Mixed Race Studies

The Rise and Decline of Hybrid (Metis) Societies on the Frontier of Western Canada and Southern Africa

The Canadian Journal of Native Studies
Volume 3, Number 1 (1983) (Special Issue on the Metis)
ISSN  0715-3244

Alvin Kienetz

A comparison of the development of the Metis in Canada and similar peoples in Southern Africa reveals some remarkable similarities between the two groups. The existence of these parallels suggests that a more extensive comparative study of peoples of mixed race throughout the world would be of value.

Une comparaison de l’évolution des Métis au Canada et de celle de certains peuples similaires dans le Sud africain révèle des ressemblances frappantes entre les deux groupes. Ce parallèle suggère qu’une étude comparative plus complete des peuples de race mixte dans le monde entier présenterait une valeur incontestable.

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Ties on the fringes of identity

Social Science Research
Volume 33, Issue 4 (December 2004)
Pages 702-723
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2003.10.002

Carolyn A. Liebler, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota

I use data on part-American Indian children in the 1990 Census 5% PUMS to assess my hypotheses that thick racial ties within the family constrain racial identification, and that structural aspects of the community (group size, inequality, and racial heterogeneity) affect racial identification when racial ties are thin within the family. American Indians present an interesting case study because their high levels of intermarriage and complex patterns of assimilation/identity retention for generations provide a varied group of people who could potentially identify their race as American Indian. Several hypotheses are supported by the data, signifying that racial identification among people with mixed-heritage is affected by the social world beyond individual psychology and racial ties within the family.

Article Outline

1. Introduction
2. Identity and thickness of ties
3. Hypotheses
4. Data and sample selection
5. Dependent variables
6. Focal independent variables
7. Control variables
8. Drawbacks to using census data to study identity
9. Results
10. Discussion
11. Conclusion
Appendix A. Descriptive statistics for entire sample
References

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Telling Our Own Stories: Lumbee History and the Federal Acknowledgment Process

The American Indian Quarterly
Volume 33, Number 4, Fall 2009
pages 499-522
E-ISSN: 1534-1828, Print ISSN: 0095-182X

Malinda Maynor Lowery, Assistant Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Being part of and writing about the Lumbee community means that history always emerges into the present, offering both opportunities and challenges for my scholarship and my sense of belonging. I was born in Robeson County, North Carolina, a place that Lumbees refer to as “the Holy Land,” “God’s Country,” or, mostly, “home,” regardless of where they actually reside. My parents raised me two hours away in the city of Durham, making me an “urban Indian” (or as my cousins used to say, a “Durham rat”). I have a Lumbee family; both of my parents are Lumbees, and all of my relatives are Lumbees—I’m just a Lum, I’m Indian. This is how I talk about myself, using terms and categories of knowledge (like “home” and “Lum”) that have specific meanings to me and to other Lumbees but may mean nothing special to anyone else. Stories and places spring from these categories and become history.

I was drawn to researching and writing about my People’s history in part because the opportunity to tell our own story was too rare for me to pass up. Outsiders, people who do not belong to the group, have told our stories for us, often characterizing us as a “tri-racial isolate,” “black Indians,” or “multi-somethings.” Lumbees seem to have a particular reputation for multiracial ancestry. Perhaps our seemingly anomalous position in the South raises the question—as nonwhites, the argument goes, whites must have classed Lumbees socially with African Americans; therefore, Lumbees must have married African Americans extensively because they could not have married anyone who was white. At the heart of these arguments are two converging assumptions: one, that ancestry and cultural identity are consanguineous rather than subject to the changing contexts of human relations, and two, that white supremacy is a timeless norm rather than a social structure designed to ensure the dominance of a certain group. Race has been linked to blood and ancestry…

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Mitsawokett to Bloomsbury: Archaeology and History of a Native-American Descendant Community in Central Delaware

Chapter 5. A Larger Ethnic Community

2008
383 pages
Delaware Department of Transportation Project 88-110-01
Federal Highway Administration Project F-NH-1003(13)
Delaware Department of Transportation Archæological Series Number 154
Carolann Wicks, Secretary

