As six Native American tribes attempted to petition the US Senate for sovereign status, Chief Stephen R. Adkins of the Chickahominy Tribe used an interesting term for what’s happened to these people — “paper genocide.” The reason this term is particularly apt in the case of Native Americans is because in many places records for tribes were lost or destroyed, or the tribes were simply reclassified altogether, making it difficult to demonstrate their origins.
Where is the outrage! As late as the 1960’s people where employed by county agencies to systematically go through records and erase all trace of American Indian ancestry.