Mixed Race Studies

Blacks, Black Indians, Afromexicans: the Dynamics of Race, Nation, and Identity in a Mexican Moreno Community (Guerrero)

American Ethnologist
Volume 27, Issue 4, November 2000
pages 898–626
DOI: 10.1525/ae.2000.27.4.898

Laura A. Lewis, Professor of Anthropology
James Madison University

In this article, I explore identity formation in Mexico from the perspective of residents of San Nicolás Tolentino, a village located on the Costa Chica, a historically black region of the southern Pacific Coast of Guerrero. Outsiders characterize San Nicolás’s residents as black, but in Mexico, national ideologies, anthropologies, and histories have traditionally worked to exclude or ignore blackness. Instead, the Spanish and Indian mestizo has been constituted as the quintessential Mexican, even as the Mexican past is tied to a romanticized and ideologically powerful Indian foundation. Ethnographic evidence suggests that San Nicolás’s “black” residents in fact see themselves as morenos, a term that signifies their common descent with Indians, whom they consider to be central to Mexicanness. As morenos interweave their identities, experiences, and descent with Indians, they also anchor themselves through Indians to the nation. These identity issues are complicated by the recent introduction to the coast of Africanness in the context of new national and scholarly projects reformulating the components of a new Mexican multicultural identity. In part, local morenos see Africanness as an outside imposition that conflicts with their sense of themselves as Mexican while it reinforces their political and economic marginality.

Read or purchase the article here.

This is Not a Biography: Pauline Johnson and the Process of National Identity

Canadian Poetry
Volume 48 (Spring/Summer 2001)

Shelley Hulan, Associate Professor of English
University of Waterloo, Canada

Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag. Paddling Her Own Canoe: the Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson–Tekahionwake. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000. 331 pp.

Anyone familiar with the literary criticism on early twentieth-century Canada knows that the writer and performer Pauline Johnson has long been a source of fascination for students of the period. Because she occupied both Native and White worlds, and because her work contributes something to dialogues on race, women, performance, and imperial identity in the young Canada, she has been the subject of several studies, most of them biographical. As biographies must, these examinations of the poet and performer seek the identity of their subject by attempting to recreate the person. Biographies often serve as bellwethers for the interests of the times when they are written, and the continuing appearance of new ones about Johnson demonstrates that she still provokes many questions for contemporary scholars. Biographies also require their authors to make inferences, sometimes tenuous, about the subject’s life on the basis of documentary evidence, sometimes sparse. This practice is especially difficult in the case of someone like Johnson, many of whose private papers were burned by her sister Eliza shortly after her death. In Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson–Tekahionwake, Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag do not attempt another biography of Johnson but undertake, instead, an analysis of the texts that she wrote in the contexts of her own time. Freeing themselves in this way from the necessity of heavy speculation on a life that is inaccessible to readers, they devote the book to a reconstruction of the milieu in which Johnson lived and to a scrutiny of writings by and about her.

This is an ambitious and exhaustively researched study, both in its quest for new documentary clues to Johnson’s situation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada and in its bibliographical search for Johnson’s many uncollected prose publications. Gerson and Strong-Boag believe that a thorough survey of Johnson’s writing is necessary in order to understand her place in the history of Canadian ideas. They forego nothing in Johnson’s life work, considering everything from her ode to Joseph Brant, which was read at the unveiling of the monument raised to the Native chief in 1886, to her early literary essays, her memoirs of her mother, and the occasional verse that she wrote for different towns on her performance circuit in later years. One of the fruits of their bibliographical research is a detailed chronology of her publications, a chronology that enables them to challenge the pattern of development into which other critics have persistently tried to place the poet-performer. Their inquiry into the expectations of the markets for which Johnson wrote suggests that writers like her addressed, at different times, two very different audiences. On one hand, there were the readers of Johnson’s poetry (which was largely unremunerated and found in anthologies and newspapers), and on the other there were the readers of her fiction and memoir-writing (which was paid writing for specific audiences with well-defined expectations). Framed by their research into her historical context and into her publication record, Gerson and Strong-Boag’s argument is that Johnson alternated between expressing popular Canadian imperialist sentiments and challenging prevailing preconceptions of Native peoples as vanishing, weak, and invisible.

