The Dispossessed: Cultural Genocide of the Mixed-Blood Utes: an Advocate’s Chronicle

Posted in Books, History, Law, Media Archive, Monographs, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2011-11-07 02:07Z by Steven

The Dispossessed: Cultural Genocide of the Mixed-Blood Utes: an Advocate’s Chronicle

University of Oklahoma Press
May 1998
384 pages
9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
ISBN-10: 0806130431; ISBN-13: 978-0806130439

Parker M. Nielson

This book is out of print.

In The Dispossessed, Parker M. Nielson chronicles the tragic story of the mixed-blood Utes. A leading Utah attorney, Nielson represented this group in its suit against the U.S. government, decided by the Supreme Court in 1972. Although the Court determined that the mixed-bloods had been defrauded, it declined to restore their property. Basing his account on extensive research as well as his own firsthand experience, Nielson brings to light for the first time the disturbing events that led up to the landmark decision.

Deprived of their native lands in central Utah by immigrant Mormons, the mixed-blood Utes—almost exclusively members of the Uintah band—were confined to a reservation in eastern Utah, with a promise from the U.S. government that the land would be theirs alone forever. This promise was not kept. The final blow was the Termination Act, enacted in the early 1950s. Designed to end government supervision of American Indians and the obligation of federal entitlements, its consequences for the mixed-blood Utes—as well as for many other Indian groups—were devastating, for it deprived them of their assets, land, and very way of life.

Drawing in particular on the testimony of individual Utes affected by the termination policy, Nielson discloses the broken promises and backhanded schemes perpetuated by government officials and the Utes’ own lawyers, whose motives were compromised by self-interest. The author thus explores an all-too-neglected subject: the role of tribal attorneys in influencing tribal histories.

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Last Child

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Novels, United States, Women on 2011-11-07 01:24Z by Steven

Last Child

Henry Holt and Company (an imprint of Macmillan)
October 2005
240 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 240 pages,
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8050-7739-1, ISBN10: 0-8050-7739-1
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-4299-3709-2, ISBN10: 1-4299-3709-2

Michael Spooner, Director
Utah State University Press

A mixed-race girl must grow up quickly when danger threatens her world

Rosalie’s biggest problem used to be her own divided feelings. The constant tug-of-war between her white half and her Native American half is hard. She even has two names: Rosalie when she’s at the fort with her father and Last Child when she’s in the village with her mother.

But now a steamboat has carried smallpox into Rosalie’s world—and the Mandans have no resistance to the disease. Suddenly the name Last Child is all too real.

Set during the smallpox epidemic of 1837, this is the powerful story of a mixed-race girl fighting her way into adulthood against all odds.

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Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance

Posted in Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, United Kingdom, Women on 2011-11-06 22:04Z by Steven

Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance

Palgrave an (imprint of Macmillan)
May 2007
256 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
ISBN: 978-1-4039-8640-5, ISBN10: 1-4039-8640-1

Lynette Goddard, Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre
Royal Holloway, University of London

Staging Black Feminisms explores the development and principles of black British women’s plays and performance since the late Twentieth century. Using contemporary performance theory to explore key themes (such as migration, motherhood, sexuality, and mixed race identity), it offers close textual readings and production analysis of a range of plays, performance poetry and live art works by practitioners, including Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay, Valerie Mason John, Winsome Pinnock, Jacqueline Rudet, Debbie Tucker Green, Dorothea Smartt, Su Andi, and Susan Lewis.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction
  • PART I: HISTORY AND AESTHETICS
    • Black British Women and Theatre: An Overview
    • Black Feminist Performance Aesthetics
  • PART II: PLAYS
    • Winsome Pinnock’s Migration Narratives
    • Jacqueline Rudet (Re)Writing Sexual Deviancy
    • Jackie Kay and Valerie Mason-John’s Zamis, Lesbians and Queers
  • PART III: PERFORMANCES
    • Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troops
    • Solo Voices: Performance Art, Dance and Poetry
  • PART IV: CONCLUSIONS
    • Black Feminist Futures?
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
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Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Social Science, United States on 2011-11-05 03:07Z by Steven

