Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South

University of Georgia Press
2005-03-28
60 pages
Illustrated, Trim size: 5.5 x 8.25
ISBN: 978-0-8203-2731-0

Theda Perdue, Atlanta Distinguished Term Professor of Southern Culture
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

On the southern frontier in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European men—including traders, soldiers, and government agents—sometimes married Native women. Children of these unions were known by whites as “half-breeds.” The Indian societies into which they were born, however, had no corresponding concepts of race or “blood.” Moreover, counter to European customs and laws, Native lineage was traced through the mother only. No familial status or rights stemmed from the father.

“Mixed Blood” Indians looks at a fascinating array of such birth- and kin-related issues as they were alternately misunderstood and astutely exploited by both Native and European cultures. Theda Perdue discusses the assimilation of non-Indians into Native societies, their descendants’ participation in tribal life, and the white cultural assumptions conveyed in the designation “mixed blood.” In addition to unions between European men and Native women, Perdue also considers the special cases arising from the presence of white women and African men and women in Indian society.

From the colonial through the early national era, “mixed bloods” were often in the middle of struggles between white expansionism and Native cultural survival. That these “half-breeds” often resisted appeals to their “civilized” blood helped foster an enduring image of Natives as fickle allies of white politicians, missionaries, and entrepreneurs. “Mixed Blood” Indians rereads a number of early writings to show us the Native outlook on these misperceptions and to make clear that race is too simple a measure of their—or any peoples’—motives.

IndiVisible – African-Native American Lives in the Americas

National Museum of the American Indian
4th Street and Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, DC
2009-11-09 through 2010-05-31

Comanche family, early 1900s Here is a family from the Comanche Nation located in southwestern Oklahoma. The elder man in Comanche traditional clothing is Ta-Ten-e-quer. His wife, Ta-Tat-ty, also wears Comanche clothing. Their niece (center) is Wife-per, also known as Frances E. Wright. Her father was a Buffalo Soldier (an African American cavalryman) who deserted and married into the Comanches. Henry (center left) and Lorenzano (center right) are the sons of Frances, who married an African American man. Courtesy Sam DeVenney

Within the fabric of American identity is woven a story that has long been invisible—the lives and experiences of people who share African American and Native American ancestry.

African and Native peoples came together in the Americas. Over centuries, African Americans and Native Americans created shared histories, communities, families, and ways of life. Prejudice, laws, and twists of history have often divided them from others, yet African-Native American people were united in the struggle against slavery and dispossession, and then for self-determination and freedom.

For African-Native Americans, their double heritage is truly indivisible.

The exhibition IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas is a collaboration between the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Service (SITES).

Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America

University of Nebraska Press
2002
396 pages
Illus., map
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-6194-5

Edited by

James F. Brooks, President and Chief Executive Officer
School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Confounding the Color Line is an essential, interdisciplinary introduction to the myriad relationships forged for centuries between Indians and Blacks in North America. Since the days of slavery, the lives and destinies of Indians and Blacks have been entwined-thrown together through circumstance, institutional design, or personal choice. Cultural sharing and intermarriage have resulted in complex identities for some members of Indian and Black communities today.

The contributors to this volume examine the origins, history, various manifestations, and long-term consequences of the different connections that have been established between Indians and Blacks. Stimulating examples of a range of relations are offered, including the challenges faced by Cherokee freedmen, the lives of Afro-Indian whalers in New England, and the ways in which Indians and Africans interacted in Spanish colonial New Mexico. Special attention is given to slavery and its continuing legacy, both in the Old South and in Indian Territory. The intricate nature of modern Indian-Black relations is showcased through discussions of the ties between Black athletes and Indian mascots, the complex identities of Indians in southern New England, the problem of Indian identity within the African American community, and the way in which today’s Lumbee Indians have creatively engaged with African American church music.

At once informative and provocative, Confounding the Color Line sheds valuable light on a pivotal and not well understood relationship between these communities of color, which together and separately have affected, sometimes profoundly, the course of American history.

Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

Oxford University Press
July 2006
312 pages
2 maps, 15 halftones, 1 line illus.
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-531310-9
ISBN10: 0-19-531310-0

Claudio Saunt, Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Institute of Native American Studies
University of Georgia

Winner of the William P. Clements Prize, Clements Center for Southwest Studies

Deceit, compromise, and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian, African, and European descent living in the newly formed United States, the most personal and emotional choices–to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship–were often necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the country’s racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons.

Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South, where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma, Katy Grayson and her brother William–both Creek Indians–had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their native land soon after the birth of the American republic, however, Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder, embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in America’s racial hierarchy. William, by contrast, refused to leave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them.

Traveling separate paths, the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears, only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards, they refused to recognize each other’s existence. In 1907, when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens, Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white, others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W. Grayson, the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation, Claudio Saunt tells not only of America’s past, but of its present, shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics, the role of “blood” in the construction of identity.

Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them, the Graysons denied their kin, enslaved their relatives, married their masters, and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its own right but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience.

Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation

University of North Carolina Press
April 2010
368 pages
6.125 x 9.25
12 illus., 3 tables, 5 genealogical charts, 3 maps, appends., notes, index
Cloth ISBN:  978-0-8078-3368-1
Paper ISBN:  978-0-8078-7111-9

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

Awards & Distinctions

• 2010 Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award
• 2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

With more than 50,000 enrolled members, North Carolina‘s Lumbee Indians are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River. Malinda Maynor Lowery, a Lumbee herself, describes how, between Reconstruction and the 1950s, the Lumbee crafted and maintained a distinct identity in an era defined by racial segregation in the South and paternalistic policies for Indians throughout the nation. They did so against the backdrop of some of the central issues in American history, including race, class, politics, and citizenship.

Lowery argues that “Indian” is a dynamic identity that, for outsiders, sometimes hinged on the presence of “Indian blood” (for federal New Deal policy makers) and sometimes on the absence of “black blood” (for southern white segregationists). Lumbee people themselves have constructed their identity in layers that tie together kin and place, race and class, tribe and nation; however, Indians have not always agreed on how to weave this fabric into a whole. Using photographs, letters, genealogy, federal and state records, and first-person family history, Lowery narrates this compelling conversation between insiders and outsiders, demonstrating how the Lumbee People challenged the boundaries of Indian, southern, and American identities

Table of Contents

• Preface: Telling Our Own Stories
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Terms
• Introduction: Coming Together
• 1 ADAPTING TO SEGREGATION
• 2 MAKING HOME AND MAKING LEADERS
• 3 TAKING SIDES
• 4 CONFRONTING THE NEW DEAL
• 5 Pembroke Farms: Gaining Economic Autonomy
• 6 MEASURING IDENTITY
• 7 RECOGNIZING THE LUMBEE
• Conclusion: Creating a Lumbee and Tuscarora Future
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index

Feminist Readings of Native American Literature: Coming to Voice

University of Arizona Press
1998
181 pages
6.0 x 9.0
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-1633-9

Kathleen M. Donovan, Professor and Department Head of English
South Dakota State University, Brookings

Who in a society can speak, and under what circumstances? These questions are at the heart of both Native American literature and feminist literary and cultural theory. Despite the recent explosion of publication in each of these fields, almost nothing has been written to date that explores the links between the two. With Feminist Readings of Native American Literature, Kathleen Donovan takes an important first step in examining how studies in these two fields inform and influence one another. Focusing on the works of N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Paula Gunn Allen, and others, Donovan analyzes the texts of these well-known writers, weaving a supporting web of feminist criticism throughout. With careful and gracefully offered insights, the book explores the reciprocally illuminating nature of culture and gender issues. The author demonstrates how Canadian women of mixed-blood ancestry achieve a voice through autobiographies and autobiographical novels. Using a framework of feminist reader response theory, she considers an underlying misogyny in the writings of N. Scott Momaday. And in examining commonalities between specific cultures, she discusses how two women of color, Paula Gunn Allen and Toni Morrison, explore representations of femaleness in their respective cultures. By synthesizing a broad spectrum of critical writing that overlaps women’s voices and Native American literature, Donovan expands on the frame of dialogue within feminist literary and cultural theory. Drawing on the related fields of ethnography, ethnopoetics, ecofeminism, and post-colonialism, Feminist Readings of Native American Literature offers the first systematic study of the intersection between two dynamic arenas in literary studies today.

