Mixed Race Studies

Birding While Indian, A Mixed-Blood Memoir

Mad Creek Books (an imprint Ohio State University Press)
June 2023
246 pages
5.5 x 8.5 inches
6 Illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8142-5872-9
eBook (PDF): ISBN: 978-0-8142-8289-2

Thomas C. Gannon, Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Thomas C. Gannon’s Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author’s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon’s traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother’s tears when coworkers called her “squaw,” and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the Indigenous humans, animals, and land of the United States.

Birding has always been Gannon’s escape and solace. He later found similar solace in literature, particularly by Native authors. He draws on both throughout this expansive, hilarious, and humane memoir. An acerbic observer—of birds, of the aftershocks of history, and of human nature—Gannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of birding and his own mixed-blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl and his own identity. The result is a rich reflection not only on one man’s life but on the transformative power of building a deeper relationship with the natural world.

Table of Contents

• PREFACE: The Lifelook
• March 1965, Piss Hill: Great Horned Owl
• July 1967, Piss Hill: Lewis’s Woodpecker
• January 1968, Rapid Creek: Common Goldeneye
• June 1969, I-90: Western Meadowlark
• April 1970, Fort Pierre/Missouri River: Sandhill Crane
• June 1970, a Fort Pierre slough: Wood Duck
• August 1971, Saskatchewan: Western Grebe
• May 1977, a Rapid City marsh: Red-winged Blackbird
• June 1978, Spearfish Canyon: American Dipper
• June 1979, a Pennington County dirt road: Common Nighthawk
• August 1981, Old Faithful: Common Raven
• June 1983, a Pennington County dirt road: Long-billed Curlew
• June 1985, Skyline Drive: Field Sparrow
• June 1985, Fort Morgan, CO: House Finch
• September 1987, northern Black Hills: Mourning Dove
• December 1987, Belle Fourche, SD: [Species Unknown]
• January 1989, Rapid City, SD: European Starling
• January 1991, Gavins Point Dam: Long-tailed Duck
• April 2001, U of Iowa English-Philosophy Building: Common Grackle
• February 2003, Kirk Funeral Home: Prairie Falcon
• April 2003, U of Iowa English-Philosophy Building: Northern Cardinal
• May 2003, Clay County Park: Bald Eagle
• June 2004, Ardmore, OK: Northern Mockingbird
• June 2005, Folsom Children’s Zoo: White Stork
• June 2006, Crazy Horse Memorial: Turkey Vulture
• July 2008, Kountze Lake: Snowy Egret
• August 2008, Fontenelle Forest: House Wren
• May 2009, the lake beside Lakeside, NE: Black-necked Stilt
• May 2009, Devils Tower: American Goldfinch
• May 2009, Little Bighorn Battlefield: Eurasian Collared-Dove
• May 2009, Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge: Marbled Godwit
• July 2009, Pioneers Park: Brown-headed Cowbird
• June 2010, Idyllwild, CA: Steller’s Jay
• June 2010, Spirit Mound: Dickcissel
• May 2011, Wilderness Park: Veery
• December 2011, Highway 385: Ferruginous Hawk
• May 2012, Indian Cave State Park: Chuck-Will’s-Widow
• June 2012, Custer State Park: Canyon Wren
• June 2012, Millwood State Park: Black-bellied Whistling-Duck
• July 2012, Newton Hills State Park: Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
• July 2012, Morrison Park: Lesser Goldfinch
• May 2013, Pawnee Lake State Recreation Area: Bonaparte’s Gull
• May 2014, El Segundo Beach: Brown Pelican
• March 2015, Pawnee Lake State Recreation Area: American Robin
• July 2016, Medicine Bow National Forest—Vedauwoo: Dusky Flycatcher
• November 2017, Lewis and Clark Lake: Snowy Owl
• March 2018, West Platte River Drive: Whooping Crane
• May 2018, Little Bighorn Battlefield: Red-tailed Hawk
• CODA: Birding While Indian
• Works Cited and Sources Consulted

Doubts Over Indigenous Identity in Academia Spark ‘Pretendian’ Claims

The New York Times
2022-10-15

Vjosa Isai

Some Canadian universities now require additional proof to back up Indigenous heritage, replacing self-declaration policies.

Since announcing discoveries of evidence last year that hundreds of Indigenous children were likely buried in unmarked graves at church-run residential school sites, Indigenous groups in Canada have captured more national attention.

So, too, has a growing group of Canadian public figures, mostly within academia, who have been accused of falsely claiming to be Indigenous.

Earlier this week, an investigation published by Canada’s national broadcaster, the C.B.C., found that the claims to Cree ancestry of a prominent scholar and former judge, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, did not align with historical records and interviews…

Read the entire article here.

