Mixed Race Studies

IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas

Smithsonian Institution
2009
256 pages
6 5/8 x 9 1/2 inches
115 color and black-and-white illustrations
ISBN: 978-1-58834-271-3

Twenty-seven passionate essays explore the complex history and contemporary lives of people with a dual heritage that is a little-known part of American culture. Authors from across the Americas share first-person accounts of struggle, adaptation, and survival and examine such diverse subjects as contemporary art, the Cherokee Freedmen issue, and the evolution of jazz and blues. This richly illustrated book brings to light an epic history that speaks to present-day struggles for racial identity and understanding.

IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas accompanies the groundbreaking exhibition of the same title developed by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES). Through the concepts of policy, community, creative resistance, and lifeways, the exhibition and publication examine the long overlooked history of Native American and African American intersections in the Americas.

The book features a foreword by NMAI Director Kevin Gover and NMAAHC Director Lonnie G. Bunch, III, essays by leading scholars, and approximately 100 object images, documents, and photographs. IndiVisible illuminates a history fraught with colonial oppression, racial antagonism, and the loss of culture and identity. Uncovered within that history, however, are stories of cultural resurgence and the need to know one’s roots. Guided by NMAI historian Gabrielle Tayac, five Native scholars served as curatorial advisors for the exhibition and contributors for the publication: Angela A. Gonzales, Robert K. Collins, Judy Kertész, Penny Gamble-Williams, and Thunder Williams. In addition to the curatorial advisors, esteemed authors Theda Perdue, Tiya Miles, Richard Hill, Sr., Herman J. Viola, and Ron Welburn—among the book’s many expert voices—discuss race relations in the Jim Crow South, creative resistance, the relationship between African Americans and the Haudenosaunee, the famed buffalo soldiers of the American West, and the roots of jazz and blues. Taken together, the book’s essays and images create a portrait of a vital American subculture.

Read the forward here.

African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation

University of Oklahoma Press
2007
368 pages, 6″ x 9″
Illustrations: 15 color illustrations, 4 maps
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806138152

Gary Zellar, Assistant Professor of History
University of Saskatchewan

A narrative history of the African Creek community

Among the Creeks, they were known as Estelvste—black people—and they had lived among them since the days of the first Spanish entradas. They spoke the same language as the Creeks, ate the same foods, and shared kinship ties. Their only difference was the color of their skin.

This book tells how people of African heritage came to blend their lives with those of their Indian neighbors and essentially became Creek themselves. Taking in the full historical sweep of African Americans among the Creeks, from the sixteenth century through Oklahoma statehood, Gary Zellar unfolds a narrative history of the many contributions these people made to Creek history.

Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Zellar reveals how African people functioned as warriors, interpreters, preachers, medicine men, and even slave labor, all of which allowed the tribe to withstand the shocks of Anglo-American expansion. He also tells how they provided leaders who helped the Creeks navigate the onslaught of allotment, tribal dissolution, and Oklahoma statehood.

In his compelling narrative, Zellar describes how African Creeks made a place for themselves in a tolerant Creek Nation in which they had access to land, resources, and political leverage—and how post–Civil War “reform” reduced them to the second-class citizenship of other African Americans. It is a stirring account that puts history in a new light as it adds to our understanding of the multi-ethnic nature of Indian societies.

Personal passion fuels Smithsonian exhibit

San Francisco State University News
2010-02-12

Denize Springer

The search for identity is particularly complex for Americans of both African and Native American heritage, according to Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies Robert Keith Collins.

Of Choctaw and African American descent, Collins has turned a personal passion into a career. His research, featured in a major exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, focuses on the racially motivated laws and other influences and issues that continue to complicate the lives of mixed-heritage people throughout the Americas.

According to the 2000 U.S. census, hundreds of thousands of Americans claim both African and Native American heritage. The tangled relationship between these groups began when Native Americans were enslaved, took African slaves, rescued them from slavery and married freed or freeborn African slaves. Collins’ research involves scouring historical records of the Americas, particularly the slave narratives compiled by the WPA (Works Project Administration) during the Great Depression, which illuminated the dynamics of slave life within Native American nations…

Read the entire article here.