Read an excerpt here.

Earthquake Weather

University of Arizona Press
1996
87 pages
5.5 x 8.5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-1630-8

Janice Gould

It’s unmistakable, that strangely calm air and sky that signals big change ahead: earthquake weather. These are familiar signs to Janice Gould, a poet, a lesbian, and a mixed-blood California Indian of Koyangk’auwi Maidu descent. Her sense of isolation is intense, her search for identity is relentless, and her words can take one’s breath away. Sometimes accepting, sometimes full of anger, Gould’s work is rare, filtered through the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of a lesbian of Indian heritage. Over and over again, she speaks as an outsider looking in at the lives of others–through a doorway, out of a car window, or from the shambles of a broken relationship. Showing a steady courage in the midst of this alienation, her words are also stark testimony to the struggle of an individual caught in social and emotional contexts defined by others. In Earthquake Weather, as in an evolving friendship, Gould opens herself to the reader in stages. “I did not know how lonely I was / till we began to talk,” she writes in an opening section, setting the introspective tone of what’s to come. She begins with a focus on those universal truths that both bind us and isolate us from each other: the pain of loss, the finality of death, our longing to see beneath the surface of things. Next, the poet turns to her growing-up years during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. She describes a family in turmoil and an Indian heritage that, oddly, was one of the factors that made her feel most disconnected from other people. And she writes poignantly about her increasing alienation from prescribed sexual roles. “What’s wrong with me? / Where do I belong? Why / am I here? Why can’t I / hold on?” Finally, as in a trusting friendship, Gould offers the reader vivid word portraits of relationships in her life–women she has loved and who have loved her. Erotic and deeply personal, these poems serve as both a reconciliation and affirmation of her individuality. “Yet would you deny / that between women desire exists / that in our friendship a delicate / and erotic strand of fire unites us?” The poems in this book, says critic Toby Langen, are most powerful for their “courageous drawing on experience and feelings.” They will speak to many general readers as well as anyone interested in questions of gender and identity, including students of literature, lesbian/women’s studies, social/cultural studies, or American Indian studies.

Itch Like Crazy

University of Arizona Press
2002
121 pages
6.0 x 9.0
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-2177-7

Wendy Rose

Among Native American writers of mixed-blood heritage, few have expressed their concerns with personal identity with as much passion as Wendy Rose. A mainstay among American Indian poets whose work addresses these issues, she is a writer with whom readers of diverse ethnic backgrounds have consistently identified. In her latest work, Rose returns to these major motifs while exploring a new dimension: using poetry as a tool to delve into the buried secrets of family history—and all of American history as well. Confronting questions of personal history that itch like crazy—the irritations that drive human existence—she acknowledges and pays tribute to her Indian and European ancestors without hiding her anger with American society. Rose’s poems are strong political and social statements that have a distinctly narrative flavor. Here are Europeans who first set foot on America’s shores while Taíno Indians greeted them as if they were visiting neighbors; Hopi and Miwok “Clan Mothers, grand-daughters, all those the missionaries erased”; and European forebears who as settlers pushed their way relentlessly west. Through her vivid imagery, she speaks to and for these ancestors with a sense of loss and an itching caused by the biases provoked by ethnic chauvinism. Itch Like Crazy is a finely crafted literary work that is also a manifesto addressing contacts and conflicts in the history of Indian-white relations. By presenting another view of U.S. history and its impact on the Native Americans who are her ancestors, it offers a new appreciation of the issue of “tribal identity” that too often faces Native peoples of the Americas—and is too often misunderstood by Euro-American society.

