Anthropological Professionalization and the Virginia Indians at the Turn of the Century

Abstract

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Indians of Virginia, like marginalized native communities throughout the Southeast, were enmeshed in struggles over their identity, as one-drop rules were increasingly applied and formalized. At that time several scholars, including James Mooney, wrote on the Powhatan tribes in American Anthropologist, the nascent journal of a professionalizing discipline. Previously, most works on the Virginia Indians had been published locally; after a brief florescence on the national scene (roughly corresponding to the 300th anniversary of English settlement in Powhatan territory), that pattern resumed. The works published on Virginia Indians in this period, and the contrast with their relative invisibility in professional journals over the following decades, cast light on U.S. anthropology's development as a profession. This article examines the transition from local to national organizations from the standpoint of ethnographic inclusion of such marginalized peoples. [Keywords: Powhatan Indians, ethnic identity, professionalization, localism, American Anthropologist]