Mixed Race Studies

Post-Racial America? Multiracial Identification and the Color Line in the 21st Century

Nanzan Review of American Studies
Volume 30 (2008)
pages 13-31

Jennifer Lee, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

The United States is more racially diverse than at any point in history. Once a largely black-white society with a distinct color line separating these two groups, the country has moved far beyond black and white due to contemporary immigration. Today, immigrants and their children comprise almost 66 million people, or about 23% of the U. S. population, but unlike the earlier waves of immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, America’s recent newcomers have been mainly non-European, with 85% originating from Latin America, Asia, or the Caribbean (Lee and Bean 2004; U. S. Bureau of Census 2002; U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service 2002). The shift in national origins―from Europe to Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean―is the single most distinctive aspect of the “new immigration” in the United States (Bean and Stevens 2003; Waldinger and Lee 2001).

America’s immigrant newcomers have undeniably altered the racial landscape of the United States. In 1970, Latinos and Asians comprised only 5% and 1% of the U. S. population, but today, they account for 13% and 4%, respectively. The Latino population has grown so rapidly that Latinos now outnumber blacks, and have become the nation’s largest minority group in the United States. While smaller in size, the Asian population is the fastest growing group in the country (Lee and Zhou 2004). America’s Latino and Asian populations are expected to continue to grow so that by 2050, they are projected to constitute 30% and 8% of the U. S. population. Clearly, today’s immigrants have transformed the United States from a largely black-white society to a newly multi-racial one…

…In this paper, I use patterns of multiracial identification as the analytical lens by which I gauge the placement of the contemporary color line in the United States. Multiracial identification speaks volumes about the meaning of race in American society, and in particular, signals where racial group boundaries are fading most rapidly and where they continue to endure. Multiracial reporting is a significant harbinger of racial change because the willingness of an individual to identify in multiracial terms reflects a jettisoning of the exclusive bases of racial categorization that have long marked the construction of race in the United States. It also reflects the diminishing significance of the current American racial scheme, which some sociologists believe will become increasingly less relevant in each generation until it disappears into obscurity….

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Mixed-Race Identity in a Nineteenth-Century Family: The Schoolcrafts of Sault Ste. Marie, 1824-27

Michigan Historical Review
Volume 25, Number 1 (Spring, 1999)
pages 1-23

Jeremy Mumford, Visiting Assistant Professor of History
Brown University

In the autumn of 1824 the Schoolcraft family set out from Sault Ste. Marie, at the mouth of Lake Superior in northern Michigan Territory, to visit New York City. For Jane, who had seldom left the remote village where she was born, this was her first visit. It was the first time Henry had returned to his home state since his appointment as federal Indian Agent in Sault Ste. Marie in 1822 and his marriage a year later. And everything was new, of course, for their son Willy who was only four months old.

The Schoolcrafts were apprehensive about the reception they would meet in the metropolis. Jane was the daughter of Oshauguscodaywayqua, a Chippewa woman from an influential lakeshore family, and John Johnston, an Irish gentleman and fur trader. In the language of her time, both Jane and her child were half-breeds.  To her relief, Jane and Willy received only friendly attention on this visit. When Henry left to do some business in Washington, some friends, Mr. and Mrs. Conant, invited Jane to leave her lodging house and stay with them. She wrote to Henry of repeated visits, interesting conversation, and “marked kindness” from many acquaintances.  The strongest impression the Schoolcrafts took away from their visit was of kindly interest in Jane and Willy, who were received as “another Pocahontas” and her “bright American boy.”

In making a family excursion to the great eastern city, the Schoolcrafts signaled ambitions within a wider arena beyond their village. One purpose of the visit was to discuss a book of Indian oratory on which Henry intended to collaborate with Samuel Conant and in which Jane may have been involved. The other was to improve Henry’s political contacts in Washington. Henry was ambitious for both literary and political fame, as well as for the prospects of his first child, William Henry Schoolcraft, the bright American boy.