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Harvard University Press
September 1999
368 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches; 14 halftones, 2 tables
Paperback ISBN: 9780674951914

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Professor of American Studies & History
Yale University

  • Winner of the 1999 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association
  • 1999 Best Book on the Social Construction of Race, Sponsored by the American Political Science Association Section on Race, Ethnicity and Politics
  • Co-Winner of the American Political Science Association’s 1999 Ralph J. Bunche Award

America’s racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of “whiteness studies” and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants “race” has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were reracialized to become Caucasian. He provides a counterhistory of how nationality groups such as the Irish or Greeks became Americans as racial groups like Celts or Mediterraneans became Caucasian.

Jacobson tracks race as a conception and perception, emphasizing the importance of knowing not only how we label one another but also how we see one another, and how that racialized vision has largely been transformed in this century. The stages of racial formation—race as formed in conquest, enslavement, imperialism, segregation, and labor migration—are all part of the complex, and now counterintuitive, history of race. Whiteness of a Different Color traces the fluidity of racial categories from an immense body of research in literature, popular culture, politics, society, ethnology, anthropology, cartoons, and legal history, including sensational trials like the Leo Frank case and the Draft Riots of 1863.

Table of Contents

  • Note on Usage
  • Introduction: The Fabrication of Race
  • I. The Political History of Whiteness
    • 1. “Free White Persons” in the Republic, 1790–1840
    • 2. Anglo-Saxons and Others, 1840–1924
    • 3. Becoming Caucasian, 1924–1965
  • II. History, Race, and Perception
    • 4. 1877: The Instability of Race
    • 5. Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews
  • III. The Manufacture of Caucasians
    • 6. The Crucible of Empire
    • 7. Naturalization and the Courts
    • 8. The Dawning Civil Rights Era
  • Epilogue: Ethnic Revival and the Denial of White Privilege
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
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New Christians/’New Whites’: Sephardic Jews, Free People of Color, and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, 1760-1789

Posted in Books, Caribbean/Latin America, Chapter, History, Judaism, Media Archive, Religion on 2011-11-05 01:56Z by Steven

New Christians/’New Whites’: Sephardic Jews, Free People of Color, and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, 1760-1789

Chapter (pages 314-332) in: The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800
Berghahn Books
2001
592 pages
Pb ISBN 978-1-57181-430-2; Hb ISBN 978-1-57181-153-0

Edited by: Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering

Chapter Author:

John D. Garrigus, Associate Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

The case of Saint-Domingue’s Sephardim illustrates that the story of Jews in Europe’s expansion westward is about more than the survival or mutation of deeply rooted family traditions. Old World questions about Jewish political identity did not disappear in the Americas. Rather, these persistent issues forced colonists and their children born in the New World to reconcile European philosophies with American conditions. In the case of the largest slave colony in the Caribbean, Saint-Domingue’s Jews helped translate emerging French nationalism into an attack on racial prejudice that eventually produced the Haitian revolution. By raising complex issues of national identity and citizenship in French America after 1763, Sephardic merchants and planters provided a model for another group whose place in colonial society was equally ambiguous: Saint-Domingue’s free people of color.

In the mid-1780s, the self-proclaimed leaders of the colony’s “mulattos” adopted many of the techniques that colonial Jews used to fight for legal rights. Their challenge to a racial hierarchy that had only recently acquired full legitimacy threatened the ideological basis of plantation society. By 1791 political and military struggles between colonial “whites” and “mulattos” had become so vicious that a great slave rebellion was possible.

The civil positions of colonial Jews and free people of mixed European and African parentage were parallel because elites in France began to construct new definitions of French citizenship in the mid-eighteenth century. In Paris and elsewhere, Jansenist judges and Protestant leaders pushed royal administrators to recognize that property, loyalty, and civic utility, not orthodox Catholicism, defined French identity. At the same time, royal bureaucrats eager to open France to wealthy families born outside its borders began to free these influential immigrants from traditional legal disabilities. By 1789, therefore, the continuum of rights and disabilities separating non-French residents and native-born subjects of the French monarchy was increasingly simplified into two mutually exclusive categories: citizen and foreigner…

Read the entire chapter here.