Like Johnson’s biographers, Gerson and Strong-Boag view Johnson as a figure through whom many questions about turn-of-the-century Canadian culture may be asked, and they want to know how her many identities–as a woman, as a person of Mixed-race heritage, as a member of the middle class, and as a performer–made her such an enduring contributor “to the national imaginary” (11). The first chapter extensively reviews the various attitudes toward race at the end of the nineteenth century, dwelling particularly on ideas of racial hybridity in Canada. By examining a variety of texts published in Canada during Johnson’s lifetime, including anthropological studies of Native North Americans, newspaper clippings, and correspondence, Gerson and Strong-Boag argue that “in enforced encounters with English language, texts, and laws, Indians increasingly confronted attitudes that designated them and their traditions as subordinate” (27). In this way, they begin to outline the sense of conflict under which they subsequently argue that Johnson lived and worked. Johnson’s immediate family (she had a White mother and a Native father) captures the complicated situations of Native and Mixed-race persons who, like Johnson’s father, simultaneously held positions of authority on a Native reserve and worked closely with federal imperial authorities. The authors draw attention both to the mixed feelings of some Reserve members towards this Native elite and to the settler community’s equally noncommittal stance towards it, and they suggest that the two groups’ always-reluctant acceptance of Native leaders shaped Johnson’s early consciousness…

Read the entire review here.

Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake)

University of Toronto Press
June 2000
354 pages
Paper ISBN: 9780802080240
Cloth ISBN: 9780802041623

Veronica Strong-Boag, Professor of Women’s History
University of British Columbia

Carole Gerson, Professor of English
Royal Society of Canada at Simon Fraser University

Winner of the Raymond Klibansky Prize, awarded by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Frequently dismissed as a ‘nature poet’ and an ‘Indian Princess’ E. Pauline Johnson (1861-1913) was not only an accomplished thinker and writer but a contentious and passionate personality who ‘talked back’ to Euro-Canadian culture. “Paddling Her Own Canoe” is the only major scholarly study that examines Johnson’s diverse roles as a First Nations champion, New Woman, serious writer and performer, and Canadian nationalist.

A Native advocate of part-Mohawk ancestry, Johnson was also an independent, self-supporting, unmarried woman during the period of first-wave feminism. Her versatile writings range from extraordinarily erotic poetry to polemical statements about the rights of First Nations. Based on thorough research into archival and published sources, this volume probes the meaning of Johnson’s energetic career and addresses the complexities of her social, racial, and cultural position. While situating Johnson in the context of turn-of-the-century Canada, the authors also use current feminist and post-colonial perspectives to reframe her contribution. Included is the first full chronology ever compiled of Johnson’s writing.

Pauline Johnson was an extraordinary woman who crossed the racial and gendered lines of her time, and thereby confounded Canadian society. This study reclaims both her writings and her larger significance.

Métis identity matters

Winnipeg Free Press
2011-02-09

Editorial

The question of Métis identity has befuddled Canadians, governments and the courts ever since Louis Riel occupied Upper Fort Garry in 1869 and established a provisional government. Just who were these troublemakers, who had their own language, customs and practices, and who now claimed territorial rights?

Well, they weren’t First Nations and they weren’t Europeans, and they weren’t merely “half-breeds,” but a relatively new nation born in the fur-trading culture of 18th-century North America.

That was probably good enough, as definitions go, until 1982 when the Canadian Constitution guaranteed legal rights to aboriginal peoples, including the Métis, but left it to the courts to sort out those rights. Obviously, if they had rights, whatever those rights were, it mattered who and what was a Métis…

Read the entire editorial here.