For both parents, their sojourn in the East prompted reflection on their responsibilities and their future. Sick in bed, Jane wrote from New York to Henry in Washington that she was unused to being separated from him and missed him. He wrote to her of his prayer that their “sweet, interesting little boy [would] be permitted to grow up to man’s estate, and that his mother may be spared to nurture him up.” He mused: “What an interesting chain of thought is connected with the idea of a home, and a wife, and a child.”

Inevitably, this chain of thought had to take account of the meaning of Jane’s and Willy’s mixed race. The Schoolcrafts were starting their family in the shadow of a very different model of family-building: what was called in the upper Great Lakes la facon du pays or “the custom of the country.” Traditionally, white men lived with and had children by Indian or mixed-blood women, only to leave their families behind when they returned east, entrusting them to other men’s protection or abandoning them altogether. Jane’s parents were unusual in the permanence of their relationship, but even they did not formalize their marriage until she was twenty.  In visiting the East together as a family, Jane and Henry (who were properly married by a visiting clergyman) broke the custom of the country and expressed their determination to start a family that was just as legitimate in New York as it was in Sault Ste. Marie.

They were opposing not only the custom of the country but also the direction of educated opinion. Jane’s and her children’s mixed ethnicity, while not uncommon, was a subject of increasing distrust. When Jane was three years old, President Jefferson predicted that white and Indian people would “blend together, … intermix, and become one people.” But during her lifetime Americans moved toward a harsher theory of racial boundaries. By the 1840s some scientists argued that a mixed-race person was a “hybrid” of biologically separate species, “a degenerate, unnatural offspring, doomed by nature to work out its own destruction.” During the years of Henry’s and Jane’s marriage, mixed-race families became ever more suspect.

To build a secure foundation for their family, the Schoolcrafts used whatever resources they could find. They looked hopefully to Jane’s Chippewa connections, which promised substantial support. Her dowry of 2,000 pounds (about $10,000) came from her parents’ business in Chippewa furs. She and Henry stood to enlarge it through gifts of land made by the tribe to Jane and Willy as mixed-blood Chippewa. Jane also contributed to her family’s fortunes in another way: by teaching Henry about Chippewa culture and folktales, she laid the foundation for Henry’s later fame as an writer about Indians.

This essay will trace two attempts the Schoolcrafts made, in the first years of their marriage, to turn Jane’s Chippewa inheritance into a family asset. These attempts were quite different, one in the realm of literature, the other in real estate. In each case, however, the nature of the inheritance made its use problematic. For Jane, her connection to the Chippewa culture she recorded undermined her position as a genteel woman of letters. For Willy, his connection to the Chippewa lands he stood to receive undermined his future as a citizen and a man of property. For the Schoolcrafts, mother and son, Indian legacies had apparent advantages but hidden liabilities. To follow them is to begin to unravel the question of race, and of mixed-race identity, in one American family…

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Some Asians’ college strategy: Don’t check ‘Asian’

The Associated Press
2011-12-04

Jesse Washington, National Writer/Race and Ethnicity

Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.

“I didn’t want to put ‘Asian’ down,” Olmstead says, “because my mom told me there’s discrimination against Asians in the application process.”

For years, many Asian-Americans have been convinced that it’s harder for them to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges.

Studies show that Asian-Americans meet these colleges’ admissions standards far out of proportion to their 6 percent representation in the U.S. population, and that they often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission. Critics say these numbers, along with the fact that some top colleges with race-blind admissions have double the Asian percentage of Ivy League schools, prove the existence of discrimination.

The way it works, the critics believe, is that Asian-Americans are evaluated not as individuals, but against the thousands of other ultra-achieving Asians who are stereotyped as boring academic robots.

Now, an unknown number of students are responding to this concern by declining to identify themselves as Asian on their applications.

For those with only one Asian parent, whose names don’t give away their heritage, that decision can be relatively easy. Harder are the questions that it raises: What’s behind the admissions difficulties? What, exactly, is an Asian-American — and is being one a choice?…

…Susanna Koetter, a Yale junior with an American father and Korean mother, was adamant about identifying her Asian side on her application. Yet she calls herself “not fully Asian-American. I’m mixed Asian-American. When I go to Korea, I’m like, blatantly white.”

And yet, asked whether she would have considered leaving the Asian box blank, she says: “That would be messed up. I’m not white.”

