Mixed Race Studies

Six-year-old taken from California foster family under Indian Child Welfare Act

The Guardian
2016-03-22

The Associated Press in Santa Clarita, California

Lexi, who has lived with the foster family for years, was removed by a court order which says her Native American heritage requires her to live with Utah relatives

A six-year-old girl who spent most of her life with California foster parents was removed from the home under a court order that says her Native American blood requires her to live with relatives in Utah.

Lexi, who is 1/64th Choctaw on her birth-father’s side, cried and clutched a stuffed bear as her foster father Rusty Page carried her out of his home north of Los Angeles to a waiting car on Monday. Los Angeles County social workers whisked her away…

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On the Boundaries of Race: Identification of Mixed-heritage Children in the United States, 1960 to 2010

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Published online before print 2016-03-17
DOI: 10.1177/2332649216632546

Carolyn A. Liebler, Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota

Socially constructed race groups have boundaries that define their membership. I study temporal trends and group-specific patterns in race and ancestry responses provided for children of interracial marriages. Common responses indicate contemporary definitions of race groups (and perhaps emerging groups); uncommon responses reveal socially defined limits of race group membership. I leverage dense, nonpublic, Census Bureau data from 1960 to 2010 to do this and include a more diverse set of families, a longer time span, and more accurate estimates than prior research. I find that the location of race group boundaries varies over time and across 11 distinct family types. Since mixed-heritage responses became possible in 1980, they have been common in most groups. Part Asians have almost always been reported as multiracial or mixed ancestry. A number of (non-Asian) mixed-heritage children are described as monoracial on the census form, particularly children with American Indian heritage. Over time, part whites are decreasingly reported as monoracially white (white race with no nonwhite ancestry). Black heritage is reported for part blacks, but monoracial black responses became nonmodal by 1980. Part Pacific Islanders show similarities to part Asians and part American Indians. Given the predominance of multiracial and mixed-ancestry Asian responses since 1980, Asian multiracial may be an emerging socially recognized race category. Black multiracial shows a similar pattern. Monoracial responses (especially common among white–American Indians and black–American Indians) create important but hard-to-measure complexity in groups’ compositions.

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Who is Black? Who is Indian? State/Federal Acknowledgment and the Politics of Racial Purity

Arizona State University
West Hall, Room 135
Tempe, Arizona
2016-03-21, 16:30-18:00 MST (Local Time)

Arica Coleman, adjunct lecturer, Center for African Studies, Johns Hopkins University African and African American History, Widener University, will discuss the politics of racial purity in state and federal acknowledgement policies for American Indian populations with known or perceived black ancestry. Racial purity, as first defined by whites and later adopted by many tribal nations, means the absence of blackness, and remains an implicit aspect of the state and federal acknowledgement processes. It has proven troublesome to many tribes in the East where extensive interracial intimacies among blacks, whites and Indians occurred. Using case studies, Coleman will focus on the questions, how do notions of racial purity affect state and federal acknowledgement processes? How has it influenced historical and contemporary views of the social phenomena of Black–Indian relations, Black–Indian familial ties, and “Black Indian” identity?

This lecture is part of the African and African American Speakers series and is also sponsored by the Center for Indian Education in the School of Social Transformation.

For more information, click here. View the flyer here.

