Mixed Race Studies

“Abominable Mixture”: Toward the Repudiation of Anglo-Indian Intermarriage in Seventeenth-Century Virginia

The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 95, Number 2 (April, 1987)
pages 157-192

David D. Smits, Professor of History
The College of New Jersey

Students of Amerindian-white relations have long ascribed to the English colonists an aversion to race mixing, especially through intermarriage, with the North American natives. To be sure, it is recognized that there was some Indian-white interbreeding, and even marriage, on all Anglo-American frontiers, but proportionately less than in Franco- and Hispanic-America. Virginia’s well-known marriage of John Rolfe to Pocahontas did not establish a widely imitated precedent for Anglo-Indian matrimony in the colony. A 1691 Virginia law prohibiting Anglo-Indian marriage and informal sexual unions surely indicates that they occurred; with a few notable exceptions, however, the Englishman who took a native wife, concubine, or mistress violated the colony’s mores…

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Brackish Bayou Blood: Weaving Mixed-Blood Indian-Creole Identity Outside the Written Record

American Indian Culture and Research Journal
Volume 32, Number 2 (2008)
Special Issue: Indigenous Locations Post-Katrina: Beyond Invisibility and Disaster
Online Date: 2008-08-22
pages 93-108
ISSN: 0161-6463

L. Rain Cranford-Gomez

As a child on the Gulf of Mexico, evacuation to higher ground for floods, hurricanes, and tornado warnings were common. At the end of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the homelands of this author’s father and grandfather in Louisiana. Hundreds of miles of wetlands, already threatened, were turned to open water; vital brackish waters were flooded with seawater, thus damaging the delicate balance between fresh and salt that many plants and animals need for their habitats. Vital records and historic documents were flooded, damaged, besieged with mold, and lost to the ravages of wind and water. However, these records do not tell the only stories in Louisiana. In the wake of the devastation that has impacted Louisiana communities, in particular Creole and Indian communities, it makes other forms of record-keeping, such as historic oral narratives and material culture, vitally important as they seek to preserve their histories as Indians, Louisiana Creoles, and uniquely mixed-blood people in Louisiana. This article is taken from a greater conversation, a work in progress. The text presented in this article should be read as a story and a conversation that seeks to open possible dialogues and interaction, shared histories, narratives, and cooperation between Louisiana Indians and Louisiana Creoles as manifested in shared material culture practices and mixed racial-cultural inheritance. By revisiting the racial mixing of Creole identity from a metis/mestizo perspective, “reading” Indian and Creole basketry as a material culture source that speaks for a people, and sharing personal reflections, the author hopes to illustrate converging narratives and dialogues further rooting Louisiana Creoles in an indigenous history; a metis/mestizo people separate but linked to their indigenous land and kin ties. The author urges other scholars to explore further the indigenous connections between Louisiana Creoles and Louisiana Indians with a particular focus on those of both Louisiana Indian and Creole descent.

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As We Are Now: Mixblood Essays on Race and Identity

University of California Press
January 1998
282 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520210738

edited by

William S. Penn, Professor of Creative Writing
Michigan State University

The thirteen contributors to As We Are Now invite readers to explore with them the untamed territory of race and mixblood identity in North America. A “mixblood,” according to editor W.S. Penn, recognizes that his or her identity comes not from distinct and separable strains of ancestry but from the sum of the tension and interplay of all his or her ancestral relationships. These first-person narratives cross racial, national, and disciplinary boundaries in a refreshingly experimental approach to writing culture. Their authors call on similar but varied cultural and aesthetic traditions—mostly oral—in order to address some aspect of race and identity about which they feel passionate, and all resist the essentialist point of view. Mixblood Native American, Mestizo/a, and African-American writers focus their discussion on the questions indigenous and minority people ask and the way in which they ask them, clearly merging the singular “I” with the communal “we.” These are new voices in the dialogue of ethnic writers, and they offer a highly original treatment of an important subject.

Table of Contents

Introduction
William S. Penn

Cutting and Pinning Patterns
Erika Aigner-Varoz

Howling at the Moon: The Queer but True Story of My Life as a Hank Williams Song
Craig Womack

Crossing Borders from the Beginning
Alfonso Rodriguez

Knots
Carol Kalafatic

What Part Moon
Inez Petersen

Tradition and the Individual Imitation
William S. Penn

On Mapping and Urban Shamans
Kimberly Blaeser

Race and Mixed-Race: A Personal Tour
Rainier Spencer

Visions in the Four Directions: Five Hundred Years of Resistance and Beyond
Arturo Aldama

Between the Masques
Diane DuBose Brunner

From the Turn of the Century to the New Age: Playing Indian, Past and Present
Shari Huhndorf

Troublemakers
Rolando Romero

Ritchie Valens Is Dead: E Pluribus Unum
Patricia Penn Hilden

Notes on Contributors

Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah. By R. Warren Metcalf. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xx, 305 pp., ISBN 0-8032-3201-2.)  [Review]

The Journal of American History
Volume 90, Number 3 (December 2003)
page 1107
DOI: 10.2307/3661030

David Rich Lewis, Professor of History
Utah State University, Logan

Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah. By R. Warren Metcalf. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xx, 305 pp., ISBN 0-8032-3201-2.)

