Mixed Race Studies

A Mestizaje of Epistemologies in American Indian Stories and Ceremony

Nakum
Volume 2.1 (2011)
49 paragraphs

Margaret Cantú-Sánchez
Department of English
University of Texas, San Antonio

A close examination of Native American literature reveals that some Native Americans find it difficult to retain ties to their cultural epistemologies once introduced to the assimilationist pedagogies of U.S. schools. In some cases, their cultures, ethnicities, and communal epistemologies are completely rejected by U.S. school systems. Such rejections have created feelings of regret, alienation, fear of failure, and confusion. For the purposes of this article, I focus on the alienation that Native Americans, specifically members of the Dakota and Laguna Pueblo tribes, experience once they are subjected to the assimilationist, patriarchal methods of the U.S. education system. I frame my exploration of this dilemma with the following questions: how do U.S. school systems affect Native Americans’ tribal identity and the Native student’s interaction with his/her family and community, and what can Native American do to reconcile the institutional education they achieve in school with indigenous knowledge? A possible solution emerges when Native Americans encounter the education/indigenous knowledge conflict, an imbalance of epistemologies caused by the clash between U.S. institutional education and indigenous knowledge, an imbalance leading to alienation from school and/or Native students’ home/cultural communities. Acknowledgement of this conflict is the first step towards one solution embodied in a mestizaje of epistemologies, a balance of institutional education and indigenous knowledge…

Read the entire article here.

Doubters and Dreamers

University of Arizona Press
2011
96 pages
5.50 in x 8.50 in
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-2927-8

Janice Gould

Doubters and Dreamers opens with a question from a young girl faced with the spectacle of Indian effigies lynched and burned “in jest” before UC Berkeley’s annual Big Game against Stanford: “What’s a debacle, Mom?” This innocent but telling question marks the girl’s entrée into the complicated knowledge of her heritage as a mixed-blood Native American of Koyangk’auwi (Concow) Maidu descent. The girl is a young Janice Gould, and the poems and narrations that follow constitute a remarkable work of sustained and courageous self-revelation, retracing the precarious emotional terrain of an adolescence shaped by a mother’s tough love and a growing consciousness of an ancestral and familial past.

In the first half of the book, “Tribal History,” Gould ingeniously repurposes the sonnet form to preserve the stories of her mother and aunt, who grew up when “muleback was the customary mode / of transport” and the “spirit world was present”—stories of “old ways” and places claimed in memory but lost in time. Elsewhere, she remembers her mother’s “ferocious, upright anger” and her unexpected tenderness (“Like a miracle, I was still her child”), culminating in the profound expression of loss that is the poem “Our Mother’s Death.”

In the second half of the book, “It Was Raining,” Gould tells of the years of lonely self-making and “unfulfilled dreams” as she comes to terms with what she has been told are her “crazy longings” as a lesbian: “It’s been hammered into me / that I’ll be spurned / by a ‘real woman,’ / the only kind I like.” The writing here commemorates old loves and relationships in language that mingles hope and despair, doubt and devotion, veering at times into dreamlike moments of consciousness. One poem and vignette at a time, Doubters and Dreamers explores what it means to be a mixed-blood Native American who grew up urban, lesbian, and middle class in the West.

Read an excerpt here.

The Ramapo Mountain People

Rutgers University Press
1974
306 pages
46 b&w illus.
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-1195-5

David Steven Cohen

Northwest of Manhattan where the New York–New Jersey boundary crosses the tree-covered ridges and hollows ridges and hollows of the Ramapo Mountains there is a group of about 1,500 racially mixed people who have long been referred to by journalists and historians as the “Jackson Whites.”

In a study combining tee disciplines of anthropology, sociology, folklore, and history, David Cohen found that the old stories about these people were legends, not history.

He found no reliable evidence that their ancestors were Tuscarora Indians, Hessian deserters from the British army, escaped slaves, and British and West Indian prostitutes imported by a sea captain named Jackson for the pleasure of British soldiers occupying Manhattan during the War for Independence.

David Cohen lived among the Ramapo Mountain People for a year, conducting genealogical research into church records, deeds, wills, and inventories in county courthouses and libraries. He established that their ancestors included free black landowners in New York City and mulattoes with some Dutch ancestry who were among the first pioneers to settle in the Hackensack River Valley of New Jersey.