Debunking the ‘Half-Breed’ Label

Indian Country Today Media Network
2015-07-01

Micah Armstrong
Blackfoot Indian of the Siksika Nation

Half-breed, mixed-blood, metis… These words are more than familiar to us who are not full-blooded American Indians. And by those who are not full-blooded, I do not speak of those who claim a “great-great-great grandmother who was a Cherokee Princess”, nor do I speak of those who say flamboyantly, “I have a little Indian in me!”, nor do I even speak of those who yell, “I am the wolverine!” at every pow-wow naming ceremony run by wannabes. I speak of those who claim Native ancestry who have irrefutable lineal proof who are not enrolled, and in a few cases, enrolled; those who were raised in the traditional ways of their people by their parents and grandparents. I am one of those who COB would place as being “half” due to so much mixing on every side of my family, including a direct connection to the Siksika band of the Niitsitapi (Blackfeet Confederacy), or as we call ourselves, “the real people”. I may be pale-skinned, but I honor my traditions through the telling of my people’s stories, by speaking my people’s language and even by creating the traditional art which my people used to and in some cases still create. My grandmother and mother raised me in our people’s traditions, however due to my great-grandfather’s parents having moved from the reservation in the very late 1800’s in order to create a better life for our family, he was the last “full-blood” in our family. Luckily, we managed to intermarry with those who also had Cheyenne and Cherokee (not the great-great-great princess tribe). Therefore we were able to keep enough blood in us for DNA to prove us as “half-breeds”. Although, none of our remaining family who are alive are enrolled in our tribe. Why, you may ask? “Don’t you have enough blood to enroll in your tribe?” Yes! Of course. “Then why? You are dishonoring your people.” I feel opposite. The reason why we are not enrolled, or refuse to for the time being is because we are proponents of the “lineal descendant” way of proving ancestry. The moment the lineal descendant way of defining ancestry hits our reservation, me and my family will be enrolled. We have all of the proof we need to be enrolled now, so why not wait a little longer? We are a surviving race of people (regardless if we are “metis” or “full”), and if we have kept our cultures and traditions alive this long without being on the reservation, why go against our way of belief just in order to feel “a part of”?…

Read the entire article here.

“But how Indian are you?”: notes on being a mixed-race Indigenous person.

A Halfbreed’s Reasoning
2012-11-15

Samantha Nock

I am mixed. It’s not like it’s a secret. I am a mixed-race, mixed-blood, hybrid, mud blood, halfbreed; these things I know to be true. The thing is, I know my identity. I am accepted by my community, yet when I tell folks, especially non-Native folks, I get one of two reactions:

1. “Really? But like, how much Indian are you? Like what fraction of your blood is Native?”
2. They lean in really close, like they’re going to tell me a secret. They cock their head to the left and squint their eyes like they’re searching each line in my face, each pore, each chicken pox scar for some trace of their cigar shop Indian. It’s like, somewhere hidden in my features their untamed savage is hiding: maybe it’s behind my eyes, or maybe its somewhere in the space between my cheek bone and my jawline. When they’re done searching for hidden Indigenous clues, they always pull back, smile, and say, “yeah I can kind of see it! Look at your cheeks!”

It’s not the act itself that bothers me, as a light skinned, white passing, Indigenous individual, I get it. But it’s the fact that people assume that because I am mixed that I am less of an individual, that now, my parts don’t make a whole and each aspect of my identity is up for scrutiny. Automatically, I lose sovereignty over my identity and my body because I become a subject to be “made sense of.” Invasive questions about blood and family are deemed okay, because I have become the embodiment of anti-dichotomous reasonings of identity: “but how can you be more than one thing!”…

Read the entire article here.

Yvonne Chouteau, Native American Ballerina, Dies at 86

The New York Times
2016-01-29

Jack Anderson

Yvonne Chouteau, one of the five celebrated Oklahoma ballerinas with an American Indian background, in a 1963 photo. Credit Jack Mitchell/Getty Images

Yvonne Chouteau, a former principal dancer of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo who emerged as one of a celebrated group of dancers known as the American Indian ballerinas of Oklahoma, died on Sunday at her home in Oklahoma City. She was 86.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Mary Margaret Holt, director of the School of Dance and dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Oklahoma. Ms. Chouteau was a founder of the dance school, one of the leading institutions of its kind in the Southwest…

…Part French and part Shawnee–Cherokee, Myra Yvonne Chouteau was born into a pioneering Southwestern family in Fort Worth on March 7, 1929, the only child of Corbett Edward Chouteau and the former Lucy Annette Taylor. The family soon moved to Vinita, Okla., and her father, who was known as C. E. Chouteau, became a prominent American Indian figure in the state.

