Play Could Begin Renaissance For Seminole Nation Culture

Posted in Articles, Arts, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2013-11-19 04:34Z by Steven

Play Could Begin Renaissance For Seminole Nation Culture

The Seminole Producer
Seminole, Oklahoma
2013-11-13
pages 1-2

Karen Anson, Senior Editor

IndianVoices.net contributed to this report

A play on the history of the Seminole Nation’s Freedmen is wrapping up in Los Angeles, but those involved hope it’s only the beginning of a movement.

The play, “the road weeps, the well runs dry,” will end Sunday in Los Angeles Theater Center.

It’s part of a “rolling premier,” being debuted in LA, as well as at the Pillsbury House Theater in Minneapolis, Minn; Perseverance Theater in Anchorage, Ala., and University of South Florida’s School of Theater and Dance.

“Surviving centuries of slavery, revolts and the Trail of Tears, a community of self-proclaimed Freedmen creates the first all-black U.S. town in Wewoka, Okla.,” states the press release about the play.

“The Freedmen (Black Seminoles and people of mixed origins) are rocked when the new religion and the old way come head to head and their former enslavers arrive to return them to the chains of bondage.

“Written in gorgeously cadenced language, utilizing elements of African American folk-lore and daring humor, ‘the road weeps, the well runs dry’ merges the myth, legends and history of the Seminole people.”

Playwright Marcus Gardley was awarded the 2011 PENN/Laura Pels award for mid-career playwright.

He holds masters of fine arts in playwriting from the Yale Drama School.

“Originally I set out to write a play about the first all-black town in the U.S., Wewoka, Okla.,” Gardley said.

“I had a special interest in the town because my grandmother was born there.

“In my research, I learned that Black Seminoles (people of African and Native American ancestry) actually incorporated the town…

…A third person involved in the program claims very close ties to Seminole County, Okla.

Phil “Pompey” Fixico spoke in a post program panel entitled “Exploring African American and Native American Spirituality.”

Fixico is featured in the Smithsonian Institute’s book and exhibit entitled “indiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas,” which will open its next show on Jan. 25 at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center in New York City.

For the exhibit, Fixico had to carefully document his heritage.

“I was a 52-year-old African-American, when I discovered that I was really an African-Native American,” Fixico said.

“This epiphany took place 14 years ago.”

Fixico’s found that he was the great-grandson of Caesar Bruner, an early leader of the Seminole Nation’s Freedman band…

Read the entire article here.

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Phil “Pompey” Fixicio To Speak on a Post Show Panel Exploring African American and Native American Spirituality

Posted in Live Events, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2013-10-26 02:31Z by Steven

Phil “Pompey” Fixicio To Speak on a Post Show Panel Exploring African American and Native American Spirituality

Los Angeles Theater Center
514 South Spring Street
Los Angeles, California 90013
Telephone: 213.489.0994
Sunday, 2013-11-03, 15:00 PST (Local Time)

On Sunday November 3rd, in honor of the new play on the Seminole people, the road weeps, the well runs dry, Phil “Pompey” Fixicio will be speaking on a post show panel at The Los Angeles Theatre Center. This panel, entitled Exploring African American and Native American Spirituality will include Rev. Dr. Cecil “Chip” Murray (USC), Phil “Pompey” Fixico (Seminole descendant), and Professor Hanay Geigomah (UCLA). The panel follows the 3:00pm performance. For tickets and information on the play, click here.
 
Phil “Pompey” Fixico, Seminole Maroon Descendant, California Semiroon Mico (Nation of One), Heniha for the Wildcat/John Horse Band of the Seminoles of Texas and Old Mexico, Honorary Elder of the Muskogee Yamassee of Florida, Featured, in the Smithsonian Institution’s, book and exhibit, entitled :”indivisible”; African-Native American Lives in the Americas, Co-Founder of the Bureau of Black Indian Affairs (indianvoices), Member of the L.A. chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers and Dept. of Interior/National Park Service/ National Underground Rail Road/ Network to Freedom Private-Sector Partner ( Semiroon Historical Society).