Punta Music Has Never Been a Honduran ‘Thing,’ It Has Always Been a Black One

Remezcla
2022-03-24

Julaiza Alvarez

I was 12 years old when I went to my first fedu, a Garifuna word for a traditional gathering or party in Honduras. I was intrigued by how comfortable everyone was: The women dressed in traditional garments danced to the beat of the drum and sang to the sound of hands clapping. It was effortless. I had never seen anything like it. While I had been to family functions and seen my aunts dance, this did not compare. It was mesmerizing, especially with everyone being Black. It was different, and it set me on a journey to discover who I was.

Growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina, I struggled to find a sense of belonging in a community that did not accept me but accepted what my Blackness could give them. I wrestled with constantly being challenged to prove myself, not realizing that we are burdened with defending ourselves from the people we call our neighbors. Through music, Garifunas have told their story. But sadly, Punta is one of the countless Black musical movements that are having its history erased. The scene at my first fedu was unlike the music videos I grew up watching on YouTube where the Garifuna men would beat the drums, and the fair-skinned and dark-haired women would dance in front of them.

In my introduction to Punta, I saw my Blackness be celebrated. But to the rest of the world, their introduction to Punta showed my Blackness used as an accessory. Something you put on and take off when you are done with it. That’s why it is disheartening to watch the deliberate whitewashing of this sacred genre of music. The genre’s mainstream face is based on the misconception that Punta is the heartbeat of the Honduran people, the entirety of the country. In fact, this genre is rooted in a more specific community: the Garifuna people, the descendants of mixed West African and indigenous people that have historically resided on the Caribbean coast of Central America…

Read the entire article here.

So What Exactly Is ‘Blood Quantum’?

Code Switch: Race. In Your Face.
National Public Radio
2018-02-09

Kat Chow

If you’re Native American, there’s a good chance that you’ve thought a lot about blood quantum — a highly controversial measurement of the amount of “Indian blood” you have. It can affect your identity, your relationships and whether or not you — or your children — may become a citizen of your tribe.

Blood quantum was initially a system that the federal government placed onto tribes in an effort to limit their citizenship. Many Native nations, including the Navajo Nation and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, still use it as part of their citizenship requirements.

And how tribes use blood quantum varies from tribe to tribe. The Navajo Nation requires a minimum of 25 percent “Navajo blood,” and Turtle Mountain requires a minimum of 25 percent of any Indian blood, as long as its in combination with some Turtle Mountain.

Blood quantum minimums really restrict who can be a citizen of a tribe. If you’ve got 25 percent of Navajo blood — according to that tribe’s blood quantum standards — and you have children with someone who has a lower blood quantum, those kids won’t be able to enroll.

So why keep a system that’s decreasing your tribe’s rolls and could lead to its demise?

“I use the term ‘Colonial Catch 22’ to say that there is no clear answer, and that one way or another, people are hurt,” says Elizabeth Rule. She’s a doctoral candidate at Brown University who specializes in Native American studies, and also a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.

“The systems are so complicated,” she explains, “but it’s all part of tribes deciding on their own terms, in their own ways, utilizing their own sovereignty [to decide] what approach is best for them.”

As we explored blood quantum in this week’s episode, we thought a primer of what, exactly, this system is and how it works — or doesn’t — might be useful. Here’s my interview with Elizabeth Rule, edited and condensed for clarity…

Read the entire story here.

The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

University Press of Kentucky
1979-12-31
128 pages
5.50 x 8.50 in
Hardcover ISBN: 9780813113906

William J. Scheick, J.R. Millikan Centennial Professor Emeritus of English
University of Texas, Austin

The half-blood—half Indian, half white—is a frequent figure in the popular fiction of nineteenth-century America, for he (or sometimes she) served to symbolize many of the conflicting cultural values with which American society was then wrestling. In literature, as in real life the half-blood was a product of the frontier, embodying the conflict between wilderness and civilization that haunted and stirred the American imagination. What was his identity? Was he indeed “half Indian, half white, and half devil”—or a bright link between the races from which would emerge a new American prototype?

In this important first study of the fictional half-blood, William J. Scheick examines works ranging from the enormously popular “dime novels” and the short fiction of such writers as Bret Harte to the more sophisticated works of Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and others. He discovers that ambivalence characterized nearly all who wrote of the half-blood. Some writers found racial mixing abhorrent, while others saw more benign possibilities. The use of a “half-blood in spirit”—a character of untainted blood who joined the virtues of the two races in his manner of life—was one ingenious literary strategy adopted by a number of writers, Scheick also compares the literary portrayal of the half-blood with the nineteenth-century view of the mulatto.

This pioneering examination of an important symbol in popular literature of the last century opens up a previously unexplored repository of attitudes toward American civilization. An important book for all those concerned with the course of American culture and literature.

