Mixed Race Studies

Elsie’s Business

University of Nebraska Press
2006
216 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-9865-1

Frances Washburn, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies and English
University of Arizona

Beaten, raped, and left for dead at the side of a road on the Standing Rock Reservation, young Elsie Roberts disappears into her self to revisit the haunts of her childhood and, perhaps, the depths of her experience to uncover the deepest mystery of all. In Elsie’s Business, Elsie’s search through her own memories ultimately intersects with the search of a stranger who is seeking Elsie’s story.

A picture emerges of a poor child, half black and half Native, whose mother has barely eked out a living for the two of them by tanning deerskins and cleaning houses. Rebuilding her life in a different town as a housekeeper, tanner, and beader of moccasins and bags, much like her mother, the taciturn Elsie finds modest comfort and connections among the white people who employ and befriend her. But her peace is fleeting, for someone from her past, or possibly her present, would like to see her silenced completely. A mystery of mesmerizing suspense and sadness, Elsie’s Business weaves the story of a ravaged woman into the traditional tales of her people to create a vivid sense of communities bound by storytelling and understanding and sundered by ignorance and silence.

The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People

University of Nebraska Press
2001 (Originally published in 1980)
298 pages
Illus., maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-6197-6

Karen I. Blu, Emeritus Associate Professor of Anthropology
New York University

How does a group of people who have American Indian ancestry but no records of treaties, reservations, Native language, or peculiarly “Indian” customs come to be accepted—socially and legally—as Indians? Originally published in 1980, The Lumbee Problem traces the political and legal history of the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, arguing that Lumbee political activities have been powerfully affected by the interplay between their own and others’ conceptions of who they are. The book offers insights into the workings of racial ideology and practice in both the past and the present South—and particularly into the nature of Indianness as it is widely experienced among non-reservation Southeastern Indians. Race and ethnicity, as concepts and as elements guiding action, are seen to be at the heart of the matter. By exploring these issues and their implications as they are worked out in the United States, Blu brings much-needed clarity to the question of how such concepts are—or should be—applied across real and perceived cultural borders.

Becoming Melungeon: Making an Ethnic Identity in the Appalachian South

University of Nebraska Press
2013
232 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-7154-8

Melissa Schrift, Associate Professor of Anthropology
East Tennessee State University

Appalachian legend describes a mysterious, multiethnic population of exotic, dark-skinned rogues called Melungeons who rejected the outside world and lived in the remote, rugged mountains in the farthest corner of northeast Tennessee. The allegedly unknown origins of these Melungeons are part of what drove this legend and generated myriad exotic origin theories. Though nobody self-identified as Melungeon before the 1960s, by the 1990s “Melungeonness” had become a full-fledged cultural phenomenon, resulting in a zealous online community and annual meetings where self-identified Melungeons gathered to discuss shared genealogy and history. Although today Melungeons are commonly identified as the descendants of underclass whites, freed African Americans, and Native Americans, this ethnic identity is still largely a social construction based on local tradition, myth, and media.

In Becoming Melungeon, Melissa Schrift examines the ways in which the Melungeon ethnic identity has been socially constructed over time by various regional and national media, plays, and other forms of popular culture. Schrift explores how the social construction of this legend evolved into a fervent movement of a self-identified ethnicity in the 1990s. This illuminating and insightful work examines these shifting social constructions of race, ethnicity, and identity both in the local context of the Melungeons and more broadly in an attempt to understand the formation of ethnic groups and identity in the modern world.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race, Identity, and the Melungeon Legend
• Chapter 1: Inventing the Melungeons
• Chapter 2: Melungeons and Media Representation
• Chapter 3: Playing the First Melungeons
• Chapter 4: Becoming Melungeon
• Chapter 5: The Mediterranean Mystique
• Chapter 6: The Melungeon Core
• Closing Thoughts
• Appendix 1: Melungeon Questionnaire
• Appendix 2: Media Articles
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Cogewea, The Half Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range

