These first Christian settlers in Jamestown got off to a terrible start with the Indians. Contrary to the gentleness that the English showed the Indians in the earlier Roanoke Colony in North Carolina, the Jamestown settlers saw themselves as superior to the Indians and treated them with much deceit and often with violence.
These abusive and deceitful attitudes towards our Native Americans have carried down to modern Virginians—as spiritual DNA often does!
In the August 11, 2003 edition of the Virginian-Pilot on page A10, there was a story outlining the continued legal fight of Virginia’s remaining eight tribes to get federal recognition. It was only in 1983 that the state of Virginia officially recognized them as Native American tribes. Unlike other states with Native American populations, Virginia has tricked and deprived its Native Americans over and over. The article states that Virginia:
…long denied education and employment opportunities to Indians. Later, the Virginia General Assembly tried bureaucratically to eliminate Indians by passing the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The law mandated that only two races be recorded on state birth records: White and Negro. It was zealously enforced by Wa
lter A. Plecker, Virginia’s first Registrar of the Bureau of Vital Statistics.Plecker, an outspoken proponent of eugenics, systematically changed the race recorded on many birth, death and marriage certificates from “Indian” to “Negro” until his retirement in 1967 when it was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But by then, it was too late for thousands of Native Americans to recover their real identity and the benefits that went with it. The State of Virginia committed ethnic cleansing of Native Americans by systematic massive identity theft.
The newspaper article goes on to tell of the “devastating impact” this law had on the Indians who could now not prove who they were. They were, consequently, not able to get the federal assistance that all the other tribes in America do for food and shelter and school scholarships.
1. First, we break our treaties with them and steal their land.
2. Then we steal their identity to deprive them of the very benefits we gave them hundreds of years later for taking their land away from them.
"We were victims of statistical genocide,” said William P. Miles, chief of the Pamunkey.
What angers me even more about this story is that many other Virginia politicians knew of it…for over 40 years! Some of those politicians called themselves Christians. Shame on them!
There has been a mean spirit in Virginia government against Indians and real Christians must act differently! Indians are our neighbor whom we are to love as ourselves. Anything else is sin. Sins like these have probably brought God’s curses on Virginia.
