Mixed Race Studies

Multicultural ‘obsession’ drives new Parliamentary Poet Laureate

The Globe and Mail
Toronto, Canada
2011-12-21

Jane Taber, Senior Political Writer

Fred Wah is a little more familiar with the outside of Parliament than the inside, having from time to time protested on its sweeping lawn as part of the Writers’ Union of Canada.

But that’s about to change. Tuesday, the award-winning scribe was appointed the country’s new Parliamentary Poet Laureate. As such, the 72-year-old Saskatchewan-born Vancouverite is not required to be reciting poetry on the floor of the Commons or the Senate, but is hoping to at some point unleash his pen on the country’s political institutions…

…Although he sees his appointment as “a symbolic gesture,” he’s got some ideas about what he wants to do, including the “possibility of developing some educational aspects” into the post. “I think there is a great need to get some our poetry and some of our Canadian literature into our schools,” he said.

Characterizing himself as a “Heinz 57,” Mr. Wah’s father was half-Chinese, his mother Swedish and he grew up “in my father’s Chinese-Canadian restaurant.” That has helped to fuel his “obsession” to the issue of race and multiculturalism. “And I’m very interested in the whole notion of hybridity and how we negotiate that in our culture,” he added.

He points to his book of short prose fiction, Diamond Grill, as a example of that. In it, he looks at family and identity. He is also proud of his 1985 book of poetry, Waiting for Saskatchewan, for which he won the Governor-General’s Literary Award…

Read the entire article here.

Student reflection on the Luther Lecture

Impetus
Luther College at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada
Fall 2011

Jenna Tickell

Senator Lillian Eva Dyck was the 36th Annual Luther Lecturer.  Senator Dyck presented her personal story in relation to the issues of racism and sexism in Canada.  She began with power-point statistics and ended with a standing ovation from the audience.  Her main point pertaining to statistics was to indicate the reality that statistics can be manipulated in various ways, so we must be cautious of what we take as fact from presumably unbiased numbers.  When looking at statistics, Senator Dyck reminded us not to get overwhelmed with the notion that maybe some race and gender issues are too big to tackle; for one, because statistics can be manipulated in various ways and truth from numbers is always subjective, and two, that the positive changes that have occurred in Canada regarding gender and race equality should be used to empower us to take the next step.  When Senator Dyck began her personal life story, her lecture really blossomed for me.  Through telling her life story, she reinforced what I had learned through my university studies while also educating me on a piece of Canadian history that I had not heard before.  As a Métis woman and as a university student, the value of guest lectures such as this is immense; she educated me regarding her personal history while at the same time empowered my activism and sense of self-discovery.              
 
Senator Dyck comes from a “mixed” racial family; her mother is Cree and her father is Chinese.  Her mother grew up on a reserve where abuse was high and poverty was extreme because of colonialist policies and laws.  During the same time period, there was considerable immigration from China, as workers were first needed to build the railway and then were left to find employment, often resulting in local Chinese cafes scattered throughout the small prairie towns in Saskatchewan.  Due to restrictive immigration policies, Chinese men were forced to leave their families behind but hoped that one day they would have the financial means to bring them to Canada. Unfortunately, immigration laws became even more restrictive, and this created an interesting phenomenon called the Chinese bachelors.  The government allowed their entrepreneurial efforts, but implemented a rule stating that Chinese men could not hire white women to work for them.  Chinese men needed waitresses for their small restaurants and since they could not hire white women it opened the opportunity for Aboriginal women to work with and meet Chinese men.  Thus, the racist laws actually facilitated “mixed” marriages between Chinese men and Aboriginal women within Saskatchewan…

Read the entire article here.

A Pedigree Study of Amerindian Crosses in Canada

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Volume 58, (July – December, 1928)
pages 511-532

R. Ruggles Gates
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University

This paper is an attempt to apply genetical methods to the study of inter-racial crossing. In the anthropological studies which have hitherto been made of racial crosses, masses of anthropometric measurements have frequently been taken, which are capable, when analysed, of furnishing valuable evidence on many points. Rut it is seldom possible to extract from them the kind of evidence the geneticist wishes to have concerning the inheritance of individual character-differences. Anthropological measurements are quantitative and require statistical treatment. The inheritance of sizes and especially of shapes is the most difficult field in genetics, and much has still to be learned from experiments with animals and plants before it can be clearly applied to man. Such features as the colour of skin, eyes, and hair, or shape of the hair in cross-section, while often presenting qualitative racial differences, also require measurements for a complete analysis of their inheritance, since intermediate grades usually occur in the hybrids. But they have the advantage that the extreme conditions at least are easily recognizable as qualitatively distinct, while this may not be evident with a mean difference in, for instance, stature or cephalic index.