University of Nebraska Press
1981 (originally published in 1927)
302 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-8110-3
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8032-3069-9

Mourning Dove (Humishuma) (1888-1936)
Introduction by Dexter Fisher (Cirillo)

One of the first known novels by a Native American woman, Cogewea (1927) is the story of a half-blood girl caught between the worlds of Anglo ranchers and full-blood reservation Indians; between the craven and false-hearted easterner Alfred Densmore and James LaGrinder, a half-blood cowboy and the best rider on the Flathead; between book learning and the folk wisdom of her full-blood grandmother. The book combines authentic Indian lore with the circumstance and dialogue of a popular romance; in its language, it shows a self-taught writer attempting to come to terms with the rift between formal written style and the comfort-able rhythms and slang of familiar speech.

Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier

University of Nebraska Press
2005
202 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-2016-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-6841-8

Andrew K. Frank, Allen Morris Associate Professor of History
Florida Atlantic University

Creeks and Southerners examines the families created by the hundreds of intermarriages between Creek Indian women and European American men in the southeastern United States during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Called “Indian countrymen” at the time, these intermarried white men moved into their wives’ villages in what is now Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. By doing so, they obtained new homes, familial obligations, occupations, and identities. At the same time, however, they maintained many of their ties to white American society and as a result entered the historical record in large numbers.

Creeks and Southerners studies the ways in which many children of these relationships lived both as Creek Indians and white Southerners. By carefully altering their physical appearances, choosing appropriate clothing, learning multiple languages, embracing maternal and paternal kinsmen and kinswomen, and balancing their loyalties, the children of intermarriages found ways to bridge what seemed to be an unbridgeable divide. Many became prominent Creek political leaders and warriors, played central roles in the lucrative deerskin trade, built inns and taverns to cater to the needs of European American travelers, frequently moved between colonial American and Native communities, and served both European American and Creek officials as interpreters, assistants, and travel escorts. The fortunes of these bicultural children reflect the changing nature of Creek-white relations, which became less flexible and increasingly contentious throughout the nineteenth century as both Creeks and Americans accepted a more rigid biological concept of race, forcing their bicultural children to choose between identities.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Introduction: The Problem of Identity in the Early American Southeast
• Chapter 1: The Invitation Within
• Chapter 2: “This Asylum of Liberty”
• Chapter 3: Kin and Strangers
• Chapter 4: Parenting and Practice
• Chapter 5: In TwoWorlds
• Chapter 6: Tustunnuggee Hutkee and the Limits of Dual Identities
• Chapter 7: The Insistence of Race
• Epilogue: Race, Clan, and Creek
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival

University of Nebraska Press
2004
206 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-1527-6

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

“A name creates life patterns,” Allison Adelle Hedge Coke writes, “which form and shape a life; my life, like my name, must have been formed many times over then handed to me to realize.” Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer is Hedge Coke’s narrative of that realization, the award-winning poet and writer’s searching account of her life as a mixed-blood woman coming of age off-reservation, yet deeply immersed in her Cherokee and Huron heritage. In a style at once elliptical and achingly clear, Hedge Coke describes her schizophrenic mother and the abuse that often overshadowed her childhood; the torments visited upon her, the rape and physical violence; and those she inflicted on herself, the alcohol and drug abuse. Yet she managed to survive with her dreams and her will, her sense of wonder and promise undiminished.

