Because of intermarriage and the long history of Virginia Indians not having communal land, Plecker believed there were few "true" Virginia Indians left. According to his beliefs, Indians of mixed race did not qualify, as he did not understand that Indians had a long practice of intermarriage and absorbing other peoples into their cultures. Their children may have been of mixed race but they identified as Indian. Plecker signed off on the Interior Department taking of Indian lands of the Ani-Stohini/Unami between 1907 and 1913, saying that there were no Indians left in Virginia. The U.S. Department of the Interior accepted some of these "non Indians" as representing all of them when persuading them to cede lands.