Mixed Race Studies

Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

Farrar, Straus and Giroux an imprint of Macmillan
2012-10-16
352 pages
Hardback ISBN-10: 0374299560; ISBN-13: 978-0374299569

Henry Wiencek

Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Master of the Mountain, Henry Wiencek’s eloquent, persuasive book—based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson’s papers—opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson’s world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money.

So far, historians have offered only easy irony or paradox to explain this extraordinary Founding Father who was an emancipationist in his youth and then recoiled from his own inspiring rhetoric and equivocated about slavery; who enjoyed his renown as a revolutionary leader yet kept some of his own children as slaves. But Wiencek’s Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the “silent profits” gained from his slaves—and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought he’d vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jefferson’s grocery bills. Parents are divided from children—in his ledgers they are recast as money—while he composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what some of his friends call “a vile commerce.”

Many people of Jefferson’s time saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had been badly distorted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story?

The thunderstorm that shook the mountain during the telling of Peter Fossett’s story passed. We tourists were deposited back into the present, with shafts of sunlight illuminating a peaceful scene–a broad pathway stretching into the distance, disappearing over the curve of the hillside. Jefferson named it Mulberry Row for the fast-growing shade trees he planted here in the 1790s. One thousand yards long, it was the main street of the African-American hamlet atop Monticello Mountain. The plantation was a small town in everything but name, not just because of its size, but in its complexity. Skilled artisans and house slaves occupied cabins on Mulberry Row alongside hired white workers; a few slaves lived in rooms in the mansion’s south dependency wing; some slept where they worked. Most of Monticello’s slaves lived in clusters of cabins scattered down the mountain and on outlying farms. In his lifetime Jefferson owned more than 600 slaves. At any one time about 100 slaves lived on the mountain; the highest slave population, in 1817, was 140…

…Jefferson made his emancipation proposal around the same time he took on an intriguing legal case, Howell v. Netherland, that illuminates the shifting, increasingly ambiguous racial borderland in colonial Virginia, where strict enforcement of racial laws could have the effect of making white people black.

In the winter of 1769, Samuel Howell, a mixed-race indentured servant who had escaped from his master, sought a lawyer in Williamsburg to represent him in suing for freedom. His grandmother was a free white woman, but his grandfather was black, so Howell had become entrapped in a law that prescribed indentured servitude to age thirty-one for certain mixed-race people “to prevent that abominable mixture of white men or women with negroes or mulattoes.” Howell, aged twenty-seven, was not indentured forever, since he would be freed in about four years, but nonetheless Jefferson felt angry enough over this denial of rights that he took Howell’s case pro bono.

Jefferson later became famous for his diatribes against racial mixing, but his arguments on behalf of Howell, made more than a decade before he wrote down his infamous racial theories, suggest that the younger Jefferson harbored doubts about the supposed “evil” of miscegenation. The word “seems” in the following sentence suggests that he did not quite accept the prevailing racial ideology: “The purpose of the act was to punish and deter women from that confusion of species, which the legislature seems to have considered as an evil.”

Having just one black grandparent, Howell probably appeared very nearly white. But with the full knowledge that Howell had African blood, Jefferson argued to the justices that he should be immediately freed. He made his case partly on a strict reading of the original law, which imposed servitude only on the first generation of mixed-race children and could not have been intended, Jefferson argued, “to oppress their innocent offspring.” He continued: “it remains for some future legislature, if any shall be found wicked enough, to extend [the punishment of servitude] to the grandchildren and other issue more remote.” Jefferson went further, declaring to the court: “Under the law of nature, all men are born free,” a concept he derived from his reading of John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers, the concept that would later form the foundation of the Declaration of Independence. In the Howell case, Jefferson deployed it in defense of a man of African descent…

Read the entire excerpt here.

Miscegenation

Otago Witness
Dunedin, New Zealand
Issue 652, 1864-05-28
Page 1
Source: Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa

From the “Saturday Review.”

