Mixed Race Studies

Are you ‘diverse’?

The Boston Globe
2012-05-05

Dante Ramos, Deputy Editorial Page Editor

In the mid-’90s, around the time Elizabeth Warren’s name was appearing on a list of minority law professors, I was applying for entry-level reporting jobs at dozens of newspapers. In a few cases — one of which involved a summer job at a paper tartly critical of affirmative action — something odd happened. First came the nibble of interest; later, the bashful questions: What, exactly, was my ethnic background? Perhaps I’d like to be considered for a minority internship?

At the time, I was in my early 20s, underemployed, and eager to please. But did I qualify? It was hard to say. One of my parents is Filipino; the other is white; my surname is Spanish. Still, I disliked the implication that my dull, dutiful stories, which I’d clipped to my resume, were suddenly fascinating if their author were less ambiguously ethnic. What grated most — what steered me away from these strange, unbidden opportunities — was that no one asked: Are you actually disadvantaged in some way? Does your ethnicity relate in any way to what you’ve written?

Which brings us back to Elizabeth Warren. We may never know whether she played up her scant Native American ancestry to advance her academic career. But whatever the flap says about the Harvard law professor’s US Senate campaign, it also reflects badly on the ham-fisted, box-checking approach that many employers once took toward diversity — and that some still use today…

…Yet if Warren handled this subject badly, let’s admit that it’s impossible to handle well. The question still lurks: Are you “diverse” or not? For mixed-race Americans who mean neither to exploit their ancestry nor minimize it, politely brushing aside the issue is harder than it seems.

Meanwhile, the usual ethnic categories keep blurring at the edges; the 2010 census counted over 9 million Americans as multiracial. Yet as The New York Times reported last summer, many elite colleges still can’t say how multiracial applicants fit in with their diversity goals. So applicants are left to fret: Check every box that applies, or hope that skipping the question entirely won’t keep you from getting in?…

Read the entire article here.

How Scuffletown Became Indian Country: Political Change and Transformations in Indian identity in Robeson County, North Carolina, 1865-1956

University of Washington
2008
267 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3328369
ISBN: 9780549817246

Anna Bailey

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

According to census reports, there were no Indians in Robeson County, North Carolina in the decades leading up to the Civil War. But as the war ended and Reconstruction began, a community, known today as the Lumbee Indians, moved from the category of mulatto into the category of Indian. My dissertation charts the emergence and evolution of Lumbee Indian identity. I argue that Lumbee identity was continually transformed in the midst of political struggles from the end of the Civil War through the post-World War II era. From the end of the Civil War to the 1930s, Lumbee identity was forged in the regional crucible of Reconstruction and Jim Crow politics and articulated through the local institutions of Indian-only churches and schools in Robeson County. Beginning in the 1930s and through the post-World War II era, national developments molded expressions of Lumbee Indian identity. The Great Depression, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, and the onset of World War II shifted the markers of Lumbee identity from churches, schools, and kinship networks to nationally recognized indices of Indianness such as measurements of Indian blood quantum, line of tribal descent, and recognizably Indian cultural traditions. By highlighting the change in Lumbee identity from a regional entity to a nationally inflected construct, this dissertation illuminates the interconnection between the contours of Lumbee identity and the shifting political landscape in Robeson County from the end of the Civil War through the World War II era.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• Chapter One: How an Outlaw became an Indian: Henry Berry Lowry and the Conservative Press, 1865-1872
• Chapter Two: Separating Out: The Emergence of Croatan Indian Identity, 1872-1900
• Chapter Three: “It is the center to which we should cling”: The Indian School System in Robeson County during Jim Crow, 1900-1930
• Chapter Four: National Events in Robeson County: The Great Depression, Indian Reorganization Act and Anthropometry, 1930-1940
• Chapter Five: “You’re the Lumbee Problem”: Social Scientist and Cultural Expressions of Indian Identity in the 1940s and Beyond
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.

