Mixed Race Studies

The Seminole Indians of Florida: Morphology and Serology

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 32, Number 1 (January, 1970)
pages 65-81

William S. Pollitzer
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Donald L. Rucknagel
University of Michigan

Richard E. Tashian
University of Michigan

Donald C. Shreffler
University of Michigan

Webster C. Leyshon
National Institute of Dental Research, NIH

Kadambari Namboodiri
Carolina Population Center
University of North Carolina

Robert C. Elston
University of North Carolina

The Seminole Indians of Florida were studied on their three reservations for blood types, red cell enzymes, serum proteins, physical measurements, and relationships. Both serologic and morphologic factors suggest their close similarity to other Indians and small amount of admixture. The Florida Seminoles are similar to Cherokee “full-bloods” in their absence of Rho and their incidence of O and M. In the presence of Di^a they are similar to other Indians, especially those of South America. While the presence of G-6-P-D A and the frequency of Hgb. S are indicative of Negro ancestry, the absence of Rho suggests that the Negro contribution must have been small. Physical traits give parallel results. Both serology and morphology further show that the Seminoles of the Dania and Big Cypress reservations are more similar to each other than to those of the Brighton reservation, in keeping with their history.

Read the entire article here.

Mulatto: Less than Human

Indian Country Today
2012-01-16

Julianne Jennings
Arizona State University

Race is not simply about the physical description of human variation. Since its origin in Western science in the eighteenth century, race has been used both to classify and rank human beings according to inferior and superior types. Although race as a concept developed in the West during the age of Enlightenment, prominent Enlightenment thinkers—Carolus Linnaeus, Johann Blumenbach, Lewis Henry Morgan and Samuel George Morton, among others—greatly influenced European ideas about economics, government and science as well as race. Concepts of race eventually spread to many parts of the non-Western world through international commerce, including the slave trade, and later colonial conquest and administration—which have used it as a tool of social division, even among “mixed-race” peoples.

For centuries, a great amount of blood-mixing has occurred, creating “Creole,” “Mestizo,” and other “colored” populations of the New World colonies and possessions of Europe. But what do these labels mean? Haitian anthropologist, Antenor Firmin observes “that human beings have always interbred whenever they came in contact with one another, so that the very notion of races is questionable. Indeed, if not for this fact of the essential unity of humanity, it would be difficult to explain the eugenic crossbreeding that have made the planet sparkle with more human colors than there are nuances in a rainbow”…

Read the entire article here.

Louis Riel and the dispersion of the American Métis

Minnesota History Magazine
Volume 49, Issue 5 (1985)
Pages 179-190

Thomas Flanagan, Professor of Political Science
University of Calgary, Alberta

THE MÉTIS leader Louis Riel is perhaps best known to readers of Minnesota History in connection with the Red River insurrection of 1869-70. When Canada agreed to purchase Rupert’s Land, the immense fur trading preserve of the Hudson’s Bay Company, no one bothered to consult the mixed-blood inhabitants of the country. Riel led the métis who lived at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers in a movement of resistance, insisting that Canada meet certain metis demands before taking possession of Rupert’s Land. The métis were clamoring for local self-government, recognition of their French language and Catholic religion, and protection of their traditional land holdings and other customary rights, such as free trade with the United States.

In one sense the metis resistance was a success. It forced the Canadian government into negotiations in which many of the métis demands were conceded and legally entrenched in the Manitoba Act which gave birth to the province of that name. Howvever, the victory was tainted by the debacle of Thomas Scott’s execution. Scott, an Ulster Orangeman who had also lived in Ontario, belonged to the small Canadian faction in Red River Settlement that tried to overthrow Riel s government. The métis imprisoned Scott for “counter-revolutionary” activities and, when he proved difficult to control in captivity’, executed him by firing squad on March 4, 1870. Riel wanted to make his provisional government respected, but this gratuitous act of brutality was a terrible mistake. It so inflamed opinion in Canada against Riel that he was forced to flee Manitoba when Canadian troops arrived in the new province in August, 1870.

Riel took refuge in St. Joseph, Dakota Territory. In fact, he spent about half his adult life in the United States. He was south of the Canadian border episodically in 1866-68 and 1870-75 and lived continuously in the United States from January, 1878, to June, 1884,
becoming an American citizen on March 16, 1883…

Read the entire article here.

