Mixed Race Studies

Far Corner Of The Strange Empire Central Alberta On The Eve Of Homestead Settlement

Great Plains Quarterly
Volume 3, Number 2, Spring 1983
pages 92-108

William C. Wonders
University of Alberta

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, what is now central Alberta was a region in transition. For centuries the area had been inhabited by native Indian peoples, but with the advance of homestead settlement, it became a marginal part of what Joseph Howard has called the “strange empire,” a portion of the northern Great Plains that was marked by unrest at the end of one era and the beginning of another. The changes that affected the Red River Valley and later the Saskatchewan Valley had significant local repercussions in this far corner of the “empire,” the valley of the upper Battle River immediately south and east of Edmonton.

The fur trade provided the initial and dominant economic base for the European presence in the Canadian Northwest. It also contributed to the appearance of the mixed-blood people variously known as the métis, half-breeds, or country-born who played such an important role in it. Though they were soon submerged by the flood of incoming settlers, for a few decades in the late nineteenth century the metis made a distinctive but short-lived impact on the northern Great Plains. The focus here is on this transitional period between fur trade and homestead settlement in central Alberta, an area that is also transitional in its geographic character.

Read the entire article here.

Indigenous Nationalities and the Mestizo Dilemma

Indian Country Today Media Network
2012-07-24

Duane Champagne, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles

Mestizo. Métis. Mixed bloods. Though clearly different, all these terms are used to racially classify people with Indian ancestry. However, the definitions vary—and none is wholly satisfactory.
 
Part of the problem is the widely varying histories of these people. The U.S. and Canada, for example, are settler states, where immigrants who took the land went on to form the majority. There, Indian and mixed-blood populations are a distinct minority.
 
However, many other countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Peru and Ecuador have majority mixed-blood and indigenous populations, or mixed-blood leadership over indigenous majorities. Here, indigenous and mixed-blood identities and political relations come into sharper focus.
 
Officially, racial classifications were officially discouraged in so-called Latin America after Spain lost control over most of its colonies there in the early 1800s. Just the same, many governments, like Mexico’s, promoted a mestizo national identity based on a mix of European and indigenous heritages. In the United States and Canada, we call this process assimilation.
 
In Mexico, by contrast, it is called mestizaje. Mestizaje policies ask Indigenous Peoples to join the national community and economy, adopt the Spanish language, and abandon their traditional tribal communities, culture, language and dress.

Read the entire article here.

Don’t Call Me Hapa

ricepaper: Asian Canadian Arts and Culture
Issue 16.3 (Fall 2011) The Hybrid Issue

Arron Leaf

THERE WAS A MOMENT IN HIGH SCHOOL when I was fascinated with mixed-race identity and the word “Hapa.” Using this Hawaiian term meaning “half” as in “half-white” to describe myself felt empowering, somehow. My mom is Malaysian and my dad is American and, yes, the cliché of mixed-race kids held true for me: Who am I? Where do I fit in?
 
Through my brand-new internet connection I learned that “Hapa” had been adopted by activists trying to fashion a sense of community and identity out of a new generation of mixed-race Asian kids. At the time, about a decade ago, I was listening to rap music about identity politics, black nationalism, and authenticity. In my grade 11 history class I was learning about colonization and the upheavals of the 20th century. I desperately needed to come from somewhere; I needed an identity to anchor myself, and “Hapa” seemed like a way to do that.
 
But the moment soon passed…

Read the entire article here.

Indigenous Studies (INST) 370/History (HIST) 370: The Métis (Revision 2)

Athabasca University
Athabasca, Alberta, Canada

INST 370 traces the historical development of Canada’s Métis from the period of the fur trade to the present. It includes discussion and debates about the origins of Métis nationalism, the validity of Métis land claims, and the character of Métis struggles for social justice from the Seven Oaks rebellion of 1816 through the two Northwest rebellions to the present.

It also examines the changes in the lives of Métis women that occurred as a result of the impact of churches, education, and racism. Throughout there is an attempt to examine the evolving character of Métis societies and the impact of Euro-Canadian government policies on these societies.

