Mixed Race Studies

Hispanics Identifying Themselves as Indians

The New York Times
2011-07-03

Goeffrey Decker

At a festival June 26 in East Elmhurst, Queens, people from the Tlaxcala tribe of Mexico wore masks parodying the Spanish conquistadors. Uli Seit for The New York Times

A procession of American Indians marched through Sunset Park, Brooklyn, on a weekend afternoon in early May, bouncing to a tribal beat. They dressed in a burst of colors, wore tall headdresses and danced in circles, as custom dictated, along a short stretch of the park.

But there was something different about this tribe, the Tlaxcala, and when the music ceased and the chatter resumed, the difference became clear: They spoke exclusively Spanish.

The event was Carnaval, an annual tradition celebrated by tribes indigenous to land that is now Mexico. And despite centuries of Spanish influence, the participants identify themselves by their indigenous heritage more than any other ethnicity.

When Fernando Meza is asked about his identity, “I tell them that I am Indian,” said Mr. Meza, a parade participant from the Tlaxcala tribe. “They say, ‘But you’re Mexican.’ And I say, ‘But I’m Indian.’ ”

Mr. Meza represents one of the changes to emerge from the 2010 census, which showed an explosion in respondents of Hispanic descent who also identified themselves as American Indians…

…“There has been an actual and dramatic increase of Amerindian immigration from Latin America,” said José C. Moya, a professor of Latin American history at Barnard College…

…“We are descendants from the original people of Tlaxcala,” said Gabriel Aguilar, a Ditmas Park resident. “Five hundred years ago, there is not territory known as Mexico. It’s just tribes.”…

…“Hispanic is not a race, ” said Mr. Quiroz, whose ancestors were the Quechua people, of the Central Andes. “Hispanic is not a culture. Hispanic is an invention by some people who wanted to erase the identity of indigenous communities in America.”…

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Rights of passage – the coming of the ‘wild west’ Constructs of identity and their effects upon Indigenous people

Counselling, Psychotherapy, and Health
Volume 3, Issue 2 (2007), Indigenous Special Issue
pages 39-45

Michael Red Shirt Semchison
M.Ed.Studies; Gr.Cert.Ed.[HE]
University of Queensland, Australia

Introduction

“We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild.’ Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it ‘wild’ for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the ‘Wild West’ began.”—Luther Standing Bear, Lakota, 1933.

It was the decade of the 1860s, the time of birth of one of my ancestors Luther Standing Bear who grew to manhood during years of crisis for the Lakota and other nations of the Great Plains. At last the process of colonisation begun in 1492, when we were labeled ‘Indian’, had reached the West. While he was still a young boy the traditional way of life of the Lakota was undergoing dramatic change. Already we had been renamed by the French fur traders and were called the Sioux. The controversial Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 had been legislated and the great Sioux Reservation had been firmly incorporated. In the years that followed virtually every important aspect and institution of Lakota life was subject to change. The annihilation of the buffalo and other natural food sources, plus confinement to the reservation caused the erosion of old traditions and forced our people to depend upon the government for the necessities of life. Our societies of autonomy were weakened and normal avenues of social and political advancement were closed. Opposition to government programs by traditional leaders caused dramatic confrontations which led to efforts to destroy positions of leadership and to create rival headmen more sympathetic to the will of agents and Washington officials. Agency police were recruited through coercion and made responsible to the already entrenched Bureau of Indian Affairs. This provided another onslaught upon Lakota traditions and further strengthened the position of the appointed Indian Agent. Government support of missionaries and their efforts to convert the ‘heathen’ undermined our religion and spiritual beliefs and practices. The prohibition of sacred ceremonies including the Sun Dance, our most important annual religious and social event, was devastating. Last but not least, education programs were developed to hasten acculturation and prepare the Lakota and other Indigenous Americans for assimilation into the dominant white society (Ellis, 1975)…

Through this dissertation I will endeavor to present a picture of the world that continues to exist for Indigenous people, one controlled by a dominant society that persists in grinding out old injustices under new guises. There will be a review of some of the complex actions created via political ontology and social influences that offend morality and common sense; actions explained away routinely by a system of administration relying upon obscurity and intricacy to insulate itself from scrutiny and criticism (Cahn and Hearne, 1969). A comparison of Native American and Australian Aboriginal experiences will be used examining some of the issues that brought conflict into Indigenous communities and centering on constructs of identity. This will include imposed caste systems and blood-quantum measurements used to determine and define a person as being ‘real’ in a culture. How these separate and divide individuals, families and whole communities will be of primary concern.