The Social Construction of Race and Monacan Education in Amherst County, Virginia, 1908–1965: Monacan Perspectives

History of Education Quarterly
Volume 47, Issue 4 (November 2007)
pages 389–415
DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-5959.2007.00107.x

Melanie D. Haimes-Bartolf
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia

That’s all you heard, everywhere we went, or whatever we done, “oh, he’s one of those issues.” We couldn’t work with white people, we couldn’t be in schools with them, we couldn’t associate with them, we couldn’t eat |with them). I think they came up with the slang word “free issue.” They had this hatred; they just had this ungodly hatred. They couldn’t accept you as a human.

At the prodding of Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia General Assembly in 1782 passed legislation that allowed slave owners to manumit their slaves by issuing slaves a copy of their emancipation papers and making them “free issues.”‘ Nevertheless, in Amherst County, Virginia, the meaning of “free issue” evolved to connote something very different than it did at its inception for a small mountain community.

In 1953, the school board of Amherst County, Virginia, approved plans for new white and black high schools, and the State Board of Education made it possible for Pamunkey and Mattaponi Indian children of Virginia’s tidewater to finish their education beyond the eighth grade at accredited Indian high schools outside Virginia. Notwithstanding, there was a group of children living in the Tobacco Row Mountains at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains for whom educational opportunity beyond the seventh grade would remain largely out of reach for another decade…

Read or purchase the article here.

American Indian Identity and Blood Quantum in the 21st Century: A Critical Review

Journal of Anthropology
Volume 2011 (2011)
Article ID 549521
9 pages
DOI: 10.1155/2011/549521

Ryan W. Schmidt
Department of Anthropology
University of Montana

Identity in American Indian communities has continually been a subject of contentious debate among legal scholars, federal policy-makers, anthropologists, historians, and even within Native American society itself. As American Indians have a unique relationship with the United States, their identity has continually been redefined and reconstructed over the last century and a half. This has placed a substantial burden on definitions for legal purposes and tribal affiliation and on American Indians trying to self-identify within multiple cultural contexts. Is there an appropriate means to recognize and define just who is an American Indian? One approach has been to define identity through the use of blood quantum, a metaphorical construction for tracing individual and group ancestry. This paper will review the utility of blood quantum by examining the cultural, social, biological, and legal implications inherent in using such group membership and, further, how American Indian identity is being affected.

1. Introduction

Identity in American Indian communities and the ability to define tribal membership has continually been a subject of contentious debate. To obtain federal recognition and protection, American Indians, unlike any other American ethnic group, must constantly prove their identity, which in turn, forces them to adopt whatever Indian histories or identities are needed to convince themselves and others of their Indian identity, and thus their unique cultural heritage. Is there an appropriate means to recognize and define just what and who is an Indian? Should it be necessary for federal officials and tribes to continually reconstruct definitions to suit the present sociopolitical climate for American Indian identity? These questions need to be answered in light of American Indian identity politics, including how race serves as a basis for the exclusion or inclusion of “mixed bloods” within tribal communities and the United States society as a whole. In this context, identity has become one of the great issues of contestation in an increasingly multicultural and “multiracial” society.

One approach to answer these complex questions since initial contact between Native American tribes and European Americans has been to define identity through the use of blood quantum, a metaphorical, and increasingly physiological construction for tracing individual and group ancestry. Initially used by the federal government to classify “Indianness” during the late 1800s in the United States, many American Indian tribes have adopted the use of blood quantum to define membership in the group. This paper will explore the utility of blood quantum by examining the cultural, biological, political, and legal implications inherent through such a restricted use of group membership. In addition, blood quantum (and other genetic methods) as a way of tracing descent will be critiqued in favor of adopting a cultural-specific approach that allows inclusive membership and criteria not based upon one’s genetic and biophysical makeup. By reducing the reliance on blood quantum to define membership, American Indians can start moving away from an imposed racial past which was artificially created in the first place…

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

A Seminole Warrior Cloaked in Defiance

Smithsonian Magazine
October 2010

Owen Edwards

A pair of woven, beaded garters reflects the spirit of Seminole warrior Osceola

Infinity of nations,” a new permanent exhibition encompassing nearly 700 works of indigenous art from North, Central and South America, opens October 23 at the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The objects include a pair of woven, beaded garters worn by Billy Powell of the Florida Seminole tribe.
 