“Identity is very malleable,” says Jasmine Zhuang, a Yale junior whose parents were both born in Taiwan…
…Steven Hsu, a physics professor at the University of Oregon and a vocal critic of current admissions policies, says there is a clear statistical case that discrimination exists…

Hsu, the physics professor, says that if the current admissions policies continue, it will become more common for Asian students to avoid identifying themselves as such, and schools will have to react.

“They’ll have to decide: A half-Asian kid, what is that? I don’t think they really know.”…

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Anglo-Indian Identity, Knowledge, and Power: Western Ballroom Music in Lucknow

The Drama Review
Volume 48, Number 4 (Winter 2004)
Pages 167-182
DOI: 10.1162/1054204042442053

Dr. Bradley Shope, Assistant Professor of Music
Texas A&M Universtity, Corpus Christi

From the 1920s to the 1940s, Anglo-Indians relished Western popular music. For this marginalized group, this music was a way of promoting respectability. And though the music mimicked styles from America and Europe, its celebration was distinctly local.

Beginning in the first half of the 20th century, Western ballroom and dance music began to make its way into Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, as well as other cities in North India. It was imported via gramophone disks, radio broadcasts, and sheet music coming from Europe and America. In the 1930s, an increasing number of dance halls, railway social institutes, auditoriums, and cafes were built to cater to a growing number of British and Americans in India, satisfying their nostalgia for the live performance of the foxtrot, the tango, the waltz, the rumba, big-band music, and Dixieland. Influenced by sound and broadcast technology, sheet music, instrument availability, the railway system, and convent schools teaching music, an appreciation for these styles of music was found in other communities. Especially involved were Portuguese Goans and Anglo-Indians, defined here as those of European and Indian descent who were born and raised in India. For these two groups, it served to assert their identities as distinct from other South Asians and highlighted that their taste for music reached beyond the geographical boundaries of India. Numerous types of media, institutions, and venues contributed to this vibrant Western music performance culture in Lucknow in the early 20th century. James Perry, an elderly Goan musician, and Mr. John Sebastian and Mr. Jonathan Taylor, two elderly Anglo-Indian ex-railway workers, were involved in its performance and appreciation. By drawing from multiple field interviews in North India conducted with these individuals between 1999 and 2001, and by describing the character of the performance culture, I will highlight the role of music in creating socioeconomic mobility and a distinct identity among Anglo-Indians in Lucknow, and address issues of power relations and colonialism with reference to the consumption of the music.

Just before and during World War II, Lucknow was considered a strategic military defense location because of the fear of bombing campaigns in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) by the Japanese military. A large portion of the Allied Eastern Command was moved inland and established in Lucknow to counter…

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121C-Mixed Race in America

University of California, Santa Cruz

Examines what it means to be of mixed race in America along historical, social, political, and cinematic lines. Theories on racial and identity formation applied to understanding multiracial experiences of various racial groups in the U.S.

Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times

University of New Mexico Press
2009
296 pages
6 x 9 in, 21 halftones, 4 maps
paperback ISBN: 978-0-8263-4701-5

Edited by:

Ben Vinson III, Professor of history and Director of the Center for Africana Studies
Johns Hopkins University

Matthew Restall, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

The essays in this collection build upon a series of conversations and papers that resulted from “New Directions in North American Scholarship on Afro-Mexico,” a symposium conducted at Pennsylvania State University in 2004. The issues addressed include contested historiography, social and economic contributions of Afro-Mexicans, social construction of race and ethnic identity, forms of agency and resistance, and contemporary inquiry into ethnographic work on Afro-Mexican communities. Comprised of a core set of chapters that examine the colonial period and a shorter epilogue addressing the modern era, this volume allows the reader to explore ideas of racial representation from the sixteenth century into the twenty-first.