In describing his findings and his experiences, Professor Cohen shows how their racially mixed ancestry, their special family and kinship system, and their intergroup attitudes and folkways distinguish and socially isolate these people as a separate racial group today, despite modern communications and transportation and their proximity to New York City.

Carolina Genesis: Beyond the Color Line

Backintyme Publishing
April 2010
258 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780939479320

Edited by

Scott Withrow

Borderlands of “Racial” Identity

Some Americans pretend that a watertight line separates the “races.” But most know that millions of mixed-heritage families crossed from one “race” to another over the past four centuries. Every essay in this collection tells such a tale. Each speaks with a different style and to different interests. But taken together, the seven articles paint a portrait, unsurpassed in the literature, of migrations, challenges, and triumphs over “racial” obstacles.

Stacy Webb tells of families of mixed ancestry who pioneered westward paths from the Carolinas into the colonial wilderness, paths now known as Cumberland Road, Natchez Trace, Three-Chopped Way, and others. They migrated, not in search of wealth or exploration, but to escape the injustice of America’s hardening “racial” barrier.

Govinda Sanyal’s astonishing research uses mtDNA markers to trace a single female lineage that winds its way through prehistoric Yemen, North Africa, Moorish Spain, the Sephardic diaspora, colonial Mexico, and finally escapes the Inquisition by assimilating into a Native American tribe, ending up in South Carolina. He fleshes out the DNA thread with documented genealogy, so we get to know their names, their lives, their struggles.

Cyndie Goins Hoelscher focuses on a specific family that scattered from the Carolinas. One branch fled to Texas, becoming friends with Sam Houston and participating in the founding of that state. Other bands fought in the war of 1812, or migrated to Florida or the Gulf coast. Nowadays, Goins descendants can be found in nearly every state and are of nearly every “race.”

Scott Withrow (the collection’s editor) concentrates on the saga of one individual of mixed ancestry. Joseph Willis was born into a community of color in South Carolina. He migrated to Louisiana, was accepted as a White man, founded one of the first churches in the area, and became one of the region’s best-loved and most fondly remembered Christian ministers.

S. Pony Hill recounts the historic struggles of South Carolina’s Cheraw tribe, in a reprint of Chapter 5 of his book, Strangers in Their Own Land.

Marvin Jones tells the history of the “Winton Triangle,” a section of North Carolina populated by successful families of mixed ancestry from colonial times until the mid-20th century. They fought for the Union, founded schools, built businesses, and thrived through adversity until the civil rights movement of 1955-65 ended legal segregation.

K. Paul Johnson traces the history of North Carolina’s antebellum Quakers. The once-strong community dissolved as it grew morally opposed to slavery. Those who stayed true to their faith migrated north. Those who remained slaveowners left the church. The worst stress was the Nat Turner event. Its aftermath helped turn the previously permeable color line into the harsh endogamous barrier that exists today.

Table of Contents

• Introduction by Scott Withrow
• They Were Other: Free Persons of Color, Restrictive Laws and Migration Patterns by Stacy R. Webb
• The Amorgarickakan Lineage of Sarah Junco by Govinda Sanyal
• Judging the Moore County Goings / Goyens / Goins Family 1790-1884 by Cyndie Goins Hoelscher
• Joseph Willis: Carolinian and Free Person of Color by Scott Withrow
• The Leading Edge of Edges: The Tri-racial People of the Winton Triangle by Marvin T. Jones
• The Cheraws of Sumter County, South Carolina by S. Pony Hill
• Dismal Swamp Quakers on the Color Line by K. Paul Johnson
• Meet The Authors

Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England

University of Minnesota Press
2010
296 pages
25 b&w photos, 2 tables
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-6578-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-6577-8

Jean M. O’Brien, (White Earth Ojibwe) Professor of History
University of Minnesota

Across nineteenth-century New England, antiquarians and community leaders wrote hundreds of local histories about the founding and growth of their cities and towns. Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the cradle of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England’s original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled.

In Firsting and Lasting, Jean M. O’Brien argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, as well as censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations, O’Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness.

In order to convince themselves that the Indians had vanished despite their continued presence, O’Brien finds that local historians and their readers embraced notions of racial purity rooted in the century’s scientific racism and saw living Indians as “mixed” and therefore no longer truly Indian. Adaptation to modern life on the part of Indian peoples was used as further evidence of their demise. Indians did not—and have not—accepted this effacement, and O’Brien details how Indians have resisted their erasure through narratives of their own. These debates and the rich and surprising history uncovered in O’Brien’s work continue to have a profound influence on discourses about race and indigenous rights.