Ms. Chouteau was a direct descendant of Maj. Jean Pierre Chouteau (1758-1849), who established Oklahoma’s oldest white settlement in 1796…

Read the entire obituary here.

White Earth members approve new constitution

The Minneapolis Star Tribune
2013-11-21

Pam Louwagie

New constitution does away with blood quantum rule.

In a historic vote that could vastly increase their membership, White Earth Band of Ojibwe members have overwhelmingly approved a new constitution.

The new document removes a requirement that tribal citizens possess one-quarter Minnesota Chippewa Tribe blood, a controversial “blood quantum” standard adopted at the urging of the federal government decades ago. Under the new constitution, White Earth’s declining citizenship will instead be based on lineal descent.

The change could mean more than doubling the population, which now stands at under 20,000.

According to ballots counted Tuesday night, nearly 80 percent of the nearly 3,500 votes cast approved of adopting a new constitution, which in addition to changing citizenship standards will create a tribal government with three branches and a separation of powers instead of one tribal council overseeing everything.

The old citizenship standard was divisive among families, with some members having children or grandchildren who couldn’t become citizens, said Jill Doerfler, associate professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Lineage citizenship won’t be automatic, however. People will still need to apply to become citizens, said Doerfler, who consulted with the tribe on reforming the constitution…

Read the entire article here.

A Romance of (Miscege)Nations: Ann Sophia Stephens’ Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1839, 1860)

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
Volume 63, Number 1, Spring 2007
pages 1-25
DOI: 10.1353/arq.2007.0000

Yu-Fang Cho, Associate Professor of English; Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

First serialized in The Ladies’ Companion in 1839 and later reprinted in 1860, Ann Sophia Stephens’ Malaeska narrates the tragic interracial union of an Indian princess and a white hunter in northeastern United States during the colonial period. By rewriting the Pocahontas legend, Malaeska allegorizes the dispossession of Native Americans at two significant historical moments in U.S. nation building: the enforcement of the Removal Act throughout the 1830s and westward expansion in the 1850s after the U.S.-Mexican War. The first version of Malaeska was serialized in a women’s magazine tailored specifically for middle- and upper-class female readers, a site of production and reception often characterized as part of the “culture of sentiment.” The second version was the first of the Beadle and Adams’s dime novel series, which often made sensational appeals to audiences across class, gender, age, profession, and ethnicity. Simultaneously inhabiting cultural spaces defined in contemporary analytical terms as mutually exclusive, Malaeska unsettles binary constructions in the study of nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. This novel thereby enables an understanding of intersecting racial, gender, class, and cultural formations in relation to U.S. nation building.

Until recently, Malaeska has been dismissed as formulaic, superficial, conservative, and therefore unworthy of scholarly attention. In her important critical re-assessment of Stephens’ Indian tales, Paola Gemme offers an insightful overview of the relationship between the increasingly essentialist dominant racial ideologies from the 1830s to the 1860s and the growing pessimism in depictions of Native American “extinction” in Stephens’ stories. Building on the historical framework in Gemme’s overview (“Rewriting”), this essay examines the ways in which the representation of Indian-white miscegenation in Stephens’ Malaeska simultaneously engages racial ideologies, gender politics, and class formations in cross-fertilized cultural forms. By considering the differences between the 1839 version and the 1860 version, the two contexts of production and reception, and narrative elements beyond the plot, this essay suggests that Malaeska does not necessarily endorse the inevitability of Native American extinction. Rather, Malaeska mobilizes “the Indian question” to critique white supremacy and patriarchy simultaneously: it appeals to women’s shared predicaments as wives, daughters, and mothers to expose the violence of white dominance and its destructive impact on both Native Americans and whites. At the same time, this double critique is limited by its displacement of racial issues onto gender concerns as the text foregrounds women’s alliances across racial and class lines and defines womanhood in terms of the emerging white middle class. The contradiction between the dramatization of racial tensions and their ultimate displacement onto gender issues, this essay suggests, registers an articulation of normative, invisible middle-class white womanhood in the broader context of the emergence of (de)racialized women’s middle-class culture. The term “(de)racialized” highlights the ways in which normative “whiteness” operates as an invisible, “unraced,” universal construction against which all other “races” are defined and thereby racialized. The naturalization and (de)racialization of women’s middle-class culture, this essay suggests, relies on its claim to moral authority and its antithetical relationship to other cultural spheres, such as the heterogeneous cultural spaces where dime novels circulated.