“African and Cherokee by Choice”: Race and Resistance under Legalized Segregation

American Indian Quarterly
Volume 22, Numbers 1/2 (Winter – Spring, 1998)
pages 203-229

Laura L. Lovett, Associate Professor of History
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Zora Neale Hurston once boasted that she was “the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.”‘ In the same breath, Hurston confessed that she was of mixed blood, but differed “from the party line in that I neither consider it an honor or a shame.” This difference from “the party line,” as she referred to African American perspectives on Native American ancestry, must have been especially striking to Hurston because she had helped to document race mixture during her brief stint as a research assistant to anthropologist Melville Herskovits. Hurston participated in a 1928 study of the ancestry and physical traits of African Americans, which surveyed 1,551 Howard University students and found that 27.2 percent claimed to have some Native American ancestry. Herskovits reports that he went to great lengths to adjust for the “distinct prestige value” of having Native American ancestry within African American communities, but neither he nor Hurston explained why Native American ancestry would have bestowed prestige.

Herskovits’s study was aimed at a long tradition of scientific research on the nature of racial difference. Strongly influenced by the work of anthropologist Franz Boas, Herskovits wanted to explain the achievement of those African Americans with lighter skin and European features in terms of the dominant system of values in American culture. Since the 1860s, Social Darwinists and later hereditarian eugenicists had sought to explain racial differences in terms of the value of innate biological traits possessed by what were considered to be separate and distinct races. Indeed, the perception that all characteristics were biologically determined and maintained in bloodlines, which were then regulated by “blood quantum” standards, formed an important part of how family identity was constructed. Herskovits questioned the biological framework of “racial integrity” by appealing to cultural and social differences to explain differences ascribed to races. However, this scientific attack did not work its way into American racial ideology for quite some time. In the interim, people renegotiated what were understood to be scientific racial categories in various ways, pointing to places where biological classificatory schema denied the historical realities of interracial relations…

The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America

University of Manitoba Press
October 1985
306 pages
30 b&w illustrations, notes, index
Paper ISBN: 9780887556173

Edited by

Jacqueline Peterson, Professor Emerita of History
Washington State University

Jennifer S. H. Brown, Professor Emerita of History
University of Winnipeg

The New Peoples is the first major work to explore in a North American context the dimensions and meanings of a process fundamental to the European invasion and colonization of the western hemisphere: the intermingling of European and Native American peoples. This book is not about racial mixture, however, but rather about ethnogenesis—about how new peoples, new ethnicities, and new nationalities come into being.

Most of the contributors to this volume were participants at the first international Conference on the Métis in North America, hosted by the Newberry Library in Chicago. The purpose of that conference, and the collection that has grown out of it, has been to examine from a regionally comparative and multi-disciplinary vantage point several questions that lie at the heart of métis studies: What are the origins of the métis people? What economic, political, and/or cultural forces prompted the métis to coalesce as a self-conscious ethnic or national group? Why have some individuals and populations of mixed Indian and white ancestry identified themselves as white or Indian rather than as métis? What are the cultural expressions of métis identity? What does it mean to be métis today?

In the opening section of the book, John Elgin Foster, Olive P. Dickason, and Jacqueline Peterson grapple with the chronologies and locations of the emergent métis peoples in the first centuries after contact. In the second section, essays by John Long on the James Bay “halfbreed,” Trudy Nicks and Kenneth Morgan on an indigenous métis community at Grande Cache, Alberta, Verne Dusenberry on the landless Chippewa of Montana, and Irene Spry on the métis and mixed-bloods of Ruperts Land reveal the difficulties in generalizing about métis groups, some of whom have only recently begun to apply that label to themselves. Sylvia Van Kirk, R. David Edmunds, and Jennifer S. H. Brown explore the other side of métis genesis: the individuals and groups who never coalesced into lasting métis communities. The foreword is by Marcel Giraud and the afterword by Robert K. Thomas. First published in the mid-1980s, The New Peoples is considered a classic in the field of métis studies.

