Mixed Race Studies

New Hampshire: Beyond Black & White

Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire
2019-2020 Elinor Williams Hooker Expanded Tea Talk Series
Keene State College
Young Student Center
Mountain View Room
229 Main Street
Keene, New Hampshire 03435
Sunday, 2019-11-10, 14:00 EST

Contact information:
JerriAnne Boggis, Executive Director
603-570-8469

Panelists: David Watters, Darrell Hucks, & (TBA)
Moderator: Dottie Morris

Moving beyond rigid racial identities, this talk will explore the contemporary as well as historic intersection between Black and Indigenous communities, the presence of “passing” mixed race individuals, and the most recent immigrant experience within a New England context. These complex interactions, connections conflicts, experiences, and resistant efforts of Black, white and multi-racial citizens will be explored through scholarly research and an analysis of the film Lost Boundaries.

For more information, click here.

Who Was the Real James Young Deer?

Bright Lights Film Journal
Issue May 2013 (2013-04-30)
10 pages

Angela Aleiss, Full Time Lecturer, Information Systems
California State University, Long Beach

The Mysterious Identity of the Pathè Producer Finally Comes to Light

“With his acting experience and technical know-how, Young Deer soon advanced to one of Pathé’s leading filmmakers. His Indian identity served him well: no one in the cast or crew at that time would have taken orders from a black man.”

Few in Hollywood knew that James Young Deer, general manager of Pathé Frères West Coast Studio from 1911 to 1914, was really an imposter. After all, Young Deer had earned a reputation as the first Native American producer and had worked alongside D. W. Griffith, Fred J. Balshofer, and Mack Sennett. As one of Hollywood’s pioneer filmmakers, Young Deer oversaw the production of more than 100 one-reel silent Westerns for Pathé, the world’s largest production company with an American studio in Edendale in Los Angeles.

Young Deer was married to Lillian St. Cyr, a Winnebago Indian from Nebraska known as “Princess Red Wing” and star of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1914 classic The Squaw Man. He boasted of a full-blooded Winnebago heritage similar to his wife: his birthplace became Dakota City, Nebraska, and his father was “Green Rainbow” from the Winnebago reservation. He claimed he attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the first off-reservation Indian boarding school.

In a 2010 BBC Radio 3 segment, “James Young Deer: The Winnebago Film-Maker,” no one — including this author — could unscramble Young Deer’s murky past. Young Deer was elusive, and a search in his background leads to a maze of contradictions and discrepancies. But after ten months of poking through dusty archives and faded vital records and tracking down Lillian’s relatives, the identity of this mysterious filmmaker finally came to light. His real name: James Young Johnson, born about April 1, 1878, in Washington, D.C., to mulatto parents George Durham Johnson and Emma Margaret Young.

“If Young Deer claimed to be Winnebago, he was lying to himself and others to promote himself,” says David Smith, Winnebago historian, author, and former director of Indian Studies at Little Priest Tribal College in Nebraska. Smith has heard endless stories about Young Deer’s supposed Winnebago heritage, and he’s had enough. His reaction is understandable: Native American identity is an especially sensitive issue, and no Indian tribe wants their name appropriated by some wannabe.

Little did anyone know that Young Deer’s true heritage lies hidden within the small mid-Atlantic community of whites, African Americans, and Native Americans once known as the “Moors of Delaware.” So secluded were these people that the late historian Clinton A. Weslager referred to them as “Delaware’s Forgotten Folk.”…

Read the entire article here.

“I’m Black, Native, gay, and I’m proud”: Fentress LeBeau shares his story about being a minority among his people

West River Eagle
Eagle Butte, South Dakota
2019-09-25

Alaina Adakai (Alaina Beautiful Bald Eagle), Managing Editor

Fentress LeBeau

Much can be said about Fentress LeBeau — with his energetic wit and bright smile, he can light up any room. Standing 6’ tall, with his hair in long braids, Fentress makes no effort to hide his chin strap beard, even as he wears glittery eyeshadow and vibrant lipstick.

By just being himself, the 20-year old Eagle Butte resident unintentionally draws attention, which sometimes results in negative and violent responses from others.

After years of suppressing his feelings and finally being confident with his identity, Fentress said he is ready to bring awareness to the two-spirit community on Cheyenne River, a sensitive topic that is not usually talked about openly; however, it is matter of great cultural significance that must be addressed, said Fentress.