In the 1950s the federal government reversed its pluralistic policies for revitalizing tribal governments and began terminating its trust responsibility under the guise of “freeing” American Indians from federal control. Termination policies flowed out of the conservative, budget-cutting, consensus rhetoric of Cold War America. As R. Warren Metcalf points out, its implementation varied, informed by the ideology of its practitioners and the circumstances of its subjects—specifically the Mormon cultural background of Arthur V. Watkins, Republican senator from Utah and chief advocate of termination in Congress, and the numerically small, powerless, and divided Shoshone, Paiute, and Ute Indians of Utah. Metcalf details the process whereby federal officials, Mormon politicians and lawyers, and Utes themselves accomplished the termination of mixed-blood members of the Northern Ute tribe despite the letter of the law and the bonds of racial identity. It is the story of identity politics that left individuals as “discarded” Indians…

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Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah

University of Nebraska Press
2002
311 pages
Illus., maps
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-3201-3; Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-2251-9

R. Warren Metcalf, Associate Professor of United States History
University of Oklahoma

Termination’s Legacy describes how the federal policy of termination irrevocably affected the lives of a group of mixed-blood Ute Indians who made their home on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah. Following World War II many Native American communities were strongly encouraged to terminate their status as wards of the federal government and develop greater economic and political power for themselves. During this era, the rights of many Native communities came under siege, and the tribal status of some was terminated. Most of the terminated communities eventually regained tribal status and federal recognition in subsequent decades. But not all did.

The mixed-blood Utes fell outside the formal categories of classification by the federal government, they did not meet the essentialist expectations of some officials of the Mormon Church, and their regaining of tribal status potentially would have threatened those Utes already classified as tribal members on the reservation. Skillfully weaving together interviews and extensive archival research, R. Warren Metcalf traces the steps that led to the termination of the mixed-blood Utes’ tribal status and shows how and why this particular group of Native Americans was never formally recognized as “Indian” again. Their repeated failure to regain their tribal status throws into relief the volatile key issue of identity then and today for full- and mixed-blood Native Americans, the federal government, and the powerful Mormon Church in Utah.

Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas

Texas Tech University Press
2003
256 pages
8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
Paper ISBN-10: 0896725162, ISBN-13: 978-0896725164

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

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, black runaways braved an escape from slavery in an unprecedented alliance with Seminole Indians in Florida. This is the story of the maroons’ ethnogenesis in Florida, their removal to the West, their role in the Texas Indian Wars, and the fate of their long quest for liberty and self-determination along both sides of the Rio Grande. Their tale is rich, colorful, and epic, stretching from the swamps of the Southeast to the desert Southwest. From a borderlands mosaic of slave hunters, corrupt Indian agents, Texas filibusters, Mexican revolutionaries, French invaders, Apache and Comanche raiders, frontier outlaws, lawmen, and Buffalo Soldiers, emerges a saga of enslavement, flight, exile, and ultimately freedom.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Florida Maroons
2. Emigrants from Indian Territory
3. Los Mascogos
4. The Seminole Negro Indian Scouts
5. Classifying Seminole Blacks
6. In Search of Home
7. Either Side of a Border
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Black Seminole Involvement and Leadership During the Second Seminole War, 1835-1842

Indiana University
May 2007
228 pages

Anthony E. Dixon

A Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History Indiana University

This thesis examines the involvement, leadership, and impact of the Black Seminoles during the Second Seminole War. In Florida, free Blacks, runaway slaves, and Blacks owned by Seminoles collectively became known as Black Seminoles. Black Seminoles either lived in separate communities near Seminole Indians, or joined them by cohabitating or intermarriage. Throughout this cohabitation, Blacks became an integral part of Seminole life by taking positions as advisers, counselors, and trusted interpreters to the English (who were rapidly advancing plantation society into territorial Florida).

By the advent of the Second Seminole War, Black Seminoles, unlike their Seminole Indian counterparts were not given the opportunity to emigrate westward under the United States government’s Indian Removal Policy. The United States government’s objective became to return as many Black Seminoles, if not all, to slavery. Therefore, it became the Black Seminole’s objective to resist enslavement or re-enslavement (for many) on American plantations.

The Introduction explains the objective and focus of this study. Moreover, it explains the need and importance of this study while examining the historiography of the Second Seminole War in relation to the Black Seminoles. The origins and cultural aspects of the Black Seminoles is the topic of chapter one. By examining the origins and cultural aspects of the Black Seminoles, this study establishes the autonomy of the Black Seminoles from their Indian counterparts. Chapter two focuses on the relationship and alliance between Seminole Blacks and Indians. Research concerning Black Seminole involvement throughout the war allows chapter three to reconstruct the Second Seminole War from the Black Seminole perspective. A biographical approach is utilized in chapter four in order to understand the Black Seminole leadership. This chapter examines the lives of the three most prominent Black Seminole leaders during the war. The overall impact of the Black Seminole involvement in the war is the focus of chapter five. Chapter six summarizes this study and provides the historiography of the Second Seminole War with a perspective that has remained relatively obscure.

