Mixed Race Studies

Notes on physical anthropology of Australian aborigines and black-white hybrids

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 8, Issue 1 (January/March 1925)
pages 73–94
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330080105

Charles B. Davenport, Director
Department of Experimental Evolution
(Carnegie Institution of Washington)
Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York

Introduction

In September 1914, after the meetings of the British Association in Australia, I was given transportation by the Government of New South Wales, enabling me to go to the government reservation for aborigines at Brewarrina on the Burke division of the State railroad. This reservation is on the Barwon fork of the Darling River, about 60 miles south of the Queensland boundary.  The purpose of the visit was to observe near by a number of  individuals of the fast disappearing race.

While at Brewarrina, during about six days, I enjoyed the hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold’s tact and good judgment that I was enabled to see as many of the inhabitants of the Station as time permitted and to make some simple measurements upon them…

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The Catholic Church and the Formation of Metis Identity

Past Imperfect
Volume 9 (2001)
pages 65-87

Jacinthe Duval

This essay explores the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Metis in the Red River colony in the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how missionaries, via their intellectual artifacts, have been responsible for shaping popular contemporary images of Metis culture. In analyzing the writings of missionaries, this paper also notes the ambiguity with which these individuals viewed Metis society. Priests steeped in European ecclesiastical and national values who hoped the Metis might form the basis of a new Francophone prairie society viewed some mixed-blood cultural practices as inimical to this end. From the perspective of the missionaries, the tantalizing familiarity of the French, Catholic aspect of the Metis contrasted jarringly with their ‘alien’ indigenous cultural and economic traits. As such, the Metis represented both a promise and a threat to the nation-building project. Although Metis identity has been stamped with the official seal of the church, the contradictions missionaries saw in this culture offer a promising avenue for the exploration of the complex processes of identity formation.

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Moya `Tipimsook (“The People Who Aren’t Their Own Bosses”): Racialization and the Misrecognition of “Métis” in Upper Great Lakes

Ethnohistory
Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011)
pages 37-63
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2010-063

Chris Andersen, Associate Professor of Native Studies
University of Alberta

Scholars have long noted the central place of racialization in the last five centuries of colonial rule and likewise the crossracial encounters and eventual colonial intimacies regulated in its shadow. In the conceptual terrain posted by these demarcations, this article explores how, in the absence of extensive documentation on historical self-ascriptions, contemporary ethnohistorians examining upper Great Lakes fur trade settlements have attempted to come to terms with the historical social ontologies that long preceded official attempts to regulate them. Specifically, we examine the racialized logics governing the retrofitting of these settlements as “métis” and “Métis” and, secondarily, the recent creep of juridical logics into ethnohistorical conversations. Rather than challenging ethnohistorical conclusions that these settlements were/are Métis, this article challenges how they are ethnohistorically imagined as such, and in doing so it appeals for a Métis “counter-ethnohistory” alternatively anchored in an analytics of peoplehood.

Blacks and Native Americans have deep ties

Our Weekly: Our Truth, Our Voice
Los Angeles, California
2010-11-18

Manny Otiko, Our Weekly Contributor

November is Native Heritage month

There is an old joke in the Black community about women attributing long hair to having “Indian blood” in their family. But like all jokes, there is an element of truth in this statement. There are deep ties between Native Americans, America’s first residents, and Black Americans, America’s first sizable minority group.

Los Angeles resident Phil Wilkes Fixico claims both Native American and African American roots on both sides of his family. Fixico, a performance artist and activist for Black Indian culture, says that he first started exploring his genealogy, when he got into his 50s.

Fixico said he has been on an 11-year journey to identify with his Native American roots. This has included reaching out to relatives in Oklahoma, producing a DVD about the Black-Indian experience and doing presentations about Native American culture around Los Angeles…

…Fixico said that he grew up a troubled youth, who was in an out of the juvenile system. After a stint in a correctional institution, he finally turned his life around. He received help from people of all races to do this.

Fixico attributes much of his problems to an identity crisis caused by lack of knowledge about his history. At 52, he decided to start investigating his background. He knew his mother, who raised him alone, was of Creek, White and African descent, but he later learned that his biological father was also part Seminole.

Fixico discovered that his ancestors were Seminole Maroons, slaves who opted to escape captivity and form alliances with the Seminole Indians in Florida…

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Phil Wilkes Fixico — a True Native Son

L. A. Watts Times
2010-03-11

Darlene Donloe, Contributing Writer

Phil Wilkes Fixico’s life is more dramatic than virtually any soap opera.

It took him about 52 years to find out who he was after growing up in what he calls a “web of lies.”

His intriguing story is part of the Smithsonian Institution’s “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas,” a book and exhibit that will tour the country for five years and make its Los Angeles debut at the California African American Museum, tentatively in March 2011. The book speaks to the challenges and triumphs of dual African American and Native American heritage.