Driving FORCE Métis community significant economic resource

Winnipeg Free Press
2012-03-17

Barbara Bowes

Although time has passed quickly, I’m sure you’ll recall that Manitoba recently celebrated Louis Riel Day. For most people, Louis Riel Day is simply another statutory holiday while for others, it is recognition that the Métis people were the driving force behind Manitoba becoming Canada’s fifth province.

Many people and especially new immigrants are not familiar with the term Métis, nor its historical significance. To help bring about a better understanding, we define the Métis people as one of the aboriginal groups that can trace their ancestral heritage to marriages of mixed First Nations and European heritage. And today, 144 years later, our Métis citizens are once again being seen as a driving force in Manitoba’s economy.

Yet, if the Métis people are indeed a driving force in the economy, where are they located? How can they be accessed as potential employees?

Believe it or not, if you checked recent demographic data, you’ll find there are over 100,000 Métis people in Manitoba living in various communities. Over half of this population is under the age of 30 and lives in an urban setting. However, in spite of having the highest rate of post-secondary education completion of all aboriginal groups in the province, the Métis median income is 24 per cent lower than for non-aboriginal people.

As you can imagine, a population of 100,000 represents a significant and relatively untapped resource in terms of employment and business partnerships. The challenge now is how to create a co-ordinated effort to link potential job candidates with employers so they can work together as partners in Manitoba’s economic growth…

Read the entire article here.

For A Century, The First Underground Railroad Ran Slaves South To Florida (PHOTOS)

The Huffington Post
2012-03-18

Bruce Smith, Associated Press

CHARLESTON, S.C. — While most Americans are familiar with the Underground Railroad that helped Southern slaves escape north before the Civil War, the first clandestine path to freedom ran for more than a century in the opposite direction.

Stories of that lesser-known “railroad” will be shared June 20-24 at the National Underground Railroad Conference in St. Augustine, Fla. The network of sympathizers gave refuge to those fleeing their masters, including many American Indians who helped slaves escape to what was then the Spanish territory of Florida. That lasted from shortly after the founding of Carolina Colony in 1670 to after the American Revolution.

They escaped not only to the South but to Mexico, the Caribbean and the American West.

And the “railroad” helps to explain at least in part why the lasting culture of slave descendants – known as Gullah in South Carolina and Geechee in Florida and Georgia – exists along the northeastern Florida coast.

“It’s a fascinating story and most people in America are stuck – they are either stuck on 1964 and the Civil Rights Act or they are stuck on the Civil War,” said Derek Hankerson, who is a Gullah descendant and a small business owner in St. Augustine, Fla. “We have been hankering to share these stories.”…

…Slaves likely started fleeing toward Florida when South Carolina was established in 1670, said Jane Landers, a Vanderbilt University historian who has researched the subject extensively. The first mention of escaped slaves in Spanish records was in 1687 when eight slaves, including a nursing baby, showed up in St. Augustine.

Spain refused to return them and instead gave them religious sanctuary, and that policy was formalized in 1693. The only condition is that those seeking sanctuary convert to Catholicism.

“It was a total shift in the geopolitics of the Caribbean and after that anyone who leaves a Protestant area to request sanctuary gets it,” Landers said.

Read the entire article here.

Spotlight on Jon Veilie: A Man on a Thirteen Year Mission

The Modern American
Volume 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2005)
Article 8
pages 22-23

Lydia Edwards

It all started one month after he passed the bar. Sylvia Davis, a black Seminole, came to Jon for help. She had been to many lawyers already. She told Jon Velie her story about how her 13 year old son was denied clothing benefits because he is black. “It hit me as obviously wrong. So I naively took the case on a contingency basis not knowing there would be no real payment. I naively thought I could inform the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the tribe they missed this.” What Jon really stepped into was something like the uphill civil rights battles of the 1960s. “It was straight up racism in conversations with the involved parties including the tribe and BIA; the ‘N word’ was thrown all around.” For his entire legal career, Jon Velie has sought to bring justice to Ms. Davis and other black Seminoles as well as black Cherokees.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Jon Velie graduated from University of Oklahoma Law School in 1993. As an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley he was a Native American studies major. During law school he was a research assistant for Rennard Stickland, a renown Indian Law scholar who is now Dean of Oregon Law School. Before attending U.C. Berkeley, Jon had already developed an affinity for Native American issues. As a child he grew up in the Absentee Shawnee tribal community. Many of his friends were from the tribe and he was exposed to sacred activities otherwise unseen by outsiders. His father, Alan Velie, taught the first course in contemporary Indian studies.