Billy Powell is hardly a household name. But his Seminole designation—Osceola—resonates in the annals of Native American history and the nation’s folklore. Celebrated by writers, studied by scholars, he was a charismatic war leader who staunchly resisted the uprooting of the Seminoles by the U.S. government; the garters testify to his sartorial style.
 
Born in Tallassee, Alabama, in 1804, Powell (hereafter Osceola) was of mixed blood. His father is thought to have been an English trader named William Powell, though his­torian Patricia R. Wickman, author of Osceola’s Legacy, believes he may have been a Creek Indian who died soon after Osceola was born. His mother was part Muscogee and part Caucasian. At some point, likely around 1814, when he and his mother moved to Florida to live among Creeks and Seminoles, Osceola began to insist he was a pure-blood Indian.
 
“He identified himself as an Indian,” says Cécile Ganteaume, an NMAI curator and organizer of the “Infinity of Nations” exhibition…

…“He was a bit flamboyant,” says historian Donald L. Fixico of Arizona State University, who is working on a book about Osceola. “Someone in his situation—a man of mixed blood living among pure-blood Seminoles—would have to try hard to prove himself as a leader and a warrior. He wanted to draw attention to himself by dressing in a finer way.”…

Read the entire article here.

Real Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood [Review by Steve George]

Ethnicities
Volume 27, Number 2 (2005)
Pages 272–274

Steve George
Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland

Real Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood. By Bonita Lawrence. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. Pp. 303, bibliography, index, ISBN 0-7748-1103 -X)

The title of Lawrence’s book is as direct as it is provocative. The book’s title states the book’s purpose to examine the central and perhaps most volatile question in Aboriginal communities today: “Who is an Indian?” In 2003, Lawrence edited Strong Women Stories: Native Vision and Community Survival (Sumach Press) with Kim Anderson and in many respects this new work is a continuation of the voices heard in that book. Lawrence is a Mi’kmaq scholar whose research at Queen’s University, and more recently at York University, has concerned how “Indian/nativeness” is defined in Euro-Canadian and Native contexts, from within historical and legal paradigms as well as within native communities across Canada.

Bonita Lawrence’s work is a continuation of powerful works like Howard Adams’ Prison of Grass (1975) and Maria Campbell’s Half-Breed (1973) and more recent works by Joseph Bruchac, Bowman’s Store (Lee & Low Books, 2001) and Warren Carriou’s, Lake of the Prairies (Anchor, 2003). It has the depth of these works because we read mixed-blood peoples’ voices directly from the page. The importance of these voices lies in how each of these persons tells their stories, relates their experiences, and shares their family and community histories. Lawrence’s style of writing is easy to read while her research approach is organic in its having informants speak for themselves.

As a mixed-blood Mi’kmaw, I read this book from both a very personal level of experience as well as from an academic one, as a Masters graduate student in Folklore. In Canada the subject of mixed-blood Native people remains a controversial one from within native communities and from without, in the large urban centres across the country. Lawrence has interviewed several mixed-blood informants to tell stories that show the different kinds of experiences mixed-bloods have had in the city of Toronto and across North America. Some of these narratives involve pain, abuse, neglect, and lack of self worth, while others involve stories of empowerment, community involvement, and survival. Each one of the informants speaks from life experiences that involve a mix of acceptance and non-acceptance of their “Indian/nativeness,” both from within themselves, from their families as well as from different native communities. The responses interviewees give Lawrence are direct and bear fruit to the underreported and underwritten subject of mixed-blood Native peoples…

Read the entire review here.