It is clear that from the onset of the war, the United States government, military, and state militias grossly underestimated both the determination and the willingness of the Black Seminole to resist at all cost. Throughout the war, both United States’ military and political strategies were constructed and reconstructed to compensate for both the intensity with which the Black Seminoles fought as well as their political savvy during negotiations. This study examines the impact of the Black Seminoles on the Second Seminole War within the context of marronage and subsequently interprets the Second Seminole War itself as a form of slave rebellion.

Table of Contents

• Title Page
• Acknowlegements
• Abstract
• Table of Contents
• Table of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Origins and Cultural Character of the Black Seminole
• Chapter 2: Seminole and Black Seminole Alliance
• Chapter 3: Black Seminole Early Resistance and Involvement During the Second Seminole War
• Chapter 4: Black Seminole Leadership During the Second Seminole War
• Chapter 5: The Impact of the Black Seminoles on the Second Seminole War
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Table of Illustrations

• Afro-Seminole Creole Language
• Annual Distribution of Runaway Slaves

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Honoring Our Legacy: Past, Present and Future, RED/BLACK Connections

Indian Voices
October 2010
pages 8-9

Black Native American Association’s First Multi-Cultural National Pow Wow
California State University Eastbay-Hayward
September 18-19, 2010

On Friday, September 17, a workshop examined the Red/Black relationships and how to improve them. Noted participants on the panel included Black Seminole Lonnie Harrington, author of “Both Sides of the Water”, a teaching artist at the Arts Connections in New York and a Native American drummer. Others were Dr. Andrew Jolivette, Associate Professor and department chief of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University and author of two books: ”Louisiana Creoles” and “Cultural Recovery and Mixed Race Native American Identity;” Dr. Elnora Webb-Mitchell, President of Laney College; Pastor Steve Constantine, Arwak Tribe, Guyna, South America; and Jewelle Gomez, poet, author, political activist, playwright, Native American (Wampanoag and Iowasy) and Director of Cultural Equity Grants Program of San Francisco…

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Estelusti Marginality: A Qualitative Examination of the Black Seminole

The Journal of Pan African Studies
Volume 2, Number 4 (June 2008)
pages 60-80

Ray Von Robertson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas

Approximately four years ago, I began collecting interview data with Black Seminoles/Estelusti in Oklahoma. My research focused on how the Black Seminoles negotiated their marginal status within the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and with nonfreedman Blacks. Using Weisberger’s (1992) marginality construct, I found that the Estelusti most often employed ‘poise’ to manage their state of ‘double ambivalence’. This study further explored the issue of Black Seminole marginality after their reintegration into the cultural group in 2003. My findings, while different in specifics, were generally consistent with those found a few years earlier. The Black Seminoles still appear to experience significant marginality and are not fully accepted by the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.

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Miengun’s Children: Tales from a Mixed-Race Family

Mrs. Jessie W. Hilton of Albuquerque, N.M., who summers at her cottage Mi-en-gun Walszh (Wolf’s Den) in Northport, was hostess at 5:00 o’clock Wednesday at Schuler’s of this city honoring Mrs. C. Stuker of Oak Park, III., house guest of her sister, Mrs. Basil Milliken of Oklahoma City, Okla., summer resident at Northport.

Traverse City [Michigan] Record Eagle, July 7, 1954

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 29, Numbers 2/3, Intermarriage and North American Indians (2008)
pp. 146-185
DOI: 10.1353/fro.0.0016

Susan E. Gray, Associate Professor of History
Arizona State University

At the time of this gathering of summer society in a northern Michigan resort town, Jessie Milton was eighty-nine years old. For more than fifty years, she had been a summer resident of Northport, on the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula, north and west of Traverse City, leaving her home in Oklahoma City every June and returning from Michigan in October, events noted in the society pages of newspapers in both places. The only break in this pattern occurred in 1947, when she moved from Oklahoma City to her daughter’s house in Albuquerque, from which she continued to commute each summer to the Leelanau. Despite Jessie’s social standing, however, her annual pilgrimages differed from most sojourns of the genteel and well-heeled to northern Michigan. Twice divorced, she was long accustomed to supporting herself, and she ran a shop in Northport during the summer tourist season, selling Indian handicrafts and pies that she made from the cherries for which the Traverse region is famous. The silverwork for sale at the “Cherry Buttery” came from New Mexico, but the sweet grass and split ash baskets were the work of local Odawa and Ojibwe people, some of whom Hilton had known far longer than she had been summering on the Leelanau. Indeed, the annual arrival of Jessie Hilton, society matron and purveyor of Indian handicrafts, at the Wolf’s Den signaled the complexity and fluidity of a mixed-race identity that she, like her twelve brothers and sisters, had spent a lifetime negotiating.

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