CCIE presents Cedar & Bamboo – Film Première and Panel Discussion

University of British Columbia, Point Grey Campus
UBC First Nations Longhouse
Thursday, 2010-10-14, 12:00-14:30 (Local Time)

Sponsored by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE).

There are numerous First Nations in what is now British Columbia and Chinese people arrived on BC’s shores many generations ago. Since then, Indigenous and Chinese people have interacted and forged relationships. Set in Vancouver and other locations in BC, Cedar and Bamboo opens with a survey of the lives of early Chinese immigrants and concentrates on addressing the more recent history of highly complex and troubled issues of interracial relationships and marriages, multiracial identity and identification, alienation and belonging. Its central focus is on the lives of four people of mixed Indigenous and Chinese ancestry and their formation of strong and meaningful identity in spite of the difficulty of reconciling divergent identities, racist laws, the complexities of familial and ethnic acceptance and/or rejection and personal identification with and alienation from Canada and Canadianness, China and Chineseness and First Nations and Indigenous identity. Lil’wat elder Judy Joe reflects on being “abandoned” by her Indigenous mother, being sent to her father’s village in China at age five, being ill treated there as a foreigner and returning to Canada as a teenager to a Vancouver from which she felt completely alienated. Musqueam elder Howard Grant, whose Chinese father worked in the market gardens near his Musqueam mother’s family, reflects on his experiences with both cultures and his principal identification as aboriginal. Siblings Jordie and Hannah Yow, now in their 20s, reflect on growing up “Canadian” in Kamloops with knowledge of being quite multiracial and multiethnic but with virtually no information about either their Chinese grandfather or their Secwempec grandmother.

As a bonus- 1788: A History of Chinese and First Nations Relations in British Columbia, 10 minutes of academic commentary from Professors Henry Yu and Jean Barman of the University of British Columbia and Harley Wylie of Nuu-chah-nulth ancestry on the intersecting histories of First Nations and Chinese people in British Columbia.

For more information, click here.

Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans

Temple University Press
May 1992
352 page
6×9
Paper EAN: 978-1-56639-202-0, ISBN: 1-56639-202-0
Cloth EAN: 978-0-87722-890-5, ISBN: 0-87722-890-6
Electronic Book: EAN: 978-1-43990-364-3

Karen Isaksen Leonard, Professor of Anthropology
University of California, Irvine

This is a study of the flexibility of ethnic identity. In the early twentieth century, men from India’s Punjab province came to California to work on the land. The new immigrants had few chances to marry. There were very few marriageable Indian women, and miscegenation laws and racial prejudice limited their ability to find white Americans. Discovering an unexpected compatibility, Punjabis married women of Mexican descent and these alliances inspired others as the men introduced their bachelor friends to the sisters and friends of their wives. These biethnic families developed an identity as “Hindus” but also as Americans. Karen Leonard has related theories linking state policies and ethnicity to those applied at the level of marriage and family life. Using written sources and numerous interviews, she invokes gender, generation, class, religion, language, and the dramatic political changes of the 1940s in South Asia and the United States to show how individual and group perceptions of ethnic identity have changed among Punjabi Mexican Americans in rural California.

Read chapter 1 here.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Part I: Introduction
  • 1. Exploring Ethnicity
• Part II: The World of the Pioneers
  • 2. Contexts: California and the Punjab
  • 3. Early Days in the Imperial Valley
  • 4. Marriages and Children
  • 5. Male and Female Networks
  • 6. Conflict and Love in the Marriages
• Part III: The Construction of Ethnic Identity
  • 7. Childhood in Rural California
  • 8. The Second Generation Comes of Age
  • 9. Political Change and Ethnic Identity
  • 10. Encounters with the Other
  • 11. Contending Voices
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

History 328: American Mixed Blood

Oberlin College
Department of History
Fall 2009

Pablo Mitchell, Eric and Jane Nord Associate Professor of History and Comparative American Studies
Oberlin College

From the coyote and the half-breed to the “tragic” mulatto, people of mixed ethnic and racial heritage occupy a conflicted and controversial place in American history. This course will chart the histories of people of mixed heritage from the colonial period to the present, exploring the relationship between the historical experiences of mixed heritage and broader trends in American history including slavery, imperialism, legal transformation, and changing cultural patterns. We will also consider current social theories of hybridity and mestizaje.