The Croatan Indians of Sampson County, North Carolina: Their Origin and Racial Status. A Plea for Separate Schools (Electronic Edition)

The Seeman Printery, Durham, North Carolina
1916
65 pages

George Edwin Butler (1868-1941)

Text transcribed by Apex Data Services, Inc.
Images scanned by Tampathia Evans
Text encoded by Apex Data Services, Inc., Tampathia Evans and Jill Kuhn Sexton
First edition, 2002

CONTENTS

• A Petition of the Indians of Sampson County
• HISTORICAL SKETCH
  • Historical
  • The Croatans
  • White’s Lost Colony
  • Their Wanderings and Location
  • Political and Educational History
  • First Separate Schools for Croatans
  • Marriage with Negroes Forbidden
  • Separate Schools in Other Counties
  • Separate Schools in Sampson
  • Why the Indian School in Sampson was Repealed
  • Indian Tax Payers in Sampson
  • Easily Recognized as Indians
  • They Were Never Slaves
  • Formerly Eroneously Classed as Negroes
  • Laws of State Recognize Them as Separate Race
  • State Provides Colleges for Whites and Negroes but not for Indians
  • Indians Justly Proud of Their History
  • Better Educational Facilities Should be Provided
  • Indian Taxes in Sampson
  • Sampson Exceeds all Other Counties, Except Robeson, in Indian Polls and Property
  • Family Relationship Between Robeson and Sampson Croatans
  • New Bethel Indian School
  • Shiloh Indian School
  • The Indian Photographs and Pictures
• SKETCH OF PROMINENT INDIAN FAMILIES OF SAMPSON
  • The Emanuel Family
  • The Maynor Family
  • The Brewington Family
  • The Jones Family
  • The Simmons Family
  • The Jacobs Family
  • Indian Families of Sampson

ILLUSTRATIONS

• The Croatan Normal School at Pembroke Frontispiece
• New Bethel Indian School
• Shiloh Indian Sunday School
• Jonah Manuel and Family
• Enoch Manuel and Wife
• William J. Bledsole and Wife
• Luther Bledsole and Children and Henry Bledsole and Wife
• Hardy A. Brewington
• Group of Boys and Girls
• Lee Locklear, Steve Lowrey, French Locklear
• Levander Manuel
• June Brewington
• C. D. Brewington
• Jonathan Goodman
• William Simmons
• Betsy J. Simmons
• Enoch Manuel, Jr., and Family
• Henry Bledsole and Wife

Read the entire book here.

“Mixed-Blood” Indians in Southern New England

TalkingFeather Radio
Blogtalk Radio
2009-07-15

The historical connections of Native Americans and African people is not a topic that is often discussed in classrooms, nor is it found in elementary, middle and high school history books. The trading that went on with Africans who sailed to this continent and Indigenous people of Mexico, the islands and parts of Central America before Columbus is often overlooked. Relationships were forged by trade and by blood for hundreds of years and yet many people do not know about this rich story. Our guest on the Talking Feather is Julieanne Jennings, who is Cheroenhaka Nottaway Native American, will talk about this history as it relates to the New England Indigenous people. For more than 15 years, she has been teaching children and adults about the history and culture of the Native people in southern New England. She currently teaches a first year program liberal arts colloquium entitled “Mixed-Blood Indians in Southern New England at Eastern Connecticut State University. Jennings is the author of several books and journal articles, and has co-authored Understanding Algonquian Indian Words and A Cultural History of the Native People of Southern New England. In 2009, she received Congressional Recognition from the United States Senate from Rhode Island’s Women of the Year Award event for cultural enrichment. Join us in this dialogue as we dispel the myths and get to the truth.

Download the episode here.

Fading Roles of Fictive Kinship: Mixed-Blood Racial Isolation and United States Indian Policy in the Lower Missouri River Basin, 1790-1830

Kansas State University, Manhattan
2012
124 pages

Zachary Charles Isenhower

A THESIS submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree MASTER OF ARTS Department of History College of Arts and Sciences

On June 3, 1825, William Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and eleven representatives of the “Kanzas” nation signed a treaty ceding their lands to the United States. The first to sign was “Nom-pa-wa-rah,” the overall Kansa leader, better known as White Plume. His participation illustrated the racial chasm that had opened between Native- and Anglo- American worlds. The treaty was designed to ease pressures of proximity in Missouri and relocate multiple nations West of the Mississippi, where they believed they would finally be beyond the American lust for land.