Race and American Indian Tribal Nationhood

February 2009
44 pages

Matthew L. M. Fletcher, Professor of Law & Director of the Indigenous Law & Policy Center
Michigan State University

Forthcoming in a 2011 University of Wyoming Law Review issue.

American Indian tribes and nations are at a crossroads. One on hand, many tribes like the Cherokee Nation—mired in the politics and law of disenfranchising the Cherokee Freedmen—continue to hold to a citizenry based in race and ancestry. Federal Indian law tends to protect, and encourage, even the worst abuses of this regime. The United States long has adopted Indian blood quantum as a proxy for tribal citizenship, creating unfortunate paradoxes for Indian tribes and their citizens. For example, the Supreme Court just a few days ago in Carcieri v. Salazar held against an Indian tribe in Rhode Island on an important land case, perhaps, because the tribe’s citizens did not have significant blood quantum collectively.

But in most other cases, the Court is skeptical of tribal government authority because tribal citizenship is based at least in part on race. This means for the Court, especially Justice Kennedy, that non-Indians by blood or ancestry can never be citizens of an Indian tribes. And the Court worries that a tribal government seeking to assert jurisdiction over these persons somehow violates the social contract.

I argue, perhaps for the first time, that Indian tribes must move beyond race and ancestry as the single most important means of determining tribal citizenship. It will not be easy for Indian tribes to move beyond race and ancestry, but it is necessary if Indian nations wish to move beyond their status as an afterthought in the American constitutional structure and develop into more complete sovereign nations. I suggest several ways for Indian tribes to alter their citizenship criteria and recommend an incremental solution based on immigration law and policy.

Read the entire paper here.

A Race or a Nation? Cherokee National Identity and the Status of Freedmen’s Descendents

bepress Legal Series
Working Paper 1570
2006-08-17
72 pages

S. Alan Ray, President
Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, Illinois

The Cherokee Nation today faces the challenge of determining its citizenship criteria in the context of race. The article focuses on the Cherokee Freedmen. As former slaves of Cherokee citizens, the Freedmen were adopted into the Cherokee Nation after the Civil War pursuant to a treaty with the United States, and given unqualified rights of citizenship. The incorporation of the Freedmen into the tribe was resisted from the start, and now, faced with a decision of the Cherokee Nation’s highest court affirming the descendents’ citizenship rights, the Nation prepares to vote on a constitutional amendment which would impose an Indian “blood quantum” requirement for citizenship. If approved, potentially thousands of African-descended citizens would be eliminated from the tribal registry. In this Article, Professor Ray examines the legal and social history of the Cherokee Freedmen to criticize and reject definitions of Cherokee political identity based on either the federal Dawes Rolls of the allotment era, or notions of “Indian blood.” Both, he argues, are heteronymous authorities for determining tribal citizenship criteria and should be replaced by the critical hermeneutic of indigenous cultural resources. Professor Ray offers a model for constructing tribal citizenship criteria that attempts to deliver ancestry from biology, and law from legal fetishism of the Dawes Rolls. The wise use of sovereignty, he suggests, requires sustained dialogue between Freedmen’s descendents and Cherokees by ancestry, not the “quick fix” of the political process.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• I. LUCY ALLEN AND THE CHEROKEE FREEDMEN CONTROVERSY
• II. THE FREEDMEN CONTROVERSY AS A CRISIS OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDENTITY
  • A. A Race or a Nation? Identity by Blood or Base Roll
  • B. Cherokee Identity: Legal Definitions and their Limits
    • 1. Collective Definitions: The Cherokee Nation
    • 2. Individual Definitions: Citizenship in the Cherokee Nation
    • 3. The Limits of Legal Definitions of Citizenship
  • C. Cherokee Identity: Biological Definitions and their Limits
    • 1. The Construction of the “Red” Race
    • 2. The Construction of “Black” by “Red”
    • 3. Cherokee Slavery and Cherokee Nation
    • 4. The Limits of Biological Definitions of Citizenship
  • D. From Biology to Ancestry, From Legal Fetishism to Law
• III. RADICAL INDIGENISM AS A RESOURCE FOR RESOLVING THE FREEDMEN CONTROVERSY
  • A. Foundational Commitments
  • B. Assumptions of the Model
    • 1. Role of Practical Knowledge
    • 2. Relationship to Spiritual Heritage
    • 3. Effective History of Colonization
  • C. Critical Hermeneutics of Ancestry and Reciprocity
    • 1. Relationship to Ancestry
    • 2. Responsibility to Reciprocity
• CONCLUSION

