Mixed Race Studies

“I’ve Never Heard of the Métis People”: The Politics of Naming, Racialization, and the Disregard for Aboriginal Canadians

ActiveHistory.ca
2012-10-18

Crystal Fraser
University of Alberta

Mike Commito
McMaster University

The controversial selection of a hamburger name by a Toronto restaurant had customers and critics raising their eyebrows this past August. Holy Chuck Burgers, located on Yonge Street, specializes in gourmet hamburgers, some of which sport clever titles like “Go Chuck Yourself” and “You Fat Pig.” Recently, the restaurant has come under criticism, not for its indulgent offerings, but because of the names of two of its items: “The Half Breed” and “The Dirty Drunken Half Breed.” It was not long before Twitterverse exploded, slamming Holy Chuck Burgers for its use of racially-charged, insensitive discourse that has had a longstanding history against Canada’s Indigenous peoples. While the criticism was well deserved, the apparent disconnect to Aboriginal issues is unfortunately part of a much larger and longer colonial mentality of indifference.

Like many racial designations in Canada, the term ‘half-breed’ is both complex and problematic. Historically, the designation was used to describe people of ‘mixed’ descent whose lineage originated from intimate relationships between non-Aboriginal newcomers and Aboriginal people. The racial designation of ‘half-breed’ was applied not only to Métis people, but also to other Aboriginals as a way to essentialize and deauthenticate all forms of indigenity. Today, by way of colonial discourse, the Métis are sometimes linked to the historic understanding of ‘half-breed.’ This was demonstrated when Holy Chuck Burgers’ racist food names were viewed as a direct attack on Métis people. But the equation of ‘half breed’ to Métis is intrinsically problematic, since many Indigenous peoples are of ‘mixed’ ancestry but not labelled as such. Nevertheless, Holy Chuck Burgers’ owner explained that the poor selection in burger names originated from the fact that the burger patties consist of a mixture of ground pork and beef. In “The Dirty Drunken Half Breed,” “dirty” refers to the chili that was poured all over the burger and “drunken” denotes the wine that was used in the cooking preparation. When considering Holy Chuck Burgers’ choice of language, it is difficult not to think about racial stereotypes about Aboriginal people that have been historically imposed and, to some extent, continue to be used…

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Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, Hybridity in American Texts

University of Washington Press
2007-06-15
352 pages
notes, bibliog., index
6 x 9 in.
Paperback ISBN: 9780295988351
Hardcover ISBN-10: 0295986816; ISBN-13: 978-0295986814
eBook ISBN: 9780295800745

Edited by

David S. Goldstein, Senior Lecturer, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
University of Washington, Bothell

Audrey B. Thacker, Lecturer in English
California State University, Northridge

This volume of collected essays offers truly multiethnic, historically comparative, and meta-theoretical readings of the literature and culture of the United States. Covering works by a diverse set of American authors—from Toni Morrison to Bret Harte—these essays provide a vital supplement to the critical literary canon, mapping a newly variegated terrain that refuses the distinction between “ethnic” and “nonethnic” literatures.

Other contributors include Jesse Alemán, Ariel Balter, Olivia Castellano, AnnaMarie Christiansen, Georgina Dodge, Tracy Floreani, Joe Lockard, Edwin J. McAllister, Sheree Meyer, William Over, Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, Chauncey Ridley, Derek Parker Royal, Alexander W. Schultheis, Andrea Tinnenmeyer, and Jose L. Torres-Padilla.

Contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Re-Constructing Race and Ethnicity: Identity Imposed or Adopted
  • 1. Citizenship Rights and Colonial Whites: The Cultural Work of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Novels
  • 2. Testifying Bodies: Citizenship Debates in Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy
  • 3. The Color of Money in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
  • 4. Passing as the “Tragic” Mulatto: Constructions of Hybridity in Toni Morrison’s Novels
  • 5. Re-Viewing the Literary Chinatown: Multicultural Hybridity in Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land
  • 6. Reading The Turner Diaries: Jewish Blackness, Judaized Blacks, and Head-Body Race Paradigms
• II. Re-Contextualizing Race and Ethnicity: Texts in Historical and Political Perspective
  • 7. Smallpox, Opium, and Invasion: Chines Invasion, White Guilt, and Native American Displacement in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction
  • 8. Visualizing Race in American Immigrant Autobiography
  • 9. Maud Martha vs. I Love Lucy: Taking on the Postwar Consumer Fantasy
• III. Re-Considering Race and Ethnicity: Meta-Issues in Theory and Criticism
  • 10. Some Do, Some Don’t: Whiteness Theory and the Treatment of Race in African American Drama
  • 11. Traumatic Legacy in Darryl Pinckney’s High Cotton
  • 12. Portnoy’s Neglected Siblings: A Case for Postmodern Jewish American Literary Studies
  • 13. Tension, Conversation, and Collectivity: Examining the Space of Double-Consciousness in the Search for Shared Knowledge
  • 14. When Hybridity Doesn’t Resist: Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing!
• Contributors
• Index