Words being the signs of ideas, for a new notion a new term is necessary. The barbarous word “miscegenation” has been invented by the fanatics of Abolitionism to express a doctrine which it was for a time found convenient to wrap up in the term of “amalgamation,” but which, after a brief tribute to modesty, it is now found not an insult to American morality to disclose in all its indecency and immodesty. That doctrine is, that the white race in general, and the white of the Northern States in particular, is dying out, and that, to preserve it from utter destruction, it must be mixed with the richer, purer, and nobler blood of the negro. Physiologically, this very practical use of the slave is based on the fact that mixture of blood is necessary for the perfection of race—which is indisputable but here a slight difficulty occurs. How does it happen that if, as the writer owns, hitherto the white has almost universally mixed with the white, and only degenerates more and more, the very opposite result occurs with the black, who just as universally has hitherto only mixed with the black, and only improves by it The white breeds in and in, and nothing but a degenerate and puny posterity is the result the black breeds in and in, and he only becomes “richer,” “warmer,” “nobler,” and more emotional,” “vigorous,” and fresher.” We may, however, best state the facts of the case in the very graphic language of the author or authoress, as it is surmised.

“The white people of America are dying for want of flesh and blood. They are dry and shrivelled for lack of the healthful juice of life. In the white American are seen unmistakeably the indications of physical decay. The cheeks are shrunken, the lips are thin and bloodless, the under jaw is narrow and retreating, the teeth decayed, the nose sharp and cold, the eyes small and watery, the complexion of a blue and yellow hue, the head and shoulders bent forward, the hair dry and straggling upon the men, the waists of the women thin and pinched, telling of sterility and consumption, the general appearance gaunt and cadaverous from head to foot. You will see bald heads upon young men. You will see eye-glasses and spectacles, false teeth, artificial colour on the face, artificial plumpness to the form. The intercourse will be formal, ascetic, unemotional. Turn now to an assemblage of negroes. Every cheek is plump, the teeth are whiter than ivory, there are no bald heads, the eyes are large and bright. Our professional men show more than any of the lack of healthful association with their opposites’ of the other sex. They need contact with healthy, loving, warm-blooded natures to fill up the lean interstices of their anatomy.

Nor is this a matter of theory only. The Southerners have shown a wonderful success in the civil war and it is all owing to their connection, licit and illicit, with the negro. “The emotional power, fervid, oratory, and intensity which distinguishes ail slaveholders is due to their intimate association with the most charming and intelligent of their slave girls.” It seems that “the mere presence of the African in large numbers infused into the air a sort of barbaric malaria” which, indeed, has been often noticed, and is commonly called by a coarser name, but which we are now told is a miasm of fierceness which has come to infect the white men and even the women too, and which accounts for the wild chivalrous spirit of the South, and its success in the field.” Nor are these the only benefits which the rebels derive from their privileged propinquity to the ideal man, the vigorous able-bodied negro. The sweet magnetism of association attracts the daughters of the South to the sable Apollos of the tropics.

“The mothers and daughters of the aristocratic slaveholders are thrilled with a strange delight by daily contact with their dusky male servitors. These relations, though intimate and full of a rare charm to the passionate and impressible daughters of the South, seldom if ever pass beyond the bounds of propriety. A platonic love, a union of sympathies, emotions, &c, &c. The white Southern girl, who matures early, is at her home surrounded by the brightest and most intelligent of the young colored men on the estate. Passionate, full of sensibility, without the cold, prudence of her Northern sister, who can wonder at the wild dreams of love which fix the hearts and fill the imagination of the impressible Southern maiden?… It is safe to say that the first heart experience of nearly every Southern maiden, the flowering sweetness and grace of her young life, is associated with a sad dream of some bondman lover. He may have been the waiter or coachman, or bright yellow lad who assisted the overseer but to her he is a hero, blazing with all the splendors of imperial manhood. She treasures the looks from those dark eyes which made her pulses bound.”

