Daniel Bachman

About This Project

The title of this project, Notes on the State of Virginia, is taken from Thomas Jefferson’s only published work which bears the same name.  For centuries now, “Notes” has been regarded as “the most important American book written before 1800”, and directly helped to “influence European understanding of the United States.”(1)  Today, Jefferson’s work reads more like an eloquent sales pitch to foreign investors, and is largely considered to be a “racist pseudo factbook”.(2)  This project hopes to update Jefferson’s text, some 240 years later, and present a more fully realized rendering of the current state of Virginia and its history.  The photos and essays that follow can be viewed as a loose chronology of historic events that help to illustrate the churning of centuries and their inherent interconnectedness of events, people, and place.  And while all photographs were taken during the 2016-2020 Donald Trump presidency, this is not a book about Virginia during the Trump administration.  This is a book about Virginia history.  

In 2016, everyone living in Virginia knew that a Trump presidency would change their life in one way or another.  How visible these changes would become had yet to be seen.  So in some effort to document this process, I went out and bought a cheap digital camera from a local Wal-Mart in Colonial Heights, VA.(3)  My thought was, that if the camera survived, I might have an interesting set of photos to remember this chaotic time by and possibly share with others.  What I did not anticipate, however, was to observe a commonality between our colonial self and our contemporary one.  A 400+ year period of sustained violent creolization that was impossible to ignore and excruciating to witness in repetition.  At this point the focus of the project became less about strictly documenting the events that unfolded, and more about revealing the highly stratified and compounded colonial experience that we live with in Virginia, as does the rest of the U.S.  How so much can change, but so much stays the same.

The photographs chosen for this project were all collected within the geographic boundaries of colonial Virginia.(4).  From the former dynastic Tidewater region, to the fringes of the Blue Ridge backcountry.  And because some of these themes are complex and abstract in a strictly visual context, I try to express them through accompanying essays, photos, and engravings.  This project listens to community histories that are often not represented in the academy, providing a wider representation of historic narratives from those who know it best, the people who live here.  Thanks must be given as well, to the hundreds of scholars who have dedicated their lives to understanding the unique and complex legacy of this place.  Thanks to the local museums, and lonely archives, who’s shelves still hold unknown secrets, legends and lore.  And the deepest gratitude must be given to the memory of generations of Virginians who pushed against the unimaginable horrors around them and endured.  Their voices resonate through the hollows and creek beds.  Black water and brackish.  Red clay and rock.  And the winds that carry their memory.

With this project, I hope to discuss the non-linear, cyclical patterns of intergenerational trauma that are currently manifesting themselves within our modern societal framework.  To draw clear lines between the earliest permanent colonial supremacy in America, (the Virginia Company of London), and the corporate entities that rule our contemporary lives.(5)  And to help put our modern crises of white supremacy, pandemic, and climate change into a broader historical timeline.  That it may further illustrate Virginia’s impact on our larger American society and psyche.  And that by highlighting some of these sad realities of our shared experience, we can begin to discuss the influences that created them, and possibly move past them.  Healing from the post traumatic stress of colonialism is no small task, and this work does not provide any answers.  Instead, it hopes to serve as an accurate public history of the Virginia experience over the past five centuries.  Just one tool of many that we may use in breaking down the traumatic “re-enactment” of our past.(6)

1 - “Notes” offered a series of answers to queries posed by French Diplomat Francois Barbe-Marbois, in 1781.  These “questionnaires” were sent to “officials of the thirteen states requesting detailed information about their history, geography, economy, and culture”, in their hopes to better understand this newly formed American society. Robert P. Forbes, “Notes on the State of Virginia (1785),” (2021, January 12.) Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities. https://encyclodepidavirginia.org/entries/notes-on-the-state-ofvirginia-1785/

2 - Ned and Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry, (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2016), 50.

3 -   The “ViviCam XX14” is a flimsy, red and silver, palm sized device, made by the Vivatar company. The camera and SD card in total was purchased for about 30$.

4 - East to west, colonial Virginia roughly encompassed the area from the Chesapeake Bay and its tributary waterways to the Appalachian/Allegheny mountains. With the Potomac river to its north and the Roanoke river to its south.  

5 - “The Virginia Company of London was a joint-stock company chartered by King James I in 1606 to establish a colony in North America. Such a venture allowed the Crown to reap the benefits of colonization - natural resources, new markets for English goods, leverage against the Spanish - without bearing the costs.” Brendan Wolfe, “Virginia Company of London,” (2020, December 07.) Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities. Https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/virginia-company-of-london.

6 - “The phenomenon that drives the repetition of past traumatic events is called re-enactment.” Peter A Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books,1997), 169.

Introduction

When you follow the streams and rivers back to the source, they all lead here.  An ocean of agony, pain and suffering hid under the veneer of red brick, oak and pine.  We can put some of the blame on Ferdinand and Isabela.(1)  Their steel cut through ancient American empires with ease.  Pizarro conquered Cajamarca.  Pardo conquered Saltville.(2)  Thousands of years of sophisticated human expression reduced to ash, thrown to the dogs.  Here, they would kidnap Paquiquineo from the banks of the river.  Take him around the world and return to Ajacan a man of god.  Don Luis de Velasco.  The Spanish would leave Bahia de Santa Maria with his relatives hanging from the ships rigging.(3)  But these wounds were superficial compared to what eventually would come.  Albion.  Which one was it again?  The Puritans at Plymouth enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with the Native Americans, or the Virginia Company at Jamestown during the starving time, eating their horses and each other.(4)  Rule Britannia.  Rule the waves.  Britons never shall be slaves.  

The original sin, however, was not cast in Aragon or London, but rather Rome, by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493.  Papal Bull “Inter caetera”: “. . . in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.”(5)  This voice of God spoke to Hernando de Soto as he lay waste to tens of thousands of human lives in La Florida.  John Smith was moved by this spirit as he hacked crosses into the ancient trees along Virginia waterways during the violent campaigns to claim the land for the English.  And a century later, Thomas Jefferson justified the removal and extermination of the Eastern Woodland Indians by perpetuating these pan-European dogmas.  Colonize, convert, enslave.  Repeat.

And as the names Maniatique, Werowocomoco, and Rassawek fade from the the settlers maps, the cities, temples, mounds, and people themselves become an esoteric commodity for future generations to debate over.  It is much easier, after all, to plant tobacco with all the Indian fields burned and unoccupied.  The endless pursuit of precious metals had been abandoned and replaced with the golden leaf.  Oronoco.(6)  It was planted in any available space, in the yards and roads of Jamestown.(7)  The sowing, weeding, worming, topping, suckering, curing, packing, and shipping of the plant had created a labor vacuum in the colony.  Hundreds of Englands orphans and criminals were shipped en masse to Jamestown.  Many, however, were unable to survive the “seasoning” period, leading to staggering death tolls.(8)  Property and profits take precedence over human life in colonial Virginia, just as they do today.  Powhatan is dead.  

The years following the dissolution of the Virginia Company more closely resemble the colonial life and experience we know today.  The planter elite and chattel slavery.  The colonial governor.  The Commonwealth.  From 1619 forward, Black bodies were shipped to Virginia to supply the endless want of labor.  They dug the clay, fired the bricks, and built the big house.  They raised the children, tended the fires, and cooked the meals.  They bled as their masters got fat on sack and strong waters.(9)  Breeding enslaved humans saved money on shipping and quickly became the preferred method in perpetuating this brutally corrupt and immoral system.(10)  And by 1860, there were more enslaved people in Virginia than anywhere else in the Union.  The deep wounds of this racial capitalism have never healed.  They fester and abscess today.  In an Amazon warehouse outside of Petersburg and in solitary confinement at Red Onion State Prison.(11)  Our parks and schools are built on top of their bodies.(12)

Any and all attempts of revolutionary action against the white elites led to severe and lasting punishments.  For the Virginia Indians, woman and children were enslaved, men were shipped to Antigua, and in many cases, communities were exterminated by any means necessary.(13)  Reservation systems were installed, as well as boarding schools, in an attempt to stifle thousands of years of inherited tradition.(14)  And in a total insult to decades of diplomacy between the English government and the Virginia Indian Nations, many treaties made before the founding of the United States would be null and void after its establishment in 1776.(15)  Gabriel, Nat Turner, along with countless other ancestors, fought for their lives.(16)  Each of these insurrections leading to harsher slave codes, which, over time, informed the laws governing all non whites living in the commonwealth.  From the maroon communities in Great Dismal Swamp, to the edges of the frontier in the Blue Ridge, “laws against intermarrying”, and similar offenses, “attempt[ed] to biologically police boundaries that governed the social divisions of labor, wealth, and power in society”.(17)

Washington, Jefferson, Monroe and Madison, all continued to shape the nation within the framework their own fathers had built for them.  Finally, free from the oppression of the Crown.  Kings of the New World.  But what to do about “the Indian problem”, “the Negro problem” . . .  It was Jefferson, in a letter to John Page on August 5th, 1776, concerning relations with the Cherokee, saying, “Nothing will reduce those wretches so soon as pushing the war into the heart of their country . . . But I would not stop there . . .  I would never cease pursuing them with war while one remained on the face of the earth.”(18)  Andrew Jackson surely took inspiration from Jefferson when implementing the federal removal of the Southeastern Indian Nations during the “Trail of Tears” some 50 years later.  And the Fugitive Slave act, as well as the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, helped keep a massive enslaved population under the complete control of an increasingly paranoid and desperate planter class.(19)  On a visit to the Fredericksburg Virginia area in 1841, Charles Dickens wrote that, “There is an air of ruin and decay abroad, which is inseparable from the institution.”(20)  John Brown dreamed the devil was dead.  