A “home-grown” kid who grew up in the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts, Fixico, 62, came up hard. His mother not only hid the identity of his biological father, but as a kid he was in and out of four juvenile institutions, experienced rejection, used drugs, committed crimes and witnessed domestic violence, said Fixico, who lives in Inglewood.

Fixico, a member of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers 9th and 10th Horse Cavalry, and the “Seminole Negro Indian Scouts,” said he “grew up as a troubled youth because I kept bumping into the truth and half-truth.

“I knew there was more than what I was being told, but I didn’t know what it was. I certainly didn’t know it was this.”

What he discovered 10 years ago rocked his core: He is a “Seminole–Maroon descendant.” He now describes it as an “identity crisis.”

By appearance, Fixico looks like a black man to some, but he doesn’t think of himself that way; instead, he describes himself as a “Seminole-Maroon descendant.”…

…To understand why he calls himself a Seminole-Maroon descendant is a long story that he pieced together through research.

“I don’t call myself black,” said Fixico, who is one-eighth Seminole Indian, one-fourth Cherokee Freedman, one-fourth Seminole Freedman, one-fourth mulatto and one-eighth Creek Freedman, according to a Smithsonian researcher. “The reason I don’t say black is because that doesn’t really describe the nuances of who I am. I’m a shade of black, a flavor of black.

“When someone asks, ‘Are you black?’ it gives me pause. I can’t take the same credit as someone coming out of Africa who is pure. I can’t take their same degree of blackness.”

To be clear, Fixico doesn’t have a problem with being called black or with black people.

“It’s not that I don’t want to be black,” said Fixico, who explained his mother was African and Cherokee and his father African and Seminole. “I’ve been the product of a mixture. The one-drop rule says I’m black as anybody.

“Under America’s concept of black, I’m black. But when I look at it as my own sense of self, I’m a flavor of black.”…

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Mixed Race in the Seminole Nation

Ethnohistory
Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011)
pages 113-141
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2010-066

Kevin Mulroy, Associate University Librarian
University of California, Los Angeles

Phil Wilkes Fixico

This is a story of two hidden identities. It focuses on the family history of Phil Wilkes Fixico (aka Philip Vincent Wilkes and Pompey Bruner Fixico), a contemporary Seminole maroon descendant of mixed race who lives in Los Angeles. Phil is one-eighth Seminole Indian, one-quarter Seminole freedman, one-eighth Creek freedman, one-quarter Cherokee-freedman, and one-quarter African-American-white. His family history records that his paternal grandfather was the offspring of a Seminole Indian woman and a Seminole freedman, but that this “intermarriage” was kept secret from the Dawes Commission and the boy was enrolled as a “fullblood” Indian. This one union and the subsequent history of the family tell us a great deal about relations between Seminoles and freedmen in the Indian Territory and Oklahoma and about status and identity issues among individuals of mixed race within American society. With tragic irony, Phil’s parents also hid the identity of his biological father, echoing the story of his grandfather. Sensing family secrets and lies, young Phil experienced an identity crisis. Eventually discovering his father’s identity and his family history, Phil turned his life around. He has embraced his mixed-race heritage, connected with the Seminole maroon communities in Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico, and become a creative and energetic tribal historian.

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We Know Who We Are: Métis Identity in a Montana Community [Book Review]

Drumlummon Views: the Online Journal of Montana Arts & Culture
Volume 1, Numbers 1-2, (Spring/Summer 2006)
pages 237-240

Nicholas C. P. Vrooman

Martha Harroun Foster, We Know Who We Are: Métis Identity in a Montana Community, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2006. Maps, tables, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 306 pages.

Given the dearth of existing titles on the Métis in the United States, it is a real pleasure to read Martha Harroun Foster’s new book. Her work has untangled and explained pieces of a little-understood yet central story to Montana history. When Anglo society took hold of this state in the late 19th and early 20th century, it committed a huge error—the aggressively unjust treatment and tragic denial of our Métis population. This book is a story of one group of Métis families who became sedentary in a specific place upon the demise of the buffalo; the town which grew around them is now known as Lewistown. Foster does a superb job of recounting those families’ struggle to maintain their distinct identity amidst a most often uncaring society.

Yet I have serious concerns. Foster names her group the Spring Creek band, saying they belong to the state’s “longest continuously occupied Métis settlement” (p. 4). Determining “continuous occupation” is a highly charged notion used against Aboriginal peoples (Montana Métis specifically, to this day) throughout the colonial and national period as a judicial determinate to divest land and ignore prior rights of habitation. Historically, native communities shifted in co-relation to ever-changing environmental conditions. Is this how we want to speak of Indigenous community status of land tenure in this era? It also projects, from an external source, the “We’re #1” syndrome of individual supremacy onto one native community. Even applying the insatiable American and Western craving for exceptionalism, Lewistown still is not the “longest continuously occupied Métis settlement in Montana.” Suffice it to say, Métis have been living “continuously” throughout Montana since at least the 1830s and probably before.

