Mixed Race Studies

“The Red and The White: A Family Saga of the American West” presentation

New Mexico State University
Nason House
1070 University Ave
Friday, 2014-02-21, 13:00-14:30 MST (Local Time)

CLABS-Book Talk to be held Feb. 21

A Center for Latin American Border Studies-Book Talk titled “The Red and The White: A Family Saga of the American West” [on the book by the same name] by Andrew Graybill, William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX will be held at 1 p.m. Friday, Feb. 21, at the Nason House. The event is free and open to the public. The Nason House is located on 1070 University Ave., across from FedEx Kinko’s.

At dawn on Jan. 23, 1870, 400 men of the Second U.S. Cavalry attacked and butchered a Piegan winter camp on the Marias River in Montana in one of the worst slaughters of Indians by American military forces in U.S. history. Come to avenge the murder of their father – a former fur trader named Malcolm Clarke, killed four months earlier by his Piegan wife’s cousin – Clarke’s own two sons rode with the cavalry that day and thus murdered their own blood relatives. Andrew R. Graybill places the Marias Massacre within a larger three-generation saga of the Clarke family, illuminating the complex history of native-white intermarriage in the American West.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information click here.

Kaa-tipeyimishoyaahk – ‘We are those who own ourselves’: A Political History of Métis Self-Determination in the North-West, 1830-1870

University of Victoria, British Columbia
2014
394 pages

Adam James Patrick Gaudry

Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of Indigenous Governance

This dissertation offers an analysis of the history of Métis political thought in the nineteenth century and its role in the anti-colonial resistances to Canada’s and Hudson’s Bay Company governance. Utilizing the Michif concepts of kaa-tipeyimishoyaahk and wahkohtowin to shed light on Métis political practices, this work argues that the Métis people had established themselves as an independent Indigenous people in the nineteenth century North West. By use of a common language of prairie diplomacy, Métis had situated themselves as a close “relation” of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but still politically independent of it. Nineteenth century Métis had repeatedly demonstrated their independence from British institutions of justice and politics, and were equally insistent that Canadian institutions had no authority over them. When they did choose to form a diplomatic relationship with Canada, it was decidedly on Métis terms. In 1869-1870, after repelling a Canadian official who was intended to establish Canadian authority over the North-West, the Métis formed a provisional government with their Halfbreed cousins to enter into negotiations with Canada to establish a confederal treaty relationship. The Provisional Government of Assiniboia then sent delegates to Ottawa to negotiate “the Manitoba Treaty,” a bilateral constitutional document that created a new province of Manitoba, that would contain a Métis/Halfbreed majority, as well as very specific territorial, political, social, cultural, and economic protections that would safeguard the Métis and Halfbreed controlled future of Manitoba. This agreement was embodied only partially in the oft-cited Manitoba Act, as several key elements of the agreement were oral negotiations that were later to be institutionalized by the Canadian cabinet, although were only ever partially implemented. These protections included restrictions on the sale of the 1.4 million acre Métis/Halfbreed land reserve, a commitment to establish a Métis/Halfbreed controlled upper-house in the new Manitoba legislature, a temporary limitation of the franchise to current residents of the North West, and restrictions on Canadian immigration to the new province until Métis lands were properly distributed. While these key components of the Manitoba Treaty were not included in the Manitoba Act, they remain a binding part of the agreement, and thus, an unfulfilled obligation borne by the contemporary government of Canada. Without adhering to Canada’s treaty with the Métis people, its presence on Métis lands, and jurisdiction over Métis people is highly suspect. Only by returning to the original agreement embodied by the Manitoba Act can Canada claim any legitimacy on Métis territories or any functional political relationship with the Métis people.

Read the entire dissertation here.

“They Treated Us Just Like Indians”: The Worlds of Bennett County, South Dakota

University of Nebraska Press
2002
156 pages
Illus., maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-9830-9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-4800-7

Paula L. Wagoner, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Juniata College, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania

On a typical day in Bennett County, South Dakota, farmers and ranchers work their fields and tend animals, merchants order inventory and stock shelves, teachers plan and teach classes, health workers aid the infirm in the county hospital or clinic, and women make quilts and heirlooms for their families or the county fair. Life is usually unhurried, with time for chatting with neighbors and catching up on gossip. But Bennett County is far from typical.

Nearly a century ago the county was carved out of Pine Ridge Reservation and opened to white settlers. Today Bennett County sits awkwardly between the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Sioux Reservations, with nearly one-third of its land classified as “Indian Country” and the rest considered by many Pine Ridge Lakotas to still belong to the reservation. The county is home to a dynamic population, divided by the residents into three groups—”whites,” “fullbloods,” and “mixedbloods.” Tensions between the three groups lurk admid the quiet harmony of Bennett County’s everyday rural life and emerge in moments of community crisis.

