{"id":15868,"date":"2011-08-26T02:27:26","date_gmt":"2011-08-26T02:27:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=15868"},"modified":"2012-03-20T23:50:33","modified_gmt":"2012-03-20T23:50:33","slug":"transcultural-transformation-african-american-and-native-american-relations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=15868","title":{"rendered":"Transcultural Transformation: African American and Native American Relations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Transcultural Transformation: African American and Native American Relations<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Nebraska
\nNovember 2009
\n139 pages<\/p>\n

Barbara S. Tracy<\/strong><\/p>\n

A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy<\/em><\/p>\n

The intersected lives of African Americans and Native Americans result not only in Black Indians, but also in a shared culture that is evidenced by music, call and response, and story. These intersected lives create a dynamic of shared and diverging pathways that speak to each other. It is a crossroads of both anguish and joy that comes together and apart again like the tradition of call and response. There is a syncopation of two cultures becoming greater than their parts, a representation of losses that are reclaimed by a greater degree. In the tradition of call and response, by denying one or the other something is lost. Claiming the relationship turns transcultural transformation into a powerful response. Working from Henry Gates\u2019<\/a> explanation of signifying combined with Houston Baker\u2019s<\/a> description of blues literature, I examine signifying, call and response, and blues\/jazz elements in the work of three writers to discover the collective lives of African Americans, Native Americans, and Black Indians. In the writing of Black-Cherokee<\/a> Alice Walker<\/a>, I look for the call and response of both African and Native American story-ways. I find these same elements in the writing of Spokane<\/a>\/Coeur d\u2019Alene<\/a> writer Sherman Alexie<\/a>, in his blues writings and his revision of Robert Johnson\u2019s<\/a> and other stories. In the work of Creek\/Cherokee Craig Womack<\/a>, I examine a Creek\/Cherokee perspective of Black Creeks<\/a> and Freemen. In all of these works, I find that the shared African American and Native American experience plainly takes place in these works in a variety of ways in which the authors call upon oral and written story, song, and dance, and create a response that clearly signifies the combined power of these shared experiences. This is a fusion of shared traditions with differences that demonstrate the blending of voices and culture between two peoples who have been improvising together for a long time.<\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n