“IndiVisible” Discusses African–Native American Lives

Newsdsesk: Newsroom of the Smithsonian Institution
2012-01-06

“IndiVisible: African–Native American Lives in the Americas,” a 20-panel display that outlines the seldom-viewed history and complex lives of people of dual African American and Native American ancestry, will open at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the George Gustav Heye Center, Thursday, Feb. 9. The exhibit will be on view through Friday, Aug. 31, in the museum’s photo corridor gallery.

“Indivisible” addresses the racially motivated laws that have been forced on Native, African American and mixed-heritage peoples. Since pre-colonial times, Native and African American peoples have built strong communities through intermarriage, unified efforts to preserve their land and taking part in creative resistance. Over time, these communities developed constructive survival strategies, and several have regained economic sustainability through gaming in the 1980s. The daily cultural practices that define the African–Native American experience through food, language, writing, music, dance and the visual arts, will also be highlighted in the exhibition…

Read the entire article here.

Marriages between African and Native Americans produced many children

Louisiana Weekly
2012-01-02

(Healthy Living News) —Native Americans with African ancestry produced more children than ‘full bloods’ in the early 1900s, despite the odds being against them, a new study demonstrates. Research by Michael Logan, Ph.D., of the University of Tennessee shows that increased fertility occurred at a time when things were not going particularly well for both African and Native Americans either — in social, economic and health terms. The work is published in Human Ecology…

…Dr. Logan examined the reproductive histories of 295 women of mixed Indian-Black and Indian-Black-white heritage. He found that Indian-Black marriages proved to be advantageous in terms of fertility, the average number of births, and offspring survival…

Read the entire article here.

American Indians with African Ancestry: Differential Fertility and the Complexities of Social Identity

Human Ecology
Volume 39, Number 6 (December 2011)
page 727-742
DOI: 10.1007/s10745-011-9439-2

Michael H. Logan, Professor of Anthropology
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Interethnic marriage represents a major trend in the demographic history of American Indians. While the majority of these unions involved Indian women and Caucasian men, a sizeable number occurred between Indians and African Americans. The children of these bicultural marriages were “mixed bloods” who in turn typically married non-Indians or other mixed bloods. Using data from the 1910 Census on American Indians in the United States and Alaska, this article explores why American Indians with African ancestry enjoyed high fertility. Differential rates of fertility among American Indians in the past were due to a number of underlying genetic, cultural, and environmental factors. By identifying these factors, the paradox of why Indian women with African heritage did so well in terms of fertility largely disappears. African admixture, however, greatly complicates Indian social identity.

Introduction

The demographic history of American Indians is characterized by a number of major trends, the most dramatic being the immense loss of life resulting from the introduction of several Old World diseases, including smallpox, measles, influenza, cholera, and malaria. While the exact size of indigenous populations in the Americas on the eve of European contact will never be known with certainty, scholars agree that up to 90% of the aboriginal population perished as a direct result of these introduced diseases (Thornton 1987, 1997; Ubelaker 1988; Ramenofsky 1987; Dobyns 1983). By 1900, the population of American Indians in the United States reached its nadir of 237,196 individuals (Thornton 1987:160). Although Ubelaker’s estimate (1988:291) for 1900 is more than twice as high (536,562). it does not alter the fact that millions of Indians died from these and other infectious disorders, as well as from other causes including famine, exposure, alcohol-related trauma, and armed combat with whites and other Indians (sec also Larsen and Milncr 1994; Bianchinc and Russo 1992).

Another highly significant demographic trend explored in this article is an increasing number of intercthnic marriages between American Indian women and non-Indian men. Although a limited number of white women married Indian men, this practice was certainly not common nor widely approved (Fllinghaus 2006; Jacobs 2002). The children of such marital unions were “mixed bloods,” who in turn typically married non-Indians or other mixed bloods (e.g.. Perdue 1998. 2003). Such “assortative” mating leads to an expansion of the gene pool, which, according to Quiggins (1990), may explain why highly admixed Cherokee are at lower risk of developing type-2 diabetes than full blood individuals. A similar finding has also been reported tor the Pima of Arizona (Williams et al. 2000). Using data from the 1980 U.S. census, Sanderur and McKinnell observe “intermarriage of Indians and whites is much more prevalent than that of blacks and whites, and … the extent of Indian white intermarriage has increased dramatically in recent decades” (1986:348). The scholarly literature on Indian-white marriages for the nineteenth and early twentieth century is quite extensive (Logan and Ousley 2001; Sturm 1998; Moore…

Read or purchase the article here.