The difficulties of applying the genetical pedigree method to haphazard human matings are very great. Nevertheless, it is so important that this method should be taken up by anthropologists, in addition to the traditional biometric methods of studying racial differences, that I venture to put forward these necessarily very incomplete results. In the biometrical method, the individual is measured as one of a population, but no sufficient account is taken of his relation to others. The purpose of the genetical method is to trace individual pedigrees, and so follow the inheritance of racial differences through successive generations. We shall never have an adequate knowledge of human racial inheritance until this has been done on a large scale with crosses between different races in various parts of the world.

This paper contains an account of observations on inter-racial crosses between whites and Indians in Canada. A single pedigree with various interlacing branches has been followed, and the evidence concerning the inheritance especially of skin colour and eye colour has been made as complete as the circumstances would permit…

International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing

Routledge
2012-05-25
224 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-59804-0

Edited by

Suki Ali, Senior Lecturer of Sociology
London School of Economics and Political Science

Chamion Cabellero, Senior Research Fellow
Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Rosalind Edwards, Professor of Sociology
University of Southampton

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

People from a ‘mixed’ racial and ethnic background, and people partnering and parenting across different racial and ethnic backgrounds, are increasingly visible internationally and often construed in diametrically opposed ways. On the one hand, images of racial and ethnic diversity are posed in opposition to unity and solidarity, creating a crisis of cohesive social trust. On the other hand, there are assertions that the portrayals of segregation and conflict ignore the reality of ongoing interactions between a mix of minority and majority racial, ethnic and religious cultures, where multiculture is an ordinary, unremarkable, feature of everyday social life.

This interdisciplinary volume brings internationally well-respected researchers together to explore the different contexts and concepts underpinning discussions about mixedness and mixing. Moving beyond pathologically focused research about confused identities and a dualistic black-white conception of mixedness, the book includes chapters on:

• Multiraciality and race classification
• Mixed race couples
• Mixedness in everyday life
• Mixed race politics

International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing develops theoretical perspectives and presents intellectually shaped empirical evidence that can deal with complexity and normalcy in order to move the debate onto more fruitful grounds. It is an important book for students and scholars of race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction / Suki Ali, Chamion Caballero, Rosalind Edwards and Miri Song
2. Multiraciality and census classification in global perspective / Ann Morning
3. Mixed race across time and place: an international perspective / Ilan Katz
4. Scaling diversity: mixed-race couples, segregation and urban America / Steven Holloway
5. The geography of mixedness in England and Wales / Charlie Owen
6. From ‘Draughtboard Alley’ to ‘Brown Britain’: the ordinariness of mixedness in British life / Chamion Caballero
7. How mixedness is understood and experienced in everyday life / Peter Aspinall and Miri Song
8. Finding value on a council estate in Nottingham: voices of white working class women / Lisa McKenzie
9. How to find mixed people in quantitative datasets / Anne Unterreiner
10. When ethnicity became an important family issue in Slovenia / Mateja Sedmak
11. Same difference? Developing a critical methodological stance in critical mixed race studies / Minelle Mahtani
12. Mixed race politics / Suki Ali

Sewing Ourselves Together: Clothing, Decorative Arts and the Expression of Métis and Half Breed Identity

University of Manitoba
2004
450 pages

Sherry Farrell Racette, Professor of Native Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies
University of Manitoba

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

When I was a university student, I worked at a summer education program in The Pas in northern Manitoba. There I met three women from the Manitoba Métis Federation who had obtained a grant to teach people who worked with their children. Tired of requests to come into classrooms to teach children beadwork, they had decided that the best use of their time and skills was to “teach the teachers” with the expectation that beadwork would be incorporated into the curriculum. The women seemed to take special care that I learned what they had to teach. Maybe it was because I was the only aboriginal woman in the workshop; maybe it was because I was interested. Kathleen Delaronde, a traditional artist of the highest caliber, was one of those women. I got to know her and her family and during another northern summer, I stayed at their home and learned at her kitchen table. Nobody in my family did beadwork but I felt an immediate connection with beads and leather.

Although beadwork and traditional arts were new to me, sewing clothes and making decorative objects for the home were not. Both my parents had been poor as children and took tremendous pleasure in dressing well. My grandmother always dressed up to go to town, and tortured my uncles by dressing them in little matching suits and hats. One summer while we were visiting my grandmother in Quebec, she sat me down at her treadle sewing machine and helped me sew a dress for my doll. At home I started sewing by helping my mother who was always making something. My job was to rip her mistakes while she forged ahead and to do hand sewing which she still loathes. In addition to what she had learned from my grandmother, my mother had taken a tailoring course that was offered by the Singer sewing machine company, and she sent me off to take a similar course when I was a teenager. Now she helps me when I embark on projects that involve sewing. For an art exhibit, Dolls for Big Girls, I merged what I knew about Métis and First Nations history and traditional arts and clothing. While I made little moccasins, my mother dressed the old woman for a piece entitled Flight based on her memories of clothing worn by my great-grandmother, Annie Poison King.

