Mixed Race Studies

Black Indian With a Camera: The Work of Valena Broussard Dismukes

Southeastern Oklahoma University
Native American Symposium
2005-Proceedings of the Sixth Native American Symposium
pages 40-46

Sarita Cannon
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In this paper, I examine the liberatory photography of a living African-Choctaw-French American artist, Valena Broussard Dismukes. I am especially fascinated by the way in which Dismukes takes the camera, an object that had previously been used as a weapon of oppression against Native Americans and people of African descent, and uses it to capture the spirit of twenty-first-century Black Indians on their own terms. In her series of portrait photographs entitled “Red-Black Connection: The Cultural Heritage of Black Native Americans,” Dismukes highlights the varied experience of Black Indians in the United States and forces her viewers to reevaluate their notions of what a “real” Indian and what a “real” Black person look like….

…The verbal narratives that accompany many of the portraits highlight many issues that contemporary Black Indians face, including the difficulty of tracing their lineage and the responses they receive from others about their authenticity or lack thereof. However, generally the narratives celebrate Black Indian Identity. A few of Dismukes’ subjects discuss how their own family members obscured their “true” ancestry. For instance, Elnora Tena Webb Mitchell (of Cherokee/Blackfeet descent) writes, “My grandparents and other members of my family were identified as Native American. However, there is much information about our ancestry that is kept secret. Being Native American is not revered nor honored by many family members.” It is interesting to note here that it is not the Black blood that is repressed, but rat her it is the Indian ancestry. It was not always advantageous to be identified as Black rather than Native. This choice depended upon historical and geographical context. Still others note how they are viewed as “wannabes” who are trying to distance themselves from Blackness. Gene “Quietwalker” Holmes of Comanche descent says, “There have been people from both communities who react to my heritage on a negative basis and ask, ‘Who or what are you trying to be?’” But Carol Munday Lawrence of Cherokee descent responds to these attacks simply by saying that she is merely discovering her multiple selves: “I fully understand why some fear that to claim Native American, or any other heritage, is to reject one’s Blackness, but this is not about ‘going Native.’ Knowing who your people are, and embracing them all unconditionally, can only enrich your life.” And Stella Vaugh playfully embraces this historical moment in which she can identify as a multiracial person: “In fact, I’m having fun boasting about my mixed-race. I jokingly say I’m 57 Heinz Variety. My mother’s mother is Cherokee and Irish. My father’s mother is Bohemian and his father is Choctaw. I am told that one of my ancestors is black and I’m still searching for that beautiful person.” Vaugh proudly embraces her multiple heritage and openly acknowledges the mystery that still surrounds her ancestry. She symbolizes the twenty-first century Black Indian who is coming out” after living much of her life in a space where she felt the need to repress parts of her identity. If Dismukes’ project can give at least one person the opportunity to feel a sense of dignity about who she is and introduce her to a community of people who also live at the crossroads of Native and African American cultures, then it is, without a doubt, a meaningful political and artistic endeavor…

Read the entire paper here.

The Politics of “Passing”: American Indians and Racial “Passing”

University of Arizona
2004
80 pages

Veronica R. Hirsch

Introduction

How is the racial “passing” behavioral concept applicable to American Indians, and what political forces created the socio-cultural circumstances that prompted this behavior? Beyond these immediate, sociologically-focused questions, what generational impacts does racial “passing” have upon tribal sovereignty and how does tribal sovereignty effect certain forms of racial “passing?” Until now, racial “passing” has been oversimplified as an exclusively Black/White social phenomenon, given the term “passing” was originally coined to describe an African-American’s attempts to identify him/herself, or to accept identification as a white person (Caughie 1999, p. 20). However, racial “passing” is neither historically nor contemporarily unique to the African-American community, since racial “passing” is facilitated by any social organization, such as the United States, that holds certain “subordinate” groups in disesteem (Sollors 1997, p. 248). Taking the United States’ “trust responsibility,” American Indian nations’ “domestic dependent” statuses, and documented history of Indian-specific, institutionalized racism together, one readily witnesses that the societal “disesteem” to which American Indians are and were subjected also positions and positioned them as both participants in and subjects of racial “passing.”…

Read the entire thesis here.