To better understand the effects of re-identifying people we must step back in historical time to see how the theory and system of ‘other’ came into being. In 15th century Europe use of the term race generally referred to differences between groups within a community based upon rank or social station. When countries such as England and Spain began full scale colonisation during the 16th and 17th centuries the vanquished became regarded as being of a different race because they were unlike their vanquishers. Then the mass movement of people came around the globe by the colonisers and their subjects, especially through the slave trade. The shift in the meaning of race then became crucial as capitalism and nationalism in Europe arose, with the success of these systems dependent upon the accumulation of new resources and military power. These factors and the use of subdued non-European labour led to the belief that Europeans were both culturally and racially superior. By the 18th century racial hierarchies were fixed based on physical differences and a modus operandi for the classification of all natural life as objects, including human beings was established (Hollinsworth, 1998. 35-43). A new worldview had emerged and was readily adopted by most European nations, especially those embroiled in the race for colonial riches to advance their needs for economic and social dominance. By having ‘scientific proof’ through the theory of evolution espoused by Darwin, the dialogue for the identification of humans seen to be inferior and the labeling of them as savages, heathens, deviants or sub-humans became an acceptable tool for exploitation. All non-whites were now categorised as ‘colored’ and put into a place of being ‘other’ to the rest of the world (Blumenbach, 1806). It became legal terminology and thus justified the dehumanisation of all Indigenous people and treatment of them, most notably the Africans, the Native Americans and the Australian Aborigines…

Removal was one of the deciding factors in the disenfranchisement of indigenous people and had a dual role to play. The first was the establishment of reserves or missions to restrain and control them under the authority of appointed government officials or missionaries from various church groups. This led to further corruption on all levels and miscegenation occurred. Incidences of miscegenation were already in evidence as it was part and parcel of contact with outsiders, be it consensual or forced. However, it seemed to escalate with reservation life and more children of mixed ancestry were born into these communities, which led to the second role of removal. Taking children from families and placing them in specially created residential institutions provided the means to civilize, acculturate and assimilate them into the dominant society. It was here that one of the most insidious elements of fragmentation was to occur, the division of nations by blood quantum and a caste system of identification. Children were separated and identified according to physical appearance and complexion. Those of fairer skin were seen to be less savage, more worthy of saving and easier to blend into white society, while those of darker skin were labeled as less desirable. Already alienated from parents, families, land and cultural knowledge, they were now alienated from each other (Read, 1981). It mattered not if it was the Kinchela Girls Home in New South Wales or the Carlisle Residential School in Pennsylvania; the story was the same and the attitudes of the caretakers similar. Richard Pratt, the Superintendent at Carlisle stated “I am a Baptist, because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilisation and when we get them under holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.” All evidence of ancestral culture was to be eliminated and replaced through the processes already legislated (Utley, 1964). Yet another construct of identity and one that has served governments well right into contemporary times.