We are inclined to suspect that the North American man and woman may be something of the sort described by this indecent writer and we can well understand how it is that Mr. Hawthorne, after his experience of his sapless, dry, and bony brethren, and his angelic but angular countrywomen, is positively enraged at the sight of the wholesome flesh and blood of an Englishman and Englishwoman. We may be rather proud of being described as “bulbous,” and think it no affront that the “female Bull” may be described in Terence’s phrase as corpus validumn et succi plenum. Our juiciness and physical fulness and strength, and redundancy of muscle and blood, are certainly in strong contrast to what the writer of the pamphlet on Miscegenation describes as dryness and meagreness, the pallor and scranniness and leanness, of the American animal; and if the citizen and citizeness of the Northern States is this or anything like it, we can quite account for Northern failures in the field or any where else. The only absurdity is, that this wretched, sapless, shrivelled caricature of a man, this specimen of humanity in]its most contemptible form, should have the place which it has in the world’s estimate of nations. If this is the ideal American, we quite agree with the author of Miscegenation that the race cannot live to the third generation. If this is what “the Anglo-Saxon”—though plentifully mixed, by the by, with Germans and Irish immigrants and with most of the scum of Europe has come to, it is a comfort to think that we are near the end of it.

The sum and substance of the whole matter is, that this nasty doctrine of the physical necessity of absorbing the white race into the negro population or rather; of creating for the necessities of the American States a mixed and Creole race, is proclaimed not only by the author of this tract, but by the Rev. Beecher Stowe’s partner in the editorship of the Independent,” Mr. Theodore Tilton, by Mr. Horace Greeley, by Mr. Wendell Phillips, and by “the inspired maid of Philadelphia,” the lecturing woman, Miss Anna Dickenson. It is perhaps inconvenient to remember that some such experiment has been tried in Haiti with what success we all know. It is now to be repeated further North. How far these people carry out their views into actual life they do not inform us. If the gentlemen practice what they preach, the demand for coloured Abishags “to engraft upon our stock the rich treasure of negro blood,” and to fill up the lean interstices of the anatomy of editors, must be something more than nominal and as Miss Dickenson has lectured before the President and in many of the cities of the Union, and has not been tarred and feathered by the ladies of America, we are forced to the unpleasant conclusion that they are quite ready to play Tamora to any and every lusty negro who fulfils the “passional” and “emotional instinct” which is among the best cravings of the soul. “It is a mean pride,” we are told, unworthy of a Christian, which would lead any. one to deny that there are wants in the white nature which only the negro could fill, defects in physical organization that only the negro could supply, cravings towards fraternity that only the negro could comfort and satisfy.” Potiphar’s wife anticipated this argument, and in her plain-spoken language to the goodly Hebrew slave only put the doctrine of Miscegenation into practice and if the ladies of New England want another precedent for their “abandonment of an unwholesome prejudice,” the history of the Byzantine Court and the life of the Empress Theodosia may satisfy them that a negro-lover, though a solecism, is by no means an absolute novelty in female taste, A strong-bodied and strong-flavoured partner is perhaps the complement to that strong mind of which the Yankee female has furnished so many and such very unfeminine instances.

The wonderful and horrible thing is that this filthy nonsense is not only not hooted down, but that it represents the more advanced, and indeed the more logical, adherents of that political party which, if the smallest, is undoubtedly the most vigorous in America. All Abolitionists are perhaps not, or perhaps not as yet, avowed adherents of the doctrine of Miscegenation, but all Abolitionists with the very least regard to consistency must render the jus connubii to those who are in every respect their equals. The Miscegenation writers of course go further, and exalt the relative superiority of the nigger, and expatiate on his necessity in the great economy of things for renovating with his fiery energies the cold and languid circulation of the North. Yet even this might do comparatively little harm, for the women who will listen to and applaud Miss Anna Dickenson lecturing on these nauseous subjects are far beyond any other corrupting influences. The shamelessnes which sees “all the splendours of imperial manhood” in a woolly-headed coachman, may be left to that natural indignation which is due to the sight of Messalina vindicating her life on philosophical principles. But the evil does not end here…

Read the entire article here.