The title Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer refers to the life-revelations that brought Hedge Coke through her trials, the melding of language and experience that has brought order to her life. In this book, Hedge Coke shares the insights she has gathered along the way, insights that touch on broader Native issues such as modern life in the diaspora; the threat of alcohol, drug abuse, and violence; and the ongoing onslaught on self amid a complex, mixed heritage.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Of Seeds
• 2. From Winds
• 3. When Fire and Water Meet
• 4. Ashes
• 5. Back to the Lands
• 6. Oceans, Rivers
• 7. Crossings

William W. Warren: The Life, Letters, and Times of an Ojibwe Leader

University of Nebraska Press
2007
212 pages
9 photographs, 2 maps, figure, index, 2 appendixes
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-4327-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-2498-8

Theresa M. Schenck, Associate Professor of Life Sciences Communications and American Indian Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison

This is the first full-length biography of William W. Warren (1825–53), an Ojibwe interpreter, historian, and legislator in the Minnesota Territory. Devoted to the interests of the Ojibwe at a time of government attempts at removal, Warren lives on in his influential book History of the Ojibway, still the most widely read and cited source on the Ojibwe people. The son of a Yankee fur trader and an Ojibwe-French mother, Warren grew up in a frontier community of mixed cultures. Warren’s loyalty to government Indian policies was challenged, but never his loyalty to the Ojibwe people. In his short life the issues with which he was concerned included land rights, treaties, Indian removal, mixed-blood politics, and state and federal Indian policy.
 
Theresa M. Schenck has assembled a remarkable collection of newly discovered documents. Dozens of letters and other writings illuminate not only Warren’s heart and mind  but also a time of radical change in American Indian history. These documents, combined with Schenck’s commentary, provide historical and contextual perspective on Warren’s life, on the breadth of his activities, and on the complexity of the man himself; as such they offer a useful and long-awaited companion to Warren’s History of the Ojibway.

Tales of the Old Indian Territory and Essays on the Indian Condition

University of Nebraska Press
2012
680 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3792-6

John Milton Oskison (1874-1947)

Edited and with an introduction by

Lionel Larré, Associate Professor of English
Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Indian Territory, which would eventually become the state of Oklahoma, was a multicultural space in which various Native tribes, European Americans, and African Americans were equally engaged in struggles to carve out meaningful lives in a harsh landscape. John Milton Oskison, born in the territory to a Cherokee mother and an immigrant English father, was brought up engaging in his Cherokee heritage, including its oral traditions, and appreciating the utilitarian value of an American education.

Oskison left Indian Territory to attend college and went on to have a long career in New York City journalism, working for the New York Evening Post and Collier’s Magazine. He also wrote short stories and essays for newspapers and magazines, most of which were about contemporary life in Indian Territory and depicted a complex multicultural landscape of cowboys, farmers, outlaws, and families dealing with the consequences of multiple interacting cultures.

Though Oskison was a well-known and prolific Cherokee writer, journalist, and activist, few of his works are known today. This first comprehensive collection of Oskison’s unpublished autobiography, short stories, autobiographical essays, and essays about life in Indian Territory at the turn of the twentieth century fills a significant void in the literature and thought of a critical time and place in the history of the United States.

Read an excerpt here.

A Stronger Kinship: One Town’s Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith

University of Nebraska Press
2007
296 pages
20 photos, 9 tables, appendix
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-6018-4

Anna-Lisa Cox

In the heartland of the United States 150 years ago, where racism and hatred were common, a community decided there could be a different America. Here schools and churches were completely integrated, blacks and whites intermarried, and power and wealth were shared by both races. But for this to happen, the town’s citizens had to keep secrets, break the laws of the world outside, and sweep aside fear and embrace hope.

In a historical-detective feat, Anna-Lisa Cox uncovers the heartening story of this community that took the road untaken. Beginning in the 1860s, the people of Covert, Michigan, attempted to do what then seemed impossible: love one’s neighbor—regardless of skin color—as oneself. Drawing on diaries, oral histories, and contemporary records, Cox gives us intimate glimpses of Covert’s people, from William Conner, the Civil War veteran who went on to become Michigan’s first black justice of the peace, to Elizabeth Gillard, who, shipwrecked and washed onto Covert’s shores, ultimately came to love the unusual community she would call home. In bringing these and other stories of this small town to light, Cox presents a vision of what our nation might have been, and could be.

