Mixed Race Studies

Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place

University of Oklahoma Press
2001
288 pages
5.25″ x 8.5″
Illustrations: 17 b&w photos
Paperback ISBN: 9780806133812

Louis Owens (1948-2002), Professor of English and Native American Studies
University of California, Davis

In this challenging and often humorous book, Louis Owens examines issues of Indian identity and relationship to the environment as depicted in literature and film and as embodied in his own mixedblood roots in family and land. Powerful social and historical forces, he maintains, conspire to colonize literature and film by and about Native Americans into a safe “Indian Territory” that will contain and neutralize Indians. Countering this colonial “Territory” is what Owens defines as “Frontier,” a dynamic, uncontainable, multi-directional space within which cultures meet and even merge.

Owens offers new insights into the works of Indian writers ranging from John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, and D’Arcy McNickle to N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor. In his analysis of Indians in film he scrutinizes distortions of Indians as victims or vanishing Americans in a series of John Wayne movies and in the politically correct but false gestures of the more recent Dances With Wolves. As Owens moves through his personal landscape in Oklahoma, Mississippi, California, and New Mexico, he questions how human beings collectively can alter their disastrous relationship with the natural world before they destroy it. He challenges all of us to articulate, through literature and other means, messages of personal and environmental — as well as cultural—survival, and to explore and share these messages by writing and reading across cultural boundaries.

24,000-Year-Old Body Shows Kinship to Europeans and American Indians

The New York Times
2013-11-20

Nicholas Wade

The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia some 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists.

The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last Ice Age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed. Though none of the Mal’ta boy’s skin or hair survives, his genes suggest he would have had brown hair, brown eyes and freckled skin.

The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion — about 25 percent — of the DNA of living Native Americans. The first people to arrive in the Americas have long been assumed to have descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. It now seems that they may be a mixture between the Western Europeans who had reached Siberia and an East Asian population...

…There they lay for some 50 years until they were examined by a team led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Willerslev, an expert in analyzing ancient DNA, was seeking to understand the peopling of the Americas by searching for possible source populations in Siberia. He extracted DNA from bone taken from the child’s upper arm, hoping to find ancestry in the East Asian peoples from whom Native Americans are known to be descended…

…The other surprise from the Mal’ta boy’s genome was that it matched to both Europeans and Native Americans but not to East Asians. Dr. Willerslev’s interpretation was that the ancestors of Native Americans had already separated from the East Asian population when they interbred with the people of the Mal’ta culture, and that this admixed population then crossed over the Beringian land bridge that then lay between Siberia and Alaska to become a founding population of Native Americans.

“We estimate that 14 to 38 percent of Native American ancestry may originate through gene flow from this ancient population,” he and colleagues wrote in an article published Wednesday in the journal Nature…

Read the entire article here.

Play Could Begin Renaissance For Seminole Nation Culture

The Seminole Producer
Seminole, Oklahoma
2013-11-13
pages 1-2

Karen Anson, Senior Editor

IndianVoices.net contributed to this report

A play on the history of the Seminole Nation’s Freedmen is wrapping up in Los Angeles, but those involved hope it’s only the beginning of a movement.

The play, “the road weeps, the well runs dry,” will end Sunday in Los Angeles Theater Center.

It’s part of a “rolling premier,” being debuted in LA, as well as at the Pillsbury House Theater in Minneapolis, Minn; Perseverance Theater in Anchorage, Ala., and University of South Florida’s School of Theater and Dance.

“Surviving centuries of slavery, revolts and the Trail of Tears, a community of self-proclaimed Freedmen creates the first all-black U.S. town in Wewoka, Okla.,” states the press release about the play.

“The Freedmen (Black Seminoles and people of mixed origins) are rocked when the new religion and the old way come head to head and their former enslavers arrive to return them to the chains of bondage.

“Written in gorgeously cadenced language, utilizing elements of African American folk-lore and daring humor, ‘the road weeps, the well runs dry’ merges the myth, legends and history of the Seminole people.”