Original and redraft prepared by

Edward F. Heite and Cara L. Blume
Heite Consulting, Inc., Camden, Delaware

Redraft of original compiled by

Heite Consulting, Inc., Frederica, Delaware

DelDOT [Delaware Department of Transportation] has edited all cultural resource documents on this website. The documents were edited to protect the location of archaeological sites, any culturally sensitive material, and all State Historic Preservation Office (archaeological) cultural resource forms. Section 304 of the National Historic Preservation Act, as amended in 1992, 36 CFR pat 800.11 of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation’s regulations implementing Section 106 of that same Act, Section 9(a) of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, and Delaware Code Title 7, Chapter 53 and 5314 provide the legal authority for restricting access to information on the location and nature of archaeological resources.

At least three Bloomsbury households belonged to a distinct local ethnic enclave. Similar, related, communities existed along the Eastern Seaboard

The preservation planning regime requires that each property must be considered in terms of its larger cultural and historical context. An obvious context for the subject property is the post-contact history of “isolate” populations of Native American descent in Delaware, not previously noticed by the planning process. While creation of a new full-blown planning context is not appropriate in a site-specific study, some information is necessary in order to place the site in its own proper ethnic milieu.

An ethnic group may be defined by any combination of such traits as consanguinity, shared foodways, settlement patterns, and common customs. A Kent County isolate community included several Bloomsbury residents. By some definitions, this closed community can be described as a distinct ethnic group, part of a series of similar, interrelated, ethnic enclaves along the eastern seaboard.

Members of Delaware’s racial isolate communities have been known by a bewildering variety of labels over the years. Labels have shifted, depending upon the era and individual points of view. It is useful to analyse the meaning behind these labels, remembering that they reflect observer bias.

As the local group developed, similar communities were coming into existence up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Genealogical research firmly connects the local community with nearby groups. On a larger scale, similar circumstances and surname similarities suggest that there was, at an early date, an informal network of such communities over long distances. In any case, research for this project indicates that the local “isolate” community was not an isolated or a unique phenomenon.

These isolate groups share certain characteristics that are consistent from North Carolina northward at least to New Jersey. Shared attributes of the various communities include:

1. Iberian surnames appear in all the communities as early as the seventeenth century, and always before the middle of the eighteenth century.
2. Families with documented Native American heritage are related to at least some members of each community. Some of the documented Native American families are found among several communities, and migrations can be traced.
3. At least by the middle of the eighteenth century, each community had begun to intermarry, thereby removing themselves from the larger local pool of prospective marriage partners.
4. People moved among the communities and married, thereby suggesting that they early recognized and embraced one another as similar cultural communities.
5. Aside from the term “Mulatto” applied with increasing frequency as time passed, most community members were not identified racially until after the Revolution…

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Cultural Activities, Identities, and Mental Health Among Urban American Indians with Mixed Racial/Ethnic Ancestries

Race and Social Problems
Volume 2, Number 2 (2010)
pages 101-114
DOI: 10.1007/s12552-010-9028-9

Yoshitaka Iwasaki, Professor of Rehabilitation Sciences and Social Work
Temple University

Namorah Gayle Byrd, Assistant Professor, Developmental English
Gloucester County College, New Jersey

Focus groups were conducted to appreciate the voices of Urban American Indians (UAI) who have mixed ancestries residing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Participants (15 women and 10 men, 19–83 years of age) with a variety of Native ancestries coming from different nations (i.e., blackfeet, blackminkwa, Cherokee, Creek, Delaware, Lakota, Powhatan, Seminole, and Shawnee) reported to also have a Non-Native racial/ethnic ancestry such as African/black, Hispanic, and/or Caucasian/white. Specifically, this study provided evidence about (a) the complexity and challenge of being “mixed” UAI (e.g., “living a culture” as opposed to blood quantum in determining a personal identity) (b) the linkage of cultural identities to mental health (c) contributions of cultural activities to identities and mental health (e.g., therapeutic and healing functions of cultural activities), and (d) very limited urban Native-oriented mental health service (e.g., visions for Native American-centered mental health clinic in an urban setting). Building on those UAI’s voices, this paper provides a context for the need of a culturally respectful transformation of urban mental health system by highlighting the clinical significance of cultural identity and mental health promotion for UAI.