Table of Contents

• Cast of Characters
• Deerfield map
• Colored population map
• Introduction
• 1: The Bleeding Heartland
• 2: The Journey: 1860–1866
• 3: Rights: 1866–1869
• 4: Citizenship: 1870–1875
• 5: Equality: 1875–1880
• 6: Independence: 1880–1884
• 7: Friendship: 1885–1889
• 8: Justice: 1890–1896
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Forgotten Tribes: Unrecognized Indians and the Federal Acknowledgment Process

University of Nebraska Press
2004
355 pages
paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-8321-3
hardback ISBN: 978-0-8032-3226-6

Mark Edwin Miller, Associate Professor of History
Southern Utah University

The Federal Acknowledgment Process (FAP) is one of the most important and contentious issues facing Native Americans today. A complicated system of criteria and procedures, the FAP is utilized by federal officials to determine whether a Native community qualifies for federal recognition by the United States government. In Forgotten Tribes, Mark Edwin Miller offers a balanced and detailed look at the origins, procedures, and assumptions governing the FAP. His work examines the FAP through the prism of four previously unrecognized tribal communities and their battles to gain indigenous rights under federal law.

Based on a wealth of interviews and original research, Forgotten Tribes features the first in-depth history and overview of the FAP and sheds light on this controversial Native identification policy involving state power over Native peoples and tribal sovereignty.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Map
• Introduction
• 1. Adrift with the Indian Office: The Historical Development of Tribal Acknowledgment Policy, 1776-–1978
• 2. Building an Edifice: The BIA’s Federal Acknowledgment Process, 1978–-2002
• 3. Bypassing the Bureau: The Pascua Yaquis’ Quest for Legislative Tribal Recognition
• 4. Sometimes Salvation: The Death Valley Timbisha Shoshones of California and the BIA’s Federal Acknowledgment Process
• 5. A Matter of Visibility: The United Houma Nation’s Struggle for Tribal Acknowledgment
• 6. From Playing Indian to Playing Slots: Gaming, Tribal Recognition, and the Tiguas of El Paso, Texas
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

It was in the early 1990s that the small Mashantucket Pequot Tribe of Connecticut burst upon the national scene, indelibly marking popular perceptions of once unacknowledged Indian tribes in the public conscious. After struggling for centuries without federal tribal status, the Pequots under Richard “Skip” Hayward dashed with aplomb into the twenty-first century, leading the march toward self-suf ciency and self-government through their phenomenally successful Foxwoods Casino complex situated midway between New York City and Boston. Making one billion dollars annually by the end of the decade, Foxwoods was the most lucrative gambling Mecca in the United States, drawing widespread attention up and down the East Coast. A decade earlier when the tribe had secured federal acknowledgment through an act of Congress in 1983, the development had raised few eyebrows, however, causing more relief than alarm because it settled a lengthy and bitter land dispute between the Pequots and neighboring property owners. Some observers undoubtedly felt that the obscure tribe, once widely believed to be extinct, had finally gotten its revenge for past injustices. Other locals simply were happy to have a place to gamble so close to their homes, cheering the Pequots for making this possible and perhaps being a little amused by the whole unlikely scenario. Questions soon arose, however, when the group possessing Indian, European, and African ancestry grew increasingly rich and powerful, with its gambling enterprise shattering the once bucolic Connecticut countryside with crowds, traffic jams, and high-rise development. Angered by their suddenly powerful neighbor, many locals began to ask: Who were these people that variously appeared white, Indian, black, or something in-between? If they looked and lived much like their well-to-do neighbors, was the group really an Indian tribe at all? Clearly, tribal acknowledgment had given the Pequots all the bene ts of tribal status and sovereignty. But it had not allowed them to exist in obscurity as before. Every year during the 1990s tensions and recriminations grew. When a book emerged claiming that the Pequots may have tricked the federal government into believing they were an Indian tribe, local leaders clamored to have their status overturned. By 2000 the continuing deluge of press coverage ensured that the Mashantucket Pequots became the dominant face of recently acknowledged Indian tribes in the United States.