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Black Seminoles and The Underground Railroad

Posted in History, Live Events, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Slavery, United States on 2013-10-11 01:13Z by Steven

Black Seminoles and The Underground Railroad

AC Bilbrew Library
150 E. El Segundo Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90061
310-538-3350
Saturday, 2013-11-23, 14:30 PST (Local Time)

Phil Wilkes Fixico

Celebrate Native American Heritage Month by exploring the history of free Blacks and fugitive slaves who escaped to Florida between the 1600s and 1800s, forging alliances with the Seminole Nation and establishing their own autonomous communities and unique culture.

Phil Wilkes “Pompey” Fixico is a Seminole Maroon descendant , member of the L.A. chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers and Dept. of Interior/National Park Service/ National Underground Railroad/ Network to Freedom Private-Sector Partner (Semiroon Historical Society). He is also the honorary spokesman for John Horse Band of the Texas Seminoles.

For more information, click here.

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The Era of Black Indian Transcendance

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2013-09-29 16:49Z by Steven

The Era of Black Indian Transcendance

Refixico
2013-09-29

Phil Wilkes Fixico, Seminole Maroon Descendant, California Seminole Mico (Nation of One) and Heniha for the Wildcat/John Horse Band of the Seminoles of Texas and Old Mexico

I was a 52 yr. old African-American, when I discovered that I was really an African-Native American. This epiphany took place 14 years ago. Since then, my quest for identity has been featured in the Smithsonian Institution’s, book and exhibit, entitled: indiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas. It’s a banner show, that has been touring the U.S. since 2009.

A few years ago, I submitted a long held idea to Indian Voices, an online/on stand monthly newspaper, which is published by Rose Davis. My idea was to create a news entity, called the Bureau of Black Indian Affairs (BBIA).  A news column, designed to address some of the issues that affect Black Indians, who only have Oral History to go on. Mr. William L. Katz, the Father of Black Indian Studies in the United States, was fully in favor of my idea and came on board with the full force of his incredible body of work. I suggested that the BBIA be formed as a News Bureau—not as an organization whose mission it was to replicate what, the Official US Government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs has done, mostly for By-Bloods. It would report on the status of Black Indians. While the 3 co-founders were Phil Wilkes Fixico, Rose Davis and Wm. L. Katz; Rose Davis, a Black Seminole, is carrying on with it…

Read the entire article here.

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A Tale of Two Seminole Counties

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2013-08-14 04:43Z by Steven

A Tale of Two Seminole Counties

Indian Voices
August 2013
page 7

Phil Fixico

Some coincidences can’t be ignored, like February the 26th, in both Florida’s and Oklahoma’s Seminole Counties. What does this date and these counties have in common. Trayvon Martin was killed on February 26th, 2012, in Seminole County, Florida. He was born on Feb. 5th, 1995, not in Seminole County, but that, is where his young life would tragically be ended.

My grandfather Pompey Bruner Fixico, on Feb. 14th, 1894, a hundred and one years before Trayvon’s birth, was born in Seminole County, Oklahoma. Eighty-seven years before Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of an armed killer, who felt entitled to take Trayvon’s life, a similar scenario would end Pompey Bruner Fixico’s life on Feb. 26th, 1925, by someone else, who also didn’t hesitate. Pompey was a good deal older than Trayvon, he was 31 yrs. old and a WW1 Vet who had served his country in France during the War. He left a wife and four children, all younger than Trayvon’s 17 years, who by many, would be considered a child in a young man’s body. Pompey’s death took place, not far from the site of the “worst racial violence in American History”, “The Tulsa Race Riot”. The Riot had occurred 4 years earlier in 1921. Pompey Bruner’s (his father was Caesar Bruner) Draft Registration Card lists, his place of employment, in 1917, as the Brady Hotel, in Tulsa, Ok. It was owned by Mr. Tate Brady, the Grand Wizard of Oklahoma’s Ku Klux Klan, in that area. Grand Wizard Brady was reported to have had a hand in the, “Tulsa Race Riot”…

Read the entire article here.