When I began my journey into traditional arts, my mother brought me a birch bark basket that belonged to my grandmother, Helen King Hanbury. Disappointed that, in a fit of creativity, my grandmother had painted it with green boat paint, I put the basket aside. I didn’t open it until shortly after my grandmother died. One day I found myself sitting on the edge of my bed with the basket in my lap. When I took off the lid, I found moccasin patterns, a piece of embroidery, assorted odds and ends, and a handmade needle case with a simple flower embroidered on the cover. I realized that I had unknowingly picked up a needle to an aesthetic tradition that my grandmother had put down. Since that time I have taken opportunities to learn from elder artists, such as the late Margaret McAuley of Cumberland House, and struggled on by myself. I have also thought a great deal about what it means when we wrap ourselves up and present ourselves to the world in a certain way and what it means when we stop. This study is an extension of the journey that began when Kathleen Delaronde helped me pick up the needle. It has been done with the greatest respect for the women who have taught me and the artists from long ago, who I am sure have been standing beside me guiding my research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• PREFACE: Picking Up the Needle
  • Acknowledgements
  • Glossary
  • Abbreviations
• CHAPTER ONE: Métis and Half Breed Clothing and Decorative Arts
• CHAPTER TWO: Métis, Half Breed and Mixed Blood: Identifying Self and Group
• CHAPTER THREE: The Métis Space of New Possibilities: Elements of Hybrid Style
• CHAPTER FOUR: “After the Half Breed Fashion”: Reconstructing 19th Century Métis and Half Breed Dress
• CHAPTER FIVE: Tent Pegs: Material Evidence
• CHAPTER SIX: Spirit and Function: Symbolic Aspects of Occupational Dress
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Clothing in Action: the Expressive Properties Of Dress
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Sewing for a Living: the Commodification of Women’s Artistic Production
• CHAPTER NINE: Artists, Making and Meaning
• CHAPTER TEN: Half Breed, but not Métis: Lakota and Dakota Mixed Bloods
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: Final Thoughts and Conclusions
  • Sewing Ourselves Together
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• PLATE GALLERY

Read the entire dissertation here.

“So what are you…?”: Life as a Mixed-Blood in Academia

The American Indian Quarterly
Volume 27, Numbers 1 & 2 (Winter/Spring 2003)
pages 369-372
E-ISSN: 1534-1828 Print ISSN: 0095-182X
DOI: 10.1353/aiq.2004.0038

Julie Pelletier, Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies and Director of the Aboriginal Governance Program
University of Winnepeg

My mentor, Loudell Snow, and I were standing in the anthropology department’s shabby little lounge, discussing the merits of French wine. Lou was teasing me for being partial to French wine since I am French American (I have always disliked the term “Franco-American,” which brings to mind bad canned pasta, so I say “French American” instead). “Hey, I thought that you’re an American Indian, but now you are saying you are French? Make up your mind!” Lou and I looked at each other in amazement when my anthropological theory professor interrupted our conversation with this comment. I am not insensitive to the complicated nature of my identity. I was appalled, however, to be addressed in such a way by a man who, in the classroom, reveled in discussions of postmodernity and the permeability of boundaries, including the boundaries of identity. Lou had the presence of mind to point out this contradiction to the professor with a snappy comeback of some kind. This conversation become one of those moments that many of us have: we linger over the memory and come up with one cutting retort after another, none of which come to mind during those stunned, seemingly endless seconds after we have been verbally assaulted.

I am French and Native American, or perhaps I should say Native Canadian, since my father was born in Quebec. Of course, in Canada I am labeled “Métis” a term used to describe people of mixed Indigenous and French ancestry. If my paternal grandfather had been Indian and his wife white, instead of the reverse, I would be a First Nations person. To make matters just a bit more interesting, I am descended from two tribal groups, the Mi’kmaq and the Maliseet. I also have dual Canadian and U.S. citizenship…

Read or purchase the entire article here.

Intelligence of Negroes of Mixed Blood in Canada

The Journal of Negro Education
Volume 10, Number 4 (October, 1941)
pages 650-652

H. A. Tanser

Miscegenation, as between the White and Negro races, presents an interesting field for study. Herskovits, Hooton, Peterson and Lanier, and others have attempted to investigate such so-called racial differences as those which concern colour of skin, hair and eyes, thickness of lips, the nasal breadth, prognathism, interpupillary distance, texture of hair, etc. An attempt has also been made to study the relationship between intelligence and certain Negroid traits. As a result of his research a few years ago Herskovits came to the conclusion that the American Negro is forming a type which lies somewhere between the European, the African, and the American Indian. The increasing uniformity of type in the American Negro he attributes to social rather than biological factors. Peterson and Lanier, after testing ninety-one cases on the Otis, and forty-nine cases on the Myers, report that there is no significant relation between lightness of skin colour and intelligence. They find a coefficient of correlation of .044±.067 for the first group, and .180±.091 for the second group.

