee holders on reservation lands. Those with this status were often referred to as “citizen Indians,” creating a dual status regarding citizenship among Indigenous peoples not just in Virginia but across the United States. Because the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted citizenship to all persons born in the country, was interpreted as excluding Indigenous peoples, the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act provided necessary clarification on their status.

The unique application of U.S. citizenship relating to Indigenous peoples was complicated and at times contradictory. Virginia Indians often invoked their noncitizen status as a mechanism to force the state of Virginia to recognize their tribal identities. Virginia Indians also used their noncitizen status to solidify their jurisdictional relationship to the U.S. federal government relating to participation in the American Civil War (1861–1865) and World War I (1914–1918) and to affect how they were enumerated in the U.S. Census. Following the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act and the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, which supported the formal restructuring of tribal governments, Indigenous peoples developed a sort of nested citizenship. They were citizens of both their respective sovereign tribes and the United States. This relationship parallels the unique position of tribal nations within the United States, where such nations exist as sovereign entities nested within the larger sovereignty of the federal government.

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The Legal Status and Classification of Virginia Indians

Indigenous communities in Virginia have experienced several shifts in their legal status over the past four centuries. From their initial status as tributaries during the colonial period, Virginia tribes saw a reduction of their tribal lands and the corresponding erosion of their legal rights throughout the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. By the late eighteenth century, only four Virginia tribes retained treaty lands and the Commonwealth of Virginia had abandoned many of its treaty obligations. Virginia tribes, however, continued to function as autonomous communities, retaining separate institutions that allowed for the continued expression of Indigeneity through cultural, social, and economic practices. These institutions included governing systems, church congregations, and schools that supported Virginia tribes’ successful efforts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to advocate for recognition at the local, state, and federal levels.

 

 

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The Virginia History and Textbook Commission

In response to the rising civil rights movement and the challenge to white supremacy, the Senate of Virginia in 1950 created the Virginia History and Textbook Commission to create history texts that sought to impose the Lost Cause version of slavery, the American Civil War (1861–1865), and Reconstruction on Virginia students. Virginia Indians found much of their history erased or ignored in the textbooks, which gave the impression that most Native Americans had been killed or pushed out of Virginia. Although critics charged the books were an attempt by segregationists to promote the history that supported their racial ideas, the fourth-grade book entered public schools in the autumn of 1956 and textbooks for seventh grade and high school were introduced the following year. The Virginia National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) opposed the textbooks, and the Virginia Teachers Association (VTA), a Black educators organization, successfully promoted an accurate telling of Black history that led to the adoption of Black history courses throughout the commonwealth beginning in the 1960s. By 1965, educators were widely complaining that the textbooks amounted to propaganda. Nonetheless, in 1966 the State Board of Education extended the use of the textbooks for another six years. A changing political climate, including the surge in Black voting following passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the overthrow of the Byrd political machine in 1970, created new impetus to remove the textbooks from schools. In 1972, the Board of Education voted unanimously to drop the books as official history texts. However, the textbooks remained in use in some schools until the late 1970s.

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Robert Mush (1758–1837)

Robert Mush (sometimes Mursh) was a member of the Pamunkey Indian Tribe who fought as a Patriot in the Revolutionary War (1775–1783). Mush was born around 1758 and attended the Brafferton Indian School at the College of William and Mary beginning in 1769. He enlisted in the Continental Army in 1776 and fought at the Battle of Brandywine (September 11, 1777) and the Battle of Germantown (October 4, 1777). In 1778, he marched south to Charleston, South Carolina, for the siege of that city, where he was captured by the British and spent time as a prisoner of war before being exchanged. He remained in the army and served under General Anthony Wayne in Georgia until the war ended in 1783. Mush subsequently returned to the Pamunkey Indian Reservation in King William County, where he married a woman named Elizabeth and served as a tribal leader. Mush became involved with the Baptist Church, and by 1800 he had moved his family to South Carolina, where he served as a minister among the Catawba Indian Tribe and later at the Flint Hill Baptist Church until his death on December 7, 1837. Following his death, Elizabeth Mush petitioned to receive the pension afforded to the widows of Revolutionary War veterans, and her claim file provides a rare glimpse into the life of an Indigenous Revolutionary War veteran.

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