White Plume knew different. Through experience with U.S. Indian policy, he understood that land cessions only restarted a cycle of events culminating in more land cessions. His identity as a mixed-blood, by virtue of the Indian-white ancestry of many of his family, opened opportunities for that experience. Thus, he attempted in 1825 to use U.S. laws and relationships with officials such as William Clark to protect the future of the Kansa. The treaty was a cession of land to satisfy conflicts, but also a guarantee of reserved land, and significantly, of a “halfbreed” tract for mixed-blood members of the Kansa Nation.

Mixed-blood go-betweens stood for a final few moments astride a widening chasm between Anglo-American and native worlds. It was a space that less than a century before offered numerous opportunities for mixed-blood people to thrive as intermediaries, brokers, traders, and diplomats. They appeared, albeit subtly, in interactions wherever white and Native worlds overlapped. As American Indians lost their economic viability and eventually their land, that overlap disappeared. White Plume’s negotiation of a reserve for his descendants is telling of a group left without a place. In bridging the two worlds, mixed-bloods became a group that by the mid-nineteenth century was defined as “other” by Anglo-American and Indians alike. This study is the first to track these evolving racial constructs and roles over both time and place. Previous studies have examined mixed-blood roles, but their identity is portrayed as static. This study contends that their roles changed with the proximity and viability of full-blood communities with which white officials had to negotiate.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Chapter 1 – A Supporting Cast: Mixed-Blood Indians in the Historical Narrative of the Frontier
  • Introduction
  • A Frontier From Each Side
  • Negotiated Social Norms
  • An Evolution of Perception
• Chapter 2 – Thriving In-Between: Mixed-Blood Indians Before 1790
  • Nous sommes touts Sauvages: White and Indian in the “Middle Ground”
  • Domino Theory: Trade, Allies, and Foreign Policy
  • “Probably Thou Are Not a Chief:” The United States Enters as a Frontier Power
• Chapter 3 – Racialization and Reduced Leverage: Perceptions and Realities of the Frontier in the Jeffersonian Vision
  • Fathers and Brothers: Mixed-Blood Indians and the Genesis of Assimilationist Policy
  • Hospitable Savages
• Chapter 4 – A Chasm Opens: Land Cession and the Loss of Place After the Fur Trade
  • “Ardent Spirits:” Decline of the Fur Trade, Adaptation, and the Deterioration of “Full-Blood” Communities
  • “The Bad Feeling That Now Exists:” Land Cession and a Perception of Betrayal
  • Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

A Heritage Celebration: Event recognizes both Hispanic and Native American roots with symposium and several performances

San Marcos Daily Record
San Marcos, Texas

2011-08-12

San Marcos — San Marcos will experience a unique, two-in-one heritage celebration in a combination of two nationally recognized heritage months — Hispanic and Native American — on Saturday, Oct. 1 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos, 211 Lee Street.

A Sunday Matinee will also take place at 3 p.m. the next day at the Texas Music Theater.

“We’re bringing attention to the fact that most Hispanics in Texas have Native American ancestors and can celebrate two national heritage months,” says Dr. Mario Garza, chair of the Indigenous Cultures Institute that is producing this event. “Most Hispanics can legitimately embrace a Native American identity because they still retain much of their indigenous culture like customs, foods and even their Native language.”…

…“Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez will be one of the speakers in our Indigenous-Hispanics Symposium,” said Dr. Lydia French, managing editor of Nakum, the Institute’s online journal. “Dr. Rodriguez is one of the major figures in the historic struggle against the Arizona legislature’s anti immigrant law SB 1070 and ban on ethnic studies programs.”…

…Dr. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández and Margaret E. Cantú-Sánchez will be joining Dr. Rodriguez as presenters on the “Education: The Indigenity Challenge” panel.  Dr. Guidotti- Hernández teaches Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona and her published articles include “Reading Violence, Making Chicana Subjectivities” and “Dora the Explorer, Constructing ‘Latinidades’ and the Politics of Global Citizenship.”

Cantú-Sánchez is pursuing her doctorate degree in English at the University of Texas at San Antonio and is developing her “mestizaje” theory, which proposes that a balance of cultural and institutional philosophies of human knowledge ensures a better grasp of one’s identity…

Read the entire article here.