Read the entire paper here.

Blood Quantum, Race, and Identity in Indian Country

January 2011
32 pages

Sarah Montana Hart, Judicial Clerk
Magistrate Judge Carolyn Ostby
Federal District Court for the District of Montana

This article discusses how blood quantum laws affect racism and other relations between Indian nations and the United States.

1. Introduction

Throughout the history of our country, different levels of “blood quantum” have been required to achieve different levels of status – one drop here, one-half there, and so on. In this way, “[o]ur propensity to sort people into categories has, over the course of history, contributed to immense human suffering.” Depending on the group, its political clout, and the monetary resources at stake, different lines are drawn around or through a group, and only enough “blood” will get you across those different lines. For example, one drop of “black” blood (aka anyone black in your family tree) was enough to make you a member of the “negro” group. However, it took anywhere from one-fourth to one-half “Indian” blood (an Indian parent or a grandparent) to get you into the “Indian” group. In this way, blood quantum has been used to define the boundaries of groups throughout our history.

A closer examination of the history of Indian blood quantum shows, however, that sometimes this boundary drawing was completely arbitrary, based on nothing more than an individual’s appearance. Sometimes the determination of insider/outsider status was also based on the property interest of the powerful class (read: whites). Despite the dubious history of blood quantification, however, the mechanism is still used today by many Indian tribes to determine insider or outsider status. Blood quantum has been adopted by the tribes to determine, for their own purposes, who is considered an Indian and who is not. Thus, blood quantum has been used by tribes to decide tribal membership.

Adoption of blood quantum rules by Indians themselves would be troubling enough, given the imperial and arbitrary history of their early implementation by the U.S. government. What is even more troubling, however, is that even today, blood quantum is used to determine who gets valuable resources – land, money, and preference. Those who are determined, by their blood quantum, to be “Indian” enough are given rights to land, natural recourses, per capita payments, and a number of other valuable assets.

In the United States, however, we have developed a very strong belief in equal protection: no one should be deprived of anything, or get anything extra, based only on the color of their skin, their racial heritage, or their affiliation with a certain group. We take this equality very seriously; people died to make sure that could happen. And yet, Indian tribes today are determining that one tribal member gets a certain amount of government money because they have the right “blood quantum,” while depriving someone who does not have that same “blood quantum” of getting an equal amount of money. To many people, tribal members or otherwise, this determination seems suspect. Given the history of our country, and our tradition of equal protection, should we be suspect of any rule that gives an individual anything on the basis of race alone?

The United States Supreme Court has said, however, that “Indian” is not a racial category. It has determined that Indian blood quantum is a political, rather than a racial determination, and therefore no one is getting anything extra, or being denied anything, based on their race. The Court has carved out Indian blood quantum rules from regular equal protection analysis, and created a troubling legal fiction. By insisting that “Indians” are political, rather than racial beings, the Court ignores both the history and the reality of tribal membership.