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Vikings Possibly Carried Native American to Europe

Discovery News
2010-11-17

Medieval texts suggest the Vikings arrived in the New World more than 1,000 years ago.

THE GIST

• DNA analysis reveals that four families in Iceland possess genes typically found in Native Americans or East Asians.
• Genealogical evidence revealed that these families shared a distant ancestor from the same region.
• The Vikings may have brought back a Native American woman with them after they arrived in the New World.

The first Native American to arrive in Europe may have been a woman brought to Iceland by the Vikings more than 1,000 years ago, a study by Spanish and Icelandic researchers suggests.

The findings boost widely-accepted theories, based on Icelandic medieval texts and a reputed Viking settlement in Newfoundland in Canada, that the Vikings reached the American continent several centuries before Christopher Columbus traveled to the “New World.”

Spain’s CSIC scientific research institute said genetic analysis of around 80 people from a total of four families in Iceland showed they possess a type of DNA normally only found in Native Americans or East Asians…

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“The Horrid Alternative”: Miscegenation and Madness in the Frontier Romance

Journal of American & Comparative Cultures
Volume 24, Issue 3 (Fall/Winter 2001)
Pages: 137-151
DOI: 10.1111/j.1537-4726.2001.2403_137.x

Harry J. Brown, Assistant Professor of English
DePauw University

In a speech delivered to a gathering of Delaware and Mohican Indians, Thomas Jefferson foresaw the destiny of the United States as a “marriage” of its various races, declaring that, in ”the natural progress of things,” Indians and whites “would meet and blend together… intermix, and become one people” (Wald 25). He invites (the Indians to “mix with us by marriage” and grandly prophesies, “your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great island” (Wald 26). But even as Jefferson imagined the new nation as a “marriage” of whites and Indians, the subsequent generation of writers who assumed the responsibility of telling the story of th nation found it difficult to imagine what such a marriage would yield.

In her survey of American frontier writing in The Land Before Her (1984), Annette Kolodny observes a “studied literary silence on the subject of white-red intermarriage” (70). Scholars have since suggested that the uneasiness of the frontier romance with miscegenation stems from the sacred myths of  racial, national, and patriarchal accendance. Racial mixing represents a fundamental contradiction to the national ideology of racial separatism; therefore, the frontier romance, intent upon the creation of a “national” literature, registers this contradiction as a tense “silence.”

I will examine this “silence” more closely in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok: A Tale of Early-Times (1824), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of The Mohicans (1826), and Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, or A Tale of Early Times in ihe Massachusetts (1827).  As these romances are confronted and confounded by the specter of miscegenation, they drift from the daylight world of the “historical,” the native realm of a solid “national” literature, into the nightmare world of me “gothic,” where racial hybridity is manifested not exactly as “silence” but more sharply as madness, degeneracy, and horror. Within these novels we find an intersection of science and sensationalism as the widely-held racial theory of “diminishing fertility” manifest itself in the romance as insanity or living death, the ineveitable “curse” invoked by the “unnatural” mingling of white and Indian blood. The presence of miscegenated women and “half-breed” figures confounds the foundational categories of the national identity imagined by these romances—white and red, civilization and nature, future and past—and, consequently, these figures are represented as irrational, perverse, or doomed, the recurring “nightmare” invading America’s dream of itself.

At the same time, a tradition of “hybrid texts” resists this widely disseminated myth of degeneration and present alternative visions of racial mixing to those provided by the critically sanctioned historical romances. James E. Seaver’s A Narrative of the the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824), for example, published in the same years as Hobomok and equal to The Last of the Mohicans in popularity, offers a way to “read against” the The popularily of the narrative further suggests that, contrary to critical assumptions, audiences were perhaps more receptive to Jefferson’s idea of a racially mixed American future than were romance writers and reviewers.  Jemison’s over-looked success tells us that while reviewers strongly objected to considering miscegenation as part of the formula for a national literature, common readers were apparently less troubled by the prospect of a heterogeneous nation and less insistent on the separation of races as a necessary component of national identity. This apparent gap between the critical and popular responses suggests that…

