Arica L. Coleman. That the Blood Stay Pure

Over the past several years, the collective interdisciplinary work of scholars has offered new insights and (re)interpretations of the nuanced history of interactions among Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans. As a result, a growing cadre of scholars, including David Chang, Barbara Krauthamer, Tiya Miles, and Fay A. Yarbrough, has been fashioning new perspectives about black-Indian encounters, connections, and relationships. Many of the recently published, and often highlighted, books by these scholars and others on black-Indian relations center on the so-called Five Civilized Tribes (the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations). Although engaged with this scholarship, Arica L. Coleman's book, That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia, shifts this scholarly discourse to black-Indian interactions in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Coleman focuses on the “legacy of Virginia's racial purity campaign and its effects on black-Indian relations, familial ties, and state recognition policy by providing a historical context by which to examine these contemporary issues” (p. xviii). She utilizes a range of primary and secondary sources to present a historical framework for understanding some of the colonial roots and manifestations of “racial purity ideology” in Virginia. In chapter 1, Coleman analyzes racialist thought in specific sections of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), then in subsequent chapters examines the different nineteenth- and twentieth-century iterations of this racialist grounding (proffering insightful discussions of the 1924 Racial Integrity Act [RIA] and the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case). She concludes with twenty-first-century remnants and ramifications of earlier racialist thought in her critical assessment of complexities of the recent state recognition processes of the Virginia Council on Indians (VCI) in relation to the United Cherokee Indian Tribe of Virginia, Inc. (UCITOVA), the Tri-County Rappahannock Indian Tribe/United Rappahannock Tribe, and the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia (NITOV)

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