The Meaning of Race in the DNA Era: Science, History and the Law

The Temple Journal of Science, Technology & Environmental Law
Volume 27, Number 2 (Fall 2008)
pages 231-265

Christian B. Sundquist, Associate Professor of Law
Albany Law School

INTRODUCTION

What is “race”? Does the concept of race represent a natural and inevitable understanding of human difference? Does race have any biological meaning, or is it merely an artificial construct employed by society and political bodies? If race is the former, then how can modern society avoid a rebirth of racial eugenics? And yet if race is an arbitrary tool of social organization without genetic content, then how should we interpret purported forensic racial determinations based on DNA analyses?

Race is biology. Race is ancestry. Race is genetic.

The meaning of “race” is constantly questioned yet rarely understood. Early theories of race assigned social, intellectual, and moral values to perceived differences among groups of people. The perception that race should be defined in terms of genetic and biologic difference fueled the “race science” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during which time geneticists, physiognomists, eugenicists, anthropologists and others purported to find scientific justification for denying equal treatment to non-“white” persons.

Part I of this article thus examines the provenance of the “race” concept. The categorization of humans into “racial” groups was neither natural nor inevitable. The initial separation of humans into “racial” categories was understood to simply reflect inherent biological differences between groups of people. These differences supposedly accounted for natural variances in intelligence, morality, and physical and sexual prowess. As such, these pseudo-biological differences were used to justify and explain power differentials between “races” of people.

Race is constructed. Race is biologically meaningless. Race is power.

The pseudo-scientific understandings of race supplied by nineteenth-century geneticists and biologists were applied by Nazi Germany in a manner that shocked the world. As a result, the concept of race following World War II increasingly was understood as a socio-political construction with no biological meaning. Modern sociological theories thus uniformly understand race as a social grouping of persons necessary to preserve unbalanced relationships of power. Part II of this article examines this post-war refutation of nineteenth-century “race science,” as well as the core assumptions underlying modern racial theory.

Race is phenotype. Race is color. Race is language. Race is citizenship. Race is class. Race is culture. Race is assimilation. Race is law.

Reducing race to a single critical “essence” is an impossible endeavor. While one’s phenotype and color may contribute to racial categorization, so can one’s national origin, social class and language. As a result, race has a complex social meaning that depends in part on the prevailing “common understanding and meaning” of society. Not-so-antiquated notions of race once deemed Italian, Irish and Southern European immigrants and their descendants as “non-white” and cursed with inferior genetic stock. These groups eventually obtained “Whiteness” based on changing social understandings of their assimilatory potential, and the formation of a racial identity defined in opposition to “Blackness.” The elusive nature of race is similarly illustrated by the conflict between the legal racialization of Middle Eastern and Mexican persons as “white” during certain historical periods, and the social racialization of these persons as “non-white” and racially distinct during other times.

Race is subjective. Race is objective. Race is whiteness. Race is blackness. Race is fixed. Race is malleable. Race is performance.

Race is constantly in flux depending on one’s baseline understanding of the nature of race. I am black according to certain understandings of race, while other interpretations may render me white. I am Latino, Creole, Egyptian, and “other” according to some outsider interpretations of race, yet I can also be reduced to “mixed” by utilizing an alternative understanding of race. Outsider perceptions of race in turn may change according to my performance of race, and how race is performed around me.
Race is biology.

Race is ancestry. Race is genetic.