Playwright Marcus Gardley was awarded the 2011 PENN/Laura Pels award for mid-career playwright.

He holds masters of fine arts in playwriting from the Yale Drama School.

“Originally I set out to write a play about the first all-black town in the U.S., Wewoka, Okla.,” Gardley said.

“I had a special interest in the town because my grandmother was born there.

“In my research, I learned that Black Seminoles (people of African and Native American ancestry) actually incorporated the town…

…A third person involved in the program claims very close ties to Seminole County, Okla.

Phil “Pompey” Fixico spoke in a post program panel entitled “Exploring African American and Native American Spirituality.”

Fixico is featured in the Smithsonian Institute’s book and exhibit entitled “indiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas,” which will open its next show on Jan. 25 at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center in New York City.

For the exhibit, Fixico had to carefully document his heritage.

“I was a 52-year-old African-American, when I discovered that I was really an African-Native American,” Fixico said.

“This epiphany took place 14 years ago.”

Fixico’s found that he was the great-grandson of Caesar Bruner, an early leader of the Seminole Nation’s Freedman band…

Read the entire article here.

The genes that build America

The Guardian
2007-07-14

Paul Harris, US Correspondent

From the discovery that presidential hopeful Barack Obama is descended from white slave owners to the realisation that the majority of black Americans have European ancestors, a boom in ‘recreational genetics’ is forcing America to redefine its roots. Paul Harris pieces together the DNA jigsaw of what it really means to be born in the USA

Al Sharpton walked into a South Carolina pine forest just outside the sleepy southern town of Edgefield and stopped at a cluster of toothlike unmarked gravestones. This was the former plantation on which a few generations ago his ancestors had worked, lived, loved and died, owned as property by white masters. ‘You must assume that it’s family here,’ Sharpton said, referring to the abandoned slave graveyard.

A few weeks previously Reverend Sharpton, one of America’s most outspoken black civil rights leaders, had not known of the cemetery’s existence. But researchers had explored his genealogy and broken the news to him. Sharpton’s story had an astonishing twist: the genealogists discovered that his ancestors had once been owned by the ancestors of Strom Thurmond, the Senator and former segregationist who once ran for president on a racist platform. The phrase ‘ironic coincidence’ did not begin to cover it…

Read the entire article here.

Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative

Cambridge University Press
November 1994
276 pages
31 b/w illus
229 x 152 x 16 mm
Paperback ISBN: 9780521469593

Robert S. Tilton, Professor of English
University of Connecticut, Torrington

From the time of its first appearance, the story of Pocahontas has provided the terms of a flexible discourse that has been put to multiple, and at times contradictory, uses. Centering around her legendary rescue of John Smith from the brink of execution and her subsequent marriage to a white Jamestown colonist, the Pocahontas convention became a source of national debate over such broad issues as miscegenation, racial conflict, and colonial expansion. At the same time, Pocahontas became the most frequently and variously portrayed female figure in antebellum literature. Robert S. Tilton draws upon the rich tradition of Pocahontas material to examine why her half-historic, half-legendary narrative so engaged the imaginations of Americans from the earliest days of the colonies through the conclusion of the Civil War. Drawing upon a wide variety of primary materials, Tilton reflects on the ways in which the Pocahontas myth was exploded, exploited, and ultimately made to rationalise dangerous preconceptions about the native American tradition.

• The only study to focus exclusively on the Pocahontas narrative during this period
• Deals with crucial aspects of Indian/white relations, such as interracial marriages, and the place of the Indian in ‘Manifest Destiny’ ideology
• Brings together a number of visual images not elsewhere presented together

Table of Contents

• 1. Miscegenation and the Pocahontas narrative in colonial and federalist America
• 2. The Pocahontas narrative in post-Revolution America
• 3. The Pocahontas narrative in the era of the romantic Indian
• 4. John Gadsby Chapman’s Baptism of Pocahontas
• 5. The figure of Pocahontas in sectionalist propaganda
• Index

Victoria to fly flag in memory of executed Métis leader Louis Riel

Times Colonist
Victoria, British Columbia
2013-11-15

Richard Watts

The infinity-embossed flag of the Métis Nation will fly at municipalities around B.C. as they proclaim Saturday as Louis Riel Day.

