{"id":19295,"date":"2011-12-27T20:55:22","date_gmt":"2011-12-27T20:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19295"},"modified":"2015-11-13T01:39:08","modified_gmt":"2015-11-13T01:39:08","slug":"my-experience-on-the-indian-negro-color-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19295","title":{"rendered":"My Experience on the Indian-Negro Color Line"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com\/ict_sbc\/my-experience-on-the-indian-negro-color-line\" target=\"_blank\">My Experience on the Indian-Negro Color Line<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Indian Country Today<\/a><br \/>\n2011-12-27<\/p>\n<p><strong>Julianne Jennings<\/strong><br \/>\n<em>Arizona State University<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Growing-up on the Indian-Negro color line (I am the daughter of a European mother and a black and Indian father), I lived with mixed signals and coded information by the dominant culture. It had determined that white European culture and people were superior in contrast to those who were generally classified as darker, \u201cprimitive\u201d and \u201cuncivilized.\u201d Applying the adage \u201cwrite what you know,\u201d my master\u2019s thesis was titled \u201cBlood, Race and Sovereignty: The Politics of Indian Identity.\u201d This work would not have been possible without the professors in the Department of Anthropology at Rhode Island College (RIC). They taught me how to challenge racial paradigms and stereotypes that Western society has about Indians; and how to brave racial orthodoxy and search new ways of thinking about our country\u2019s seemingly insoluble problems with race.<\/p>\n<p>Classroom discussions about race motivated me, at the age of 46, to reclaim my Indian ancestry by having my birth certificate changed from \u201cNegro\u201d to \u201cAmerican Indian.\u201d The experience was emotionally overwhelming as I had been denied my birthright as an <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Eastern_Pequot_Tribal_Nation\" target=\"_blank\">E. Pequot<\/a>&#8211;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nottoway_people\" target=\"_blank\">Nottoway<\/a>. Changing my birth certificate was not because I was ashamed of my multiracial identity; <strong>it was an affirmation of my survival as an Indian and an act of self-determination in a country that has gone so far to erase my ancestry from history.<\/strong> I assert my tri-racial identity, but most of America\u2019s forms, like birth certificates, at present allow listing only one race. To employ biological over cultural definitions of American Indians reflects a fundamental ignorance of American history and its unprocessed shame of slavery and American Indian traditions. Thus, issues about race are especially important to me, as \u201cmixed-blood\u201d Indians are not considered \u201cauthentic\u201d by mainstream society. We have to dress in buckskin; feathers and beads to be taken seriously, yet those with European ancestry do not have to wear tall black hats or buckled shoes to convince others of their ancestry&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com\/ict_sbc\/my-experience-on-the-indian-negro-color-line\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My Experience on the Indian-Negro Color Line Indian Country Today 2011-12-27 Julianne Jennings Arizona State University Growing-up on the Indian-Negro color line (I am the daughter of a European mother and a black and Indian father), I lived with mixed signals and coded information by the dominant culture. It had determined that white European culture [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,125,8,3015,20],"tags":[8904,5371],"class_list":["post-19295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-usa","tag-indian-country-today","tag-julianne-jennings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43939,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19295\/revisions\/43939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}