Required Texts:

Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Ann Stoler, ed., selected essays
Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century
Earl Lewis, Heidi Ardizzone, Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White
Renee Christine Romano, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Post-War America
Jane M. Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era
Susan Koshy, Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation
Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States
Karen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans
Lauren Basson, White Enough to be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation

White Negro Communities: Too White To Be Black And Too Black To Be White

Johnathon Odell: Discovering Our Stories
2010-07-25

John Odell

Yvonne Bivins had to make a choice very few Americans have forced upon them.  She could live as a black woman or a white woman.

Yvonne’s ancestry is enmeshed with the Knights of Jones County [Mississippi]. She was born into one of the so-called “White Negro” communities that sprang up after the Civil War all over through the Piney Woods. These communities grew up around Piney Woods plantations, actually no bigger than farms. There’s Six Town and Soso and Sheeplow. Her community is called Kelly Settlement and located few miles miles outside of Laurel.

Hold on to your hats and I’ll tell you how Kelly Settlement came into existence.  John Kelly, an early petitioner in Mississippi Territory, purchased 640 acres on the Leaf River. His son, Green Kelly had a liaison with a slave named Sarah. Sarah had children by her white master, by a white neighbor and by another slave on the farm. That made three sets of children, a total of eleven.

This may surprise you. It sure did me. But according to Yvonne, it was not an uncommon practice for Piney Woods slave owners, perhaps because of the intimacy created by these modest estates that demanded close-quarters living, to provide for all their offspring, regardless of color. We just don’t hear about it. Newt Knight was vilified not because he sired darker offspring, but because he refused to deny them…

Read the entire article here.

Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920

University of Chicago Press
2005
224 pages
10 halftones  6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780226532424
Paper ISBN: 9780226532431
E-book ISBN: 9780226532523

Pablo Mitchell, Eric and Jane Nord Associate Professor of History and Comparative American Studies
Oberlin College

With the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s came the emergence of a modern and profoundly multicultural New Mexico. Native Americans, working-class Mexicans, elite Hispanos, and black and white newcomers all commingled and interacted in the territory in ways that had not been previously possible. But what did it mean to be white in this multiethnic milieu? And how did ideas of sexuality and racial supremacy shape ideas of citizenry and determine who would govern the region?

Coyote Nation considers these questions as it explores how New Mexicans evaluated and categorized racial identities through bodily practices. Where ethnic groups were numerous and—in the wake of miscegenation—often difficult to discern, the ways one dressed, bathed, spoke, gestured, or even stood were largely instrumental in conveying one’s race. Even such practices as cutting one’s hair, shopping, drinking alcohol, or embalming a deceased loved one could inextricably link a person to a very specific racial identity.

A fascinating history of an extraordinarily plural and polyglot region, Coyote Nation will be of value to historians of race and ethnicity in American culture.

Table of Contents

Preface: A Note on Coyotes
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Bodies on Borders
2. Compromising Positions: Racializing Bodies at Pueblo Indian Schools
3. Carnal Knowledge: Racializing Hispano Bodies in the Courts
4. Transits of Venus: Ceremonies and Contested Public Space
5. Strange Bedfellows: Anglos and Hispanos in the Reproduction of Whiteness
6. “Promiscuous Expectoration”: Medicine and the Naturalization of Whiteness
7. “Just Gauzy Enough”: Consumer Culture and the Shared White Body of Anglos and Hispanos
8. Conclusion: Birth of a Coyote Nation
Notes
Bibliography
Index

…One might argue that discrimination against multiracial people is merely a subset—perhaps even a milder one—of discrimination against monoracial individuals. In other words, a person who is identified as partially Black might be subject to the same kind of animus as one who is identified as fully Black. This Part aims to disprove that notion and demonstrate that animus against people identified as multiracial is a unique phenomenon.