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Another flavor of Black

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2013-04-10 13:45Z by Steven

Racially, I’m an African-Native American.  Culturally, I’m an aspiring Seminole Maroon descendant. But to the people of America who see me on the street, I’m just another flavor of Black.

Phil Wilkes Fixico, “Episode 225 – Phil Wilkes Fixico,” Mixed Chicks Chat, September 14, 2011. (00:09:12-00:09:28). http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-34257/TS-504952.mp3.

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As Racist as We Wish to Be: Project RACE, “The Talk”, Obama and the Fear of Blackness

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, My Articles/Point of View/Activities, Social Science, United States on 2012-04-27 00:48Z by Steven

As Racist as We Wish to Be: Project RACE, “The Talk”, Obama and the Fear of Blackness

MixedRaceStudies.org
2012-04-10

Steven F. Riley

Late last year, I opined about the inability of some activists in the multiracial identity movement to combat racism.  It is difficult to combat racism if you are not anti-racist and quite impossible if you—or at least your rhetoric—is actually racist. Such is the case in a March 29, 2012 blog post by Susan Graham at Project RACE titled “Walking While Black,” (also here) that epitomizes racist anti-black ideology.

Graham, a white woman who purports to represent the interests of multiracial Americans, has written the most inane commentary on multiracialism you will find anywhere.  Her  pseudo-scientific commentary reads as if it were written in the early part of the previous century, deploying ideologies long since abandoned by anthropologists and biologists alike. For instance, in “The Obama Racial Identity Factor and Saving Multiracial Lives” (June 7, 2008) she opens with, “Barack Obama can call himself black, white, magenta, green, or whatever he wants, it really does not matter socially. However, genes are genes and his genes are multiracial.” Seven months later, when millions of Americans have moved from doubting that a black man can become president and actually electing one, Graham continues with her mindless foray into genetics in “January 2009 – Is this President Obama’s Post-Racial America?” (January 20, 2009) where she says, “We have our first multiracial president, Barack Obama, and even if he does self-identify as black, he cannot deny DNA.”

Three years later and not a day wiser, in a still pre-post-racial America, Graham uses the tragic and racially motivated shooting death of Trayvon Martin as an entree into her racist “Walking While Black” about the travails of the lives of African American males.  She partially describes the concept of “Driving While Black” and the so-called “Black Male Code” of conduct when one is confronted by the police.  She neglects to mention that “Driving While Black” also involves being targeted to be pulled over in the first place. Graham goes on to describe her then-husband’s habit of always carrying identification no matter where he went just in case he was confronted by police. Finally, she describes how when her son reached driving age, she and her then-husband had “the talk” with him about what to do when confronted by police.  Graham says, “she gets it.”  She does not.

Despite the death of Trayvon Martin, the indignities and civil rights violations of “Driving While Black,” and the “Black Male Code,” Graham is neither, angry, concerned or even bothered about the daily aggressions directed at black men in American as they try to live as decent citizens.  She is unwilling to speak out against even the most explicit forms of racism that still exist in America.  So what does bother her? What “bothers” her is the fact that President Obama, chooses to proudly identify as “black.”

While many view the multiracial identity movement in America as a way to transcend race and to remove the proverbial millstone of racialized identities off of all our necks, scholars like Jared Ball, Minkah Makalani, Lewis R. Gordon, Ralina L. Joseph, Jared Sexton, Rainier Spencer and others, see a movement with a primary goal of transcending blackness. As blogger Summer McDonald eloquently states in her essay “Canon Fodder: ‘The Girl Who Fell From the Sky’ and the Problem of Mixed-Race Identity” (August 18, 2011),

Accepting and embracing a mixed-race identity hardly reveals racial progress. As it is currently constructed, mixed-race identity does not dismantle racial hierarchies. Rather, it reiterates white supremacy by attempting to etch a space for itself somewhere under whiteness–which it knows it can never access–and definitely above blackness.