By the first half of the 20th century most Native Americans and Australian Aborigines had experienced a deprivation of autonomy through aggression, suppression and institutionalisation. However, it was the caste barrier of color prejudice and discrimination that separated them from mainstream society and made them outcasts in their own lands. Already there was demarcation of identity using terms such as, fullblood, half-breed or half-caste, quarter-blood or just plain ‘breed’, all measured on appearance. Kinship and membership in nations, tribes or clan groups, cultural knowledge and rights to them had been disregarded. Only those seen as full-blooded were acknowledged as being the ‘real’ Indians or Aborigines. This was based on the ‘Rule of Recognition’ established by the British and adapted in the Americas in 1825, which holds that only a person whose non-white ancestry is visible is of that ancestry. While originally formatted to refer to persons of African heritage, this was also applied to Native Americans (Gotanda, 1995. 258). It is also evident in Australia where Aborigines no longer controlled by reserve conditions were controlled by a color bar and caste system that created two distinct social environments of black and white. In this system people can be either assigned or denied opportunities depending on provisos outside their control, regardless of any abilities they might have. One extreme and officially sanctioned example of this existed until 1949 whereby the Education Department of New South Wales could exclude identifiable Aboriginal children from state schools if Anglo/European parents objected to their presence. Racism was entrenched and prejudice rampant. Identity was used as a political tool to enact power over others by putting them in a place of being ‘other’ and this process goes through all the cognitive structures of society. Economically and socially this created a multi-faceted cycle of impoverishment that entrapped Aboriginal communities on every level. Then they were blamed for it, while the real cause of economic deprivation and political powerlessness was overt and covert racial discrimination (Broome, 1994. Ch.9)…

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The Blackfoot Tribe of the Midsouth

American Society of Ethnohistory Conference
“Blackfoot, Redbones, Brass Ankles and Pied Noir: Colorful Identities, Creative Strategies American Society of Ethnohistory conference”
Santa Fe, New Mexico
2005-11-18 through 2005-11-20
2005-11-19

Carol A. Morrow, Professor of Anthropology
Southeast Missouri State University

Over the years, I have had a number of African-American students identify themselves as having Native American heritage.  Occasionally they claim descent from the ‘Blackfoot tribe’, but they always have a southern heritage.  Most students don’t know much more than just the term, Blackfoot, but one student explained that Blackfoot meant a blend of African and Cherokee heritage.  Given our location on the Trail of Tears, Cherokee heritage is common; the Blackfoot tribe is something else entirely.  This paper reviews the use of the Blackfoot term throughout the Midsouth.

Over the years, I have had a number of students in my North American Indians classes who have self-identified as Blackfoot, or Cherokee and Blackfoot, or in one case, Choctaw and Blackfoot.  I would always ask them if they had ties or relatives in Montana, and with one exception, they all said NO. The one exception is the blond blue-eyed young man, who in fact, did have relatives in Montana.

I teach at Southeast Missouri State, which is in Cape Girardeau and the Cherokee Trail of tears passed through our community in 1838-1839.  Additionally, there was a large community of Cherokee Indians that lived to the sound of our area in Arkansas territory, and many pushed north into Missouri when they were moved in 1828 West into Indian territory (these were the Old Settlers).  So we have always had a number of people in the area of Cherokee ancestry.  But Blackfoot Indian is another story entirely.  Finally, I realized that the Blackfoot students were African-American.  My African-American students almost always had Indian blood, but it took me a while to figure out that they were the only ones that claimed Blackfoot blood…

Read the entire paper here.

The First Black Prairie Novel: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance’s Autobiography and the Repression of Prairie Blackness

Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes
Volume 45, Number 2 (Spring 2011)
pages 31-57
E-ISSN: 1911-0251; Print ISSN: 0021-9495
DOI: 10.1353/jcs.2011.0022

Karina Vernon, Assistant Professor of English
University of Toronto

This essay situates Chief Buffalo Child’s Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) within the cultural context of its production, the anti-Black racial climate of the Canadian Prairies in the early part of the twentieth century, in order to analyze the textual repression of its author’s Blackness. Although the Autobiography has been discredited as a fraud because, as Donald B. Smith discovered, Long Lance was not in fact Blackfoot as the Autobiography claims, but “mixed blood” from North Carolina, this essay reclaims it as the first novel penned on the Prairies by a Black author, for it tells a true—more metaphorical and allegorical than factual—story about the desire on the part of displaced “new” world Blacks for Indigenous status and belonging. This essay examines the implications of claiming the Autobiography as the first Black prairie novel and explores how reading it as fiction rather than autobiography extends our understandings of “passing,” racial identification and transformation.

