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Deposition of Chief Cook, August 25, 1917

When the Constitution of the United States was drafted in 1787, it embodied the attitude of many white people that American Indians were essentially foreign nationals and therefore could not be citizens of the United States. The drafters designated those noncitizens as "Indians not taxed" and they were exempted from the population entitled to representation in Congress. This and other constitutional distinctions revealed that the founding generation of white men did not regard Indians, even those residing within long-settled communities, as being equal to white men or possessing the same rights. Not even the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which defined as citizens "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" conferred full civil rights and liberties on American Indians, as the amendment retains the exemption of "Indians not taxed."

The Pamunkey Indian Tribe did not negotiate with the federal government directly when the United States was established. Their reservation in Prince William County was created through a 1677 treaty with the English. As early as the eighteenth century, many white Virginians believed that all Virginia Indians had been assimilated into either European or African American culture. A few Virginia Indian tribes struggled throughout the centuries to retain their legal position as Indians in the face of this overarching societal belief.

The official relationship between the Pamunkey Indian Tribe and the Commonwealth of Virginia is that of ward of the state, under the protection of the governor and tax exempt. In 1917, when young men of the tribe including Ottigney Pontiac Cook, were drafted into the military, Chief George Major Cook, O. P. Cook's father, successfully gained a reaffirmation from the attorney general's office that the Pamunkey Indians living on the reservation continued to be the wards of the state, without voting rights and were therefore were not subject to the draft. The United States Army agreed, and once the young men had proved their point, O. P. and several other Indians enlisted.

During World War II the Pamunkey and other Virginia Indians again ran into problems with enlisting in the armed forces. As the federal 1924 Indian Citizenship Act had conferred national citizenship on the reservation Indians, they were then also subject to the draft. The young men had to fight to be inducted with the white troops, so as not to be subject to the discrimination dealt out to African Americans in the segregated armed forces. Some Virginia Indians served time in federal prisons when they refused to be inducted with blacks instead of with whites.

When the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act conferred federal citizenship and the right to vote on American Indians including the Pamunkey, the political atmosphere of Virginia was such that very few if any Virginia Indians were able to exercise that right. After an edict was issued in 1948 by the federal Office of Indian Affairs decreeing that all American Indians were entitled to vote in that year's presidential election, Virginia Indians slowly began to vote. Indians living on the Pamunkey Reservation still enjoy many tax and licensing exemptions, and continue to bring an annual tribute of game to the governor of Virginia as stipulated by the 1677 treaty.