At least 620,000 people died during the Civil War, with many of its battles occurring within Virginia’s borders.(21)  An entire generation ripped in half by the Minie ball.(22)  The land is still scarred by the trenches, studded with lead and haunted by its casualties.  But the Civil War did not end Slavery, it only modernized it.  The tenant farming systems, first inherited from 16th century England, would again find a foothold in North America with share cropping agricultural systems.(23)  And modern adaptations of the colonial slave codes twist and contort, becoming Black Codes and Jim Crow in the 19th and 20th centuries.  It was also just one year after the Gettysburg Address, that Federal forces continued , “ . . . pushing war into the heart of their country . . . ”, with the U.S. military massacre at Sand Creek against the Cheyenne and Arapaho.(24)  The reservation systems and boarding schools, first designed in colonial Virginia, were now being used to suppress Indigenous cultures of the western territories.  “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man”, Captain Richard H. Pratt, 1892.(25)

Now, the putrid, post war, reconstruction years.  A bankrupt planter class, scurrying back to their mansions and ledger books, digging up the silver buried in the yard.  Monuments to Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Lee line the boulevards of Richmond.  The rising scientistic study of eugenics was creeping into government office’s, universities, and state institutions, with non white Virginians suddenly facing a reality just as bleak as the pre war years.  Walter Plecker’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 now classified all non white people in Virginia as “colored”.(26)  Removing the  “Indian” from the vital statistic records legally eliminated them from existence.(27)  Paper genocide.  The architects of these policies, in many cases, were the sons of confederate veterans themselves.  Dr. Joseph “Sterilization” DeJarnette, born on a prominent plantation in Caroline county Virginia, was once quoted saying, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”(28)  Above Staunton, smoke from the Western State crematory fills the air.  The unfit lie in rows of unmarked graves.  Purifying the line.  The tactics of oppression that had been honed over hundreds of years of Virginia society became the cornerstones of racial science for the Nazi Party.  

Back home in Old Virginia, non white communities continued to be terrorized by lynchings, poverty, and the post traumatic stress of institutionalized slavery.  Pandemic.  Recession.  Depression.  War.  Then another, and another.  If only Jefferson could have seen the empire.  The sun rising over Saigon, across the Potomac, setting over Honolulu Harbor.  One nation under God.  Separate but equal.  Is this what you had in mind?  But now, the people stand their ground.  From the Woolworth’s lunch counter, to the pulpit, they pressed against the weight of centuries, and said no more.(29)  Dorthy Davis, Mildred and Richard Loving, and Charles Green, they pushed it through the courts.(30)  Their children carried it to school.  Unfortunately, reactionary responses to Virginia’s Civil Rights movements would lead, once again, to updated, more efficient forms of oppression.  Redlining, prison industry, wage theft, and the neglect of municipal and social infrastructure.  Food deserts, sacrifice zones, minimum wage.  Anomie.  A life sentence in Virginia is without the possibility of parole.  

By the turn of the 21st century, some of the largest concentrations of wealth in America have remained in Virginia.(31)  Their four door garages not far from the crumbling brick porticos and wasted fields of their ancestors.  The big house, just as it was in the 17th century, is occupied by retired government employees and CEOs.  The use of immigrant populations is the preferred source of labor on their plantations.  They mulch the magnolia and fold the clothes.  They pick up the groceries and prune the boxwoods.  ICE waits in a Wal-Mart parking lot like the pattyroller on the turnpike.  Mining, deforestation, and invasive species have created a landscape nearly unrecognizable to its pre-Columbian self.  Oil and fracked gas have taken the place of tobacco and cotton.  And again, pan European diseases, like Covid-19, disproportionately affect indigenous and black communities, just as the bloody flux, smallpox, and cholera did to their ancestors.  Donald Trump, the bastard son of Queen Elizabeth.  

Tsenacomoco.(32)  The Chesapeake Bay and its tributary rivers.  The land that makes up the cradle of our empire now faces it’s own imminent destruction.  Just as the settlers attempted to transform the land through violent Creolization, Earth, experiencing climate catastrophe, will ultimately dominate us.  A Blue Ocean Event taking our myths and memories out with the tide.(33)  All that pomp and heraldry, soon home for the crabs and eel grass.  Droughts, fires, famine.  Floods, mass migration, desperation.  All for short term gains, quarterly business reports and the push for constant profits.  With the Virginia Company soon bankrupt and forgotten, new corporate powers will move about North America.  And as we wander over land we will be forced to take one of two roads ahead of us.  Either we collectively adapt to our New World, change our life ways, our expectations and our minds.  Or, we perish.  Leaving only the rotting edifice of a civilization based on greed and hate, too arrogant to change, and too irreverent to be sustainable.  

1 - “In 1469, with the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille, two of these crowns were joined together.” This established Spain as “the greatest power of Europe . . . backed Columbus’s discovery of the New World and initiated the conquest and settlement of that vast unknown land.” Charles Hudson, Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun, (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1997), 3.

2 - Jim Glanville, “Conquistadors at Saltville in 1567? A Review of the Archaeological and Documentary Evidence,” The Smithfield Review, (Volume VIII, 2004), 70 -108.

3 - Upon returning to his native “Ajacan”, Paquiquineo would lead a successful revolt against his Jesuit captors and escape subsequent punitive measures from the Spanish.  His fate is unknown. Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries, (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 18. 

4 -  “There are five hundred people in the colony now. And they are starving. They offer the only authentic examples of cannibalism witnessed in Virginia. One provident man chops up his wife and salts down the pieces. Others dig up graves to eat the corpses. By spring only sixty are left alive.” Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery - American Freedom, (New York and London, W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), 73.  

5 - Pope Alexander VI, “Inter caetera”, Pope Alexander VI (May 4, 1493). (2020, December 07). Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/inter-caetera-by-pope-alexander-vi-may-4-1493.

6 - “We developed the dark-leaf [tobacco], called Oronoco . . . A gift to us, it seemed, this money and land enough for all, until the earth itself failed us, its richness spent, and the topsoil drifted away . . . We went by moonlight to the fields, hacked stalks down, held ceremonies, prayed, but greed spread like blight, and others took the money, then the land.” Karenne Wood, Markings on Earth,  (Tucson, The University of Arizona Press, 2001), 21.

7 - Morgan, American Slavery - American Freedom, 90.   

8 - The summer in Virginia proved to be a death trap for many colonists.  The hot humid weather brought malaria, typhoid, and a number of other deadly ailments.  It was believed that if one could survive a season or two of these conditions, they might be immune to future episodes. Morgan, American Slavery - American Freedom, 158.  

9 - Sack was a type of fortified white wine imported from Spanish territories.  Strong waters refers to any number of alcoholic beverages consumed by the colonial elite.  Rum was a favorite among the Virginia planters.  

10 - Thomas Jefferson signed the act prohibiting the trans Atlantic trade of human beings in the United States on March 2, 1807. The move was not a humanitarian effort, however, but one of protecting the planter’s control over human capital. “With Jefferson having shut the African trade off, Virginia and Maryland traders settled into their newly protected domestic slave trade”  A thorough account of “The Capitalized Womb”, can be found in: Ned and Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry, (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2016), 374-375.

11 - Red Onion State Prison is a “supermax” facility located in Pound, Wise co. Virginia.  The prison has been shrouded in controversy since its opening in 1998, due to excessive use of solitary confinement, live ammunition carried by guards, and other inhumane treatment of prisoners.  Artist and activist, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, has written extensively about his own incarnation at Red Onion.  Kevin Rashid Johnson, “Breaking Prisoners’ Fingers at Red Onion State Prison: Restraint Technique or Plain Old Torture?”. (Blog Post. September 12, 2011). https://rashidmod.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/breaking-prisoners-fingers-at-red-onion-state-prison-restraint-technique-or-plain-old-torture/.