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Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World

Posted in Anthologies, Anthropology, Books, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Religion, Slavery, United States on 2011-11-04 21:36Z by Steven

Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World

Texas A&M University Press
2010-07-12
168 pages
6 x 9, Illus.
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-60344-192-6

Edited by:

John D. Garrigus, Associate Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

Christopher Morris, Associate Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

With the recent election of the nation’s first African American president—an individual of blended Kenyan and American heritage who spent his formative years in Hawaii and Indonesia—the topic of transnational identity is reaching the forefront of the national consciousness in an unprecedented way. As our society becomes increasingly diverse and intermingled, it is increasingly imperative to understand how race and heritage impact our perceptions of and interactions with each other. Assumed Identities constitutes an important step in this direction.

However, “identity is a slippery concept,” say the editors of this instructive volume. This is nowhere more true than in the melting pot of the early trans-Atlantic cultures formed in the colonial New World during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. As the studies in this volume show, during this period in the trans-Atlantic world individuals and groups fashioned their identities but also had identities ascribed to them by surrounding societies. The historians who have contributed to this volume investigate these processes of multiple identity formation, as well as contemporary understandings of them.

Originating in the 2007 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures presented at the University of Texas at Arlington, Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World examines, among other topics, perceptions of racial identity in the Chesapeake community, in Brazil, and in Saint-Domingue (colonial-era Haiti). As the contributors demonstrate, the cultures in which these studies are sited helped define the subjects’ self-perceptions and the ways others related to them.

Table of Contents

  • Preface and Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Race and Identity in the New World; Franklin W. Knight
  • “Thy Coming Fame, Ogé! Is Sure”: New Evidence on Ogé’s 1790 Revolt and the Beginnings of the Haitian Revolution; John D. Garrigus
  • “The Child Should Be Made a Christian”: Baptism, Race, and Identity in the Seventeenth-century Chesapeake; Rebecca Goetz
  • West Indian Identity in the Eighteenth Century; Trevor Burnard
  • Illegal Enslavement and the Precariousness of Freedom in Nineteenth-century Brazil; Sidney Chalhoub
  • Rosalie of the Poulard Nation: Freedom, Law, and Dignity in the Era of the Haitian Revolution; Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard
  • In Memoriam, Evan Anders
  • About the Contributors
  • Index
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Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation

Posted in Books, Caribbean/Latin America, Europe, Identity Development/Psychology, Law, Media Archive, Monographs, Passing, Slavery, United States, Women on 2011-11-04 20:46Z by Steven

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation

Harvard University Press
February 2012
288 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
17 halftones, 1 line illustration, 1 map
Hardcover ISBN 9780674047747

Rebecca J. Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law
University of Michigan

Jean M. Hébrard, Historian and Visiting Professor
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris)
University of Michigan

Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family’s quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States.

Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana’s state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie’s great-great-granddaughter Marie-José was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium.

Freedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect. The strategies they used to overcome the constraints of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent epoch.

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The Multiracial Identity Movement: Countless Ways to Misunderstand Race

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, My Articles/Point of View/Activities, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2011-11-04 04:15Z by Steven

The Multiracial Identity Movement: Countless Ways to Misunderstand Race

MixedRaceStudies.org
2011-11-04

Steven F. Riley

In Jen Chau’s essay, “Multiracial Families: Counted But Still Misunderstood,” in the October 31, 2011 issue of Racialiscious, reveals just how much race is misunderstood by some activists within the multiracial identity movement and exemplifies why the movement—in its current form—is incapable of leading us into a post-racial future.