Notwithstanding the post-war rejection of a biological interpretation of race, modern genetic science has increasingly claimed the ability to identify “race” through the biological analysis of DNA samples. Law enforcement agencies in the United States and elsewhere analyze individual DNA samples to identify the likely “race” of a criminal suspect, while courts in the United States increasingly admit expert testimony stating the statistical probability that a criminal suspect belongs to a specific race based on such DNA analyses. Such a re-biologicalization of race clearly contradicts the classical post-war theory of race as a social construct. Part III of this article examines the contemporary re-interpretation of race as having some biologically traceable genetic essence.

Race is constructed. Race is biologically meaningless. Race is power.

The claims of modern genetics notwithstanding, race remains a biologically meaningless concept of human categorization. Race simply has no traceable genetic essence, and the proliferation of racial DNA testing represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of race rather than the neutral application of scientific principles. Part IV of this article argues that contemporary genetics has misapprehended the elusive nature of race in a manner strikingly similar to that of the nineteenth-century race science…

Read the entire article here.

Three Winton Triangle Presentations at Greensboro conference.

Chowan Discovery Group
2012-10-15

Marvin T. Jones

The Chowan Discovery presentations about the Winton Triangle, its Civil War history and Chowan Discovery historical markers attracted many enthusiastic attendees at the annual conference of the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society (AAGHS) in Greensboro. Included in the audiences were history professionals and authors.
 
One of the joys of having three presentations at the conference was that the reputation of each lecture fed the attendance of the next.  This also gave more people the opportunity to hear about our work.  And then there are those increased sales of Carolina Genesis and the CDG mugs.  Hawking those mugs are fun, whether they sell or not – and they sold.  I enjoyed all of questions and comments.

Among the participants, I saw growing awareness about tri-racial people and free people of color in North Carolina at the conference.  This is an important trend for our mission…

Read the entire article here.

‘Passing’ in colonial Colombia

Havard University Gazette
2009-02-12

Corydon Ireland, Harvard News Office

Racial categories today are self-evident — part of what social scientists might call “socially constructed discourse.” Contemporary people of one race are aware of what other races look like, as well as where they themselves belong in the racial scheme of things.
 
But racial categories were not so firm or reliable while being created centuries ago, in particular in early colonial Latin America. It’s this historical crucible of racial identities that anthropologist and Radcliffe Fellow Joanne Rappaport has chosen to study.
 
She gave a glimpse of her work last week (Feb. 4) during a talk at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, where 80 listeners were drawn in by her intriguing title: “Mischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers: The Meaning of Passing in Colonial Bogotá.”
 
“Spaniard or a mestizo, mulato, indio, or negro,” said Rappaport to begin. “What did these categories mean?”
 
Or to put it another way, she added, what did race mean to these early modern people?
 
For one, it wasn’t a matter of black and white, said Rappaport — that is, it was more subtle than “the genetic metaphor of bounded populations that has characterized the (pseudo) scientific discourse of race since the 19th century.”
 
The word “white” seldom appears in the 16th and 17th century Latin American and Spanish documents she has pored over, she said. Europeans were instead identified by where they were from — Spain, France, or England, for instance. And in what is now present-day Colombia, people were identified not so much by racial categories but more often as citizens — vecinos — of a particular town or city.
 
More important than “white” was the designation “noble,” said Rappaport, who teaches at Georgetown University. “It takes us out of a narrowly racial mindset.”…

…Rappaport, a frequent scholarly traveler to old archives in Spain and Latin America, is using many ways to study the emergence of racial identity in early colonial societies. She’s looking at phenotype and physiognomy as they were used in legal documents 400 years ago and more; at how the moral attributes of racially mixed groups were described; and how these attributes were challenged by the literature of the day…

Read the entire article here.

