The Monacan Indian Nation: Asserting Tribal Sovereignty in the Absence of Federal Recognition

In the spring of 1997, the Virginia Assembly passed a law allowing all Virginia Indians to have the racial designation on their birth certificates and other vital documents changed to read "Indian," as opposed to "Negro," without having to pay requisite administrative fees. ¹ How many Virginia Indians came to be classified as "Negroes" in decades past is a complicated story that will be addressed later in this article, but the act of having their legal identity (or at least the right to self-identification) restored was a landmark symbol of good faith on the part of the state government. What is most significant, however, is the fact that the impetus for this legislation came largely from Virginia Indians themselves. Previously, officials in the Virginia Office of Vital Statistics had agreed to change the racial designation of Indians requesting such alterations, but they refused to acknowledge that their office had historically been responsible for deliberate alterations of vital records, effectively denying Virginia Indians the right to identify as anything other than "Negro." Thus, any Indians wishing to have their racial designation properly restored on vital records would have to pay the eight-dollar administrative fee. Such a fee may seem a pittance under other circumstances, but for Virginia Indians it was a belligerent symbol of "legal racism and documentary genocide" in Virginia. ² Hence, a grassroots movement among Virginia tribes to lobby for legislation removing such bureaucratic screens that obscured past injustices ultimately resulted in an official act that was tantamount to an apology from the General Assembly. At the forefront of this movement was the Monacan Indian Nation.

Scholars such as Vine Deloria Jr. and Frank Pommersheim have argued that tribal dependence on federal largesse is one of the greatest barriers to the exercise of inherent tribal sovereignty, and that ultimately the only way for a tribe to be sovereign is to act sovereign. ³ These scholars, of course, were directing their analyses toward the legal obstacles confronting federally recognized tribes. In this article I examine the manner in which a nonfederally recognized tribal nation—the Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia—has attempted to assert its inherent sovereignty, notwithstanding a lack of explicit legal recognition of that right. By way of historical contextualization, I will consider how aspects of aboriginal Monacan culture have been incorporated into the tribe's contemporary political arena, or have been modified or supplanted to cope with changing circumstances. I will also attempt to link the Monacans' historical experiences as a people with contemporary political expressions. I base my analysis primarily on ethnohistorical and ethnographic data collected during my ongoing association with the Monacan people since 1995, as a researcher and a friend. In the long run, my analysis raises questions concerning not only the sovereign status of nonfederally recognized tribes, but also the legal rights of all Indians and the nature of sovereignty in general.

Federal (Non)Recognition as a Colonial Device

The concept of federal "recognition" or acknowledgment of Indian tribes has its antecedent in pre-1870 channels for federal-tribal relations, such as treaties and executive orders, which William Quinn suggests were fundamentally "cognitive" forms of recognition based on Euramerican conceptions of legitimate Indians. ⁴ With the cessation of Indian treaty making in 1871 ⁵ and the concurring diminishing military threat posed by tribes, legal acknowledgment of Indian tribes momentarily waned as a federal concern or practice. However, as assimilationist sentiments gave way to sometimes romantic preservationistconcerns among policy makers in the 1930s, acknowledgment of Indian tribes again became a relevant issue on the federal agenda. The passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) ⁶ officially sanctioned a reopening of the process. However, as Terry Anderson notes, the essentialist IRA template for recognizing the cultural and political existence of a tribe as a distinct legal entity became the gauge by which previously unrecognized tribes were deemed worthy or unworthy of...