Part of the “quiet” that Ms. Chau is experiencing is due to the realization that President Barack Obama is not the multiracial messiah some had thought he would be. He is neither a messiah, nor is he—as he has stated on multiple occasions—multiracial.  Unfortunately, in many ways, the policies of our first black President differ little from our previous white President (George W. Bush). Is this the “black-white mix” we were hoping for? Perhaps the quiet is the palatable disappointment in President Obama’s first three years office. What part of “race is a social construction” does she not understand?  As succinctly stated by Professor Richard Thompson Ford,

“Because race is a social category and not a biological or genetic one, Obama’s mixed parentage does not determine his race. Mixed parentage may influence one’s appearance, and a person whose appearance is racially ambiguous can influence how she is perceived. In such instances, race may be a question of personal affiliation to some extent. And mixed parentage may influence how one chooses to identify. But for the most part, society assigns us our races. At any rate, Obama’s appearance is not ambiguous, and he unquestionably identifies as black.” (Emphasis is mine.)

A good first step would be to for activists respect Obama’s identity as they would like us to respect theirs.

My theory—which differs considerably from Ms. Chau’s—is that the “quiet” is due to fact that multiracial-identity movement is simply not the progressive force she and others think it is; and we—including activists themselves—are beginning to recognize that.  In many ways, the multiracial-identity movement mimics the tactics, ideologies and demagogueries of the right-wing conservative adherents that it claims to fight.

The problems with the movement are numerous, but they can be narrowed to three major issues: 1) Race as biology, 2) Ahistoricity, and 3) the refusal to discuss the role of white supremacy within the discourses of multiraciality.

After nearly a century of scientific acknowledgment that there is no such thing as “race” as a biological concept, why do some in the movement still pursue issues dealing with so-called “multiracial medicine?”  A truly progressive movement would preface all of its statements with the fact that “race” in short, was a concept used to justify the extermination and enslavement of non-Europeans.

Another deficiency in the multiracial movement is its unwillingness to acknowledge that so-called “racial mixing” in the Americas is a five-century—not four decade—aspect of our history.  Thus even if “race” were a biological concept, we are all most certainly “mixed” by now.  Rather than making hypocritical (demanding the freedom to self-identify for some but not for others) pronouncements on President Obama’s heterogeneous background, multiracial activists should also consider the heterogeneity of the First Lady Michelle Obama, the overwhelming vast majority of black and Latino Americans, and yes, a significant segment of white Americans. In 1927, 40 years before the mythological baby-boom that was allegedly brought about by Loving v. Virginia and just seven years after the last 20th-century census that would enumerate “mixed-race” people (Ms. Chau seems to have forgotten the seven past censuses starting in 1850 that counted mixed-race individuals), anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, revealed that,

“The word “Negro” is, biologically, a misnomer, for the African Negroes, brought to the United States as slaves, have crossed in breeding with the dominant White population, as well as with the aboriginal American Indian types with whom they came into contact, so that there is today only a small percentage of the American Negroes who may be considered Negro in the ordinary sense of the term.” (The emphasis is mine.)

When an early 20th-century anthropologist—in the midst of an overtly racist era—can show more insight that 21st century activists—in the midst of the so-called “Age of Obama” era—we have a serious problem.

Lastly, the most deafening “quiet” within the multiracial movement, is its silence on the role of white supremacy in the continuing oppression and shaping of identities here in United States and around the world.  It is the ideology of white supremacy that created the notion of race as biology, then racialized and dehumanized, enlslaved, and exterminated people around the world for centuries—and continue to do—to preserve the current Eurocentric hegemonic paradigm.  As Professor G. Reginald Daniel has warned,

“We should be especially concerned about any half-hearted attack on the Eurocentric paradigm in the manner of interracial colorism that merely weakens rather than eradicates the dichotomization of blackness and whiteness, while leaving intact the racial hierarchy that maintains white privilege.”

The type of incidents that agitate the multiracial identity movement today are not the growing wealth disparities among racialized groups, or current vigorous attempts to curtail voting rights of minorities ahead of the 2012 General Election, but rather the freely chosen racial identity by the President or the chosen racial identity of the child of a Hollywood celebrity.  As Ms. Chau has stated, there are many ways that we have to fight racism and ignorance, yet the movement—particularly on the internet—is more interested in exploiting the bodies of young people by hosting “mixed-race” fashion shows that conjure-up images of Quadroon Balls from the early 19th-century or posting photographs of the allegedly “multiracial person of-the-day” in a self-aggrandizing exercise that Professor Rainier Spencer has coined as “miscentrism.”  At this rate, the multiracial-identity movement will be no more effective in combating racism and ignorance than a lukewarm decaffeinated soy-triple-shot no-fat latte at Starbucks.