12 - The near constant development of Virginia’s urban environments occasionally disturbs its own long forgotten Black cemeteries.  Such was the case in 2011 when Virginia Commonwealth University discovered the Richmond African Burial Ground underneath a parking lot.  Sadly, unknown numbers of free Black, and enslaved peoples burying grounds lay beneath the city streets of the Commonwealth.

13 - “A colonial militia from Richmond County, Virginia, hunted down and captured 49 Nanzaticos and tried them for murder. While 5 men were hanged for the murder, and all the other Nazaticos over age 12 were sold into slavery in the West Indies under a 1665 law that held communities responsible for any murders of English settlers. Children were forced to work as servants for officials of the Virginia Colony.” Anita L Wills, Along the Rappahannock: The Homeland of the Nanzatico (Nantaughtacund) Indian Nation, (Self Published, 2017), 17 - 27.  

14 - Helen C Rountree, “Indian Land Loss in Virginia: A Prototype of U.S. Federal Indian Policy.” PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, 1973. 96-97.

15 - King George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 ended the French and Indian War and made all lands west of the “Lands beyond the Heads or Sources of any of the Rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West . . . Indian Reserve“.  Virginia’s leading land speculators would all play an integral role in the slow erosion of this treaty and the further domination of Indian Country in the post revolution years. Jim Glanville, “The 250th Anniversary of the Proclamation of 1763 [and the Blacksburg Connection],” Video presentation. Wise, Virginia, November 7, 2013. URL.

16 - Gabriel’s Rebellion, August 30, 1800. Nat Turner’s Rebellion, August 21-3, 1831.  

17 - Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford, Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South, (Oakland, Edinburgh, Baltimore: AK Press, 2015), 30.

18 - Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to John Page”, (National Archives: National Historical Publications & Records Commission, Letter, 5 August 1776). https://founders.archives.gov/documents/jefferson/01-01-02-0202

19 - The fugitive slave act of 1850 required that enslaved people living in free states be returned to their “owners”. The Dred Scott decision extended the 1850 act and ruled that an enslaved person living in a free territory, (Dred Scott), did not entitle an enslaved person to their freedom.  Earl Maltz, “Fugitive Slave Laws”, (Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities, June 09, 2021). https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/fugitive-slave-laws/

20 - Charles Dickens, American Notes For General Circulation and Pictures From Italy, (London: Chapman & Hall, LTD, 1913), 107-121.

21 - Drew Gilpin Faust, “Death and Dying”, (National Park Service: Blogpost). https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/national_cemeteries/death.html

22 - The Minie Ball was a conical shaped lead bullet that would flatten out upon impact, often causing severe injury and emergency amputation.  

23 - David Hackett Fischer, Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in America, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 245.

24 - The Sand Creek Massacre, November 29, 1864, was a U.S. Army massacre carried out against a peaceful camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho, many of whom were woman, children, and the elderly. After murdering over 200 souls, the soldiers took scalps, fingers, ears, and testicles as souvenirs. Stan Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 145-162.

25 - Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction(1892), 46–59. Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–271

26 - Walter Plecker, “Virginia Health Bulletin: The New Virginia Law to Preserve Racial Integrity, March 1924,” (The Library of Virginia, Richmond, State Government Records Collection, Virginia Governor 1922 -1926: Trinkle ), Box 76 Folder 8. https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/dbva/items/show/226.

27 - “[Walter Plecker] waged a campaign that Chief William Miles of the Pamunkey Tribe would later describe as ‘statistical genocide.’ Using the power of an office that touched every life in the state, Plecker created a false genealogical record of Virginia’s Native peoples that would eventually allow him to boast, ‘Hitler’s genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete.’” Elizabeth Catte, Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia, (Cleveland: Belt Publishing, 2021), 3-84.

28 - Egbert Klautke, “The Germans are beating us at our own game: American eugenics and the German sterilization law of 1933.” (University College London, UK, Research Article, February 28, 2016).

29 - Ruth Coder Fitzgerald, A Different Story: A Black History of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania, Virginia, (Unicorn, 1979), 240-246.

30 - Dorothy E. Davis, et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (1952), Loving v. Virginia (1967), and Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968), were landmark court cases that helped to slowly break down Virginia’s fierce segregation and anti miscegenation laws. “Massive Resistance” measures were implemented by white power interests, shutting down schools and further complicating segregated education in Virginia. James H. Hershman “Massive Resistance”, (Encyclopedia Virginia, December 07, 2020).

31 - Northern Virginia has always held some of the largest concentrations of wealth in the United States. Alexandria was a major hub for the sale of enslaved humans during the 18 and 19 centuries, amassing great fortunes for its residents. “Looking at the richest counties in the U.S.[in 2021], the No. 1 spot is claimed by Loudoun County, Virginia . . . Indeed, several counties in Virginia rank among the richest counties in the U.S.” Andrew DePietro, “The Richest Counties In The U.S. By State, (Forbes Magazine, Online Article, March 8, 2021). https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewdepietro/2021/03/08/the-richest-counties-in-the-us-by-state/?sh=a1e9e686a2ae

32 - Tsenacomoco was the Algonquian speaking territory of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributary Rivers as recorded by colonist William Strachey.  Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Cultures, (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 13.   

33 - A Blue Ocean Event, or (BOE), is the moment when Earth’s arctic sea ice reaches a threshold of less than 1 million square kilometers. “If we lose the Arctic, we will also lose the jet stream as we know it, the troposphere will expand causing droughts and fires on many continents, food production in the Northern Hemisphere will be threatened, more viruses and pandemics would be unleashed, and we will be well on the way to a Hothouse Earth state in a 4-7 degree Centigrade world of monster storms and mass extinctions.” Shani Cairns, “The Arctic Death Spiral”, (Scientists Warning, Online Article, June 19, 2021.) https://www.scientistswarning.org/2020/06/04/blue-ocean-event/

1 - “Long Fallow” and 2 - “Landscape Architecture”

The Virginia Company came to the Chesapeake Bay in 1607 with the express purpose of exploiting its natural recourses for profits.(1)  Gold and silver were in the eyes of every settler in Jamestown, all hoping to steal a fortune similar to what had existed in Mexico or Peru.  Instead, they would find only Matchqueon.(2)  Fools gold.  In this absence of mineral wealth, the company attempted to force a profit out of anything it could.  Sassafrass, silk, potash, pitch, tar, and lumber all failed to make any impact in the European marketplace.  And while short term gains were made off of Tobacco, unsustainable farming practices and a saturated market left the industry perpetually coming up short.(3)  The seeds of American industrialization were planted along the Rapidan river at Spotswood’s Furnace.(4)  Its iron pigs left to rot in the sand when profits failed.  And as the centuries wore on, the land is hunted, fished, and harvested to the bone.  One would be hard pressed to find another section of North America that has been so continually scarred behind the horse and plow.

Community historian Roger Gallagher saw some of these Earth changes for himself throughout his lifetime spent in Virginia’s Northern Neck.(5)  And on a walk one day in January, he found himself lost in his own childhood neighborhood.  The devastation caused by logging crews was extensive.  Trees and pathways that he had known his entire life were left carelessly tossed about.  Lost among the pottery shards and rusting iron bits of a colonial cousinage.  The woods left to long fallow until profits could be reaped again.  The memories of towering oak and lonely gravesite are now gone with Roger’s own passing.  Gone with the great sturgeon of the Chesapeake Bay, the big cats, and the buffalo of Virginia’s highlands.  The pine savannah’s that were reduced to heartwood and ships mast.(6)  The hemlock and chestnut groves who have been decimated by disease.  And now, even our eternal mountaintops are cut in half for weak seams of bituminous coal.(7)  Earthly memories fading with the passing of each generation.  And it remains clear, that if we continue down this destructive path, we will meet a similar end.(8)

1 - “[English] men with capital had already for several decades been investing in overseas trading ventures . . . many of the same men joined in the Virginia Company, which was also a trading venture. But in order to produce profits . . . Englishmen would have to live there and themselves produce articles of trade that they could not or would not produce at home.” Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery - American Freedom, (New York and London, W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), 70.

2 - Powhatan Algonquian for the common mineral Pyrite. Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Cultures, (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 76.

3 - Land degradation and loss of biodiversity are two primary concerns surrounding sustained tobacco cultivation. “There is evidence of substantial, and largely irreversible, losses of trees and other plant species caused by tobacco farming that makes it a particular threat to biodiversity.” World Health Organization, “Tobacco and its environmental impact: an overview”, (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2017), 20.

