In the cards

Sitting around playing bridge can be an entertaining way to pass a Sunday afternoon with friends or family members. For Monacan Indians during the middle of the last century, however, a similar card game turned out to be their lifeline.

It was during the height of the Jim Crow era, and Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was intended to restrict the rights of nonwhites. Infected with the fever of segregation, however, the state’s Registrar for Vital Statistics, Walter Plecker, vigorously enforced the discriminatory law against the Native American population as well.

Operating under the assumption that all Indians had intermarried with Negroes and were therefore, according to Virginia’s “one-drop rule,” Negro themselves, Plecker removed the Indian designation and vowed to prosecute for fraud — a felony offense — tribal members who identified themselves as such on birth or marriage certificates. With only two official racial options, “White” or “Colored,” native people in the state of Virginia were documented out of existence.

“It’s a legacy that has persisted even today,” says Rhyannon Berkowitz (MA Anthropology ’07). “I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘You mean there are Indians in Virginia?’”

Berkowitz, a member of the Creek tribe, has been heavily involved with local native issues since she was an undergraduate at Virginia Tech. As a graduate student in anthropology, she is researching the effects of these eugenics laws on Virginia Indians, especially the Monacan tribe now living in Amherst County.

Until the Supreme Court overturned antimiscegenation laws in 1967, native culture was forced underground. While officials attempted to prevent any activity that could in any way be identified as Indian, the card game known as pedro (pronounced PEEdro) allowed the tribe to maintain some thread of cohesion.

The game “seemed like a mainstream pastime,” Berkowitz explains. “It wasn’t attached to feathers and beads. It wasn’t seen as Indian. So it wasn’t a threat to the state or the white race, and [tribe members] were allowed to continue it.”

Much more than entertainment, pedro provided the people with a way to cultivate some sense of community, share stories and reinforce kinship connections, even in the face of punitive government regulations that undermined this sense of identity. Over an innocent hand of cards, tribal members were subtly able to proclaim their Indian heritage.

Pedro “became for the tribe a space where they could be Indian without interference from the state,” Berkowitz asserts. “It was a vehicle for them to continue their culture.”