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe

Walters Art Museum
600 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland
2012-10-14 through 2013-01-21
Open Wednesday-Sunday, 10:00-17:00 ET (Local Time)
Telephone: 410-547-9000

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, an unprecedented exhibition, explores the world of Renaissance art in Europe to bring to life the hidden African presence in its midst. During the first half of the 1500s, Africa became a focus of European attention as it had not been since the time of the Roman Empire. The European thirst for new markets already in the mid 1400s drove the Portuguese (and subsequently the English and Dutch) to explore the establishment of new trading routes down the west coast of Africa and, by the turn of the new century, into the Indian Ocean. At the same time, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa brought the Turks into military and political conflict with European interests. These elements, along with the importation of captured Africans as slaves, primarily from West Africa, increasingly supplanting the trade of slaves of Slavic origin, resulted in a growing African presence in Europe.

1. Annibale Carracci (attributed). Portrait of a Black Servant (Fragment of larger portrait), ca. 1580s, oil on canvas, 24 x 12 in. (60.96 x 30.48cm). Leeds, private collection. 2. Jacopo da Pontormo. Portrait of Maria Salviati de Medici and Giulia de Medici, ca. 1539, oil on panel, 34 5/8 x 28 1/16 in. (88 x 71 cm). The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. 3. German or Flemish. Portrait of a Wealthy Black Man, ca. 1540, oil on panel, diameter 11.7 in. (29.7 cm). Private Collection, Antwerp.

The first half of the exhibition of approximately 75 works explores the historical circumstances as well as the conventions of exoticism that constituted the prism of “Africa” through which individuals were inevitably perceived.

11. Cristovao de Morais. Portrait of Juana of Austria with her Black Slave Girl,1555, oil on canvas, 39 x 31 7/8 in. (99 x 81 cm). Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique, Brussels. 12. Paolo Veronese. Study of a Black Boy Eating, ca. 1570s, black and white chalk on paper, 6 x 7 in. (15.5 x 20 cm). Mia Weiner, Norfolk, Connecticut. 13. Bronzino (workshop replica). Portrait of Duke Alessandro de Medici, ca 1553, oil on tin, 5 7/8 x 4 in. (15 x 12 cm). Uffizi, Florence. 14. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Two Flemish Peasants (Africans), ca.1564-5, etching, ca. 5 x 7 3/8 in. (13/3 x 18.7 cm). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

In the second half, attention shifts to individuals, focusing on portraits. These often very sensitive images underscore the role of art in bringing people from the past to life. While some Africans played respected, public roles, the names of most slaves and freed men and women are lost. Recognizing the traces of their existence is a way of restoring their identity…

For more information, click here.

A Vanishing Race

Chronicles of Oklahoma
Volume 4, Number 1 (June, 1926)
pages 100-115

G. A. Crossett, Editor
Caddo Herald

One of the largest and most intelligent tribes of original American Indians in the United States today is the Choctaws, who inhabit the southeastern portion of Oklahoma.

The Choctaws formerly occupied the central and northern portions of Mississippi. At the time of the war of the American Independence they numbered about twelve thousand. They early made friends with the white settlers, and rarely gave serious trouble to their white neighbors. They were loyal to the United States Government.

AIDED JACKSON

In the War of 1812, the Choctaws furnished a large regiment of soldiers to the American army, commanded by Andrew Jackson. Their outstanding leader was a young man named Apushmataha. He was unlettered, but a brilliant leader of men; strong and wise in council, eloquent and convincing in speech. He made a journey to the neighboring tribes of Cherokees, Creeks and Chickasaws, and won them over to the cause of the Americans in this campaign. It was during this campaign that he and Andrew Jackson became fast friends—a friendship that continued as long as both men lived. He was with Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and his men gave a good account of themselves, being expert marksmen with their popular weapons, the rifle.