Outline

• Unit 1: Métis Identities and Origins
• Unit 2: The Historic Métis Nation to 1869
• Unit 3: The Métis Diaspora, 1870-1890
• Unit 4: The Re-Emergence of the Métis, 1890-1950
• Unit 5: Land Claims
• Unit 6: Les Métisses in the Canadian West

Irrevocable Ties and Forgotten Ancestry: The Legacy of Colonial Intermarriage for Descendents of Mixed Ancestry

University of British Columbia, Vancouver
April 2008
56 pages

Kim S. Dertien

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Anthropology)

The identities of mixed Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descendents in British Columbia is as varied as it is complex. In this paper I examine what caused some people of mixed Native and non-Native ancestry not to identify as Aboriginal while others did. The point of fracture for those who identify with their Aboriginal origins and those who do not can be traced to a specific time in our history. More importantly, specific variables were instrumental in causing that divergence of identity, spurred by a pervasive social stigma in colonial society. For many of mixed ancestry, the disassociation from their Aboriginal identity led to generations of silence and denial and eventually to a ‘complete disappearance of race’. It was a deliberate breeding out of cultural identity through assimilative ideology and actions in order to conform to European norms.

Determining what factors caused this divergence of identity for mixed-descendents entails considering why many Aboriginal women married non-Native partners in B.C. during the mid-19th century, how intermarriage affected identity formation for offspring, and what the multi-generational effects have been on the identities of mixed descendents. Today, this leaves a dilemma for those in-between who are eligible for status, and for those who are not but who choose to reconnect with, acknowledge and learn more of their ancestry. Both assertions of First Nations identity and choices to reconnect with a First Nations heritage while maintaining a non-Native identity, challenge the assumed inevitability of assimilation, and the federal government’s continuing reluctance to understand the cultural significance of identification as ‘Indian’.

Read the entire thesis here.

The Arab and the Brit: The Last of the Welcome Immigrants

Syracuse University Press
2012
248 pages
6 x 9; 12 black-and-white illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8156-0974-2

Bill Rezak, Former President
Alfred State College, Alfred, New York

Born of a Palestinian father and a British mother, Rezak has always been intrigued by the different worlds from which his parents came. His father’s ancestors were highwaymen on the Arabian Peninsula in the eighteenth century. They sparred unsuccessfully with ruling Ottoman Turks and escaped with their families to America. His mother’s parents were sent separately from Great Britain into indentured servitude in Canada, alone at the ages of ten and sixteen. They worked off their servitude, met, married, and moved to New York State. In The Arab and the Brit, a memoir that spans multiple generations and countries, Rezak traces the remarkable lives of his ancestors. Narrating their experiences against the backdrop of two world wars and an emerging modern Middle East, the author gives readers a textured and vivid immigrant story.

Rezak recalls his paternal grandmother apprehending would-be Russian saboteurs during World War I, his grandfather’s time at Dr. Bernardo’s home, a shelter for destitute children, and his father’s work with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association following World War II. Told with humor and captivating detail, The Arab and the Brit chronicles the trials and triumphs of one family’s struggle to succeed in the New World.

Re-searching Metis Identity: My Metis Family Story

University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon
April 2010
200 pages

Tara Turner

A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Psychology

This research explores Metis identity through the use of a Metis family story. The participants of this Metis family were my father and his two sisters and his two brothers. As children, they lost both their parents at the same time in a car accident. After the death of their parents my participants all encountered the child welfare system, through adoption, orphanage, and foster care. Through adoption, the two youngest participants were separated from their siblings, and any knowledge of their Metis heritage, until they were adults. Individual interviews were conducted with each participant to gather their life stories. Two additional gatherings of the participants were completed in order to share individual and family stories. The second and final gathering was conducted as a talking circle. A culturally congruent qualitative research process was created with the use of stories, ceremonies, and the strengthening of family relationships. Analysis was completed with the use of Aboriginal storytelling guidelines. The themes examined through my family’s story include trauma, the child welfare system, and Metis identity. A significant piece of the research process was the creation of a ‘Metis psychological homeland’ (Richardson, 2004, p. 56), a psychological space of both healing and affirming Aboriginal identity. This dissertation is an example of how research can be completed in a way that does not perpetuate the mistrust between Aboriginal people and researchers, and that works to improve this relationship.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Mixed race: Fastest growing demographic in Canada

The Province
Vancouver, British Columbia
2012-06-24

Sam Cooper

…And the hardest in the world to find a match for blood cells; one in millions, literally

Brutal. Intensive. Without hope. Those are words that just don’t translate when you hear the voice of 14-year-old Lourdess Sumners, of Duncan.