Victoria, Langford and Sidney have agreed to the proclamation. Victoria has even agreed to fly the flag of the Métis Nation, a white infinity symbol (a sideways “8”) on a solid blue, black or red background.

Today, at Royal Roads University in the Blue Heron House, Métis culture will be showcased with a short film, bannock and tea, from 10 a.m. to noon.

Bill Bresser, president of Métis Nation Greater Victoria, said the celebration is part of a growing recognition across Canada that now sees Riel, not as an executed villain but as a defender of the Métis.

“He is now recognized not as a traitor but somebody fighting for his people and the rights and property of people that were being taken advantage of,” said Bresser.

Also, Bresser said, Métis people are now being recognized as legitimate builders of the modern country…

Read the entire article here.

Red: Racism and the American Indian

UCLA Law Review
Volume 56, Issue 3 (February 2009)
pages 591-656

Bethany R. Berger, Thomas F. Gallivan, Jr. Professor of Real Property Law
University of Connecticut

How does racism work in American Indian law and policy? Scholarship on the subject too often has assumed that racism works for Indians in the same way that it does for African Americans, and has therefore either emphasized the presence of hallmarks of black-white racism, such as uses of blood quantum, as evidence of racism, or has emphasized the lack of such hallmarks, such as prohibitions on interracial marriage, to argue that racism is not a significant factor. This Article surveys the different eras of Indian-white interaction to argue that racism has been important in those interactions, but has worked in a distinctive way. North Americans were not primarily concerned with using Indian people as a source of labor, and therefore did not have to theorize Indians as inferior individuals to control that labor. Rather, the primary concern was to obtain tribal resources and use tribes as a flattering foil for American society and culture. As a result, it was necessary to theorize tribal societies as fatally and racially inferior groups, while emphasizing the ability of Indian individuals to leave their societies and join non-Indian ones. This theory addresses the odd paradox that the most unquestionably racist eras in Indian-white interaction emphasized and encouraged assimilation of Indian individuals. It also contributes to the ongoing effort to understand the varying manifestations of racism in a multiracial America. Most important, it provides a new perspective on efforts to curtail tribal sovereignty in the name of racial equality, revealing their connection to historic efforts to maintain the inferiority of Indian tribes by treating them as racial groups rather than political entities with governmental rights.

Read the entire article here.

The legend of Lone Star Dietz: Redskins namesake, coach — and possible impostor?

The Washington Post
2013-11-06

Richard Leiby

Reading, Pa. — Here lies the celebrated Lone Star Dietz — in a donated cemetery plot, aside a back road, under a drooping evergreen. A simple marker, paid for by friends, bears only one word that hints at his legend: “Coach.”

Finally, we have found him, the Washington Redskins’ namesake. Dietz coached the inaugural Boston Redskins team 80 years ago, before it moved to Washington. He was a Sioux Indian, and the team was named in his honor, “out of respect for Native American heritage and tradition.”

That is what the team’s attorneys have said, anyway, in court filings battling an effort by Native Americans to cancel the Redskins trademark as disparaging — a campaign more than two decades old. Now the objections to the name are reaching an unprecedented volume, including Tuesday’s D.C. Council vote condemning the team name as “racist and derogatory.”

In the midst of this criticism, team owner Dan Snyder wrote a letter to season-ticket holders last month in which he mentioned the team’s former Native American head coach and called the name “a badge of honor.”