4 - Virginia is home to many early American industrial sites. By 1720, Governor Alexander Spotswood had forced a group of indentured German iron workers, and their families, to work at his iron furnace along the Rapidan river. The Germans “departed as soon as any financial obligation to the former governor had been satisfied . . . the governor [then] turned increasingly to slave labor.” City of Fredericksburg, “Frontier Industry: Spotswood’s Iron”, (Fredericksburg.gov, Online Article). https://www.fredericksburgva.gov/DocumentCenter/View/1403/Historic-Sites-Frontier-Industry?bidld=

5 - The Northern Neck is the northernmost of three peninsulas on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay and is tucked between the Potomac River to the north, and the Rappahannock to the south.  The peninsula was one of the first settled by English land speculators and is the ancestral home of the Washingtons, Lees, and other “First Families of Virginia.” “John C. Wilson, “Virginia’s Northern Neck: a pictorial history”, (Norfolk, Virginia Beach: The Donnin Company, 1984), 16-29.

6 - The last Baker Pine that Roger Gallagher knew of in his section of the Northern Neck fell during hurricane Isabel in 2003. Roger Gallagher, (Westmoreland county, conversational research, community historian, February 8, 2018).

7 -  “Tremendous environmental capital is being spent to achieve what are only modest energy gains.” Brian D. Lutz, Emily S. Bernhardt, William H. Schesinger, “The Environmental Price Tag on a Ton of Mountaintop Removal Coal”, (PLoS ONE 8(9): e73202, 2013). https://journals.plos.org/plosone.artcile?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073203

8 - “Disruptive impacts from climate change are now inevitable. Geoengineering is likely to be ineffective or counter-productive . . . Instead, a new approach which explores how to reduce harm and not make matters worse is important to develop.” Jem Bendell, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” (Ambleside, UK: University of Cumbria, Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) Occasional Papers Volume 2”, 2018.) (Unpublished)

3 - “2,000 Police at Heather Heyer Memorial” and 4 - “Monacan Pow Wow at Bear Mountain”

The English began policing Indigenous inhabitants of North America as quickly as a permeant settlement could be established.  For much of the 17 century James Fort and surrounding environs were little more than a military outpost on the edge of Indian Country.  And while tenuous alliances were made, the wars, theft and murder that occurred would quickly erode any short lived relationship between the two.  The colonists responded to this schism by creating more laws and boundaries to be enforced by the colonial governor and his militia.  Reservation systems eliminated traditional land use, further limiting freedom of movement and traditional life ways.(1)  “Colleges” for Indian children were planned to strengthen compulsorily anglicization efforts.(2)  And only after all attempts had failed to forcibly enslave the Virginia Indian were they deemed “necessary to destroy”.(3)  These tactics of oppression that were first perfected in colonial Virginia would later be used by our Federal government in the continued criminalization of traditional Native American cultures.(4)

It was the 20th century, however, that saw some of the darkest days in this legacy of hate.  The “Racial Integrity Act” of 1924 was the primary tool in Virginia’s Eugenics movement against the Virginia Indians.  Its legacy can be felt to this day.(5)  21st century Virginia acknowledges 7 Federally recognized Tribes, 4 state recognized Tribes, as well as the remnants of different historic Indian Nations scattered statewide.(6)  A far cry from the pre-columbian populations that once inhabited Tsenacomico and the interior.  For many Virginians, the only visual reminder of these peoples historical presence is in the occasional artifact picked up from a field.  Or the waterways and road signs that still bear their Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan languages.  Occoquan, Appomattox, the Powhite Parkway.  The Pamunkey Regional Jail.  Menokin, Chippokes, and Tuckahoe; now known for the plantation homes we celebrate rather than the life ways of their rightful owners.  And while our government continues to challenge Native sovereignty across Indian Country to this day, the Virginia Indian Nations can be heard in one resounding sentiment.(7)  “We’re Still Here”.(8)

1 - “By the time that the Reservation Period came to an end for the Nottoway and Gingaskin, and nearly to an end for the Pamunkey, the surviving landed tribes had lost most of their lands. They had changed greatly in their way of life, coming to rely less upon hunting and agriculture for a living and more upon a little gardening and the proceeds of land leases and sales.” Helen C Rountree, “Indian Land Loss in Virginia: A Prototype of U.S. Federal Indian Policy.” PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, 1973. 91-127

2 - “The failure of the College project in the events of 1622 [Powhatan Uprising of 1622] effectively shut down this sense of religious purpose and duty until the foundation of the College of William and Mary in the last decade of the 17th Century. The ‘missioinizing’ spirit to inferior races died in a newly articulated racial hatred.” Benjamin P. Campbell, “Anglicanism at the Inception of Virginia”, (Virginia Union University: Faith Journeys in the Black Experience:1619-2019, March 20-21, 2019).

3 - “I think it necessary to destroy all these northern Indians . . ’Twill be a great terror and example and instruction to all other Indians.” Sir William Berkeley to Maj. Gen. Smyth, 22 June 1666. David Hackett Fischer, Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in America, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 387.

4 - Rountree, “Indian Land Loss In Virginia”, 174-190.

5 - “The Racial Integrity Law was the law of Virginia until 1969, but the effect is still lingering today in some cases.” Kenneth Branham, Tribal Chief Monacan Nation. (Amherst county: Reclaiming Our Heritage Video Collection, 5/17/09), 3:57:31.

6 - Federally recognized Tribes - Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Monacan, Nansemond, Pamunkey, Rappahannock, and Upper Mattaponi. State recognized Tribes - Cheroenhaka-Nottoway, Mattaponi, Nottoway, and Patawomeck. Remants of the Cherokee, Occoneechi, Sapony, and Tutelo Nations remain and are just some of the historic Tribes of Virginia.

7 - The James River Water Authority has planned to build a water pumping facility at the historic Monacan capital city of Rassawek. Despite the Monacan Nation’s Federal recognition status and the presence of numerous National Register-eligible archaeological sites, the JRWA contends the current plans are “more economical”. National Trust for Historic Preservation, “Discover America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places for 2020”, (National Trust for Historic Preservation, Online Article, September 24, 2020.) https://savingplaces.org/stories/discover-americas-11-most-endangered-historic-places-for-202#YF4Up8Bq2Ed

8 - A collection of contemporary Virginia Indian interviews can be found in, We’re Still Here - Contemporary Virginia Indians Tell Their Stories. Sandra F. Waugaman and Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, Ph.D, We’re Still Here - Contemporary Virginia Indians Tell Their Stories, (Richmond Virginia: Palari Pulari Publishing, 2000).

  5 - “Quarantine” and 6 - “Election Day”

The pandemics that followed the Christian invasion of North America were among the most effective weapons used to dominate the American Indians and acquire their lands.  And by the time the English arrived in the Chesapeake Bay, Native populations of the southeast had been experiencing the fallout of pan European disease for almost a century.(1)  The English and Africans who died from disease could be, and were, replaced by others from abroad.(2)  The Virginia Indians, however, “entered into an inexorable decline.”(3)  Smallpox, typhoid, measles, bubonic plague, influenza, malaria etc. ravaged colonial Virginia.(4)  And as western movement continued into frontier regions in the late 17 through 19 centuries, these areas saw similar patterns of disease.  The psychological and physical toll of living in such sustained proximity to death must have been immense.  In our day, Covid-19 and other modern pandemics continue to disproportionately affect Indigenous and African American communities.(5)

The U.S. government’s neglectful handling of our most recent coronavirus pandemic comes as no surprise.  President Woodrow Wilson, a proud white supremacist from Staunton Va, never officially acknowledged the 1918-1920 H1N1 pandemic.(6)  The White House shifted its focus instead to the war effort and the economic boom it created.  National death rates soared, and ”by the time it waned, the epidemic had claimed the lives of at least 16,000 Virginians.”(7)  Wilson himself would eventually succumb to the disease, suffering a “major and debilitating stroke”, and remained in a compromised state for the rest of his presidency.(8)  Official death tolls in the U.S. from the “Spanish Flu” range between 600,000 and 1.5 million.  A year after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a study on excess death rate estimated just under one million Americans dead.(9)  Property and profits continue to take precedence over human life, just as they did in colonial Virginia.  Essential workers collect less than a living wage as many Virginians fall deeper into poverty, housing insecurity, and despair.  All the while, Amazon builds their HQ2 in Arlington, at the cost of 4.6 billion to the Virginia taxpayer.(10)  

1 - “European diseases often decimated Indian populations before the Europeans themselves ever appeared on the scene.” Helen C Rountree, “Indian Land Loss in Virginia: A Prototype of U.S. Federal Indian Policy.” PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, 1973. 191.

2 - “It is well known that before 1624 Virginia was a death trap for most of those who went there. One reason why the king dissolved the Virginia Company was that it seemed to have sent so many men to their deaths without taking adequate measures to feed and shelter them.” Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery - American Freedom, (New York and London, W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), 158.

3 - “By 1669 only about 1,800 were left, compared to more than 20,000 when the English arrived.” David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Western Movement, (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 71. 