Perspective on Mixed-Blood Natives: The Silence of Indian Country

Native News Network
Native Condition: Analysis and Opinion
2011-09-22

Mike Raccoon Eyes
Eastern Band of the Cherokee
Quallah, North Carolina

SAN FRANCISCO—Cherokee culture was steeped deeply into the great Meso-American pyramid temple cities as early as 800 AD. When the Olmecs, Toltecs, Mayans and Aztecs were moving from north to south deep into Mexico and Central America. They quickly absorbed and embraced building their own great pyramid temple spiritual cities they had observed and seen in the great Cherokee cities of the Southeast.

Cherokee intermarriage to both the Mexican and Central Americans would become the norm for the next 300 years. The mixed-blood Cherokees would hold a high place of honor within the Meso-American world of Mexico and Central America. For the mixed-blood Cherokee of the time were the priests, prophets, engineers and administrators, who were the elite of running the new spiritual pyramid temple cities of both Mexico and Central America. Without the mixed-blood Cherokees, the great pyramid temple cities in Mexico and Central America would cease to run, much less function.

The Cherokee started having intergenerational marriage with the Europeans in the early 1700s. Many Cherokee bands and families were quick to see the economic benefits of having trade, land and business dealings with Europeans. In a sense this could be viewed as a classic Cherokee version of the ‘hang around the fort Indians’. However this story was not true for the majority of mixed-blood Cherokee people of that time.

The preference of mixed-blood Cherokee men of the time was to marry European or other mixed-blood Cherokee women. Their children and grandchildren would follow suit. The new generation of light-skinned mixed-blood bourgeoisie Cherokee would wash their hands of and renounce the traditional ways of Cherokee culture and Spirituality.

However, there was another side to the mixed-blood Cherokee people that has been neglected and treated with silence. The story is that of the traditional mixed-blood Cherokee that retained their cultural and Spiritual identities…

Read the entire essay here.

Escaping to Destinations South: The Underground Railroad, Cultural Identity, and Freedom Along the Southern Borderlands

National Park Service
Network to Freedom
2012-06-20 through 2012-06-24
St. Augustine, Florida

The Network to Freedom has joined with local partners to present an annual UGRR [Underground Railroad] conference beginning in 2007. These conferences bring together a mix of grass roots researchers, community advocates, site stewards, government officials, and scholars to explore the history of the Underground Railroad. Rotated to different parts of the country, the conferences highlight the unique history of various regions along with new research.

The 2012 Conference theme is the resistance to slavery through escape and flight to and from the South, including through international flight, from the 16th century to the end of the Civil War. Traditional views of the Underground Railroad focus on Northern destinations of freedom seekers, with symbols such as the North Star, Canada, and the Ohio River (the River Jordan) constructed as the primary beacons of freedom. This conception reduces the complexity of the Underground Railroad by ignoring the many freedom seekers that sought to obtain their freedom in southern destinations.

Likewise, borders and the movement across them by southern freedom seekers are also very crucial to our understanding of the complexities of the Underground Railroad. Freedom seekers often sought out political and geographical borderlands, as crossing these locations usually represented the divide between slavery and freedom. To this end, the conference will explore how southern freedom seekers seized opportunities to escape slavery into Spanish Florida and the Seminole Nation, to the Caribbean Islands, and into the western borderlands of Indian Territory, Texas, and Mexico.

Escape from enslavement was not just about physical freedom, but also about the search for cultural autonomy. The conference will explore the transformation and creation of new cultural identities among southern freedom seekers that occurred as a result of their journeys to freedom, such as the dispersal of Gullah Geechee culture and the formation of Black Seminole cultural identity.

The 2012 Conference will include participation by independent and academic scholars at all levels, educators, community activists, public historians and preservationists, and multi-media and performance artists. The conference seeks to create a cultural, historical, and interpretive exchange between domestic and international descendent communities of southern freedom seekers.

Gullah Geechee and Black Seminole descendants are particularly welcome at the conference.

For more information, click here.  Call for papers information (Deadline 2012-01-15) is here.