Later years saw Apushmataha the spokesman of his people in Washington, before the Interior Department and Congress. His intimacy and friendship with Jackson was renewed when that warrior became president. It was during this period that agitation for removal of the Indian tribes from the southeastern states began. The white settlers had found the soil good, and wanted it all for themselves…

…By nature the Choctaws were roving, loved the field and forest, the great outdoors. He liked the dew, the big wide places; he built his houses far apart. He communed with his God, Chiowa, he called Him, in His vaulted dome; he felt the pull of the Great Spirit in the outdoors. Not many fullbloods are left. He had mixed his blood with the white, until they truly are a, vanishing race. He has taken on white man’s ways; he has accepted his God; he has taken his language; he has built homes like his white brothers. He is no longer pure American in his blood. Now he lives like the white man. He has as many characteristics as there are people. He has take on the good and the bad. He is simply now like the average American white man.

Read the entire article here.

The Mayes

Chronicles of Oklahoma
Volume 15, Number 1 (March, 1937)
pages 56-65

John Bartlett Meserve

The saga of the Cherokees, from the dawn of their arrival in the old Indian Territory down to the present, is emphatically one of constant change in their social, economic, and political lives. The influence of the adventurous white men who intermarried and cast their fortunes among the Indians was very pronounced. The mixed blood descendants of those soldiers of fortune in numerous instances achieved wealth, distinction, and leadership among the Indians and strongly influenced their tribal life. Numerous families of prominence grew up among the mixed blood Cherokee Indians. These families, while none the less proud of their Indian blood, were and are today, capable, in many instances, of tracing an ancestry back to some early white colonial ancestor of more or less renown. The intermarriage of these families provoked a sort of aristocracy in the social and intellectual life of the Cherokees and today among them are families of the highest culture and refinement. They may have been clannish to a degree, but probably inherited this trait from the Scotch with whom they were largely intermarried. The Cherokees have their “first families” and most charming they are indeed. It is worthy of note that the Cherokee Nation had no principal chief of the full blood after the days of the adoption of its constitution in 1827. Its political affairs, after that time, were managed by shrewd, mixed-blood politicians bearing white men’s names and speaking the white man’s language and frequently, with scarcely enough Indian blood to evidence itself in their features.

The Adair family was outstanding among the Cherokees. Two brothers, John and Edward Adair, Scotchmen whose father is reputed to have achieved much prominence in England during the reign of George III, came to America in 1770 and engaged in trading operations with the Indians and ultimately intermarried among the Cherokees in Tennessee. John Adair married Ga-hoga, a full blood Cherokee Indian woman of the Deer clan and his son, Walter Adair, known as Black Watt, was born on December 11, 1783 and became an active character among the Cherokees. Walter Adair married Rachel Thompson, a white woman, on May 13, 1804 and died in Georgia on January 20, 1835. Rachel Thompson was born in Georgia on December 24, 1786 and died near what is today Stilwell, Oklahoma, on April 22, 1876. Nancy Adair, a daughter of Walter and Rachel Adair was born in Georgia on October 7, 1808, married Samuel Mayes on January 22, 1824 and died in what is today Mayes County, Oklahoma on May 28, 1876 and is buried in the old family cemetery on the Wiley Mayes place some seven miles east of Pryor, Oklahoma…

Read the entire article here.

A diverged family converges at Harvard Law

Havard Law School News
2012-10-10

Audrey Kunycky

A chance encounter, a discovery of kin on opposite sides of the world

It wasn’t inevitable that Harvard Law School graduate students Erum Khalid Sattar and Rebecca Zaman would meet so soon, or even at all. Sattar has been at the law school for three years, pursuing a doctorate in juridical science (S.J.D.); Zaman arrived in August to begin a year of study for a master’s in law (LL.M.). Sattar is from Pakistan, and studied law in London; Zaman grew up, earned her law degree and completed a judicial clerkship in Australia. Then again, they’re about the same height, with the same dark brown hair, and that might not be just a coincidence.

In August, a few days into LL.M. Orientation, the two women shook hands and said hello at a Graduate Program reception. “If we hadn’t been wearing nametags, what happened next might never have happened,” says Zaman. Sattar’s large, expressive eyes are glittering, but she wants Zaman to tell the story, because she tells it better.