While Davenport and Steggerda, on investigation of race crossing in Jamaica, hold the opinion that crossing Whites and Negroes results in disharmonic combinations, Reuter, on the other hand, champions the cause of mulattoes on account of the hybrid vigour they display as compared with the general lack of achievement on the part of full-blooded Negroes. He makes the interesting contention that mulattoes are the result of a process of biological selection in which the best elements of the Negro race have been assimilated into the mixed blood of the mulattoes. He also makes the observation that in the days of slavery the White masters naturally selected the intellectually superior Negro women for their mistresses. He and Herskovits further contend that this process of biological selection has been perpetuated by the tendency that exists for talented Negroes to marry girls whose skin is light in colour. On account of the social cleavage that still exists between the Whites and Negroes, to a greater extent in the Southern States and to a less extent in the Northern States and Canada, one would naturally expect that any race crossing that takes place would represent the best elements of the Negroes and the less superior elements of the Whites.

In investigating the intelligence of Negroes, Mixed-bloods, and Whites, the present writer would like to emphasize…

Read or purchase the article here.

Stuck at the border of the reserve: Self-identity and authentic identity amongst mixed race First Nations women

University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
January 2010
330 pages
Publication Number: AAT NR64501
ISBN: 9780494645017

Jaime Mishibinijima Miller

A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of Graduate Studies of The University of Guelph by for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The lowered self-esteem of First Nations people is evident in the disparities in health that exist in comparison with the rest of the Canadian population. High risk behaviors such as alcohol and drug use, and poor decisions relating to health and wellness are the outcome of decades of negative perceptions of self brought on by the lateral violence of colonialism. This research demonstrates how different determinants of First Nations identity (legal and policy based, social and culturally based definitions, and the self-identification ideology) interplay and influence a sense of authenticity which informs self-worth and the ability to realize health and wellness for twelve First Nations women on Manitoulin Island. First Nations identity is multi-layered and for women who only have one First Nations parent, and who often have Bill C-31 Indian status, identity becomes complicated and painful. Using life histories, the research participants demonstrate that an authentic identity is difficult to navigate because of the stigmatization they feel by non First Nations people for being a First Nations woman, and also the lateral violence they experience in their communities for being “bi-racial”, not growing up on their reserve, not knowing language and culture, and often having either Bill C-31 Indian status or no status at all. The medicine wheel is used to explore this topic and a Nanabush story provides the context to understand it.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Cultural identities of people of “mixed” backgrounds: racial, ethnic and national meanings in negotiation

McGill University, Montreal
2005

Sahira Iqbal

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree ofMasters of Arts in Culture and Values in Education.

This qualitative study aims to describe and understand the cultural identities of people of “mixed” backgrounds whose mother comes from one racial, ethnic or national background and whose father comes from another background. In-depth, individual interviews were conducted with nine people of “mixed” backgrounds in order to understand the meanings that particular racial, ethnic or national labels have for them and how those meanings are constructed. My analysis is shaped by the works of Hall (1996, 2003), Taylor (1989, 1992) and Bourdieu (1986, 1990) among others. The participants claimed multiple labels in ambivalent ways. They spoke about what they know or do not know about the culture, connections to people and places, languages and customs, physical features and values. They take on various positionings depending on the discourses that are available and the meanings that they negotiate in their daily encounters. I conclude with the implications the findings may have for policymakers, identity politics and educators and with future research directions.

Read the entire thesis here.

Le métissage dans l’œuvre indochinoise de Marguerite Duras

McGill University, Montreal
2006
106 pages

Elisabeth Desaulniers

Mémoire soumis à l’Université McGill en vue de l’obtention du grade de Maître ès arts (MA) en langue et littérature françaises

This dissertation focuses on the issue of hybridity in Marguerite Duras’ corpus of Indochinese texts, as well as on the meeting of identities in the colonial realm. In order to identify the problematics of colonial coexistence, we will address the themes of the encounter between the Orient and the Occident, the use of hybrid discourse and the role of memory in the process of rewriting. Edward Said’s Orientalism theory as well as Homi Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence in colonial discourse will serve as the basis for the analysis of the Indochinese cycle. Far from being a totalizing experience, hybridity will reveal itself as being a harrowing dichotomy.

Read the entire thesis (in French) here.