Cet article situe l’autobiographie Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) du Chef Buffalo Child dans le contexte culturel de sa production—le climat racial anti-Noirs des Prairies canadiennes au début du XX^e siècle—afin d’analyser la répression textuelle de son auteur noir. Donald B. Smith a par la suite considéré cette autobiographie comme une imposture, ayant découvert que Long Lance ne faisait pas partie de la confédération des Pieds-Noirs, mais était plutôt un « sang-mêlé » de la Caroline du Nord. Cependant, l’auteur du présent article considère cette autobiographie comme le premier roman écrit dans les Prairies par un Noir puisqu’il raconte une histoire vraie—quoique plus métaphorique et allégorique que factuelle—du désir des Noirs déplacés du « Nouveau » Monde d’acquérir le statut d’indigène et d’appartenir à leur monde. L’article examine les conséquences de la classification de cette pseudo-autobiographie comme le premier roman des Prairies écrit par un Noir et explore les manières dont sa lecture en tant qu’œuvre de fiction plutôt qu’autobiographie nous aide à mieux comprendre le concept de « passage », d’identification et de transformation raciales.

Read or purchase the article here.

A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Métis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737-1832

University of Nebraska Press
2000
233 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-8293-3

Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Professor of History
Ohio State University, Newark

In A Gathering of Rivers, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy traces the histories of Indian, multiracial, and mining communities in the western Great Lakes region during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For a century the Winnebagos (Ho-Chunks), Mesquakies (Fox), and Sauks successfully confronted waves of French and British immigration by diversifying their economies and commercializing lead mining.

Focusing on personal stories and detailed community histories, Murphy charts the changed economic forces at work in the region, connecting them to shifts in gender roles and intercultural relationships. She argues that French, British, and Native peoples forged cooperative social and economic bonds expressed partly by mixed-race marriages and the emergence of multiethnic communities at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien. Significantly, Native peoples in the western Great Lakes region were able to adapt successfully to the new frontier market economy until their lead mining operations became the envy of outsiders in the 1820s.

Cultural Representation in Native America

AltaMira Press
August 2006
192 pages
Cloth 0-7591-0984-2 / 978-0-7591-0984-1
Paper 0-7591-0985-0 / 978-0-7591-0985-8

Edited by:

Andrew J. Jolivétte, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies
San Francisco State University

Today as in the past there are many cultural and commercial representations of American Indians that, thoughtlessly or otherwise, negatively shape the images of indigenous people. Jolivétte and his co-authors challenge and contest these images, demonstrating how Native representation and identity are at the heart of Native politics and Native activism. In portrayals of a Native Barbie Doll or a racist mascot, disrespect of Native women, misconceptions of mixed race identities, or the commodification of all things “Indian”, the authors reveal how the very existence of Native people continues to be challenged, with harmful repercussions in social and legal policy, not just in popular culture. The authors re-articulate Native history, religion, identity, and oral and literary traditions in ways that allow the true identity and persona of the Native person to be recognized and respected. It is a project that is fundamental to ethnic revitalization and the recognition of indigenous rights in North America. This book is a provocative and essential introduction for students and Native and non-Native people who wish to understand the images and realities of American Indian lifeways in American society.

Table of Contents

• PART I: Contestation and Representation, Chapter 1: Mapping Contests in Unknown Locations
  Paula Gunn Allen

• Say Hau to Native American Barbie
  Kim Shuck

• Liquor Moccasins
  Philip Klasky

• (Dis)Locating Spiritual Knowledge: Embodied Ideologies, Social Landscapes, and the Power of the Neoshamanic Other
  Sara Sutler-Cohen

• Mascots in the New Millennium
  Winona LaDuke

• PART II: Contestation and Politics, Chapter 6: Native American Resistance and Revitalization in the Era of Self-Determination
  Troy Johnson

• Identity, Oral Tradition, and Inter-generational Healing in the Southern Paiute Salt Songs
  Melissa Nelson

• In the Spirit of Crazy Horse
  Winona LaDuke

• Part III: Contestation and Mixed Race Identity; Chapter 9: In the Tracks of ‘the’ Native Woman
  Norma Alarcon