My surname is Zaman, and it’s a very unusual surname for a white-appearing Australian to have,” explains Zaman. “So when they saw my nametag, a lot of the Indians, Pakistanis and Middle Easterners asked how I could have this name. When I met Erum, it was very similar.  So I said, ‘Oh! My father’s father is a Muslim Indian from Hyderabad.’ And Erum said, ‘Oh, what a coincidence. My family was from Hyderabad, before they moved to Karachi after the partition.’ And she laughed, and said, ‘Maybe we’re related.’ We both laughed, and I said, ‘Maybe. It’s a strange story.’”…

Read the entire article here.

Métis Families and Schools: The Decline and Reclamation of Métis Identities in Saskatchewan, 1885-1980

University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon
March 2009
270 pages

Jonathan Anuik, Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies
University of Alberta

A Dissertation Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History

In the late-nineteenth century, Métis families and communities resisted what they perceived to be the encroachment of non-Aboriginal newcomers into the West. Resistance gave way to open conflict at the Red River Settlement and later in north central Saskatchewan. Both attempts by the Métis to resist the imposition of the newcomer’s settlement agenda were not successful, and the next 100 years would bring challenges to Métis unity. The transmission of knowledge of a Métis past declined as parents and grandparents opted to encourage their children and youth to pass into the growing settler society in what would become Saskatchewan. As parents restricted the flow of Métis knowledge, missionaries who represented Christian churches collaborated to develop the first Northwest Territories Board of Education, the agent responsible for the first state-supported schools in what would become the province of Saskatchewan. These first schools included Métis students and helped to shift their loyalties away from their families and communities and toward the British state. However, many Métis children and youth remained on the margins of educational attainment. They were either unable to attend school, or their schools did not have the required infrastructure or relevant pedagogy and curriculum. In the years after World War II, the Government of Saskatchewan noticed the unequal access to and achievement of the Métis in its schools. The government attempted to bring Métis students in from the margins through infrastructural, pedagogical, and curricular adaptations to support their learning.

Scholars have unearthed voluminous evidence of missionary work in Canada and have researched and written about public schools. As well, several scholars have undertaken research projects on Status First Nations education in the twentieth century. However, less is known about Métis’ interactions with Christian missionaries and in the state-supported or publicly funded schools. In this dissertation, I examine the history of missions and public schools in what would become Saskatchewan, and I enumerate the foundations that the Métis considered important for their learning. I identify Métis children and youth’s reactions to Christian and public schools in Saskatchewan, but I argue that Métis families who knew of their heritages actively participated in Roman Catholic Church rituals and activities and preserved and protected their pasts. Although experiences with Christianity varied, those with strong family ties and ties to the land adjusted well to the expectations of Christian teachings and formal public education. Overall, I tell the story of Métis children and youth and their involvement in church and public schooling based on how they saw Christianity, education, and its role on their lands and in their families. And I explain how Métis learners negotiated Protestant and Roman Catholic teachings and influences with the pedagogy and curriculum of public schools.

Oral history forms a substantial portion of the sources for this history of Métis children and youth and church and public education. I approached the interviews as means to generate new data – in collaboration with the people I interviewed. Consequently, I went into the interviews with a list of questions, but I strove to make these interviews conversational and allow for a two-way flow of knowledge. I started with contextual questions (i.e. date of birth, school attended, where family was from) and proceeded to probe further based on the responses I received from the person being interviewed and from previous interviews. As well, I drew from two oral history projects with tapes and transcripts available in the archives: the Saskatchewan Archives Board’s “Towards a New Past Oral History Project ‘The Métis’” and the Provincial Archives of Manitoba’s Manitoba Métis Oral History Project. See appendices A and B for discussion of my oral history methodology and the utility of the aforementioned oral history projects for my own research…

Read the entire dissertation here.