I readily acknowledge some overlap between what we might call monoracial and multiracial animus: a racist who dislikes people who she views as Asian might well dislike an individual whom she identifies as part-Asian for some of the same reasons. But viewing someone as part-Asian also lends itself to unique forms of animus not directed at those perceived as monoracial. A mixed-race person may be viewed as polluted, defective, confusing or confused, passing, threatening, or—in our diversity-obsessed society—as opportunistic, gaining an advantage by identifying with a group in which he is at best a partial member. These negative associations may be distinguished from those directed at people perceived as monoracial.

I use history, sociology, and jurisprudence to buttress my claim that animus against multiracial people is a unique form of animus that is distinguishable from animus directed at any monoracial group. In the process, I hope to demonstrate that animus against racially mixed individuals is anything but benign or mild.

Other scholars have attempted to illuminate the reason underlying the persistent discomfort with racial mixing and racial mixedness. My own view is that different groups’ discomfort with mixing is so heterogeneous that any theory attempting to explain animus toward multiracial people will by necessity be quite complicated. While I believe that development of such a theory is an important project, it is one I do not address in this Article. Instead, I focus on demonstrating that racism directed at people who are viewed as multiracial is a real phenomenon that may result in tangible negative consequences to the lives of the people thus identified…

Nancy Leong, “Judicial Erasure of Mixed-Race Discrimination,” American University Law Review, Volume 59, Number 3 (2010): 483-484.

Quadroon Balls functioned as a form of entertainment but also served a meeting space for its participants to enter into plaçage/sexual relationships. It was at these dances that free young women of color, guided by their mothers, charmed their way into the hearts and pockets of Louisiana’s white males. At the balls, quadroon women “show their accomplishments in dancing and conversation to the white men.” Upon finding a quadroon to his liking, a man would negotiate with the quadroon woman’s mother. If both mother and daughter were satisfied with his financial and social ranking, she would be “placed” as his placée. According to literary traveler George William Featherstonhaugh,

When one of them [a quadroon] attracts the attention of an admirer, and he is desirous of forming a liaison with her, he makes a bargain with the mother, agrees to pay her a sum of money, perhaps 2000 dollars, or some sum in proportion to her merits, as a fund upon which she may retire when the liaison terminates. She is now called “une placée;” those of her caste who are her intimate friends give her fetes, and the lover prepares “un joli appartement meuble.”

 Each quadroon had a “value” which “depended on the attractiveness of the subject, the fairness of her complexion, and her mother’s ability to show her off against the competition.” This “value” was derived through negotiations between the quadroon’s mother and the white suitor. If an agreement was reached, the quadroon would become a concubine or placée for the white man in exchange for financial support for the woman. These exchanges frequently meant that the quadroon woman would receive housing, a sum of money, and promised financial support for any children that would come from these relationships. The “price” for a quadroon varied, but could be as much as $2,000. Often times, the quadroon woman would be set up in an apartment (“un joli appartement meuble”) located on Ramparts Street in New Orleans that was rented by the white gentleman for their use. These plaçage relationships could last for weeks, months, years, and, much less frequently, a life-time. In these exchanges, sexual exploitation by both parties is particularly noticeable; the quadroon exploited the pocketbook and the man exploited her body.

Quadroon women who participated in the balls had been groomed from early childhood by their mothers to take advantage of this unique opportunity to become the exploiters, using their bodies, beauty and assumed exotic sexuality to enter into contracts with wealthy white men. Monique Guillory discusses this exchange that gives women some power when she states, “Through this strategic commodification of the quadroon body, which I have called the commercial, women of color seized an opportunity beyond the confines of slavery to set the price for their own bodies.” These quadroon women chose to use their bodies as leverage to raise their own social status above the “negro” slave and the dark-skinned free people of color. This population of women became agents who exploited themselves and white men in an effort to transcend the racist system of antebellum Louisiana.

Noël Voltz, “Black Female Agency and Sexual Exploitation: Quadroon Balls and Plaçage Relationships” (PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2008).