Alan Velie was a Shakespearean professor at the Oklahoma University in the 1970s in the midst of the American Indian rights movement when he was approached by Native American students and agreed to teach a course on American Indian literature. At the time, all the courses taught about Native Americans were concentrated on the past and more in the anthropological sense. He now travels the world talking about Native American literature and has written seven books on the subject.

WHO ARE THE BLACK INDIANS?

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Five Civilized Tribes (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Creek) have had long traditions of African membership and enslavement. The Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes had a form of African slavery that closely mirrored that of Southern white plantation owners. The Seminole tribe, however, has had a unique relationship with its African members. The Seminole tribe and its African members (commonly referred to as Freedmen Freedmen) have coexisted together since the 16th Century. Many slaves of white plantation owners ran away to live with the Seminole tribe. Both Seminole Wars were fought over the number of runaway slaves who lived with the tribe. African members could intermarry and take on positions of leadership. Many served as translators between the Spanish, the tribe, and southern white plantation owners.

During the Civil War, the Five Civilized Tribes fought with the Confederacy against the Union. After the war, all of the tribes signed treaties with the United States government in order to maintain their sovereignty and reinstitute an autonomous government. In all of their treaties, there were clauses ordering the tribes to free their slaves and treat them and their descendants equally. Over the years, Congress and the courts have enforced the treaties to assure equal rights for the black Indians. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Congress set up the Dawes Commission to record all the members of respective Indian Tribes. Their records are called the Dawes Rolls. The commission recorded black Indians on separate rolls for all of the tribes. Cherokees and Seminoles that were ¾ white were recorded on a “full blood” list while their black members were enrolled on the Freedmen list. The quantity of Indian blood of each black Indian was not recorded by the Dawes Commission…

Read the entire article here.

Coloring: An Investigation of Racial Identity Politics within the Black Indian Community

Georgia State University
2007
106 pages

Charlene Jeanette Graham

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts In the College of Arts and Sciences

Historical interconnections between Native Americans and many people of African descent in America created a group of Black Indians whose lineage continues today. Though largely unrecognized, they remain an important racially mixed group. Through analysis using qualitative feminist methodologies, this thesis examines the history and analyzes the narratives of African-Native American females regarding their racial identity and political claims of tribal citizenship. Their socialization, which includes kin keeping, extended families and the sharing of family stories, allows them to claim native ancestry because of the information usually passed down to them from mothers, grandmothers, aunts and other family members. Their culture and identity revealed that Black Indian women have particular attitudes regarding their racial identity. I conclude my investigation with the suggestion that Native and African American studies can be instrumental as an alternative method of studying American race relations and the ways race intersects with gender in the formation of identity politics.

Read the entire thesis here.

Anthropology 324L/American Studies 321: The Black Indian Experience in the United States

University of Texas, Austin
Fall 2011

Circe Dawn Sturm, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Texas, Austin

This course explores the entwined histories, cultures and identities of African American and Native American people in the United States. Long neglected in popular and scholarly accounts, the Black Indian experience sheds light on comparative histories and legacies of racial formation, as well as the conjoined role that these two groups played in the emergence of the United States as an independent nation. Students will be exposed to a range of voices, including Black Indian artists, scholars and activists, as well as other scholars working in a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, history, Native American Studies, African American Studies, American Studies and women’s studies. The readings will range from primary historical documents and ethnographies, to creative and autobiographical accounts. Course content will cover key issues and topics critical to Black Indian communities, such as US settler colonialism, American Indian slaveholding, cultural and linguistic exchange, kinship practices, forms of resistance, and ongoing struggles for tribal citizenship, with an in depth focus on several different tribes as they are represented in the required texts. Throughout the course, we will focus particular attention on how American race making practices have shaped Native American and African American views of one another and overshadowed the contexts in which they have interacted. Students are also required to consider how their own perceptions of race, culture, and indigeneity might limit their understanding of how American Indians, African Americans, and those of both heritages, answer the question, “Who am I,” for themselves.