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Native, Aboriginal, Indigenous: Who Counts as Indian in Post Apartheid Virginia

Posted in Anthropology, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Papers/Presentations, Tri-Racial Isolates, United States, Virginia on 2011-11-04 03:56Z by Steven

Native, Aboriginal, Indigenous: Who Counts as Indian in Post Apartheid Virginia

Mid-Atlantic Conference on the Scholarship of Diversity, Conference Proceedings
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
April 2004
17 pages

Jay Hansford C. Vest, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies
University of North Carolina, Pembroke

In 1948, sociologist William Gilbert wrote: “Indian blood still remains noticeable in our eastern States population in spite of the depletions arising from over 300 years of wars, invasions by disease and white men from Europe and black men from Africa.” Gilbert chronicled remnant Indian groups of the eastern states from Maine to Texas and Virginia to Illinois. In his findings, he reported that only Vermont and New Hampshire exhibit no residual Native tribal population while Georgia, Arkansas and Illinois manifest no surviving social groups. At the time, Gilbert estimated the survival of 75,000 to 100,000 mixed-blood Natives “Who may frequently be more white or Negro in appearance” than Indian. Having fallen into disuse, the original tribal names were largely lost in time and most often the distinguishing terms applied to these Native Americans has been nicknames given them by the dominant white people.

Noting that Virginia’s surviving Indian groups tended to retain traditions of their Native origin, Gilbert identified several mixed blood groups along the Blue Ridge and Piedmont zones of the state. Stating that these concentrations “beginning with Rappahannock County in the north and continuing southward along the Blue Ridge through Rockbridge and Amherst Counties and striking directly southward to Halifax County on the North Carolina border,” he gave definition to the geographical occupation of these interior Virginia tribal groups. Specifically he identified 500 to 600 mixed bloods in central and the extreme western end of Amherst County near Bear Mountain and Tobacco Row Mountain of the Blue Ridge. Known locally as “Issues,” he describes these people as having “a very rich brunette with straight black hair and Caucasian features.” Noting a second group northwest of Amherst County, he further identified a population of over 300 “Brown people” exhibiting “a mixture of white, Indian, and occasionally Negro blood.” A third group who claimed Indian descent was identified by Gilbert in “Halifax County on the North Carolina border. Locally both groups were considered to be “mulattoes” but acknowledged as “a group apart from both whites and Negroes.” While this brief summary exhausts the information supplied by Gilbert, it does not begin to manifest the social history and cultural significance of these and other surviving Virginia Piedmont and Blue Ridge Indian groups.

Considered in an ahistorical context, these sociological reports of “tri-racial isolates” have largely been taken as a means of undermining the aboriginal-indigenous character of surviving Native Americans in the eastern United States. Minding this conclusion, it is the intent of this paper to, first, supply to an historical background of Colonial Indian assimilation and explore the American institutional racism that has plagued these Natives, particularly in the south, and second, to consider factors of their Native-aboriginal-indigenous birthright…

Read the entire paper here.

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Outside the box: The multiracial/multiethnic student experience

Posted in Campus Life, Live Events, Media Archive, United States on 2011-11-03 23:40Z by Steven

Outside the box: The multiracial/multiethnic student experience

University of Colorado, Boulder
Main Campus – University Memorial Center (UMC)
1669 Euclid Avenue
Boulder, Colorado
Room: 415
2011-11-08, 15:30-16:45 MST (Local Time)

For the multiracial student, college is often a time of consolidating and exploring identity. Through a combination of research, personal stories, and facilitated discussion, this session offers models of multiracial and multiethnic identity development, and explores the unique challenges and strengths of multiracial students at CU. One of the goals of this session is to develop strategies for improving the climate for multiracial students at CU.

For more information, click here.

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