4 - Examples of American and Pan Euro disease events in North America. Todd L. Savitt, Fevers, Agues, and Cures Medical Life in Old Virginia, (Richmond: Virginia Historical Society, 1990), 15.

5 - DB Chastain, SP Osae, AF Henao-Martinez, C Franco-Paredes,, JS Chastain, HN Young, “Racial Disproportionality in Covid Clinical Trials”, (New England Journal of Medicine: August 11, 2020).

6 - “In 1918 the lies of officials and of the press never allowed the terror to condense into the concrete. The public could trust nothing so they knew nothing.” “And no national official ever publicly acknowledged the danger of influenza.” John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, (New York: Penguin Group, 2004), 461; 343.

7 - “It raged through Virginia from the autumn of 1918 through the spring of 1919, spreading through cities, small towns, isolated rural areas, and military camps.” Addeane S. Calleigh “Influenza Pandemic in Virginia, The (1918-1919)” Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities, February 9, 2021. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/influenza-pandemic-in-virginia-the-1918-1919/

8 - “For months his wife and [physician] Grayson would control all access to him and become arguably the de facto most important policy makers in the country.” Barry, The Great Influenza, 391.

9 - “Our approach to estimating the total COVID-19 death rate is based on measurement of the excess death rate during the pandemic week by week compared to what would have been expected based on past trends and seasonality.” Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, “Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19”, Online Article, May 13, 2021. www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimations-excess-mortality-due-covid-19-and-scalars-reported-covid-19-deaths

10 - “Amazon’s new headquarters will bring it at least $4.6 billion in state and local subsidies, according to an analysis by Good Jobs First . . .“ The Crystal City neighborhood chosen for HQ2 has been “rebranded” by developers and local officials as “National Landing”. David Dayen, Rachel M. Cohen, “Amazon HQ2 Will Cost Taxpayers at Least $4.6 Billion, More than Twice What the Company Claimed, New Study Shows.” The Intercept, Online Article, November 15, 2018. https://theintercept.com/2018/11/15/amazon-hq2-long-island-city-virginia-subsidies/

7 - “Low Street” and 8 - “Market Street”

The Afro Chesapeake cultures of Virginia are among the oldest in America’s African diaspora.  From 1619 onward, Black men and women were kidnapped and brought to Virginia against their will.(1)  The practice of breeding enslaved humans grew exponentially throughout the 19 century.(2)  And by 1860 there were at least 490,865 enslaved people in Virginia, with a free black population of 58,042.(3)  Despite constant pressure and abuse imposed on all non white Virginians, a small percentage of free black and Virginia Indian communities continued to establish themselves and grow.  Places like Liberty Town, Ravenscroft, and Free Union were all founded to act as semi autonomous zones between the strict racial boundaries of Virginia society.(4)  Oftentimes located on the fringes of a town or city, or its inner alley systems, but always alongside tightly controlled white land holdings.  And as Black populations and dissent continued to grow, the planter class fell into deeper states of paranoia.  “In the towns, repressing the enslaved population was the principal goal of the policing system.”(5)  This violence would continue past emancipation.  It churned and convulsed into Jim Crow and eugenics policy.  The K.K.K. and the Trump administration.  An ever evolving militarized police presence. 

The city of Petersburg has maintained a proud legacy of independent black culture throughout this long period of painful coalescence.  “On the eve of the Civll War, Petersburg had the largest number of ‘free persons of color’ of any Southern city.”(6)  The Pocahontas Island neighborhood had been a haven for generations of free residents of the city since the 17th century and acted as a stop along the Underground Railroad.(7)  The First Baptist Church is also one of the oldest African American Baptist congregations in the United States, established in 1774.(8)  It was destroyed in 1866, one of several arson attacks on Black churches in the area.(9)  Later rebuilt at its current location, it continues to serve the community to this day.  In recent years Petersburg has seen deep infrastructural failings due to governmental corruption, natural disaster, and racist policies targeting Black communities.(10)  And by 2016, city residents saw their mail trucks being repossessed, tap water “boil advisories” issued in the news, and its streets turning to food deserts.  The city instead budgeted its resources to fund a new fleet of police cruisers.    

1 - “Article 1, section 9 of the Constitution stated that Congress could not prohibit the “importation” of persons prior to 1808. Twenty years later, the Act ‘to prohibit the importation of slaves in any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States, from and after the first day of January [1808.]’ was passed.” National Archives, “The Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves, 1808”, June 2, 2021. https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/slave-trade.html

2 - “I consider the labor of a breeding woman as no object, and that a child raised every 2. Years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man . . .” Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to to John Wayles Eppes, Jne 30, 1820”, (National Archives: National Historical Publications & Records Commission, Letter, June 30, 1820). http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-1352 

3 - “On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, the Free Black population had doubled to nearly four percent despite Virginia’s policy of deliberately reducing the number of blacks in its territory . . . There, 600,000 whites lived, numbering just slightly above the total black population of 548,907.”  Sherri L. Burr, Complicated Lives: Free Blacks in Virginia, 1619-1865, (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2019), 119.

4 - Liberty Town, City of Fredericksburg Virginia.  Ravenscroft, City of Petersburg Virginia.  Free Union, Albemarle County Virginia.  

5 - “[These were] not one of beat cops on patrol but of military-style squads that made street sweeps. In Charleston, these sweeps were done nightly by twenty to thirty officers at a time, which required much higher levels of manpower than Northern police forces.” Sublette, The American Slave Coast, 65.

6 - “Even after the Civil War the black population continued to climb, as the white population declined. Moreover, black businesses, as well as cultural and social organizations, thrived . . . Black home-ownership increased by 300% during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, while white home-ownership was stagnant.” Michael Trinkley, Debi Hacker, “The African American Cemeteries of Petersburg, Virginia: Continuity and Change”, (Columbia, SC: Chicora Foundation, Inc., May 1999), i.

7 - “By the 1650s and 1660s there were African Americans who were free and trading with the Indians [on Pocahontas].” Dulaney Ward, “The Enduring Sage of Pocahontas Island”, Legacy Media Institute, Video, 2010, 2:20.

8 -  “During the Civil Rights Movement, First Baptist was a center of community organization, and Martin Luther King Jr., spoke at the church in 1962 during a regional meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” Virginia Department of Historic Resources, “State Historical Highway Marker ‘First Baptist Church’ to be Dedicated in Petersburg”, Press Release, February 5, 2020. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/press_releases/state-historical-highway-marker-first-baptist-church-to-be-dedicated-in-petersburg/ 

9 - “Under cover of darkness, a series of arson attacks was made on African-American churches in Petersburg in the early hours of the morning . . . the African Baptist Church on Harrison Street. . .  was completely destroyed.” John Osborne, “Burning of Churches in Petersburg,” Harper’s Weekly Magazine, May 19, 1866, 317.

10 - “On August 6, 1993, the most powerful tornado in Virginia history struck Petersburg, destroying up to a quarter of the buildings on Pocahontas Island.”  Emergency relief funds were never received in full. And much of downtown Petersburg was never rebuilt, further damaging the local economy, and leading directly to the crises of urban blight in the 21 century. Historic Petersburg Foundation, Inc., “The 1993 Tornado in Petersburg”, Online Article. www.historicpetersburg.org/the-1993-tornado-in-petersburg/

9 - “Dog Killer Next Door” and 10 -  “Trump”

Our inherited mechanisms of racial capitalism and white supremacy “preserved many forms of inequality which had existed in the mother country”.(1)  The planter class would gladly appropriate Caribbean, African, and Native American life ways into their own, yet simultaneously view any deviation from an Anglican idea of the patriarchal family as a threat.(2)  Sections of the colony were even under the control of a “Church State”, where corporal punishment was used against absent parishioners.(3)  Typically order was maintained through a system of excessive violence, controlled by the colonial governor and his council made of white land owners.  Public hangings, as well as other types of torture, were the primary techniques for subduing the population, sometimes displaying the mutilated remains along riverbanks or public roads to further instill fear.  These executions were so common at times that a group of 13 men in Richmond petitioned to have the gallows relocated “out of sight”.(4)  The near constant proximity to these traumatic events created untold psychological consequences for colonial Virginians and their descendants.(5)

“Another symptom of the colonial malaise was a deep sense of uneasiness about present conditions and future events.  These feelings grew steadily in mid-seventeenth-century Virginia, reaching a flashpoint in Nathanial Bacons rebellion (1676).”(6)  The rich bottom lands of Virginia’s tributary rivers were under the near complete control of it’s wealthiest men, prompting further westward expansion of settler communities into the frontier regions.  The Blue Ridge beckoned to white land speculators and offered sanctuary far from Virginia’s ever increasing Black populations in the Tidewater region.  Sadly, these migrations would only trigger similar patterns of violence, furthering the perpetuation of the Slavocracy, its governmental systems based in white supremacy, and racist attitudes based on fear and intergenerational trauma.  This legacy of deep felt paranoia and distrust of the “other” has mutated into the conservatism, xenophobia, and violence of our modern society.(8) It has migrated over the mountains, and across the plains.  Coast to coast.  And can be seen hung along any stretch of American highway.