In a moving account, anthropologist Paula L. Wagoner tells the story of Bennett County, using snapshots of community events and crises, past and present, to reveal the complexity of race relations and identities there. A homecoming weekend at Bennett County High School becomes a flashpoint for controversy because of the differences of meaning ascribed by the county’s three identity groups to the school’s team name—the Warriors. At another time, the shooting of a Lakota man by a local non-Indian rancher and the volatile wake that follows demonstrate the impulse to racialize disputes that lies just beneath the surface of everyday life.

Yet such very real problems of identity have not completely overwhelmed Bennett County. Wagoner also shows that despite their differences, residents have managed to find common ground as a region of “diverse insiders” who share an economic dependency on federal funds, distrust outsiders, and, above all, deeply love their land.

Elsie’s Business

University of Nebraska Press
2006
216 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-9865-1

Frances Washburn, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies and English
University of Arizona

Beaten, raped, and left for dead at the side of a road on the Standing Rock Reservation, young Elsie Roberts disappears into her self to revisit the haunts of her childhood and, perhaps, the depths of her experience to uncover the deepest mystery of all. In Elsie’s Business, Elsie’s search through her own memories ultimately intersects with the search of a stranger who is seeking Elsie’s story.

A picture emerges of a poor child, half black and half Native, whose mother has barely eked out a living for the two of them by tanning deerskins and cleaning houses. Rebuilding her life in a different town as a housekeeper, tanner, and beader of moccasins and bags, much like her mother, the taciturn Elsie finds modest comfort and connections among the white people who employ and befriend her. But her peace is fleeting, for someone from her past, or possibly her present, would like to see her silenced completely. A mystery of mesmerizing suspense and sadness, Elsie’s Business weaves the story of a ravaged woman into the traditional tales of her people to create a vivid sense of communities bound by storytelling and understanding and sundered by ignorance and silence.

“Native Voices on Mixed Race” at the Mitchell Musem of the American Indian

Native News Online.net
Grand Rapids, Michigan
2014-02-07

Native News Online Staff

Local Native Americans discuss the legal, cultural, & social boundaries of Native American status

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS – There are over 30,000 American Indians living in the Chicago area, all of whom identify or hold status with different tribal nations across the country. But how is tribal status preserved in bands, and how do the rules differ from tribe to tribe? How do individuals maintain their American Indian culture when they or their children no longer qualify for membership? What are the difficulties culturally blended families face as they create new traditions, on and off the reservation?

The Mitchell Museum of the American Indian hosts a panel discussion on these varied perspectives of American Indian identification on February 13, 2014 from 6:00 to 7:30 at the Mitchell Museum in Evanston, Illinois…

Read the entire article here.

Cultural Identities: Mixed Blood

Mitchell Museum of the American Indian
3001 Central Street
Evanston, Illinois 60201
847.475.1030
September 2013

With the influx of immigrants from throughout the world, the United States has been called the great melting pot. But how has this played out for the original people in America? Explore how American Indian peoples from multiple cultures and races identify themselves, pre-European contact and today in our new exhibit Cultural Identities: Mixed Blood, opening September 28th 2013.

In the exhibit, curator Melissa Halverson highlights how American Indian history from pre-European contact to the present shaped the current debates over tribal membership and cultural appropriation and discusses the many way in which a mixed race or mixed culture person can identify themselves. The exhibit reviews historical family unit structures, including slavery and adoption, the impact of treaties, assimilation campaigns, and the U.S. government’s introduction of blood quantum. Finally hear about today’s controversies from tribal members, as well as those no longer qualified for membership.

Consider the many facets of identity from government allegiance, religious beliefs, living on or off reservations to legal rights and genealogy. The exhibit includes unique pieces from the museum’s collection including a U.S. government ration card from 1886, a Cochiti nativity scene, a Navajo beaded Chicago Bulls hat, and a beaded pipe bag pictured above. Come learn about the importance of self-identification and how history and culture affects the way you identify yourself.

For more information, click here.