The Elegy of the Vanishing American: Removal, Western Expansion, and the Consequences of the Failed Contract across Racial Lines

From the 1830s to the 1860s, conflicts between whites and Indians were a recurrent theme in cultural representations. As the enforcement of the 1830 Removal Act took place in the late 1830s, Indian tales and poems lamenting the predicament of the “vanishing American” appeared frequently in popular magazines. A generation later many Beadle and Adams dime novels also featured violent encounters between whites and Indians as the clash between white settlers and Indians continued to intensify after the removal era due to westward expansion after the U.S.-Mexican War. While the figuration of different racial others in relation to U.S. national identity varies in different periods, the Indian was particularly important in shaping the emergence of U.S. national identity, most notably perhaps in the republican era when the U.S. struggled to define itself and expanded its territory (Rogin 4). During this period, the Indian functioned as an important icon…

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Black Indians Formed the First American Rainbow Coalition

The New York Times
1991-03-17

To the Editor:

“Census Finds Many Claiming New Identity: Indian” (front-page, March 5) discusses whites who now assert their Indian blood, but fails to mention African-Americans who can claim longer and more legitimate ties to America’s Indian heritage. Many in the New York area are pursuing their biracial heritage through such organizations as the National Alliance of Native Americans and radio stations such as WLIB.

The African-native American connection came to light in 1503, when Gov. Nicolas de Ovando of Hispaniola complained to King Ferdinand that African slaves “fled among the Indians . . . and never could be captured.” His words announced our first rainbow coalition. Today almost every African-American family — from Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes and Alex Haley to Alice Walker, Jesse Jackson and L. L. Cool J — has an Indian branch in its family tree. The statistics are much lower for white Americans…

…William L. Katz
New York
March 6, 1991

The writer, a scholar in residence at N.Y.U., is the author of “Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage” (1986).

Read the entire letter here.

Census Finds Many Claiming New Identity: Indian

The New York Times
1991-03-05

Dirk Johnson

For the first 43 years of her life, Barbara Anderson did not talk about her ethnic background. But now it is a matter of pride — and record. On the latest census form, Mrs. Anderson, now 48, checked a different box: American Indian.

“I no longer had to pretend,” she said.

Census officials are finding a sharp increase in the number of people who identify themselves as American Indians. Tribes are swamped with applications for enrollment. And a large wave of urban Indians now takes part in traditional Indian practices, like the “vision quest,” a time of spiritual reflection spent alone in the wilderness.

As American society becomes more accepting and admiring of the Indian heritage, and as governments set aside contracts and benefits for tribe members, an increasing number of Indians, like Mrs. Anderson, feel freer to assert their identities.

“There were many people who were ashamed of their Indian past, so they hid it,” said Russell Thornton, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley. “But a lot of people who went the assimilationist route have come back. And the tribes have been enjoying a renaissance.”

Since 1960, the Government count of American Indians has tripled, to an estimated 1.8 million. The Census Bureau has so far released ethnic data from 38 states and the District of Columbia showing a 38 percent increase in the last 10 years. Some of the biggest increases came in states without large Indian populations: Alabama rose 118 percent, New Jersey 78 percent. In Wyoming, which had an overall population loss of more than 3 percent, the number of Indians grew by more than 33 percent…

…Many of the Indians who now strongly assert their identities are the children or grandchildren of Indians who “passed” as white. Others were adopted into white families, and later sought to reclaim their heritage. John Homer, for example, was born 44 years ago to Indian parents in Hugo, Okla., but was adopted by a white couple. As a child growing up in Arkansas, he knew that he was Indian and was bothered that he could walk comfortably in whites-only neighborhoods because of his adopted parents but that other Indian boys could not…

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