1 - Virginia became a “conservative utopia” for Britain’s II and III sons who stood to inherit little from their families. David Hackett Fischer, Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in America, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 383.

2 - “There really was, then, an age in which men’s fears of and frustrations with women could be extended to nightmare proportions by assembling misogynistic fragments from the western cultural memory . . . and the whole tinged with deadly rage.” Robert Filmer’s book, Patriarcha (1680), was a very influential text for many Virginia planters. In it, Filmer “. . . defended the theory of divine right of kings: the authority of every king is divinely sanctioned by his descent from Adam . . .” Kenneth A. Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century, (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992) ix. / The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, “Sir Robert Filmer”, Encyclopedia Britannica, May 22, 2021. https://britannica.com/topic/Patriarcha

3 - Debbie Haliday, “Church-State Ties in Early St. George’s Parish”, St. Georges Episcopal Church, Online Article.  https://history.churchsp.org/church-state-ties-in-early-st-georges-parish/ 

4 - “On September 18 [1800], thirteen men from Richmond petitioned the Henrico County court to move the executions somewhere out of sight, ‘as frequent Executions that have lately taken place, has been extremely distressing to the view of our families-especially the female members.’” Ned and Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry, (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2016). 341.

5 - “The science of epigenetics, literally “above the gene,” proposes that we pass along more than DNA in our genes; it suggests that our genes can carry memories of trauma experienced by our ancestors and can influence how we react to trauma and stress.“ Mary Annette Pember, “Intergenerational Trauma: Understanding Natives’ Inherited Pain”, Indian Country Today Media Network, LLC, Online Article, 2016, 3.

6 - Bacons Rebellion was centered around the perceived failings of then governor William Berkeley ability to control increasing Indian raids on rural plantations. The failed insurrection would result in the loss of life and land of unknown numbers of Virginian Indians as well as the burning of Jamestown.  Fischer, Albions Seed, 255.

7 - A thorough exploration into Virginia’s “westward movement”, as well as its influence on the United States as a whole, can be found in David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly’s, “Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement”, (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2000).

8 - Growing up, my own next door neighbor displayed a K.K.K. torch in his home. Near the end of his life our family dog Spunky bit him, leading him to threaten to put the dog down. After a few days he finally admitted to beating the dog with a wire rake all the years the animal had been staked outside.  

13 - “Roman Soldier” and 14 - “Mourning Portrait”

The music, literature, and art of the old world served to soothe some of the pains that came with the distance between the white colonists and their mother countries.  Harpsichord filled their ballrooms, European literature lined their libraries, and fine portraits decorated their gilded halls and parlor.(1) The colonists however, saw no value in the complex creative expressions of Native American or African people in Virginia.  “Powhatan music and dancing went largely unappreciated by the English, who recorded little about the former and made fun of the latter.”(2)  African cultures were constantly suppressed by whites, though “quite complex African instruments could find their way across the Atlantic, either literally or in the minds of slaves.”(3)  And in the centuries that followed, a creolized creative spirit of Indigenous, African and European life ways became deeply infused throughout colonial society, although any social exchange between the three was strictly forbidden.(4)  Ultimately, efforts to stifle this influence were unsuccessful.  The echos of these ancestral artists is heard today on every radio station, in every museum, and at all intersections of our popular culture.

Similar to our modern society, colonial artists used their skills to supplement an income and add security to their unstable existence.  Peter Pelham, the organist at Bruton Parish Church, would moonlight as Williamsburg’s Jailer at the old “Gaol”(5)  And while enslaved fiddlers “earned money”, they were still bound to their masters when the concert was over.(6)  The “Roman Soldier” pictured above was likely created by a craftsperson working on the Stratford Hall Plantation.(7)  And the unknown artist of the “Mourning Portrait” seems to have been preoccupied with the rendering of white elites’ “elaborate and structured mourning customs”.(8)  Richmond’s theatre going crowd watched Eliza Poe die penniless in a boarding house, and shunned her writer son.(9)  And in 1842 Charles Dickens left Richmond, appalled and disappointed, after meeting only its agricultural and industrial leaders, and none of its artists.(10)  If Dickens were to come to Virginia in the 21 century he might be invited to a similar luncheon.  One sponsored by councils comprised of former CEO’s and industrial leaders, with similar interest’s in the arts.

1 - The Planter class fancied themselves learned, insightful, and masterful men. William Byrd II would rise before 8 every morning to digest readings of Homer or study his Greek. Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and even played the fiddle.  The reality is that the craftsmen and artists, oftentimes their own enslaved workforce, were the true masters on the plantation. 

2 - “The principal instruments of the Powhatan were rattles, which were made of gourds and graded in size and pitch into ‘Bass, Tenor, Countertenor, Means and Trible.” “All other Powhatan instruments were percussion instruments except for ‘a thick cane, on which they pipe as on a Recorder’ . . . Powhatan men and women frequently danced together, and they always danced in a circle around someone or something.” Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries, (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 97.

3 - Some instruments such as the balafo, or xylophone, as well as different drum designs, survived passage to Virginia. ”Chesapeake slaves also engaged in dances, apparently often accompanied by drums.” This creative spirit was later transferred to European instruments such as the violin, or in several cases, the French horn. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 581-588.

4 - On a visit to Westmoreland co. Nomini Hall, the tutor Phillip Fithian noted, “the Negroes collected themselves into the School-Room and began to play the Fiddle, and dance”.  The social function was broken up after “finding Robert Carter’s son Benjamin and his nephew Harry part of the company.” Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 418.

5 - Peter Pelham was the premier organist, harpsichordist, teacher, and composer during Virginia’s colonial period, although it appears that his “music career [was] not sufficient to support [his] family.” The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, “Peter Pelham”, Online Article. https://www.slaveryandrememberance.org/almanack/people/bios/biopet.cfm?showSite=mobile-regular

6 - Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 591-592.

7 - This artistic rendering of a “Roman solider” is the last remaining of five such examples. It is thought to have served as a directional marker along the wooded trails of the county. Roger Gallagher, (Westmoreland county, conversational research, community historian, February 8, 2018).

8 - The mourning portrait above is one of two from an unknown Virginia/Maryland married couple. Each portrait was damaged, on separate incidents, after falling off a wall during a violent summer storm.  The custom of mourning during the Victorian era.  National Park Service, “The custom of mourning during the Victorian era”, PDF.

9 - “To The Humane Heart: On this night, Mrs. Poe, lingering on the bed of disease and surrounded by her children, asks your assistance; and perhaps for the last time. - The generosity of a Richmond Audience can need no other appeal.” Dwight R. Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log (1987), (The Richmond Enquirer, 29 November, 1811), 10.

10 - “At the Virginia capital [Dickens] was ‘informally’ entertained at a petit super where he hobnobbed with ninety of the commission merchants and tobacconists of the city . . . They were friendly and assured him that, though they had little time for reading themselves, their wives and daughters liked his books.” W. M. Thackeray, Charles Dickens (1812-1870), (Edinburgh: A R. Clark, Limited, 1945), 176.

11 - “Rosewel Plantation” and 12 - “Custom Home Plan Design”

The “great house” of Virginia sought to embody the spirit that the manor homes and estates of old England had held for centuries.(1)  Typically, plantation architecture centered around, “a handsome, brick-built structure, surround by outbuildings, gardens, and fields.”(2)  The engine of this society, its enslaved workforce, lived in small cottage or duplex structures, often with open windows and dirt floors.(3)  Many Chesapeake planters “sited slave houses at a distance from their mansions . . . to impose their sense of hierarchy on their ‘people’ and display their alleged liberality.”(4)  No greater example of this colonial opulence can be found than “Rosewell” of Gloucester county.(5). The rich bottom land along both sides of the York river were once within the boundaries of Werowocomoco, the principle city of the Powhatan Indians.(6)  Their ancestral fields were burned in 1612, stolen by white land speculators, and worked to death by generations of enslaved people.(7)  Once host to the Tidewater nabob, it now rests a decrepit ruin of brick and earth, haunted by its past and alone.(8)  The home finally succumbed to the weight of its own inhumane legacy and died by fire in 1916.