• Chapped with Weather and Age: Mixed-Blood Identity and the Shape of History
  Sara Stuler-Cohen

• Dunn Playing Indian
  Carolyn Dunn

• Examining the Regional and Multi-Generational Context of Creole and American Indian Identity
  Andrew Jolivette

A Health Survey of the Seminole Indians

Yale Journal Biology and Medicine
Volume 6, Number 2 (December 1933)
pages 155–177

H. Hamlin

Among the numerous tribes of Indians living in Oklahoma the Seminoles offer some interesting phenomena for study which may contribute information on the subject of race mixture and its relationship to environment and health. The early history of the tribe in its original habitat of the Florida Everglades is not without romantic color, embodying as it does the Spanish occupation of the Southeastern United States and the stormy times before and after the War of 1812 that culminated in the Florida purchase. Many other tribes besides the Seminoles were occupying rich lands that European settlers coveted for plantations so that agitation for removal of the Indians by coercion gained increasing favor. Slavery augmented the conflict since negro deserters were continually seeking refuge among the Indians, especially in parts that now constitute Georgia and Florida.

It is recorded that as early as 1785 bands of Cherokees, Choctaws, Delawares and Shawnees began migrating west to settle because of pressure from whites along the borders of their old domain and the scarcity of game. The transfer of Indians comprising the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole tribes from their indigenous habitat to lands in what is now the state of Oklahoma was carried on with continuous difficulty until after 1840. The government was forced to conduct two expensive military campaigns against the Seminoles, and over a thousand recalcitrants refused to be caught and expatriated. These survivors remained in Florida. By 1906 around 100,000 individuals, of whom only about 26.4 per cent were full-bloods, had been officially enrolled as the Five Civilized Tribes and had been given individual land grants.

From the foregoing historical outline the possibilities of comparative study on the present-day Seminoles in both Oklahoma and Florida can be understood. Such a project was sponsored by the Laboratory of Anthropology at Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the summer of 1932 and placed under the direction of Dr. W. M. Krogman of the Anatomy Department of Western Reserve University. The greater part of the work resolved itself into the compilation of detailed anthropometric measurements of selected individuals. The tribal rolls, upon which the government based the land allotments, made feasible the deduction of rather accurate genealogical tables for four or five generations. The statements of every subject concerning his or her family were checked and protracted further by comparison with Campbell’s Abstract of Seminole Indian Census Cards, which proved an invaluable source of information. It is hoped that opportunity may avail to correlate the findings on physical measurements and other criteria of the Oklahoma Seminoles with the results of a similar procedure among the Seminoles still living in Florida, the latter serving as a control group…

…After the Creek war of 1813-14 a great many Creeks from the upper Creek country moved into Florida. They increased the population considerably and began mixing with the predominant Hitchiti (Oconee) racial element. This new strain was definitely Creek and later came to be identified with the Seminole. Such an interpretation is substantiated further by Wissler’, who classifies the languages of the Upper Creeks, Lower Creeks, and Seminoles together under the northern division of Muskogee proper. It seems clear that the Florida Seminoles were originally derived from the non-Muskogean Hitchiti of Georgia admixed with the earlier Floridian Yamasee and Yuchi, and this combination later admixed with Muskogee, mostly Creek. Before his departure for the west therefore, the Florida Seminole undoubtedly had a high percentage of Creek blood; and the two by impact of association had become linked enough in language and culture to obscure their separate origin.

