Mixed Race Studies

Man with a Cross: Hawkeye Was a “Half-Breed”

Cooper Panel
American Literature Association Conference
San Diego, California
May 1998

James Fenimore Cooper Society

Barbara Mann, Lecturer of English
University of Toledo

Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 10, August 1998

Natty Bumppo—Hawkeye of James Fenimore Cooper’s five Leather-Stocking Tales—is indelibly inscribed in the critical mind as the “man without a cross,” that prototypical “white Indian” of American literature. So accustomed are they to Natty’s “man-without-a-cross” mantra that critics take it at face value, never asking the obvious question: Was Natty really a man without a racial cross? I say, “Not a chance.” Seen against the backdrop of Native history, of which Cooper was intimately aware, Natty could only have been a mixed blood.

Now for a little primer: Modem critics tend to assume that the one-drop rule of racial identity was always in force in America, legally disallowing any wiggle room to people of racially mixed ancestry. Not so. There were in actuality three rules of racial identity, each competing with the others between 1750 and 1850: generational passing; the rule of recognition; and the rule of descent. Generational passing, the British rule under colonialism, allowed third generation cross-bloods to pass as “white,” regardless of how Native or African they might look. By 1825, racist theory was gaining ground in America, positing two new, conflicting “rules” of race, those of recognition and descent. The rule of recognition was the eye-test of identity: whoever could pass, might; while the rule of descent—the infamous “one-drop” rule—forbade passing at all times, regardless of generation or appearance. After 1825, only the rules of recognition and descent remained to vie for social control and, from 1850 on, the one-drop rule alone applied. Note that, in Natty’s lifetime, the generational rule and the rule of recognition were in force. Under either, Natty was legally “white,” even though in modem, more racist America, he would not be so categorized…

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From the “half-breed” to the “tragic mulatto”: The race integration film in the fifties and the struggle for social equality

New York University
May 2007
435 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3269779
ISBN: 9780549099536

Ryan Daniel DeRosa, Assistant Professor of Film Studies
Ohio University

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Cinema Studies New York University

This dissertation connects Hollywood “integration films” of the 1950s to the modern civil rights movement and to “liberal” racial ideologies. We use the historiography of Foucault to exhume correspondences between political and popular representations of racial-national identity and of integration, following changes in the formation of ideas empowering racial liberalism. We place film interactively alongside Supreme Court rulings and Congressional debates around race integration, contemporaneously published works of history and sociology, and the “memory” of slavery and Reconstruction as displayed in the wider culture.

In films centering a protagonist who is racially or culturally “mixed,” we examine a change in discourse surrounding racial integration. In the early fifties—from the social problem film such as No Way Out (1950) to the pro-Indian western such as Broken Arrow (1950) and Broken Lance (1954)—motion pictures employ a framework of the melting pot, or cultural assimilation, to represent integration. This signifies national support for racial progress yet also, by using terms of “culture” to repress terms of “class,” suggests widespread resistance to imagining and ensuring needed change in the racial-social structure of society. In the later fifties, a different logic–based on cultural pluralism—represents integration, often in films making miscegenation or racial mixing problematic. Movies such as The Searchers (1956) and Imitation of Life (1959) construct an imagined “right” to protect white status as a “culture,” or “racial cultural” boundaries that would oppose our political knowledge of race and class struggle.

Further, we connect seminal liberal representations of race in the fifties to ideological positions today that efface the persistence of segregation—or that would represent poverty but do not advance a social remedy for it. This dissertation would challenge liberalism to speak not just for passive racial “progress,” for “rationalism” and for the individual, but moreover for the rights of the poor and working class to equal social resources, rights that interact with and would advance racial equality.