The yeoman of today attempt to recreate some of this colonial extravagance in their own homes.(9)  Neo-classical forms remain fashionable in modern design and adorn even the most modest homes with pediments, pillars, and portico.  Interiors are still modeled after the symmetrical “hall and parlor house” so commonly found in Virginia’s early building ways.(10). The gardens remain dotted with boxwood, daffodil and rose beds.  The lawn still as fine as the governor’s bowling green.  Even contemporary communities bear the names of the plantation homes that once occupied the space.  And while our modern lifestyle has rendered many of the colonial dependency buildings obsolete or transmuted entirely, many similarities remain.  The stable and coach house now appears as a garage.  The kitchen and smokehouse, now a pre-fabricated shed.  Cheap vinyl siding replaces glazed brick facades.  With drywall and plywood taking the place of the heart pine and plaster that once filled the halls of the big house.  Each home a monument to the power ways inherited from our colonial self, replicated en masse, and much sooner to decay than other “Garland of Virginia”.  

1 - “Virginia’s building ways, like its speech ways, were not created de novo in the new world.  They grew out of the vernacular architecture of southern England in a process that was guided by cultural purposes, environmental conditions and the inherited memory of an English past.” David Hackett Fischer, Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in America, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 264.

2 - Fischer, Albions Seed, 265.

3 - Enslaved populations in Virginia were subdivided into “quarters” during the early 18 century. “Apparently to clarify the meaning of the word, Edward Kimber, an eighteenth-century traveler . . .  [wrote] ‘A Negro Quarter is a Number of Huts or Hovels, built some Distance from the Mansion-House; where the Negroes reside with their wives and Families and cultivate at vacant times the little Spots allow’d them.’” John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery, (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 154.

4 - Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 120.

5 - “The masterpiece called Rosewell at the height of its glory, in mid-eighteenth century, knew few rivals and has been called by many the finest example of colonial architecture in America.” Claude O. Lanciano, Jr., Rosewell: Garland of Virginia, (Charlotte, North Carolina: Delmar Company, 1978), 5.

6 - Werowocomoco was the political, cultural, and religious center for the Powhatan Indians. Its name comes from the Powhatan Algonquian “werowans”and “komakah”, meaning, “leader settlement”. Archaeological excavations were carried out in the early 21 century and the site is now under the control of the National Park Service. Lanciano, Rosewell, 203 -215.

7 - Rosewell’s financier, 'Mann Page II’s grandfather Colonel John Page had worked in the 1670s as an agent for the Royal African Company. A key player in the transport of Africans to the West Indies and Virginia, the trade would later be referred to as the Atlantic Slave Trade.” The Rosewell Foundation, “Rosewell Ruins”, Online Article. www.pcwinery.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Rosewell-Ruins-Final.pdf

 8 - There is a legend surrounding Rosewell of an enslaved person buried within the walls of the mansions wine cellar. The plantation continues to play a central role in Tidewater ghost lore. L. B. Taylor, The Ghosts of Tidewater Virginia . . . and nearby environs, (Progress Printing Co., Inc., 1990)  17. 

9 - Yeomanry in Virginia was defined as a “group of small freeholders . . . who owned their own land and tilled it with their own hands, often with the help of a servant or two.” Fischer, Albions Seed, 374.

10 - A popular colonial era design scheme based on the floor plan of the great house but significantly scaled down. Fischer, Albions Seed, 271.

15 - “People’s Memorial Cemetery” and 16 - “Arm of Stonewall Jackson”

Cemeteries are among the best places to illustrate historical racial inequities in Virginia.  Every county in colonial Virginia was dotted with church cemetery and country gravesite.  While the gentry erected elaborate vaults and obelisks, those with even a modest income could carve a slab of slate and memorialize a loved one’s passing.  Enslaved populations, whether Black or Native American, were given none of the liberties the ruling class were privy to.  “Black slaves were often buried in unmarked graves, apart from their masters.  Public funerals for slaves were forbidden by the order of the Virginia Council in 1687.”(1)  In the case of marked grave sites for enslaved Virginians, little more than a stone at the head and foot would be laid.(2)  It is the Virginia Indian Nations, however, that have suffered the most prolonged crimes against their ancestors.  Communities have been built on top of native burial sites and in some cases earthen mounds were demolished for agriculture and scientific study.(3)  Remains of these people are still stored in local and federal museums.(4)

People’s Memorial Cemetery in Petersburg holds a rare example of a large burying ground for free Black citizens before the Civil War.  It sits slightly downhill from Blandford Church, where Tiffany stained glass windows of “Confederate representative saints” stare dimly at eternity.(5)  The cemetery began interring members of its community when the Old Beneficial Board bought the first land in the 1840s, and continued on until the early 1960s.(6)  Today many of plots look empty and are impossible to designate, with wood and less hardy grave markers fading with time.(7)  Mary White’s stone is one of the few remaining vernacular grave markers in the cemetery.  It stands in stark contrast next to the carefully carved stone memorializing Stonewall Jackson’s arm, which lays in rest at Elwood manor, Wilderness battlefield.  If left undisturbed, the stone for Jackson’s arm will outlive the concrete slab commemorating Mary White’s body.  

1 - David Hackett Fischer, Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in America, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 329.

2 - There is a large burying ground for the enslaved off of Wild Sally road, Westmoreland co. Va. The cemetery is nestled between the remains of a cabin and “The largest cedar tree I have ever seen in my life.” There, in neat rows, are graves marked with a red and white stone at the head and foot. Roger Gallagher, (Westmoreland county, conversational research, community historian, January 27, 2015).

3 - It is well known that Thomas Jefferson excavated a Virginia Indian mound along the Rivanna River in 1783. Unknown numbers of Native disinterment have occurred since then. “In 1993, Chief Emeritus Perry [of the Nansemond Tribe] oversaw the reburial of eighteen remains of the Paspahegh Tribe that were disturbed by a housing construction crew.” Sandra F. Waugaman and Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, Ph.D, We’re Still Here - Contemporary Virginia Indians Tell Their Stories, (Richmond Virginia: Palari Pulari Publishing, 2000), 62.

4 - “Virginia Indians are aware that at least one of the nation’s most prominent museums has human remains that have been identified as those of Virginia Indians.” Waugaman and Moretti-Langholtz, We’re Still Here, 61-62.

5 - “As part of [Blandford church’s] restoration project, the Ladies’ Memorial Association solicited funds from each former Confederate state for the creation and installation of a stained glass window in memory of the Confederate soldiers from that state . . . Most display a state seal, the figure of a saint, and an inscription.” Blandford Church also includes the only confederate flag ever created by the Tiffany company. Martha Wren Briggs, The Compass Windows of Old Blandford Church: A Tribute in Tiffany Glass, (Dory Press, June 1, 1992), 1-8.

6 - “During the 1830s . . .  restrictions on free blacks were being enacted in several states (Virginia was especially vigorous, reacting to Nat Turner's rebellion) . . . in 1831 a City Ordinance forbade the burial of blacks in Blandford Cemetery. New restrictions at Blandford, the limited land area at Pocahontas; and the absence of churchyard cemeteries all contributed to the need for a larger cemetery for the free black community” Michael Trinkley, Debi Hacker, “The African American Cemeteries of Petersburg, Virginia: Continuity and Change”, (Columbia, SC: Chicora Foundation, Inc., May 1999), 23.

7 - “Not all graves were marked, and families died out, moved away, or simply forgot where relatives were buried.” The African American Cemeteries of Petersburg Virginia: Continuity and Change, Trinkley, Hacker, and Fick, “The African American Cemeteries of Petersburg, Virginia, 56.

17 - “Field Trip” and 18 - “Juneteenth”

From the Anglo-Powhatan Wars, to the War on Drugs, Virginia has waged an unending campaign for the perpetuation of its white dominant culture.  It became clear early on that Virginia Native groups would not willingly assimilate to the newly created colonial society.  The colonists thus began to invest in ways to “civilize” Native populations.(1)  The Brafferton Indian School at William and Mary was founded to force Native children to unlearn their traditional life ways and establish themselves within the racial hierarchy of colonial society.(2)  The enslaved Black populations of the Chesapeake Bay felt a similar loss of cultural identity, creative expression, and tradition while enduring centuries in bondage.  And in the years following the collapse of the Plantocracy, updated techniques to “civilize” Native Americans and the formally enslaved were installed.(3)  The Hampton Institute, in Hampton Va, was established in 1868 by General Samual Armstrong to “attend to the civilizing and training [of] former slaves” and Native American children.(4)  And while the names and missionary zeal have changed over the years, both institutions exist to this day.  Monuments to our inherited colonial education apparatus.  