At the same time, in stark contrast to the glitz and wealth of the Pequots stood a struggling band of Shoshones in California. A world away from Connecticut in the desert sands of Death Valley National Park, the Timbisha Shoshone Indians also existed without federal acknowledgment until the early 1980s. The Shoshones were unlike the Pequots at first glance, however, and few non-Indians doubted that the tiny Timbisha group was Indian. In the late 1970s the Shoshones were struggling against the National Park Service’s efforts to evict them from their ancestral homeland, clinging to their crumbling adobe casitas and modest trailers that shifting sand dunes threatened to swallow at any moment. Decades earlier the Park Service had corralled them into a single village to make room for its luxury hotels, golf course, and RV resort to cater to tourists hoping to escape the northern winters or recapture the “Wild West” for a weekend. Like the Pequots, the Timbisha Shoshones also secured acknowledgment in 1983, but this new status provided few of the fringe benefits afforded the Connecticut tribe. In 2000 the band still lacked a federal reservation and lived in poor housing much like it had before recognition. The Timbisha Shoshones presented another face of once unacknowledged Indian peoples in the modern United States. The experience of the over two hundred other unacknowledged groups likely lies somewhere in between.

Issues

This work is about the process of acknowledging Indian tribes, whether accomplished through the administrative channels of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) or through Congress.  At its core it is about modern Indian identity: how the state identifies and legitimizes tribes and how recognized tribes, non-Indian scholars, and the American public perceive Indians. Along the way it provides a rare glimpse into Indian and non-Indian representations of “Indianness” and tribalism. These pages also present the histories of four unacknowledged tribal groups viewed through the prism of their efforts to gain federal recognition. Federal tribal acknowledgment or recognition is one of the most significant developments in Indian policy in the post–World War II era, yet is also one of the most acrimonious methods of sorting out and defining Indianness in the United States. As the list of over two hundred groups seeking to secure federal tribal status grows each year, federal acknowledgment policy has become increasingly controversial and contested terrain for determining Indian authenticity.

Tribal recognition is contentious precisely because it involves definitions of what constitutes an Indian tribe,who can lay claim to being an Indian, and what factors should be paramount in the process of identifying Indian tribes. Akin to the recognition of foreign governments, federal tribal acknowledgment is highly valued because it establishes a “government-to-government” relationship between the federal government and an Indian group. Federal status thus allows a newly recognized federal tribe the power to exercise sovereignty and participate in federal Indian programs emanating from the BIA and the Indian Health Service. It also affects issues as diverse as Indian self-government, health care, Native American cultural repatriation, Indian gaming, and public lands held by the National Park Service and other federal agencies. Beyond these facts the acknowledgment process can determine the life or death of struggling groups while providing unacknowledged tribes outside validation of their racial and cultural identity as Indians…

…From the start local whites questioned whether these groups were indeed tribes and expressed doubts about their Indian identity. To the eastern landowners, most of these groups “looked” variously white, black, Indian, or something in between. They clearly did not fit the image of the horseriding, buffalo-hunting Indians they had seen in Hollywood westerns. In court the town attorneys proceeded to impugn the cultural and tribal integrity of these people, claiming that the groups had long ago abandoned their tribal organizations and assimilated into American society and culture. Despite the Wampanoags’ assertions that the land on Martha’s Vineyard was sacred to their people and that they maintained a vibrant tribal organization, town lawyers echoed a popular belief that the Wampanoags——if they were a group at all——were assimilated individuals hoping to get rich off land claims. Because the rights asserted were group rights, the hopes of the Martha’s Vineyard Indians and others ultimately rested on whether they were still an Indian “tribal” entity…

Read the entire introduction here.