Table of Contents

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABSTRACT
• INTRODUCTION The Fifties Integration Film and the Limits of Racial Liberalism
  • 1. The Integration Film and the Melting Pot
  • 2. The Fifties Western and Historiography
  • 3. Gunnar Myrdal and Racial Liberalism
• CHAPTER I “I Thought You Were Worried about Being an Indian”: Broken Lance, Brown v. Board of Ed, and Integration Discourse
  • 1. Discourses of Psychology, Integration, and Culture
  • 2. Integration Discourse
  • 1. Discourses of Psychology, Integration, and Culture
  • 2. Integration Discourse
  • 3. Oscar Handlin and the Melting Pot
  • 4. Broken Lance, Integration, and the Status of White Patriarchy
  • 5. Conclusion: Brown’s Lost Justification
• CHAPTER II From Social Problems to Cultural Relations: No Way Out, Broken Arrow, and “Melting Pot” Liberalism
  • 1. The Melting Pot and the Pro-Indian Western
  • 2. To Discover and Unite America: The Sociology of the Melting Pot
  • 3. Reading Culture in Broken Arrow
  • 4. Segregation with Assimilation: Pinky
  • 5. No Way Out and the Return of Class Conflict
  • 6. The Radical Sociology of Oliver C. Cox
  • 7. Conclusion: Ideological Opportunities for Integration
• CHAPTER III The Searchers, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and the Ideology of Cultural Rights
  • 1. Cultural Rights and Debbie’s Choice
  • 2. The Searchers, Ambiguity and Historical Investigation
  • 3. Relations in the Film
  • 4. American Judaism and Integration Fears
  • 5. The Searchers and the Civil Rights Act of 1957
  • 6. Conclusion: Cultural Rights and History
• CHAPTER IV “You Weren’t Being Colored”: Imitation of Life, Cultural Pluralism, and the Struggle for Social Equality
  • 1. Introduction: “Radical Ambiguity” and Imitation of Life
  • 2. Melodrama and Changing Gender Relations
  • 3. Melodrama, Realism, and Race
  • 4 Imitation in the 1930s: “Mammy” and the New Deal
  • 5. Imitation and Slavery
  • 6. “Mammy” and Melodrama
  • 7. Elkins and a New Pluralism
  • 8. Imitation’s Dual/Dueling Aesthetics
  • 9. Conclusion: “The Other Nation”
• CONCLUSION The Representation of Poverty and the Veil over Culture
  • 1. Looking Forward
  • 2. The “Tragic Mulatto” in the Western, 1960
  • 3. Affirmative Action and Struggle over Diversity
  • 4. The Representation of Poverty
  • 5. Culture as Social Struggle
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Between Race and Nation: The Plains Metis and the Canada-United States Border

University of Wisconsin, Madison
May 2009
419 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3384469
ISBN: 9781109476347

Michel Hogue, Assistant Professor of History
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation examines how the Plains Métis both experienced and shaped their incorporation into two nation-states: the U.S. and Canada. It explores how, as the northern Plains were pulled into the economic, political, and social orbits of distinct metropolitan centers, the social category of race emerged as a key measure of the boundaries of citizenship within new nation-states. The study encompasses a critical time period when ideas about race and the differences it marked were in flux. Set in a place that straddled national borders, where national territorial claims were weak, and where national borders marked different legal regimes, it explores the question of how and why mixed racial groups in North America formed or failed to form. This study asks, What effect did the new political boundaries and racial hierarchies emerging within these new states have on the potential for the creation of the Métis as a distinct people?

The study shows that, as this borderland world became more closely tied to national economies and polities through the nineteenth century, the socio-legal categories of nationality and race became key faultlines that circumscribed Métis claims to belonging in both countries. Incorporative projects, whether commercial or national, initially allowed Plains Métis communities to flourish. But, as settler-based societies supplanted fur trade societies, social relations changed dramatically. Even in Canada, where distinct legal and conceptual categories existed for people of mixed Indigenous and white ancestry and where fur trade interactions had given rise to separate Métis communities in other parts of the country, recurring questions about nationality and race undercut Plains Métis attempts to secure a more permanent place in the borderlands. The precise meanings of the categories of race and nation—or who could be included within them—remained the subject of intense negotiation among officials, the Métis, and their Indigenous neighbors. Ultimately, the absence of appropriate legal frameworks for the recognition of mixed-race groups and state willingness to guarantee the corporate rights of those groups created significant barriers for the continuation of separate, identifiable Plains Métis borderland communities.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Note on Terminology
• INTRODUCTION: Remapping Plains Metis History from the Borderlands
• CHAPTER ONE: Creating a Metis Borderland, 1800-1840
• CHAPTER TWO: Fur Trade, Free Trade, and the Franchise: The Politics and Economics of Metis Borderland Settlements, 1840-1870
• CHAPTER THREE: Crossing Boundaries: The Plains Metis in Montana, 1869-1878
• CHAPTER FOUR: White, Indian, Metis: Race and Incorporation on the Canadian Prairies, 1869-1879
• CHAPTER FIVE: Dismantling Plains Metis Borderland Settlements, 1879-1885
• CHAPTER SIX: Scrip & Enrollment Commissions and the Shifting Boundaries of Belonging, 1885-1920
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

List of Figures

1. “Heart of a Continent”
2. Northern Plains in the 1860s
3. Metis Wintering Sites, 1840s-1870s
4. Metis Migrations
5. Northern Plains in the 1870s
6. Reduction of Montana Indian Reservations, 1885-95

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