The manipulation and sanitization of historic narratives has always been a powerful weapon in these ongoing “civilizing” efforts.  Sacred landmarks of Virginia that were shaped by thousands of years of Native occupation were no match for the European plow.(5)  Even the Smithsonian Institution had a hand in limiting “the use of some anthropologic data.”(6)  This spirit of misinformation continues to linger among our battlefields and house museums.  The White Oak Civil War Museum in Stafford co. is situated around the former U.S. Army encampments for the battle of Fredericksburg.  A recreation camp has been painstakingly recreated and flies a Confederate battle flag despite its historical inaccuracy.  A short drive from here brings you to the Lee plantation, Stratford Hall.  The mansion and its grounds have been immaculately restored by the Robert E. Lee Memorial Association.  Cabins to house the board of directors were built directly over large burial grounds for the enslaved.  Only a small marker dedicated to those “who served Stratford so faithfully” acknowledges the site.(7)  Both museums are popular destinations for local school field trips.

1 - “Originally the English hoped to share the New World with the Indians. It was expected that the English population would spread out into the new territory, and the Indians would be "civilized" and assimilated so that they could take part in the wealthy new English society that would be built there. But when after a couple of years the Indians had made no move to take up English customs, the English policy toward them hardened.”  Helen C Rountree, “Indian Land Loss in Virginia: A Prototype of U.S. Federal Indian Policy.” PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, 1973, 40.

2 - William and Mary “would keep ‘some many Indian children in Sicknesse and health, in Meat, drink, Washing, Lodgeing, Clothes, Medicine, books and Education from the first beginning of Letters till they are ready to receive Orders and be thought Sufficient to be sent abroad to preach and Convert the Indians.”  The College of William and Mary, “The Indian School at William & Mary”,  Online Article. https://www.wm.edu/about/history/historiccampus/brafferton/indianschool/index.php

3 -“. . . the freed slaves ‘had to be incorporated in the life of the nation, or remain a permanent menace to its welfare and its self-respect’ . . . [Peabody] maintained that the only way to ensure ‘ national security was through a comprehensive scheme of education.’” Francis Peabody, Harvard University. Shirley Moody-Turner, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 52-53.

4 - “What happened in practice, however, is that the Hampton idea came to define the moral, educated, and civilized black student against the immoral, uneducated, and uncivilized black folk.” Moody-Turner, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation, 52-55. Photos from Frances Benjamin Johnston’s 1899-1900 Hampton Institute series show Native American student life at the school.  

5 - In the late 18 century Thomas Jefferson lead an archaeological expedition to dismantle a nearby sacred earthwork along the Rivannah river outside of Charlottesville. Jefferson guessed that 12 years of plowing had reduced the mound to half its original size. By 1911 it had disappeared completely. Jeffrey L. Hantman, Monacan Millennium: A Collaborative Archaeology and History of a Virginia Indian People, (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 51-76.

6 - “Hence it will be seen that it is illegitimate to use any pictograph matter of a date anterior to the discovery of the continent by Columbus for historic purposes” John W. Powell, Director Smithsonian Institution, “On Limitations to the Use of Some Anthropologic Data” (Bureau of Ethnology, 1881 N 01 / 1879-1880) 73-86. 

7 - “This Marks The Area Where Are Buried Those Negroes Who Served Stratford So Faithfully On This Plantation” - Stratford Hall Enslaved Cemetery Marker  The photo above is of a blessing ceremony offering prayer, drums, and libations, June 19 2019. While Juneteenth is celebrated as Emancipation Day in our contemporary society, it is important to note that this region historically celebrates emancipation on April 3. That being the day the city of Richmond fell to Union forces during the Civil War.  

19 - “Mourning Shroud” and 20 - “Meade’s Pyramid”

In the post war, reconstruction years, Virginia’s white upper class struggled to maintain total control over all non white citizens.  Organizations like the “United Confederate Veterans” and the “United Daughters of the Confederacy” were created to “perpetuate the dominance of a white male elite and a culture of white supremacy.”(1)  In the 19th and 20th centuries these groups helped turn the mood from one of mourning a “lost cause”, to celebrating it.  The “veneration of confederate heroes provided legitimation for the consolidation of Democratic hegemony and the Jim Crow regime”.(2)  Monuments, plaques and memorials of all kinds were installed on courthouse lawns, segregated cemeteries, and other public spaces.  Oftentimes donated philanthropically by wealthy businessmen or corporations.  And in an attempt do indoctrinate new generations to the cause, groups lobbied for pro-Confederate education in schools.(3)  The post-bellum elite could not control the course of a rapidly changing American society, but they could control its myth, manners, and memory.  

It was in this spirit that the Lee statue in Charlottesville was commissioned.  The bronze monument and pedestal was to be the centerpiece for a newly created “whites only” park downtown.(4)  Virginia had recently signed into order the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, further emboldening white suprematists ideology statewide.  Days before the statue’s unveiling, local K.K.K. chapters burned a cross on the mountainside and proudly paraded through Charlottesville’s downtown.(5)  A scene we saw mirrored in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally.  The Lee monument was draped in a black plastic mourning shroud in the days following the white supremacist violence on August 11 & 12, 2017.  This symbolic nod to victorian etiquette did little more than prolong the discussion for its removal.  Monuments to Lee remain to this day, alongside other more esoteric cousins, like the Jefferson Davis Highway, or, “Meade’s Pyramid”. The latter, built along a railroad track to commemorate confederate dead, can be seen by Amtrak passengers to this day.(6)  As long as they stand, we languish in mourning. “May the Sun burn away ghosts that still haunt us.”(7)

1 - “As veterans themselves aged, leadership of the Lost Cause passed to the women of the UDC . . . Between 1890 and 1912 the UDC and other groups put up Confederate monuments in many southern towns . . . most featured a common soldier atop a column, but some honored specific Confederate leaders.”  Gaines M. Foster, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Myth Manners, & Memory, “Lost Cause Myth”, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 241.

2 - Thomas Brown, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture “Confederate Monuments”, 47.

3 - Textbooks, field trips and all manner of educational devices were sponsored by local chapters of the UDC to bolster pro confederate sentiments among children.  An essay contest sponsored by the UDC was still being used as late as 2004/05 in Westmoreland co. and scholarships for undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D degrees are still advertised through their website, but only for “the lineal descendant of an eligible Confederate”. Foster, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 240.

4 - The commissioned artist, Henry Merwin, actually requested that bronze confederate cannons be used in the casting of the Lee monument.  “Such artillery pieces were rare, however, and none were ever made available. Brendan Wolfe, “Robert Edward Lee Sculpture” Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities, 08 Feb. 2021.

5 - “The march of the white robed figures was impressive,” Daily Progress May 19 1924. Wolfe, “Robert Edward Lee Sculpture”, February 08,  2021.

6 - Meade’s Pyramid National Park Service Plaque Text “In 1897, the Confederate Memorial Literary Society contacted Virginia railroad executives asking them to erect markers at historically significant sites along their lines. The president of the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad embraced this proposal, but rather than simply erecting a sign, he constructed a stone pyramid molded after the memorial to the unknown confederate dead buried in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery.”

7 - Dianne Bachman pictured above.

Coda

Today, it remains clear that “our past encounters with one another have generated a legacy of fear, separation, prejudice, and hostility.”(1)  And that as long as we continue to “re-enact” our most horrific historical realities, we will see similar results.(2)  We remain paralyzed within the reverberations of colonialism, and confined to its traumatic cycle of existence.  This influence extends past a collective human experience and into the health of the Earth itself.  Which, in turn, creates a negative feedback loop of natural and demographic disaster.  A crisis that will undoubtably increase in severity as long as we remain rooted in these destructive life ways.(3)  I hope that this work is not only emotionally relatable to the reader, but that the narratives here help to humanize the history.  To render our painful past into a relatable present.  So we can attempt to dissect these centuries with respect, understanding, and compassion.  And begin to release the inherited traumatic response mechanisms that have governed Virginia for nearly five centuries.  

1 - Peter A Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books,1997), 225.

2 - “Traumatic re-enactment is one of the strongest and most enduring reactions that occurs in the wake of a trauma. Once we are traumatized, it is almost certain that we will continue to repeat or re-enact parts of the experience in some way. We will be drawn over and over again into situations that are reminiscent of the original trauma. When people are traumatized by war, the implications are staggering.” Levine, Waking the Tiger, 225-226.

3 - “The global climate has changed relative to the pre-industrial period, and there are multiple lines of evidence that these changes have had impacts on organisms and ecosystems, as well as on human systems and well being . . . Trends in intensity and frequency of some climate and weather extremes have been detected . . . Exposure to multiple and compound climate-related risks is projected to increase . . .” V. Mason-Delmotte,  P. Zhai, H.-O. Portner, D. Roberts, J, Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okida, C. Pean, R Pidcock, S. Connors, J.B.R. Matthews, Y Chen, X. Zhou, M.I. Gomis, E. Loonoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, and T. Waterfield, “IPCC, 2018: Global Warming of 1.5 C: An IPCC special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2019, 35-36.

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