The Barber of Natchez

National Park Service
Natchez: National Historical Park, Mississippi
2012-07-19

Timothy Van Cleave, Park Ranger
Natchez National Historical Park

The Life of William Johnson

Known as the “barber” of Natchez, William Johnson began his life as a slave. His freedom at age eleven followed that of his mother Amy and his sister Adelia. After working as an apprentice to his brother-in-law James Miller, Johnson bought the barber shop in 1830 for three hundred dollars and taught the trade to free black boys. It was shortly after he established a barber shop in downtown Natchez that he began to keep a diary. The diary was a mainstay in Johnson’s life until his death in 1851.

As a young prominent citizen in the free black community of Natchez, Johnson’s interest in marriage and starting a family was strengthened by his thriving business. By 1835, his initial investment of three hundred dollars had grown to almost three thousand. His dress was impeccable and he was confident in his future. So confident that he caught the eye of twenty year old Ann Battles. Battles, also a free black married Johnson in 1835. Their eleventh child was born in 1851 at the time of Johnson’s death…

…In 1851 a boundary dispute with his neighbor Baylor Winn found the two men in court. Although, the judge ruled in Johnson’s favor, Winn was not satisfied. Winn, also a free black ambushed Johnson returning from his farm and shot him. Johnson lived long enough to name Winn as the guilty party. Through strange circumstances, Winn was never convicted of the killing. Winn and his defense argued that he was actually white and not a free person of color because of his Indian ancestry in Virginia. Therefore, the “mulatto” boy who accompanied Johnson on that fateful day could not testify against Winn. Mississippi law allowed for blacks to testify against whites in civil cases, but not in criminal cases. Two hung juries could not decide if he was white or black, so Johnson’s killer walked free…

Read the entire article here.

The Mixed-Blood Racial Strain of Carmel, Ohio and Magoffin County, Kentucky

Ohio Journal of Science
Volume 50, Number 6 (November 1950)
pages 281-290

Edward T. Price, Professor Emeritus of Geography
University of Oregon

A number of population groups of dark-skinned peoples, recognized as socially distinct in rural localities of eastern United States, are commonly assumed to be tri-racial, mixed from white, Negro, and Indian ancestors. A small example of such a group is mentioned by The Ohio Guide (1) as living in the vicinity of Carmel in Highland County. Aside from another small mixed-blood settlement of very different circumstances in Darke County, this group near Carmel is probably the only one to be found rooted in Ohio.

Carmel is a cross-roads hamlet based on a school, a church, and a country store. Its location on the margin of the Till Plains, half surrounded by the wooded hills which mark the western edge of the Appalachian Plateau, is probably significant for the phenomenon which brings it this notice (figs. 1 and 2).

The “half-breeds” or “Carmel Indians,” as they are locally identified, are well known to the farmers of the vicinity, who, on the surface at least, accept good-naturedly the claim of the former to Indian ancestry. Privately the question of Negro blood also may be raised. Most of the older residents think that both are present and can name families or individuals who they think illustrated each type in the days before the mixing was so thorough. The group look mixed; a few of them are nearly white, but most are identifiable by their brown or tan skin; many of them have curly black hair, and many have straight black hair. Few, if any, really look like Indians, but identifying negroid features are not usual. I consider it likely that Indian and Negro mixtures are both present on the basis that the degree of pigmentation in most of the people otherwise seems inconsistent with their general lack of negroid features (figs. 3, 4, and 5).

The surnames of the members of this group are, with few exceptions, Gibson (Gipson), Nichols, and Perkins. One or two other names have recently been added to the group by marriage. Some of the Gipsons aver that the Gibsons have a trace of Negro blood. In the summer of 1947 their number was determined to be at least 150; the population is said to have been somewhat larger in times past…

Read the entire article here.

Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom

University of California Press
February 2005
329 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520241329
Paperback ISBN: 9780520250024

Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies
University of Michigan

• Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize, American Studies Association
• Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, Organization of American Historians

This beautifully written book tells the haunting saga of a quintessentially American family. It is the story of Shoe Boots, a famed Cherokee warrior and successful farmer, and Doll, an African slave he acquired in the late 1790s. Over the next thirty years, Shoe Boots and Doll lived together as master and slave and also as lifelong partners who, with their children and grandchildren, experienced key events in American history—including slavery, the Creek War, the founding of the Cherokee Nation and subsequent removal of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War. This is the gripping story of their lives, in slavery and in freedom.