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Constructing Whiteness: Regulating Aboriginal identity

University of Toronto
2009
93 pages
Publication Number: AAT MR59722
ISBN: 9780494597224

Rebecca Boock

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts Graduate Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

Curricula in classrooms facilitate a national amnesia of colonialism that renders inconceivable the possibility of Aboriginal heritage or mixed-blood presence in national subjects. This thesis examines my own family history alongside the Indian Act and discourses of multiculturalism. I provide a personal account for the ways in which Aboriginal identities are regulated in Canada. I examine how glorified white settler narratives—reproduced through both formal and informal schooling—work to displace Aboriginal peoples as the original inhabitants of the land. I argue that this facilitates ongoing Canadian colonialism that continues to circumvent the possibility of particular mixed-blood Aboriginal identities within the confines of national belonging. Citizenship education in the Toronto District School Board is situated as a mechanism of formal schooling that continues to negate the ongoing colonization of Aboriginal people so that mixed-race Aboriginal students may continue to assume themselves as white subjects within the nation.

Table of Contents

• Title Page
• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Rendering Whiteness: Making National Belonging White
• Chapter Two: National Benevolence and the Erasure of Canadian Colonialism
• Chapter Three” Citizenship Education: Reinscribing Whiteness
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

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“Hearing Radmilla” Film Screening

Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, Arizona
Gardner Auditorium, W. A. Franke College of Business (bldg. 81, room 101)
2010-11-22, 19:00 to 21:30 (Local Time)

Native American Heritage Month

The film will be introduced by filmmaker/producer Angela Webb, Radmilla Cody–Miss Navajo Nation 1997-1998, followed by Questions & Answer session. The film follows Radmilla through her controversial reign as the first biracial Miss Navajo (Navajo and African-American). An inspiring story of an activist-artist’s triumph over adversity and an identity colored by the politics of race and ethnicity. Co-sponsored by the Department of English, NAISA, and the Student Activity Council. Contact: Jeff Berglund, 523-9237.

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The Pocahontas Exception: The Exemption of American Indian Ancestry from Racial Purity Law

bepress Legal Series
Working Paper 1572
2006-08-18
47 pages

Kevin N. Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

“The Pocahontas Exception” confronts the legal existence and cultural fascination with the eponymous “Indian Grandmother.” Laws existed in many states that prohibited marriage between whites and nonwhites to prevent the “quagmire of mongrelization.” Yet, this racial protectionism, as ingrained in law, blatantly exempted Indian blood from the threat to white racial purity. In Virginia, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 made exceptions for whites of mixed descent who proudly claimed Native American ancestry from Pocahontas. This paper questions the juridical exceptions made for Native American ancestry in antimiscegenation statues, and analyzes the concomitant exemptions in contemporary social practice. With increasing numbers of Americans freely and lately claiming Native ancestry, this openness escapes the triumvirate of resistance, shame, and secrecy that regularly accompanies findings of partial African ancestry. I contend that antimiscegenation laws such as the Racial Integrity Act relegate Indians to existence only in a distant past, creating a temporal disjuncture to free Indians from a contemporary discourse of racial politics. I argue that such exemptions assess Indians as abstractions rather than practicalities, which facilitates the miscegenistic exceptionalism as demonstrated in Virginia’s antimiscegenation statute.

Table of Contents

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. ADVOCATING INDIAN-WHITE INTERMIXTURE
  • A. Support from the Founding Fathers
  • B. Assimilation Schemes and the Dawes Allotment Act
• III. EUGENICS AND THE RACIAL INTEGRITY ACT OF 1924
  • A. The Growth of the Eugenics Movement
  • B. Fear Ingrained in Law: The Racial Integrity Act
  • C. Accommodating the Elite: Redefining the Parameters of Whiteness
• IV. THE LEGEND OF POCAHONTAS
• V. THE VANISHING INDIAN
  • A. The Indian Grandmother Complex: A Different Kind of Birth for the Nation
  • B. To the Margins of Society: The Non-Threat of Indian Blood
  • VI. CONCLUSION

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