Mixed Race Studies

My name is Joseph Boyden

Maclean’s
2017-08-02

Joseph Boyden

Joseph Boyden (Photograph by Jacob C Boynton)

Being Indigenous isn’t all about DNA. It’s about who you claim, and who claims you.

My name is Joseph Boyden. Late last December I had a hard time wrapping my head around what a Cree Elder I’ve known and respected for 25 years told me when we spoke about the firestorm that questions concerning my ancestry had sparked in Canada over the holidays. This elder told me that I was experiencing a rite of passage. I wanted to tell him that I’d not long ago turned 50, and weren’t rites of passage something geared more toward the teenage years? But I knew to listen and not interrupt. He told me that what I was experiencing was actually a gift.

A gift? People I did and didn’t know were questioning my family’s history, our creation stories, our ancestry. People were questioning me as a fiction writer and a journalist and a vocal activist for Indigenous rights in our country as an honorary witness of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Now, from these months of hindsight, I understand it was the perfect storm brewing. Last October I’d spoken up publicly to demand accountability by a university and its conduct in the treatment of a friend—and the complainants— embroiled in an ugly and horribly mishandled controversy that ended up sending shockwaves beyond literary Canada…

Read the entire article here.

The double life of Injun Joe

Maclean’s
1956-07-21

Dorothy Sangster [Katz] (1913-2011)

The tourists at Algonquin Park think they’re meeting a real live redskin in a tribal tepee. Indian schmindian! He’s Tex Boyden, who reads the New Yorker, sips Martinis and makes his living selling beads to the white natives

When Erl Boyden was five years old, his Uncle Richard took him to a wild-west show in Ottawa and introduced him to Buffalo Bill.

Excited by tom-toms and war cries and trailing war bonnets, little Erl fell in love with Indians on the spot. He took to cutting out pictures of Indians, improvising Indian costumes, collecting Indian souvenirs. His bedroom in the old Boyden home on Mackenzie Avenue, in the shadow of the Parliament Buildings, became a litter of bows and arrows and buckskins. His most treasured possession was a five-foot cotton tepee his aunt Bertha O’Donaghue sent him from New York. The Last of the Mohicans was his favorite book and he and his two brothers saved their nickels to see Broncho Billy Anderson on Saturday afternoons at the neighborhood movie house, and Custer’s Last Stand, a stage show that came to Ottawa’s Grand Opera House in 1907. School bored young Erl—his thoughts were elsewhere. He saw himself as a white boy who by his knowledge of hunting and outdoor lore is adopted by an Indian chief and given a place of honor in the tribe.

Boyden is sixty years old now, but he’s still playing Indian. All summer long you can find him sitting beside the highway at Dwight, a small resort town 160 miles north of Toronto on the road to Algonquin Park, under a sign that says, “Ugh! Indian Souvenirs!”

Tourists know him as Injun Joe…

Read the entire article here.

Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Dolezal and instability in gender and race

Maclean’s
2016-12-04

Sujaya Dhanvantari

Sociologist Rogers Brubaker examines transgender and transracial differences

TRANS

By Rogers Brubaker

In Western culture, gender and race were traditionally thought to be unchangeable and fixed for life. Black or white, male or female: These were forever separated by the binary logic of absolute difference. But even as the old colonial theories of racial determinism have long been discredited, the notion of changing race is still ethically troubling. Not so for changing gender, which is now socially accepted in unprecedented ways. That is why celebrity trans woman Caitlyn Jenner and transracial civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal, born white but now identifying as black, are not the same kind of “trans.” Inspired by those two news stories, UCLA sociologist Rogers Brubaker explores the unstable categories of gender and race in his new book…

Read the entire review here.