"We Are an Indian People": Mixed-Race Peoples on Virginia's Eastern Shore

         This paper will examine the fate of a group of mixed-race peoples who lived on the Eastern Shore of Virginia during the eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century, a native American tribe called the Gingaskins accepted an offer from the English government which established a portion of their traditional lands as a reservation. After an initial period of accommodation and cooperation, relations between the Indians and the English began to deteriorate. Seeking to acquire Gingaskin land, the colonists maintained that the Indians were not cultivating the land to its fullest. Even more significantly, they became more and more alarmed as the native people began to intermarry with local free blacks, whose population was greater on the Eastern Shore than anywhere else in the Chesapeake. As a plantation based economy reliant on African slaves, Eastern Shore colonists viewed the free black population as a danger, always a threat to incite a slave revolt.

        To combat this growing fear, English colonists initiated a series of legal claims to void the earlier treaty and dispossess the Gingaskins of their land. Their argument was that the people living on the Eastern Shore were not Indians, only blacks who claimed to be Indian. These legal challenges continued after the American Revolution. In 1812, an American court forced the members of the Gingaskin community to dissolve the reservation and divide the land amongst themselves. The following year Virginia’s General Assembly passed legislation terminating the Gingaskin Indian reservation, the first instance of termination and allotment in the history of the United States. By highlighting how definitions of "race" changed over time, this paper will show how mixed-race peoples were particularly subject to the social and economic pressures of the larger society in which they existed.