Childhood memories: always knowing he was different

Fentress is the son of Amber LeBeau, a Lakota descendant of Chief Swift Bird (Oohenumpa), and an African American father. Fentress said many of his childhood memories were of being bullied for being different, first for his skin color, and then for his sexual orientation.

“Whenever we were three or four years old, people would bully us because my sister and I were black. At that age, I don’t think people knew I was two-spirited, so the bullying was because of my skin color,” said Fentress…

Read the entire article here.

Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America

SUNY Press
April 2018
194 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6945-4
Paperback ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6946-1

Kyle T. Mays, Assistant Professor
Department of African American Studies and American Indian Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Argues that Indigenous hip hop is the latest and newest assertion of Indigenous sovereignty throughout Indigenous North America.

Expressive culture has always been an important part of the social, political, and economic lives of Indigenous people. More recently, Indigenous people have blended expressive cultures with hip hop culture, creating new sounds, aesthetics, movements, and ways of being Indigenous. This book documents recent developments among the Indigenous hip hop generation. Meeting at the nexus of hip hop studies, Indigenous studies, and critical ethnic studies, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes argues that Indigenous people use hip hop culture to assert their sovereignty and challenge settler colonialism. From rapping about land and water rights from Flint to Standing Rock, to remixing “traditional” beading with hip hop aesthetics, Indigenous people are using hip hop to challenge their ongoing dispossession, disrupt racist stereotypes and images of Indigenous people, contest white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, and reconstruct ideas of a progressive masculinity. In addition, this book carefully traces the idea of authenticity; that is, the common notion that, by engaging in a Black culture, Indigenous people are losing their “traditions.” Indigenous hip hop artists navigate the muddy waters of the “politics of authenticity” by creating art that is not bound by narrow conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous; instead, they flip the notion of “tradition” and create alternative visions of what being Indigenous means today, and what that might look like going forward.

Table of Contents

• Preface: A Note on Language: Black English and Uncensored Mode
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Can We Live and Be Modern and Indigenous?: Toward an Indigenous Hip Hop Culture
• 1. #NotYourMascot: Indigenous Hip Hop Artists as Modern Subjects
• 2. The Fashion of Indigenous Hip Hop
• 3. Indigenous Masculinity in Hip Hop Culture: Or, How Indigenous Feminism Can Reform Indigenous Manhood
• 4. “He’s just tryna be black”: The Intersections of Blackness and Indigeneity in Hip Hop Culture
• 5. Rhyming Decolonization: A Conversation with Frank Waln, Sicangu Lakota
• Conclusion: “It’s bigger than Hip Hop”: Toward the Indigenous Hip Hop Generation
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Black Indian: A Memoir by Shonda Buchanan

Wayne State University Press
2019-08-26
352 pages
7 black-and-white photos
Size: 6×9
Paperback ISBN: 9780814345801
Ebook ISBN: 9780814345818

Shonda Buchanan, Literary Editor
Harriet Tubman Press

Black Indian, searing and raw, is Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple meets Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony—only, this isn’t fiction. Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, alcoholism, and old resentments, Shonda Buchanan’s memoir is an inspiring story that explores her family’s legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society’s ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance.

Buchanan was raised as a Black woman, who grew up hearing cherished stories of her multi-racial heritage, while simultaneously suffering from everything she (and the rest of her family) didn’t know. Tracing the arduous migration of Mixed Bloods, or Free People of Color, from the Southeast to the Midwest, Buchanan tells the story of her Michigan tribe—a comedic yet manically depressed family of fierce women, who were everything from caretakers and cornbread makers to poets and witches, and men who were either ignored, protected, imprisoned, or maimed—and how their lives collided over love, failure, fights, and prayer despite a stacked deck of challenges, including addiction and abuse. Ultimately, Buchanan’s nomadic people endured a collective identity crisis after years of constantly straddling two, then three, races. The physical, spiritual, and emotional displacement of American Indians who met and married Mixed or Black slaves and indentured servants at America’s early crossroads is where this powerful journey begins.

Black Indian doesn’t have answers, nor does it aim to represent every American’s multi-ethnic experience. Instead, it digs as far down into this one family’s history as it can go—sometimes, with a bit of discomfort. But every family has its own truth, and Buchanan’s search for hers will resonate with anyone who has wondered “maybe there’s more than what I’m being told.”

