Mellow Mushroom

My family has lived in Charlottesville for seven years. Before that, we lived in Richmond. Since I was small, my family would take annual trips to Charlottesville to go apple picking at Carter’s Mountain, and then we always went to Mellow Mushroom after. It was a family tradition. The first half of the day was spent on the mountain; My brother’s friends and I raced each other down the orchard’s hills, I took pride in finding the perfect apple that was always on the highest branch of a picked-over tree, we all stood in a circle in the parking lot sinking our teeth into apple cider donuts fresh out of the fryer, and we all chatted about the day’s events in the car on the way to Mellow Mushroom.

Walking up to the restaurant, I would always pass a statue but barely paid attention to it. If anything, I stood there to admire the brave-looking man on the horse, with the other figures seeming as its opposite, in a subservient role. That is the feeling that the builder intended when looking at the George Rogers Clark statue. Even if observers were across the street like I was sitting outside at the restaurant, the statue communicated in its presentation that it was a monument of pride, along with the description “Conqueror of the Northwest.” At the Lewis and Clark unveiling ceremony, there was rhetoric that this was a singular achievement by the two men working for Jefferson, along with the notion that everything to the west was free for taking. Local historian Armistead Gordon concluded the ceremony with the words, “The immortal names of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark whose indomitable courage and endurance, defying life and death, carved an empire out of the wilderness, and gave to succeeding generations of Americans the inheritance which they conquered.” Monuments such as this were myth-building projects to label Indigenous people as a “vanishing race.” Indigenous people had to be everything white people were not; if Lewis and Clark carved out a future for the succeeding generation of Americans, then Indigenous people had to be objects of the past. To reinforce this, the General Assembly passed the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, which redefined racial classification in Virginia so that there would only be two races: white and black. Being indigenous wasn’t an option. After its passing, Indigenous people began to disappear from Virginia's public records, like the consensus.

We see something similar with the pandemic, where Indigenous people are not included in the demographic data on the impact of the coronavirus across the U.S. They don’t exist in the public health data, which means they don’t exist for the allocation of resources.