Read an excerpt here.

In-between Places

University of Arizona Press
2005
119 pages
6.0 x 9.0
2005
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8165-2385-6
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-2387-0

Diane Glancy, Professor of Native American Literature and Creative Writing
Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota

“There is a map you decide to call a book. A book of the territories you’ve traveled. A map is a meaning you hold against the unknowing. The places you speak in many directions.” In-Between Places would be enjoyed by anyone interested in thoughtful, careful prose that investigates complex issues of the self and the world. Energetic and beautifully constructed prose.  For Diane Glancy, there are books that you open like a map. In-between Places is such a book: a collection of eleven essays unified by a common concern with landscape and its relation both to our spiritual life and to the craft of writing. Taking readers on a trip to New Mexico, a voyage across the sea of middle America, even a journey to China, Glancy has crafted a sustained meditation on the nature and workings of language, stories, and poems; on travel and motion as metaphors for life and literature; and on the relationships between Native American and Judeo-Christian ways of thinking and being in the world. Reflecting on strip mines in Missouri (“as long as there is anything left to take, human industry will take it”) and hog barns in Iowa (writing about them from the hogs’ perspective), Glancy speaks in the margins of cross-cultural issues and from the places in-between as she explores the middle ground between places that we handle with the potholder of language. She leaves in her wake a dance of words and the structures left after the collision of cultures. A writer who has often examined her native heritage, Glancy also asks here what it means to be part white. “What does whiteness look like viewed from the other, especially when that other is also within oneself?” And in considering the legacy of Christianity, she ponders “how it is when the Holy Ghost enters your life like a brother-in-law you know is going to be there a while.” Insightful and provocative, In-between Places is a book for anyone interested in a sense of place and in the relationship between religion and our stance toward nature. It is also a book for anyone who loves thoughtful writing and wishes to learn from a modern master of language.

One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820–1870

University of Massachusetts Press
June 2005
288 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-55849-483-1

Karen Woods Weierman, Associate Professor of English
Worcester State University

Examines the roots of a pernicious and persistent American taboo

The proscription against interracial marriage was for many years a flashpoint in American culture. In One Nation, One Blood, Karen Woods Weierman explores this taboo by investigating the traditional link between marriage and property. Her research reveals that the opposition to intermarriage originated in large measure in the nineteenth-century desire for Indian land and African labor. Yet despite the white majority’s overwhelming rejection of nonwhite peoples as marriage partners, citizens, and social equals, nineteenth-century reformers challenged the rule against intermarriage. Dismissing the new “race science” that purported to prove white superiority, reformers held fast to the religious notion of a common humanity and the republican rhetoric of freedom and equality, arguing that God made all people “of one blood.”

The years from 1820 to 1870 marked a crucial period in the history of this prejudice. Tales of interracial marriage recounted in fiction, real-life scandals, and legal statutes figured prominently in public discussion of both slavery and the fate of Native Americans. In Part One of this book, Weierman focuses on Indian-white marriages during the 1820s, when Indian removal became a rallying cry for New England intellectuals.

In Part Two she shifts her attention to black-white marriages from the antebellum period through the early years of Reconstruction. In both cases she finds that the combination of a highly publicized intermarriage scandal, new legislation prohibiting interracial marriage, and fictional portrayals of the ills associated with such unions served to reinforce popular prejudice, justifying the displacement of Indians from their lands and upholding the system of slavery. Even after the demise of slavery, restrictions against intermarriage remained in place in many parts of the country long into the twentieth century. Not until the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision did the Supreme Court finally rule that such laws were unconstitutional.

Finishing on a contemporary note, Weierman suggests that the stories Americans tell about intermarriage today—stories defining family, racial identity, and citizenship—still reflect a struggle for resources and power.