Paper Genocide

Trudith Dyer, a member of the Upper Mattaponi Indian Tribe, made this mixed-media piece entitled “Paper Genocide” in 2019 for the South Carolina SHE Festival celebrating women in the arts. She chose to commemorate her great-grandmother, Mollie Wade Holmes Adams, a member of the Upper Mattaponi Indian Tribe in King William County. In the 1920s Adams resisted the efforts of Walter Ashby Plecker, the state registrar of vital statistics, to reclassify Indigenous Virginians as either white or “colored,” thereby erasing the legal ability of Indigenous people identify as "Indian."

Dyer placed her great-grandmother at the center of the artwork, with tribal elders featured on the bottom left. Adams’s hand hovers over a jar, which stands for the people who lost their connection to their Indigenous heritage because of the Racial Integrity Act. On the right are some of Adams’s descendants, representing the future of the Upper Mattaponi Indian Tribe. In the process of creating this piece Dyer connected with members of her family whom she had never before met.