This paper argues that this legal fiction is not only absurd, but harmful to Indian interests. Blood quantum is a suspect classification that should be subject to normal equal protection analysis. Part Two of this paper discusses the intellectual concept of “blood quantum” and defines it in the abstract. This discussion and definition show how easily blood quantum rules can be used as arbitrary political tools. Part Three puts this abstract definition into actual historical contexts and shows how Indian blood quantum rules came to exist. The history shows that the rules were based on a disturbing historical precedent, and implemented by the U.S. government with the specific intention of limiting the number of “Indians” who were eligible for land grants. The history also makes it clear that who was determined “Indian” and who was not was the product of a split-second, racial determination by random government officials during a chaotic enrollment process. Part Four shows how, despite the dubious history of blood quantum rules, tribes have increasingly used them to determine tribal membership. Part Five discusses how the U.S. Supreme Court continues to insist that “Indian” is not a racial category, but a political one. The section explains why, in the light of the history and the practical use of blood quantum by tribes today, this is a complete legal fiction.

Part Six discusses why the continued use of blood quantum rules should matter, based on an equal protection analysis. The section explains that maintaining a legal fiction (that “Indian” is not a racial category), actually harms Indian interests, and promotes racism rather than understanding. While blood quantum rules are racial, and should be subject to strict scrutiny, this section also discusses arguments that could be used to overcome that judicial hurdle. The conclusion, in Part Seven, reiterates that discussion about Indian identity, and the benefits or preferences that one can receive as an Indian, should be candidly one of racial distinction. This discussion should also include a justification of policies specifically tailored to advance a compelling tribal and governmental interest in maintaining a trust relationship and righting historical wrongs. If that conversation can occur openly, the racist idea that Indians get special treatment or something for nothing, is addressed head on, and justified through recognizable equal protection standards. This is a far more productive discussion than side-stepping the issue entirely and pretending that race is not a factor in the equation…

Read the entire paper here.

None of the Above

Filmakers Library (an imprint of Alexander Street Press)
1994
23 minutes

Erika Surat Andersen
University of Southern California

None of the Above is a documentary about people of mixed racial heritage based on the filmmaker’s own search for identity and community. Ms. Andersen, whose mother is (Asian) Indian and father is Danish American, explores her “own personal hangup” by finding others in the same ambiguous category. Through her journey into the multiracial world we are given an inside view of the emotional reality of what it’s like to be racially unclassifiable in a society obsessed with race.

During the course of the film we meet Leslie, a young woman of Native American, African, and European ancestry; Curtiss, whose mother is Japanese and father is African-American; and Henrietta, whose family has been mixed for at least six generations and defies all categorization. The intimacy of the interviews and the filmmaker’s openness about her own experience make this film emotionally compelling and particularly relevant in today’s multicultural society.

AIS 350 : Black-Indians in the Americas

San Francisco State University
Fall 2011

In this course students will be introduced to some of the major sociological and historical factors that have given rise to multiracial cultural identities in American Indian communities throughout the Americas and the Caribbean with a specific focus on Black-Indians within American Indian and African American Studies. Students will explore the ways that mainstream society comes to understand American Indians and their location within the social, legal, political, and economic sphere of race relations in the West. Students will engage key concepts and theories regarding blood quantum, sovereignty, and land rights as they apply to Natives of mixed ancestry. We will begin with a comprehensive analysis of the notion of a fixed or essential monolithic American Indian identity and how this construction has influenced social, legal, and political understanding of mixed-race Native Americans today and their role within the greater American Indian community. Issues of authenticity, group and community membership, as well as cultural vs. racial formation will be addressed in our weekly readings, lectures, discussions, films, guest lectures, and projects.

Are You an Indian?

Public Broadcasting Service
Independent Lens
Premiere Date: 2011-11-17
Duration: 00:05:25

Though their ethnicities are mixed, the Wampanoag take pride in their tribal heritage.

In this companion piece to the documentary film We Still Live Here—Âs Nutayuneân, Wampanoag tribal members discuss how their multicultural heritage both complicates and enriches their identities as Native American people.

Watch Are You an Indian? on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.