But what if Coach Lone Star Dietz wasn’t an Indian?…

…A half-century after his death, it seems that no one has decisively pinned down the heritage of William Henry “Lone Star” Dietz. This makes the Redskins’ flat-out assertions that the First Coach was an Indian even more problematic for some…

…Dietz’s claims about his Sioux origins were accepted and repeated for decades by researchers and credulous reporters.

I was one of them. Ninety years after The Post first took note of Dietz and his artistry at the 1904 World’s Fair, I wrote about him. “His father was German, his mother Sioux,” I said in a story about how the Redskins got their name.

At the time, my understanding of Dietz’s heritage was based on the available scholarship and a number of interviews. Indians I talked to did not raise questions about his self-proclaimed Sioux identity…

Read the entire article here.

Analysis of a Tri-Racial Isolate

Human Biology
Volume 36, Number 4 (December 1964)
pages 362-373

William S. Pollitzer
Department of Anatomy
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Based on a paper presented at the meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Philadelphia, May 2, 1962

A relatively isolated population in the state of North Carolina, composed of persons who call themselves Indian but who appear to be of tri-racial origin, provides a model for the study of analysis by gene frequencies of a mixed population of White, Negro, and Indian ancestry.

A people considered Indian is known to have occupied this territory by the mid-eighteenth century; they spoke English, tilled the soil, and owned slaves. English, Scotch Highlanders, and French Huguenots migrated into the area in the eighteenth century also. Planters from neighboring states settled in this vicinity, often bringing slaves and a few free Negroes with them. The most common names of the free Negroes are the same as those of the present-day mixed population.

The origin of the Indian component of this hybrid population is open to speculation; three ideas have been advanced. The most colorful theory is that the people of the present isolate are the descendants of Raleigh’s famous “Lost Colony” who mixed with the Croatan Indians, an Algonquin-speaking tribe on the coast. Some similarity in the names of the colonists and the names in the present population, plus a few cultural traits, have been construed as evidence for this view. Another suggestion is that the Cherokee, a powerful Iroquois-speaking tribe who had general overlordship in the Western Carolinas, contributed the Indian genes to the hybrid group. Finally, the view has been advanced that the Siouan-speaking tribes who lived in the Piedmont Carolinas, e.g., the Catawba, were the Indian stock involved.

Considerable phenotypic variation is found within the isolate today, with extremes of skin color from light to dark and of hair form from very curly to straight- The morphology of the face also suggests broad racial backgrounds. It is therefore of interest to learn what the blood factors and hemoglobins tell of the composition of this population of multiple racial origins.

In 1958, in cooperation with Dr. Amoz Chernoff, blood samples were…

Phil “Pompey” Fixicio To Speak on a Post Show Panel Exploring African American and Native American Spirituality

Los Angeles Theater Center
514 South Spring Street
Los Angeles, California 90013
Telephone: 213.489.0994
Sunday, 2013-11-03, 15:00 PST (Local Time)

On Sunday November 3rd, in honor of the new play on the Seminole people, the road weeps, the well runs dry, Phil “Pompey” Fixicio will be speaking on a post show panel at The Los Angeles Theatre Center. This panel, entitled Exploring African American and Native American Spirituality will include Rev. Dr. Cecil “Chip” Murray (USC), Phil “Pompey” Fixico (Seminole descendant), and Professor Hanay Geigomah (UCLA). The panel follows the 3:00pm performance. For tickets and information on the play, click here.
 
Phil “Pompey” Fixico, Seminole Maroon Descendant, California Semiroon Mico (Nation of One), Heniha for the Wildcat/John Horse Band of the Seminoles of Texas and Old Mexico, Honorary Elder of the Muskogee Yamassee of Florida, Featured, in the Smithsonian Institution’s, book and exhibit, entitled :”indivisible”; African-Native American Lives in the Americas, Co-Founder of the Bureau of Black Indian Affairs (indianvoices), Member of the L.A. chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers and Dept. of Interior/National Park Service/ National Underground Rail Road/ Network to Freedom Private-Sector Partner ( Semiroon Historical Society).