Before the advent of Seminole stock in the west there was unquestionably an appreciable amount of negro blood present. This was a result of slavery, which reached its greatest development as a social practice in the Southeast during the latter part of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Large numbers of slaves apparently succeeded in escaping from their masters to gain sanctuary among the Florida Indians. It would seem that negroes were usually anxious to make their way into Florida where they were often able to acquire a kind of group independence among the Indians. A large number of negroes accompanied the Five Tribes on their westward migration, including slaves of the Indians as well as those who had intermarried and their offspring. To the Creek fraction represented in Florida Seminole blood, therefore, must be added an unknown but quite definite component representing negro admixture acquired prior to removal. There probably had been some infusion of white blood with the Seminoles through Spanish intermixture before they took up residence in the west. Nash”, Giddings and Bartram’ predicate its occurrence in their writings, but the emphasis on the negro element is much greater. According to Nash”, the amount of white blood in the modern Florida Seminoles has increased to some extent, and this view is confirmed by others, notably Hrdlikcka. On the other hand negro intermixture among the present-day descendants of the original Florida Seminoles has declined. The population has been reported to be around 500 for a number of decades so that investigators have been able to tabulate race crossing with some certainty’0. White half-castes are granted full status by the Indians and an increase in their number is predicted for the future. Presumably, the propagation of white blood in the Florida Indians since the Seminole wars may be attributed to the offspring of unsanctioned Indian-White matings…

Pure Seminole—Age 44.

Seminole-Negro—Age 25.

Seminole-White—Age 34.

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The Hidden History of Mestizo America

The Journal of American History
Volume 82, Number 3 (December, 1995)
pages 941-964
5 illustrations

Gary B. Nash, Professor Emeritus of History
University of California, Los Angeles

This essay was delivered as the presidential address at the national meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Washington, March 31, 1995.

La Nature aime les croisements (Nature loves cross-breedings).
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

On a dank January evening in London in 1617, the audience was distracted from a performance of Ben Johnson’s The Vision of Delight by the persons sitting next to King James I and Queen Anne: a dashing adventurer who had just returned from the outer edge of the fledgling English empire and his new wife, ten years his junior. The king’s guests were John Rolfe and his wife Rebecca—a name newly invented to anglicize the daughter of another king who ruled over a domain as big and populous as a north English county. She was Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan. The first recorded interracial marriage in American history had taken place because Rebecca’s father and the English leaders in the colony of Virginia were eager to bring about a detente after a decade of abrasive and sometimes bloody European-Algonkian contact on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

The Rolfe-Pocahontas marriage might have become the embryo of a mestizo United States. I use the term mestizo in the original sense—referring to racial intermixture of all kinds. In the early seventeenth century, negative ideas about miscegenation had hardly formed; indeed, the word itself did not appear for another two and a half centuries. King James was not worried about interracial marriage. He fretted only about whether a commoner such as Rolfe was entitled to wed the daughter of a king. Nearly a century later, Robert Beverley’s History and Present State of Virginia (1705) described Indian women as “generally beautiful, possessing uncommon delicacy of shape and features,” and he regretted that Rolfe’s intermarriage was not followed by many more.

William Byrd, writing at the same time, was still commending what he called the “modern policy” of racial intermarriage employed in French Canada and Louisiana by which alliances rather than warfare were effected. Byrd confessed his preference for light-skinned women (a woman’s skin color, however, rarely curbed his sexual appetite), but he was sure that English “false delicacy” blocked a “prudent alliance” that might have saved Virginians much tragedy. Most colonies saw no reason to ban intermarriage with Native Americans (North Carolina was the exception).

In 1784, Patrick Henry nearly pushed through the Virginia legislature a law offering bounties for white-Indian marriages and free public education for interracial children. In the third year of his presidency, Thomas Jefferson pleaded “to let our settlements and theirs [Indians] meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people.” Six years later, just before returning to Monticello, Jefferson promised a group of western Indian chiefs, “you will unite yourselves with us,… and we shall all be Americans; you will mix with us by marriage, your blood will run in our veins, and will spread with us over this great island.”

In 1809, almost two hundred years after Pocahontas sat in the theater with James I, the sixteen-year-old Sam Houston, taking a page from the book of Benjamin Franklin, ran away from his autocratic older brothers. The teenage Franklin fled south from Boston to Philadelphia, but Houston made his way west from Virginia to Hiwassee Island in western Tennessee. There he took up life among the Cherokees and was soon adopted by Ooleteka, who would become the Cherokee chief in 1820. Reappearing in white society in 1818, Houston launched a tumultuous, alcohol-laced, violent, and roller-coaster political career, but he retained his yen for the Cherokee life. After his disastrous first marriage at age thirty-six, he rejoined the Cherokee, became the ambassador of the Cherokee nation to Washington (in which office he wore Indian regalia) in 1829, and married Ooleteka’s niece, the widowed, mixed-blood Cherokee woman Tiana Rogers Gentry.

