{"id":55661,"date":"2018-02-11T03:45:04","date_gmt":"2018-02-11T03:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=55661"},"modified":"2018-02-11T03:45:04","modified_gmt":"2018-02-11T03:45:04","slug":"looking-at-indians-white-americans-see-themselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=55661","title":{"rendered":"Looking at Indians, white Americans see themselves"},"content":{"rendered":"

Looking at Indians, white Americans see themselves<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Economist<\/a>
\n2018-02-10<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Thinking about natives in an era of nativism<\/em><\/p>\n

IN EARLY 1924 the blue-bloods<\/a> of Virginia<\/a> found themselves with a problem. To criminalise interracial marriage, the state had drafted a law<\/a> that classified anyone possessing even \u201cone drop\u201d of non-white blood as \u201ccoloured\u201d<\/a>. Awkwardly, that would include many of the so-called First Families of Virginia, because they traced their descent to a native American woman, Pocahontas<\/a>, who had been abducted and married by a member of the Jamestown colony three centuries before. This ancestry had been considered far from shameful. It was a mark of American aristocracy, the real-life Pocahontas having been reinvented (she probably did not save the life of a colonist called John Smith<\/a>) as an \u201cAmerican princess\u201d. To fix matters, a clause known as the \u201cPocahontas exception\u201d<\/a> was added to the racist law, to exempt anyone with no more than one-sixteenth Indian blood.<\/p>\n

This episode, documented in a new exhibition<\/a> at the National Museum of the American Indian<\/a> in Washington, DC<\/a>, on Indian myths and reality, helps explain a cultural puzzle. It has become clear that the pre-Columbian Americas<\/a> were much more densely populated, by more sophisticated civilisations, than was previously thought. By one estimate North America<\/a>, the more sparsely populated continent, had 18m people when Columbus<\/a> sailed, more than England<\/a> and France<\/a> combined. Yet in the popular imagination it remains a vast wilderness, peopled by a few buffalo-hunters. The reason for this gigantic misunderstanding, suggest the Smithsonian\u2019s<\/a> curators, goes beyond bad schooling…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thinking about natives in an era of nativism<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,1467,8,3015,26,20],"tags":[12960,6366],"class_list":["post-55661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-politics","category-usa","tag-national-museum-of-the-american-indian","tag-the-economist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55661","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=55661"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55662,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55661\/revisions\/55662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}