Contributors:

Joan Bristol, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
Patrick Carroll, Texas A & M University, Corpus Christi
Andrew B. Fisher, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota
Nicole von Germeten, Oregon State University, Corvallis
Laura A. Lewis, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia
Jean-Philibert Mobwa Mobwa N’djoli, Congolese native living in Mexico City
Frank “Trey” Proctor III, Denison University, Granville, Ohio
Alva Moore Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles
Bobby Vaughn, Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, California

Creating and Contesting Community: Indians and Afromestizos in the Late-Colonial Tierra Caliente of Guerrero, Mexico
 
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2006
E-ISSN: 1532-5768
DOI: 10.1353/cch.2006.0030

Andrew B. Fisher, Associate Professor of History
Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

Late in the afternoon of January 13, 1783 the parish priest of Tetela del Río, Br. don Nicolás Vásquez, rested in the hamlet (cuadrilla) of Cacalotepeque as he prepared to trek back to his parish seat. Father Vásquez had arrived only an hour earlier to minister to the ailing daughter of Capitán Luis de la Cruz, the mulato leader of the settlement. Cacalotepeque was but one of a number of informal communities scattered across the mid-Balsas River Valley of western Mexico. Consisting mostly of mulato farmers, the hamlet was neither recognized by the colonial state as an Indian pueblo nor held as a private estate. The land it occupied did not belong to its inhabitants, but rather comprised part of the contested territorial limits of two rival Indian pueblos, Tetela and Apaxtla, situated roughly equidistant from both. Much as Afromestizos lacked a stable and recognized position within colonial racial hierarchies, a semi-autonomous Afromestizo community likewise confronted a precarious existence. This reality was made abundantly clear to Father Vásquez on that fateful afternoon. As he conversed with the hamlet’s residents, some sixty indigenous villagers from Apaxtla approached on horseback. Several local men informed Vásquez that the villagers had arrived to steal away the cuadrilla’s corn, inducing…

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Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America

Duke University Press
2009
320 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4401-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4420-9

Edited by:

Matthew D. O’Hara, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Santa Cruz

Andrew Fisher, Associate Professor of History
Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

In colonial Latin America, social identity did not correlate neatly with fixed categories of race and ethnicity. As Imperial Subjects demonstrates, from the early years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, understandings of race and ethnicity were fluid. In this collection, historians offer nuanced interpretations of identity as they investigate how Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multi-ethnic progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and as imperial subjects. The contributors’ explorations of the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the identities historical actors presented span the entire colonial period and beyond: from early contact to the legacy of colonial identities in the new republics of the nineteenth century. The volume includes essays on the major colonial centers of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, as well as the Caribbean basin and the imperial borderlands.

Whether analyzing cases in which the Inquisition found that the individuals before it were “legally” Indians and thus exempt from prosecution, or considering late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century petitions for declarations of whiteness that entitled the mixed-race recipients to the legal and social benefits enjoyed by whites, the book’s contributors approach the question of identity by examining interactions between imperial subjects and colonial institutions. Colonial mandates, rulings, and legislation worked in conjunction with the exercise and negotiation of power between individual officials and an array of social actors engaged in countless brief interactions. Identities emerged out of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group association and externalized social norms and categories.

Table of Contents

• Foreword / Irene Silverblatt
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Racial Identities and Their Interpreters in Colonial Latin America / Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara
• 1. Aristocracy on the Auction Block: Race, Lords, and the Perpetuity Controversy of Sixteenth-Century Peru / Jeremy Mumford
• 2. A Market of Identities: Women, Trade, and Ethnic Labels in Colonial Potosí­ / Jane E. Mangan
• 3. Legally Indian: Inquisitorial Readings of Indigenous Identity in New Spain / David Tavárez
• 4. The Many Faces of Colonialism in Two Iberoamerican Borderlands: Northern New Spain and the Eastern Lowlands of Charcas / Cynthia Radding
• 5. Humble Slaves and Loyal Vassals: Free Africans and Their Descendents in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil / Mariana L. R. Dantas
• 6. Purchasing Whiteness: Conversations of the Essence of Parso-ness and Mulatto-ness at the End of Empire / Ann Twinam
• 7. Patricians and Plebians in Late Colonial Charcas: Identity, Representation, and Colonialism / Sergio Serulnikov
• 8. Conjuring Identities: Race, Nativeness, Local Citizenship, and Royal Slavery on an Imperial Frontier (Revisiting El Cobre, Cuba) / María Elena Díaz
• 9. Indigenous Citizenship: Liberalism, Political Participation, and Ethic Identity in Post-Independence Oaxaca and Yucatán / Karen D. Caplan
• Conclusion / R. Douglas Cope
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index