…This brings us to a consideration of the virulent racial ideology that arose among the dominant Euro-Americans and that profoundly affected people of color. How most Americans came to believe that character and culture are literally carried in the blood, and how the idea of racial mixture was almost banished officially, has its own history. How would it come to happen, as Barbara Fields has expressed it, that a white woman can give birth to a Black child but a Black woman can never give birth to a white child? How would it come to be that the children of Indian-white marriages would contemptuously be referred to by whites as half- breeds?

The sequence of legal definitions of Blacks in Virginia demonstrates this progression. In 1785, the revolutionary generation defined a Black person as anyone with a Black parent or grandparent, thus conferring whiteness on whomever was less than one-quarter Black. Virginia changed the law 125 years later to define as “Negro,” as the term then was used, anyone who was at least one-sixteenth Black. In 1930, Virginia adopted the notorious “one-drop” law—defining as Black anyone with one drop of African blood, however that might have been determined…

…There is nothing new about crossing racial boundaries; what is new is the frequency of border crossings and boundary hoppings and the refusal to bow to the thorn-filled American concept, perhaps unknown outside the United States, that each person has a race but only one. Racial blending is undermining the master idea that race is an irreducible marker among diverse peoples—an idea in any case that always has been socially constructed and has no scientific validity. (In this century, revivals of purportedly scientifically provable racial categories have surfaced every generation or so. Ideas die hard, especially when they are socially and politically useful.) Twenty-five years ago, it would have been unthinkable for Time-Life to publish a computer-created chart of racial synthesizing; seventy-five years ago, an issue on “The New Face of America” might have put Time out of business for promoting racial impurity…

Read the entire article here.

To Intermix With Our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from Earliest Times to the Indian Removals

University of New Mexico Press
2006
472 pages
6 x 9 in.; 10 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8263-3287-5

Thomas Ingersoll, Associate Professor of History
Ohio State University

“I think that I or any of my brethren have a right to choose a wife for themselves as well as the whites, and as the whites have taken the liberty to choose my brethren, the Indians, hundreds of thousands of them, as partners in life, I believe the Indians have as much right to choose their partners among the whites if they wish.”—William Apess, An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man, 1833

In this groundbreaking study, Thomas Ingersoll argues the Jacksonian American Indian removal policy appealed to popular racial prejudice against all Indians, including special suspicion of mixed bloods. Lawmakers also perceived a threat to white Americans’ transatlantic reputation posed by the potential for general racial mixture, or “amalgamation.” Beginning in the 1780s, and for the ensuing half-century, alarmed government officials attempted to separate full blood and mixed-blood Indians into enclaves in the Far West, to isolate them from white migrants out of the eastern states and prevent the rise of a new, genuinely alternative mixed society.

Ingersoll begins by examining the origins and early history of mixed bloods in North America. He follows with the lives of individual mixed bloods, an exploration of how the growing mixed population informed racial thought in the Early National Period, and the role of mixed-blood chiefs in opposing the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Walking in Two Worlds: Mixed-Blood Indian Women Seeking Their Path

Caxton Press
2006
264 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 0-87004-450-8

Nancy M. Peterson

Nancy M. Peterson tells the stories of mixed-blood women who, steeped in the tradition of their Indian mothers but forced into the world of their white fathers, fought to find their identities in a rapidly changing world.

In an era when most white women had limited opportunities outside the home, these mix-blood women often became nationally recognized leaders in the fight for Native American rights. They took the tools and training whites provided and used them to help their people. They found differing paths—medicine, music, crafts, the classroom, the lecture hall, the stage, the written word—and walked strong and tall.

These women did far more than survive; they extended a hand to help their people find a place in a hard new future.