Blood and Boundaries: The Limits of Religious and Racial Exclusion in Early Modern Latin America

Brandeis University Press
2020-11-01
212 pages
5.5 x 8.5 in.
Cloth ISBN: 9781684580194

Stuart B. Schwartz, George Burton Adams Professor of History
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

In Blood and Boundaries, Stuart B. Schwartz takes us to late medieval Latin America to show how Spain and Portugal’s policies of exclusion and discrimination based on religious origins and genealogy were transferred to their colonies in Latin America. Rather than concentrating on the three principal divisions of colonial society—Indians, Europeans, and people of African origins—as is common in studies of these colonial societies, Schwartz examines the three minority groups of moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Muslim and Jewish converts and their descendants, he shows, posed a special problem for colonial society: they were feared and distrusted as peoples considered ethnically distinct, but at the same time their conversion to Christianity seemed to violate stable social categories and identities. This led to the creation of “cleanliness of blood” regulations that explicitly discriminated against converts. Eventually, Schwartz shows, those regulations were extended to control the subject indigenous and enslaved African populations, and over time, applied to the growing numbers of mestizos, peoples of mixed ethnic origins. Despite the efforts of civil and church and state institutions to regulate, denigrate, and exclude, members of these affected groups often found legal and practical means to ignore, circumvent, or challenge the efforts to categorize and exclude them, creating in the process the dynamic societies of Latin America that emerged in the nineteenth century.

Contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Moriscos: Real, Occasional, and Imaginary Muslims
• Conversos: The Mestizos of Faith
• Mestizos: “A Monster of . . . Many Species”
• Notes
• Index

Interwoven Lives: Indigenous Mothers of Salish Coast Communities

Washington State University Press
2019
310 pages
Illustrations / maps / notes / bibliography / index
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-87422-364-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-87422-389-7

Candace Wellman

In this companion work to Peace Weavers, her previous book on Puget Sound’s cross-cultural marriages, award-winning author Candace Wellman depicts the lives of four additional intermarried indigenous women who influenced mid-1800s settlement in the Bellingham Bay area. She describes each wife’s native culture, details ancestral history and traits for both spouses, and traces descendants’ destinies, highlighting the families’ contributions to new communities.

• Finalist, 2020 Willa Literary Award, scholarly nonfiction
• 2020 Washington State Historical Society WOW selection

For mixed-descent people on America’s frontier, acceptance and suspicion

The Washington Post
2022-03-11

H.W. Brands

In the late 19th century, Frederick Jackson Turner lit up the historical world with his frontier thesis of American history. He asserted that American democracy owed its distinctiveness to the existence of an advancing frontier, where American institutions reinvented themselves every generation. By no means did all historians accept Turner’s views, but his approach framed debate on the subject far into the 20th century.

More recently the concept of frontier has given way to the idea of borders and borderlands, where peoples and cultures have intermingled and interacted. In “Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West,” Anne F. Hyde examines family life in the borderlands; her carefully wrought portrait of five families reveals the peculiar challenges faced by these quintessential people of the border…

Read the entire review here.

The 2020 census had big undercounts of Black people, Latinos and Native Americans

National Public Radio
2022-03-10

Hansi Lo Wang

The 2020 census continued a longstanding trend of undercounting Black people, Latinos and Native Americans, while overcounting people who identified as white and not Latino, according to estimates from a report the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday.

Latinos were left out of the 2020 census at more than three times the rate of a decade earlier.

Among Native Americans living on reservations and Black people, the net undercount rates were numerically higher but not statistically different from the 2010 rates.

People who identified as white and not Latino were overcounted at almost double the rate in 2010. Asian Americans were also overcounted. The bureau said based on its estimates, it’s unclear how well the 2020 tally counted Pacific Islanders…

Read or listen to the story here.

Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West

W. W. Norton & Company
2022-02-25
464 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-63409-9

Anne F. Hyde, Professor of History
University of Oklahoma

A fresh history of the West grounded in the lives of mixed-descent Native families who first bridged and then collided with racial boundaries.

Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using intermarriage to link disparate communities and create protective circles of kin. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Native peoples—Ojibwes, Otoes, Cheyennes, Chinooks, and others—formed new families with young French, English, Canadian, and American fur traders who spent months in smoky winter lodges or at boisterous summer rendezvous. These families built cosmopolitan trade centers from Michilimackinac on the Great Lakes to Bellevue on the Missouri River, Bent’s Fort in the southern Plains, and Fort Vancouver in the Pacific Northwest. Their family names are often imprinted on the landscape, but their voices have long been muted in our histories. Anne F. Hyde’s pathbreaking history restores them in full.

Vividly combining the panoramic and the particular, Born of Lakes and Plains follows five mixed-descent families whose lives intertwined major events: imperial battles over the fur trade; the first extensions of American authority west of the Appalachians; the ravages of imported disease; the violence of Indian removal; encroaching American settlement; and, following the Civil War, the disasters of Indian war, reservations policy, and allotment. During the pivotal nineteenth century, mixed-descent people who had once occupied a middle ground became a racial problem drawing hostility from all sides. Their identities were challenged by the pseudo-science of blood quantum—the instrument of allotment policy—and their traditions by the Indian schools established to erase Native ways. As Anne F. Hyde shows, they navigated the hard choices they faced as they had for centuries: by relying on the rich resources of family and kin. Here is an indelible western history with a new human face.