The Tiger Woods phenomenon: a note on biracial identity

The Social Science Journal
Volume 38, Issue 2, Summer 2001
Pages 333-336
DOI: 10.1016/S0362-3319(01)00118-5

Ronald E. Hall, Professor of Social Work
Michigan State University

Traditional race based models exclude the unique developmental dynamics of biracial Americans such as “Tiger” Woods. Conversely, a substantial portion of the scholarly literature emphasizes social experience rather than physiological attributes as the keystone to individual identity development. In the aftermath biracial Americans are conflicted. In an effort to ensure their psychic health social scientist scholars and practitioners must inculcate a human development across the life span model to accommodate the nation’s increasing level of racial and cultural miscegenation.

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Forgotten Tribes: Unrecognized Indians and the Federal Acknowledgment Process

University of Nebraska Press
2004
355 pages
paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-8321-3
hardback ISBN: 978-0-8032-3226-6

Mark Edwin Miller, Associate Professor of History
Southern Utah University

The Federal Acknowledgment Process (FAP) is one of the most important and contentious issues facing Native Americans today. A complicated system of criteria and procedures, the FAP is utilized by federal officials to determine whether a Native community qualifies for federal recognition by the United States government. In Forgotten Tribes, Mark Edwin Miller offers a balanced and detailed look at the origins, procedures, and assumptions governing the FAP. His work examines the FAP through the prism of four previously unrecognized tribal communities and their battles to gain indigenous rights under federal law.

Based on a wealth of interviews and original research, Forgotten Tribes features the first in-depth history and overview of the FAP and sheds light on this controversial Native identification policy involving state power over Native peoples and tribal sovereignty.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Map
• Introduction
• 1. Adrift with the Indian Office: The Historical Development of Tribal Acknowledgment Policy, 1776-–1978
• 2. Building an Edifice: The BIA’s Federal Acknowledgment Process, 1978–-2002
• 3. Bypassing the Bureau: The Pascua Yaquis’ Quest for Legislative Tribal Recognition
• 4. Sometimes Salvation: The Death Valley Timbisha Shoshones of California and the BIA’s Federal Acknowledgment Process
• 5. A Matter of Visibility: The United Houma Nation’s Struggle for Tribal Acknowledgment
• 6. From Playing Indian to Playing Slots: Gaming, Tribal Recognition, and the Tiguas of El Paso, Texas
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

It was in the early 1990s that the small Mashantucket Pequot Tribe of Connecticut burst upon the national scene, indelibly marking popular perceptions of once unacknowledged Indian tribes in the public conscious. After struggling for centuries without federal tribal status, the Pequots under Richard “Skip” Hayward dashed with aplomb into the twenty-first century, leading the march toward self-suf ciency and self-government through their phenomenally successful Foxwoods Casino complex situated midway between New York City and Boston. Making one billion dollars annually by the end of the decade, Foxwoods was the most lucrative gambling Mecca in the United States, drawing widespread attention up and down the East Coast. A decade earlier when the tribe had secured federal acknowledgment through an act of Congress in 1983, the development had raised few eyebrows, however, causing more relief than alarm because it settled a lengthy and bitter land dispute between the Pequots and neighboring property owners. Some observers undoubtedly felt that the obscure tribe, once widely believed to be extinct, had finally gotten its revenge for past injustices. Other locals simply were happy to have a place to gamble so close to their homes, cheering the Pequots for making this possible and perhaps being a little amused by the whole unlikely scenario. Questions soon arose, however, when the group possessing Indian, European, and African ancestry grew increasingly rich and powerful, with its gambling enterprise shattering the once bucolic Connecticut countryside with crowds, traffic jams, and high-rise development. Angered by their suddenly powerful neighbor, many locals began to ask: Who were these people that variously appeared white, Indian, black, or something in-between? If they looked and lived much like their well-to-do neighbors, was the group really an Indian tribe at all? Clearly, tribal acknowledgment had given the Pequots all the bene ts of tribal status and sovereignty. But it had not allowed them to exist in obscurity as before. Every year during the 1990s tensions and recriminations grew. When a book emerged claiming that the Pequots may have tricked the federal government into believing they were an Indian tribe, local leaders clamored to have their status overturned. By 2000 the continuing deluge of press coverage ensured that the Mashantucket Pequots became the dominant face of recently acknowledged Indian tribes in the United States.