After Years of Searching, I Finally Found My Black Indian Community

Zora
2019-08-19

Shonda Buchanan, Literary Editor
Harriet Tubman Press

The blood of two peoples runs in us, and we want everyone to know we are still here

Dropping off a book at the Hampton Public Library, I glance at the counter and see a licorice-red flyer that says, “Come Join the Weyanoke Association: African Americans Honoring Our American Indian Heritage.” I look around. Is someone playing a joke on me?

In August 2004, my daughter and I moved to Hampton, Virginia, for my job at a Historically Black College. Our first year was hard and lonely, and we desperately missed our communities back in Los Angeles and in the Los Padres National Forest.

“I hate it here,” Afiya said at least once a week as she tried to make friends in the ninth grade. I tried to placate her with the proverbial “give it time” talks, but I had moved her away from her friends at 14, just as she was about to start high school. We had many “I hate it here” fights, but the truth was I was having a hard time finding my people, too. I missed the African American, African-centered communities, and the American Indian groups that had become my family over the years. This flyer seemed to be a sign: Little did I know I was about to find a space where both sides of my heritage combined…

Read the entire article here.

Sabrina & Corina: Stories

One World (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2019-04-02
224 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780525511298

Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection—a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.

In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.

Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.

Indian allies and white antagonists: toward an alternative mestizaje on Mexico’s Costa Chica

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 11, 2016 – Issue 3: Mestizo Acts: The Politics and Performance of Mestizaje in Guatemala, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru and Colombia
pages 222-241
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2015.1094873

Laura A. Lewis, Professor of Anthropology in Modern Languages and Linguistics
University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

San Nicolás Tolentino, Guerrero, Mexico, is a ‘mixed’ black-Indian agricultural community on the coastal belt of Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, the Costa Chica. This article examines local expressions of race in San Nicolás in relation to Mexico’s national ideology of mestizaje (race mixing), which excludes blackness but is foundational to Mexican racial identities. San Nicolás’s black-Indians are strongly nationalistic while expressing a collective or regional identity different from those of peoples they identify as Indians and as whites. Such collective expression produces an alternative model of mestizaje, here explored through local agrarian history and several village festivals. It is argued that this alternative model favors Indians and distances whites, thereby challenging dominant forms of Mexican mestizaje.

Read or purchase the article here.

Claiming to be Cherokee, contractors with white ancestry got $300 million

The Los Angeles Times
2019-06-26

Adam Elmahrek, Investigative Reporter

Paul Pringle, Investigative Reporter

Two years ago, when the mayor’s office in St. Louis announced a $311,000 contract to tear down an old shoe factory, it made a point of identifying the demolition company as minority owned.

That was welcome news. The Missouri city was still grappling with racial tensions from the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old, in nearby Ferguson. After angry protests, elected officials had pledged to set aside more government work for minority-owned firms.

There was only one problem…

Read the entire article here.

Jamaica gets first Taino chief in over 500 years

The Gleaner
Kingston, Jamaica
2019-06-19

Paul H. Williams, Gleaner Writer

Paul H. Williams

When the Europeans came to what is now known as Jamaica (Yamaye), the Tainos had established themselves in several villages all over the island. They had functional social, commercial, religious and political systems.

The cacique (also spelt kasike/cacike) was the paramount chief of the cacicazgo (chiefdom), which consisted of several villages. The cacique’s power was vast, and he was highly respected. The power that he wielded and the respect he commanded were obliterated after the Spaniards arrived.

The history books are explicit in their narratives about the total genocide of the Tainos in Jamaica. Yet, it is a fact that the Taino DNA had survived through interbreeding, and there are many Jamaicans, some of whom are academics, who have laid claim to their Taino ancestry and preserving Taino heritage.

Robert Pairman is one of the people who are active in preserving the Taino heritage in Jamaica, and recently he was enstooled in an elaborate ritualistic ceremony as kasike (cacique) of the Taino Tribe, Jamaican Hummingbird (YukayekeYamayeGuani), inside the Asafu Yard at Charles Town Maroon village in Portland.

For more than two hours, people watched as history unfolded in front of their eyes. They listened to the impassioned voice of Boriken (Puerto Rico) Taino elder Bibi Vanessa Inarunikia Pastrana as she guided the participants and informed onlookers about their Taino and Africa heritage, and the need to embrace them. It was she who handed Pairman the mayana (Jamaican Taino ceremonial axe) that was used by a Jamaican cacique…

Read the entire article here.