From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans: A Mixed Blood Highway

NeWest Press
April 2008
48 pages
ISBN: 978-1-897126-29-5

Joseph Boyden

In 2007, Joseph Boyden, author of the bestselling novel Three Day Road and 2008 Giller Prize winner for Through Black Spruce, was invited by the Canadian Literature Centre | Centre de littérature canadienne to deliver the inaugural Henry Kreisel Lecture at the University of Alberta. Boyden spoke passionately, relating Aboriginal people in Canada to poor African Americans, Whites, and Hispanics in post-Katrina New Orleans. At the end of his lecture he presented a manifesto to the audience, demanding independence from the shackles of North American governments on behalf of these oppressed cultures. The lecture was received with much acclaim and enthusiasm.

In collaboration with the Canadian Literature Centre, NeWest Press is pleased to present the Henry Kreisel Lecture Series publications, a forum for open, inclusive critical thinking, and a tribute to Henry Kreisel himself.

What Comes Naturally: A Racially Inclusive Look at Miscegenation Law

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 31, Number 3, 2010
pages 15-21
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2010.0020

Jacki Thompson Rand, Professor of History; American Indian and Native Studies
University of Iowa

In What Comes Naturally Peggy Pascoe interrogates the U.S. racial regime through a study of civil marriage and miscegenation law. Her admirable work traces the development of legislation and court decisions about mixed marriage between White settlers and African Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asians, and American Indians. Bans against mixed marriages, or miscegenation, between White men and women of color, Pascoe argues, served to protect White supremacy and heteronormative patriarchy. By maintaining boundaries between the races, and material consequences that favored men in land disputes and White relatives in estate disputes, for example, White men’s economic and social positions were reinforced while women’s positions were undermined. Pascoe includes American Indians in her study because their lands, unique relationship with the federal government, and kinship systems presented complications not found in other cases. Pascoe also briefly mentions tribal miscegenation laws among the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Creeks.

Pascoe’s book and a recent special issue of the journal Frontiers, on interracial marriage and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North American Indians, White settlers, and African Americans, complement each other in some ways. French fur traders in the Northeast and Great Lakes region and Spanish and Mexicans in the Southwest mixed with Native women long before the creation of the United States. The French were early astute observers of Native people and soon realized the crucial role kinship played in providing access to prime beaver-trapping grounds along rivers. French men married into Native groups to enhance their trade. By the nineteenth century White American men also sought Native women who held land as a way of gaining access to resources. The federal government looked upon such unions as a means to facilitate Indian acculturation and assimilation into White society, even well into the twentieth century. In many instances Native families saw the marriage of their daughters to White men as a means to enhance their access to trade goods and to a more secure life.

Pascoe treats miscegenation law that covered American Indians primarily in the case of Oregon. In fact, miscegenation law evolved from initially targeting White and African American unions to include White unions with other races, including American Indians. The creation and enforcement of laws that pertained to marriages with Native Americans, Pascoe notes, seemed to coincide with external or individual circumstances where the acquisition or loss of land was at stake. Like the unions of French men and Native women, many marriages followed the custom of the country, where the partners were bound to each other outside of civil law. In the mid-nineteenth century the Oregon Territorial Supreme Court heard a case to determine whether such marriages were legal under territorial law. Oregon settler land claims at that time were unstable, so it is not surprising that the court and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the custom of the country. While this chapter of American Indian history diverged from the history of barring mixed marriages, Pascoe demonstrates that the tolerance of mixed marriage between White men and Indian women also secured White male patriarchy. It was a variation on the theme of White supremacy.

Like settler regimes elsewhere White American society viewed race through a biological lens that assessed parentage, phenotype, and blood quantum. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both the American and the Australian governments encouraged intermarriage to Whiten and eventually erase indigenous populations. The coexistence of miscegenation laws that pertained to Native peoples and assimilation proponents of interracial marriage arose from conflicting impulses. On one hand, intermarriage was objectionable on the grounds Pascoe depicts in her book: the progeny of mixed marriages challenged racial regimes, White supremacy, and White male privilege. But the federal government and settler society’s twin desires to avert an unaffordable war with Indians and to expropriate lands in Native possession weakened the resolve to bar mixed marriages. In the Frontiers special issue Cathleen Cahill explores the federal Indian Service as a site of applied assimilation policy where marriages between Whites and American Indians were made possible by putting numbers of White women in proximity to eligible Native men.