At the same time, in stark contrast to the glitz and wealth of the Pequots stood a struggling band of Shoshones in California. A world away from Connecticut in the desert sands of Death Valley National Park, the Timbisha Shoshone Indians also existed without federal acknowledgment until the early 1980s. The Shoshones were unlike the Pequots at first glance, however, and few non-Indians doubted that the tiny Timbisha group was Indian. In the late 1970s the Shoshones were struggling against the National Park Service’s efforts to evict them from their ancestral homeland, clinging to their crumbling adobe casitas and modest trailers that shifting sand dunes threatened to swallow at any moment. Decades earlier the Park Service had corralled them into a single village to make room for its luxury hotels, golf course, and RV resort to cater to tourists hoping to escape the northern winters or recapture the “Wild West” for a weekend. Like the Pequots, the Timbisha Shoshones also secured acknowledgment in 1983, but this new status provided few of the fringe benefits afforded the Connecticut tribe. In 2000 the band still lacked a federal reservation and lived in poor housing much like it had before recognition. The Timbisha Shoshones presented another face of once unacknowledged Indian peoples in the modern United States. The experience of the over two hundred other unacknowledged groups likely lies somewhere in between.

Issues

This work is about the process of acknowledging Indian tribes, whether accomplished through the administrative channels of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) or through Congress.  At its core it is about modern Indian identity: how the state identifies and legitimizes tribes and how recognized tribes, non-Indian scholars, and the American public perceive Indians. Along the way it provides a rare glimpse into Indian and non-Indian representations of “Indianness” and tribalism. These pages also present the histories of four unacknowledged tribal groups viewed through the prism of their efforts to gain federal recognition. Federal tribal acknowledgment or recognition is one of the most significant developments in Indian policy in the post–World War II era, yet is also one of the most acrimonious methods of sorting out and defining Indianness in the United States. As the list of over two hundred groups seeking to secure federal tribal status grows each year, federal acknowledgment policy has become increasingly controversial and contested terrain for determining Indian authenticity.

Tribal recognition is contentious precisely because it involves definitions of what constitutes an Indian tribe,who can lay claim to being an Indian, and what factors should be paramount in the process of identifying Indian tribes. Akin to the recognition of foreign governments, federal tribal acknowledgment is highly valued because it establishes a “government-to-government” relationship between the federal government and an Indian group. Federal status thus allows a newly recognized federal tribe the power to exercise sovereignty and participate in federal Indian programs emanating from the BIA and the Indian Health Service. It also affects issues as diverse as Indian self-government, health care, Native American cultural repatriation, Indian gaming, and public lands held by the National Park Service and other federal agencies. Beyond these facts the acknowledgment process can determine the life or death of struggling groups while providing unacknowledged tribes outside validation of their racial and cultural identity as Indians…

…From the start local whites questioned whether these groups were indeed tribes and expressed doubts about their Indian identity. To the eastern landowners, most of these groups “looked” variously white, black, Indian, or something in between. They clearly did not fit the image of the horseriding, buffalo-hunting Indians they had seen in Hollywood westerns. In court the town attorneys proceeded to impugn the cultural and tribal integrity of these people, claiming that the groups had long ago abandoned their tribal organizations and assimilated into American society and culture. Despite the Wampanoags’ assertions that the land on Martha’s Vineyard was sacred to their people and that they maintained a vibrant tribal organization, town lawyers echoed a popular belief that the Wampanoags——if they were a group at all——were assimilated individuals hoping to get rich off land claims. Because the rights asserted were group rights, the hopes of the Martha’s Vineyard Indians and others ultimately rested on whether they were still an Indian “tribal” entity…

Read the entire introduction here.