She’s a happy teen who liberally sprinkles her speech with giggles and words like, “Gee . . . Woo-hoo! . . . No big whup.”

You’d never know she’s spent half her young life facing death, with survival chances many times lower than other children, because of her diverse genetic makeup.

She was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive cancer of the blood and bone marrow, in 2006. She endured eight months of chemotherapy, seemed to beat the fast-growing cancer, but relapsed.

The doctors at Children’s Hospital in Vancouver said her last hope was a life-saving bone marrow transplant.

The medical process is harrowing enough for any child. But with a Filipino and Caucasian background, doctors could not find Lourdess a bone marrow match, after several worldwide searches.

As a child of mixed race—the fastest growing demographic in Canada, and especially B.C.—she is representative of a demographic group that is disadvantaged, in terms of medical blood work…

Read the entire article here.

The Hybridity Revolution

Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review
2012-05-31

Michelle La Flamme

Adebe DeRango-Adem (Editor) and Andrea Thompson (Editor), Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out.

Societies that pride themselves on an imagined monoracial norm have rare glimpses into the multi-racial experience. The contemporary literary phenomenon some refer to as the “boom in bi-racial biography” (Spickard) has offered nuanced reflections on the ontological impact of this liminal hybrid position. At their thematic core, most bi-racial and multiracial narratives demonstrate the complexity of this form of embodiment and the semiotics of a body continually affected, and constructed, by the racialized gaze. Several thematic issues are repeated in both Carol Camper’s seminal anthology, Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women (1994), and the more recent Other Tongue: Mixed Race Women Speak Out (2010). The writing in both anthologies is a bold testament to the pervasiveness of multiraciality and ultimately counters many social scientific conclusions. The interest in such anthologies is also in keeping with the rise in autobiography and critical race theories. In both fields there is a consistent tendency to privilege personal accounts of the mixed race experience and, as Camper claims in her preface, the importance of “speaking for ourselves” as “experts on our own lives.”

The women writers in Other Tongues outline moments of interpellation, the power of the racialized gaze, and the stages of their shifting notions of self based on multiply-coded bodies that challenge monoracial definitions of identity. The work accounts for various individual experiences of “passing” and the complexities of a body that is repeatedly read for signs of authenticity. These writers contest the notion of a “post-racial” world in that these poems, memoirs, short stories, and art work continually reference the fact that visual identifiers of race are understood within “always already” historical and cultural conditions that lead to the racialization of the body despite the individual’s efforts (or best intentions) to defy these norms. The editors of Other Tongues suggest that it offers unique perspectives on the “changing racial landscape that [has] occurred over the last decade” in order to offer a “snapshot of the North American terrain of questions about race, mixed-race, racial identity, and how mixed-race women in North American identify in the twenty-first century” in a time that is marked by “the inauguration of the first mixed-race Black president in North America.” However, the anthology is more personal than critical, privileges women’s voices, and fails to represent the range of mixedness in North America. Given that the themes and content echo Camper’s 1994 anthology, the uniqueness of this collection is perhaps overstated…

Read the entire review here.

The Black Peril and Miscegenation: The Regulation of Inter-racial Sexual Relations in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1933

McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
September 1991
140 Pages

Katherine Gombay

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree  of M.A.

For over forty years, at the turn of this century, the white settlers of Southern Rhodesia devoted considerable energy to the discussion and the regulation of inter-racial sexual relations. The settlers’ worries about maintaining their position in power were expressed, in part, in the periodic outbreaks of ‘black peril’ hysteria, a term which well-captures white fears about the threat that African men were thought to represent to white women. Although voluntary sexual encounters between white women and black men were prohibited from 1903 onwards, no such prohibition existed for white men in their relations with black women. The white women made several attempts to have legislation passed prohibiting such liasons, and failed largely because in doing so they were perceived to be challenging the authority of the white men. The regulation of interracial sexual intercourse thus served to reinforce the white male domination of Rhodesian society.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1—Setting the Scene: The White Settlement of Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1903.
• Chapter 2—1903-1916: The Black Peril and the Immorality Acts.
• Chapter 3—The Miscegenation Debates, 1916 -1930.
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire thesis here.