In the same period intermarriage could also serve as a vehicle for the expropriation of Native…

Red, White, and Black: A Personal Essay on Interracial Marriage

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 29, Numbers 2 & 3, 2008
pages 51-58
DOI: 10.1353/fro.0.0021

Jacki Thompson Rand, Professor of History; American Indian and Native Studies
University of Iowa

About a month before my father died, a long-held question spilled out of my ten-year-old mouth. “Daddy, why do you hate colored people so much and love Mama?” The silence that filled the kitchen where my mother was cooking blocked out the evening news blaring from the television. It was another nightly report about the blacks’ grim battle for freedom from racial segregation. The March on Washington and rise of black power had energized their struggle, making for significant advances, but the struggle continued. My father’s routine rants against the “coloreds” had unexpectedly pulled the naïve question from my throat where it had been lodged for some time. My mother began to cry. I looked up into his usually loving face and saw cold silent anger. Somehow, I had intuited that it would be this way. For the first time in my life I was sent to bed without supper and told to stay upstairs until morning. My parents never brought up our exchange and several weeks later my father died of a heart attack in front of me. Some forty years later I asked my mother if she recalled that event and she looked at me levelly, “Why, yes, I certainly do.” The cold indignation in her eyes and my silence formed an unspoken agreement that we would not revisit the incident that took place in the kitchen in early 1967. In the intervening decades, however, I had given it much thought, peeling away the layers of my confusion about my experiences in a racially mixed household where black, white, and red shaped our familial relations, individual identities, and confused interpretations of how race had come to define us.

In retrospect it seems that both race and color were at the center of our family relations. My mother’s darkness was the basis of a terrible insecurity that played out in her comments about her children and about other dark-skinned people. Simultaneously, my father’s open racism against blacks contradicted his seeming blindness to my mother’s insecurity-inducing darkness. I recall my father’s special song for my mother. “Portrait of my Love,” a syrupy popular tune suggesting that extraordinary beauty cannot be captured by the artist’s brush. Their romanticized fraught defiance of convention became swept up in the growing momentum of the civil rights movement. Historically invisible dark people filled television screens, as well as white-sheeted Klansmen, water cannons, billy clubs, and jeering white crowds. Under the circumstances, my mother’s insecurity about her darkness intensified. Events taking place outside our family charged the dynamics among us. We all became actors on her stage, which she directed relentlessly to buffer herself against a pervasive racism that could easily and frequently did sweep her up in the net of all denigrated colored peoples.

My parents’ relationship married my mother’s ever-present awareness of her dark skin to my father’s insecurities about his origins and driven desire to escape them. He sought membership in the American middle class and spent his life accumulating what he believed were the essential requirements: comportment, a steady job, children, a home, and car. My father’s near-obsession with “good manners” and appropriate appearances was most evident in our relationship. My little brother and ally was a mute, invisible actor throughout our time with both parents, while I received the bounty of attention due a Southern princess. My parents insisted on tightly controlling how I wore my hair and how I was clothed. Trained as an excellent, creative seamstress, my mother made many of my clothes. My occasional effort to follow a fashion trend—one year it was empire waist summer dresses—was usually quashed by my father. (“Jean, that thing makes her look pregnant. Take it back.” I was probably all of eight or nine.) White anklets and some version of Mary Janes rounded out my outfits. As the only girl in the family with two brothers I seemed an inescapable target of monitoring and molding into Southern perfection. My mother was uncharacteristically unquestioning and compliant in these matters.

My parents were a striking, charismatic pair. My mother is the daughter of…

Jim Beckwourth: Black Mountain Man and War Chief of the Crows

University of Oklahoma Press
1980
264 pages
5.5″ x 8.25″
Paperback ISBN: 9780806115559

Elinor Wilson

Dismissed as a “gaudy liar” by most historians and often discredited by writers who deprecated his mixed blood, James Pierson Beckwourth was one of the giants of the early West, certainly deserving to rank alongside Kit Carson, Bill Williams, Louis Vasquez, and Jim Bridger.

Sometime around 1800 James Beckwourth was born a slave in Frederick County, Virginia, the natural son of Sir Jennings Beckwith and a slave girl. In 1810 Sir Jennings moved with his family to the wilderness of St. Louis, Missouri, where Jim was educated and eventually apprenticed to a blacksmith. His father recorded a Deed of Emancipation in his name on three different occasions, sending young Jim out into the world with his blessings.

Jim Beckwourth’s apprenticeship as a fur trapper was served with General William Ashley’s grueling 1824 winter expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Except for a short stint as an army scout during the Seminole campaign, Jim spent the remainder of his long, eventful life in the West, dying among the Crow Indians whom he loved. He was fur trapper, trader, scout war chief of the Crow Nation, explorer, hotelkeeper, dispatch carrier, storekeeper, prospector, Indian agent for the Cheyennes—in short, a mountain man extraordinaire.

In his old age Beckwourth dictated an autobiography to T.D. Bonner, a man more interested in making money with Jim’s adventures than in accurately recording his life. Beckwourth was later disparaged because of the inaccuracies that crept into Bonner’s account.