I love Lewistown. It exists because it fits within the intrinsic unifying flow of river valleys and ancient roadways through permeable pulsating ecosystems to and fro’ areas of seasonal sustenance and power on an east/west and north/south axis across the Northern Plains. Throughout these environments Aboriginal communities, including the Métis, have long lived and continue to circulate. It is all related. It still exists. It is there to be known. The Medicine Line remains mysterious…

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Was Your Mama Mulatto? Notes toward a Theory of Racialized Sexuality in Gayl Jones’s “Corregidora” and Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust”

Callaloo
Volume 27, Number 3 (Summer, 2004)
pages 768-787
E-ISSN: 1080-6512, Print ISSN: 0161-2492
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2004.0136

Caroline A. Streeter, Associate Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles

Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora (1975) and Julie Dash’s feature film Daughters of the Dust (1991) are singular texts that use historical frameworks to comment upon post Civil-Rights- era race and gender relations and identity formations. Daughters of the Dust, the first feature film written and directed by Dash, was also the first film by an African-American woman to receive widespread theatrical distribution. Daughters is an independent work that resists and contests many aspects of the Hollywood film. Corregidora was the first novel by Gayl Jones, a reclusive figure with a small but striking literary output. Both the novel and the film call attention to understudied aspects of the African diaspora. In Corregiilora, Jones creates an unusual migration circuit that links mid-to-late twentieth-century African Americans living in Kentucky to their slave ancestors in Brazil. In Daughters of the Dust, the plot concerns the persistence of African traditions among black people at the turn of the century living on the Sea Islands. located off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Both works also highlight the crucial role of women in maintaining cultural memory for black communities. This essay concerns the ways in which Corregidora and Daughters of the Dust make compelling interventions that transform mulatto characters—“racially mixed” women of African descent who bear the phenotypical (physical) markers of “race mixing”—into figures that help us to understand new things about sexual and racial normativity. Both texts effect a surprising deployment of a figure that has been symbolic of repressed histories and regressive discourses.

Mulatta characters have long been controversial figures for scholars of African-American literature. In novels such as Clotelle, or the Colored Heroine, A Tale of the Southern States (William Wells Brown, 1867), lola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1892), Megda (Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, 1891), and Contending Forces: A Romance lllustrative of Negro Life North and South (Pauline Hopkins, 1900), mulatta characters are symbolic of traumatic histories of enslavement. In novels of the 1920s and 1930s, especially those associated with Harlem Renaissance writers such as Nella Larsen Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) and Jessie Fauset There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1928), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), and Comedy American Style ( 1933). mulatta characters represented access to class mobility and the possibility of escaping the stigma of blackness altogether through “racial passing.”…

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The Rise and Decline of Hybrid (Metis) Societies on the Frontier of Western Canada and Southern Africa

The Canadian Journal of Native Studies
Volume 3, Number 1 (1983) (Special Issue on the Metis)
ISSN  0715-3244

Alvin Kienetz

A comparison of the development of the Metis in Canada and similar peoples in Southern Africa reveals some remarkable similarities between the two groups. The existence of these parallels suggests that a more extensive comparative study of peoples of mixed race throughout the world would be of value.

Une comparaison de l’évolution des Métis au Canada et de celle de certains peuples similaires dans le Sud africain révèle des ressemblances frappantes entre les deux groupes. Ce parallèle suggère qu’une étude comparative plus complete des peuples de race mixte dans le monde entier présenterait une valeur incontestable.

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A shameful history: Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia’s Identity [Book Review]

The Lancet
Volume 366, Issue 9495 (October 2005)
page 1428
DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67586

Caroline de Costa, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology; Director of the Clinical School
James Cook University School of Medicine, Cairns Campus, North Queensland, Australia

Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia’s Identity
Henry Reynolds
Viking, 2005
Pp 204. ISBN-0-670-04118-1

A few years ago my daughter, a poised young woman, found herself in a large rural Australian town she did not know well. She sought directions from an older white woman who, glancing briefly at her appearance, gave the required information, but in the slow and careful tones one might use for the mentally impaired. This incident annoyed but did not surprise my daughter; my husband is of Sri Lankan origin, and all of our six children, of varying hues and facial features, have at times been taken to be of mixed Aboriginal descent in rural Australia, and know something of the experience that can go with this.

So it was with great personal interest that I opened Henry Reynolds’ impressive study of the history of people of “mixed-race” in the 19th and 20th centuries in all those countries where colonists confronted people of different colour and physiognomy. As a 21st-century medical practitioner well aware that we are all one species, I was dismayed to find how much medical practitioners and scientists had contributed to repressive legislation and social engineering, both in Australia and elsewhere…

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