Meticulously crafted from historical and literary sources, Ties That Bind vividly portrays the members of the Shoeboots family. Doll emerges as an especially poignant character, whose life is mostly known through the records of things done to her—her purchase, her marriage, the loss of her children—but also through her moving petition to the federal government for the pension owed to her as Shoe Boots’s widow. A sensitive rendition of the hard realities of black slavery within Native American nations, the book provides the fullest picture we have of the myriad complexities, ironies, and tensions among African Americans, Native Americans, and whites in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Shoeboots Family Tree
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE. BONE OF MY BONE: SLAVERY, RACE, AND NATION—EAST
  • 1. Captivity
  • 2. Slavery
  • 3. Motherhood
  • 4. Property
  • 5. Christianity
  • 6. Nationhood
  • 7. Gold Rush
• PART TWO. OF BLOOD AND BONE: FREEDOM, KINSHIP, AND CITIZENSHIP—WEST
  • 8. Removal
  • 9. Capture
  • 10. Freedom
• Epilogue: Citizenship
• Coda: The Shoeboots Family Today
• Appendix 1. Research Methods and Challenges
• Appendix 2. Definition and Use of Terms
• Appendix 3. Cherokee Names and Mistaken Identities
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America [Patricia Cleary Review]

William and Mary Quarterly
Third Series, Volume 69, Number 3, July 2012
pages 665-667
DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.69.3.0665

Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America. By Gwenn A. Miller. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010. 242 pages.

Patricia Cleary, Professor of History
California State University, Long Beach

In a period of imperial expansion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Russia founded only one overseas colony, in several sites off the Alaskan coast. On Kodiak Island, the focus of Gwenn A. Miller’s study, the Russian American Company pursued the fur trade and sought the support of church and state for its efforts. In the process, the company’s agents disrupted the lives of the indigenous Alutiiq people, not least through forming relationships with local women and creating an ethnically mixed Kreol population. In her exploration of this North Pacific outpost, Miller focuses on how these initially tenuous and later increasingly formalized relationships laid the basis for a distinctive category and community of people within the Russian empire.

Drawing on slim and occasionally challenging sources, Miller traces Russian colonial expansion, examining how conquest and the exaction of tribute from subjugated peoples in Siberia facilitated the Kodiak venture. Teasing out how Russians differentiated themselves from locals, Miller focuses narrowly on the inhabitants of one island outpost, whose interactions, both peaceful and violent, led to the creation of a “new world” that was “never wholly Russian or Alutiiq” (xi). Although less well known than other Russian ventures, such as that at Sitka, Kodiak was, Miller argues, important in no small part because it lay at the “crossroads of early Alaskan colonial contact” (xi)…

…At the heart of Miller’s analysis is how mixed-race children came to be important both culturally and economically. Russian American children drew the interest of company leaders and government officials, who “singled out these children to be groomed for middling and at times high-level work within the colonial apparatus” (138). Demographic changes prompted such attention. With the overwhelming majority of native men forced to engage in the increasingly dangerous and difficult otter hunt, overhunting led to ever longer voyages, and growing numbers of men perished at sea. European diseases further contributed to the decline of the indigenous population. Company officials began to recognize two related needs: for young indigenous boys to remain in their communities “to train in the art of the sea otter hunt” (114) as their elders died at accelerated rates and for a population of future company workers to be educated appropriately. The hardships of life in the colonial outpost, the “difficulty of transporting substantial numbers of settlers from mainland Russia” (127), the skewed sex ratio among those who did emigrate, the declining Alutiiq population, and an expanding Kreol one turned the Kreol into “an important constituent of the subject population on Kodiak” (127), a few of whom were sent to study at the company’s expense in Saint Petersburg. State encouragement of mixed-race unions elsewhere, Miller states, typically took place in the earlier rather than later phases of colonial enterprises, with families rather than the state or firms responsible for making decisions about children’s educations. In stark contrast, Russian imperial officials “took increasing interest in this Kreol group of colonial residents as a loyal local population, and their expectations for the behavior of these people as European Russians was expressed in more concrete terms over time” (138), with the 1820s a high point. The church, state, and company all became more interested in these children; the company paid for their education in exchange for years of service, an arrangement that would turn “the local Kreol population into a literate managerial force that would be loyal to the Russian crown” (112)…

Read the entire review here.

Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America

Cornell University Press
2010-08-05
248 pages
7 Illustrations
6.1 x 9.3 in
ISBN-10: 0801446422; ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-4642-9

Gwenn A. Miller, Assistant Professor of History
College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts

From the 1780s to the 1820s, Kodiak Island, the first capital of Imperial Russia’s only overseas colony, was inhabited by indigenous Alutiiq people and colonized by Russians. Together, they established an ethnically mixed “kreol” community. Against the backdrop of the fur trade, the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church, and competition among Pacific colonial powers, Gwenn A. Miller brings to light the social, political, and economic patterns of life in the settlement, making clear that Russia’s modest colonial effort off the Alaskan coast fully depended on the assistance of Alutiiq people.

In this context, Miller argues, the relationships that developed between Alutiiq women and Russian men were critical keys to the initial success of Russia’s North Pacific venture. Although Russia’s Alaskan enterprise began some two centuries after other European powers—Spain, England, Holland, and France—started to colonize North America, many aspects of the contacts between Russians and Alutiiq people mirror earlier colonial episodes: adaptation to alien environments, the “discovery” and exploitation of natural resources, complicated relations between indigenous peoples and colonizing Europeans, attempts by an imperial state to moderate those relations, and a web of Christianizing practices. Russia’s Pacific colony, however, was founded on the cusp of modernity at the intersection of earlier New World forms of colonization and the bureaucratic age of high empire. Miller’s attention to the coexisting intimacy and violence of human connections on Kodiak offers new insights into the nature of colonialism in a little-known American outpost of European imperial power.

Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Comparative Timeline
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. An Economy of Confiscation
• 2. Beach Crossings on Kodiak Island
• 3. Colonial Formations
• 4. Between Two Worlds
• 5. Students of Empire
• 6. A Kreol Generation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

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

W. W. Norton & Company
October 2013
352 pages
6.1 × 9.3 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-87140-445-9

Andrew R. Graybill, Associate Professor of History
Southern Methodist University

One of the American West’s bloodiest—and least-known—massacres is searingly re-created in this generation-spanning history of native-white intermarriage.

National Book Award–winning histories such as The Hemingses of Monticello and Slaves in the Family have raised our awareness about America’s intimately mixed black and white past. Award-winning western historian Andrew R. Graybill now sheds light on the overlooked interracial Native-white relationships critical in the development of the trans-Mississippi West in this multigenerational saga. Beginning in 1844 with the marriage of Montana fur trader Malcolm Clarke and his Piegan Blackfeet bride, Coth-co-co-na, Graybill traces the family from the mid-nineteenth century, when such mixed marriages proliferated, to the first half of the twentieth, when Clarke ’s children and grandchildren often encountered virulent prejudice. At the center of Graybill’s history is the virtually unexamined 1870 Marias Massacre, on a par with the more infamous slaughters at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, an episode set in motion by the murder of Malcolm Clarke and in which Clarke ’s two sons rode with the Second U.S. Cavalry to kill their own blood relatives.

kiyâm

Athabasca University Press
May 2012
144 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-926836-69-0
eBook (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-926836-70-6
eBook (EPub) ISBN: 978-1-926836-71-3

Naomi McIlwraith

Through poems that move between the two languages, McIlwraith explores the beauty of the intersection between nêhiyawêwin, the Plains Cree language, and English, âkayâsîmowin. Written to honour her father’s facility in nêhiyawêwin and her mother’s beauty and generosity as an inheritor of Cree, Ojibwe, Scottish, and English, kiyâm articulates a powerful yearning for family, history, peace, and love.

Download the entire book here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. It may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original author is credited.

The Chowan Discovery Group: Documenting the Mixed-Race History of North Carolina’s “Winton Triangle”

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2013-03-20

Vikki Bynum, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Here’s another region of the South with a fascinating history of mixed-race ancestry. I discovered the Chowan Discovery Group after Steven Riley, creator and moderator of MixedRaceStudies.org, introduced me via email to the Group’s Executive Director, Marvin T. Jones. The “Winton Triangle,” located in Hertford County, North Carolina, encompasses the three towns of Winton, Cofield, and Ahoskie. Here, people maintain a distinctive identity rooted in Native American, European, and African ancestry.

According to Marvin Jones, the Triangle traces its origins to before the 1584 arrival of the English to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where Chowanoke (Choanoac) Indian settlements were prominent along the Chowan River. After the English invasion, diseases (to which Native Americans lacked immunity) and territorial disputes decimated and disrupted the Chowanoke settlements of present-day Hertford County…

Read the entire article here.