Susan Graham and Project RACE, without a doubt, prove these writers correct. When her son asks “what does ‘driving while black’ mean to me?” She explains, “self-identification is one thing, but how he appears to someone can be completely different and yes, someone could assume he was black, so he had to act accordingly. Be on the safe side, son.” Again, what bothers Graham is not that black men are “perceived as a threat,” but rather, that her son will be perceived as a black man. Thus in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin tragedy when multitudes of commentators of all racialized identities proclaim  “We are Trayvon,” Graham and Project RACE, proclaim “We are not black.”

While Graham does seem to accept the fact that one’s self-identification can be different from how one appears to someone else, she refuses to grasp how one’s appearance to others can and does influence one’s self-identification. Scholar Nikki Khanna’s excellent article, “‘If You’re Half Black, You’re Just Black’: Reflected Appraisals and the Persistence of the One-Drop Rule” describes the role of self-reflected appraisals—how we think we are seen by others—on the identity of those of mixed-ancestry and shows how these identity choices, like one made by President Obama, are honest, common—and despite Ms. Graham’s continual protestations—valid. Phil Wilkes Fixico said it best when he stated on Mixed Chicks Chat (September 14, 2011), “Racially, I’m an African-Native American. Culturally, I’m an aspiring Seminole Maroon descendant. But to the people of America who see me on the street, I’m just another flavor of Black.”

As countless commentators continue to appropriately condemn the prevalence of white supremacy that demonizes people of color (like Trayvon Martin) and white privilege that provides license to the demonizers, Graham says nothing whatsoever about these evils, but rather chooses to take offense exclusively President Obama when he suggested that if he had a son, “he would look like Trayvon.” Though she is correct in stating that the President “doesn’t know that his son would look like Trayvon or anybody else,” it is clear that her anger at Obama is magnified, not just by his identifying as a black American, but now, identifying with black Americans. Furthermore, the resemblance of Obama’s imaginary son to Trayvon Martin is irrelevant because more importantly, it is Obama himself who would “look like Trayvon” if he were seventeen. As Leila McDowell put it so aptly in Associated Press columnist Jesse Washington’s “Black or biracial? Census forces a choice for some,” “Put a hoodie on him and have him walk down an alley, and see how biracial he is then.”

Susan Graham fails to see that the things we ultimately pass down to our children are more important than genes; they are our values and attitudes, hopes and fears, our love and our hate. In short, these are the things that define us. Hopefully, one of those things won’t be race. Until then, Graham may discover that in passing down the “Black Male Code” to her son, he may one day choose to identify, like President Obama and Phil Fixico, as “just a another flavor of Black.” In the meanwhile, perhaps it’s time someone had “the talk” with Ms. Graham and suggest she move on to a new project.

©2012, Steven F. Riley

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SML 63: Black Indians: Phil Wilkes Fixico, William Katz

Posted in Audio, History, Interviews, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2012-02-20 01:59Z by Steven

SML 63: Black Indians: Phil Wilkes Fixico, William Katz

Blogtalk Radio
SundayMorning Live
2012-02-19

Guests:

Phil Wilkes Fixico—African-Native American activist, is a Seminole Maroon Descendant, Creek and Cherokee Freedmen descendant, Honorary Heniha for the Wildcat/John Horse Band of the Texas Seminoles, California Semiroon Mico, Member of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers 9th & 10th (horse) Cavalry and the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts of Brackettville, Texas.

William Katz is the author of “Black Indians” and over 40 books on history.  He specializes in the history of Black Indians and the relationships between the two groups.

Download the episode here. (02:00:14)

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Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa Honors A West Coast Black Seminole Leader

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2012-01-31 02:50Z by Steven

Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa Honors A West Coast Black Seminole Leader

Indian Voices
January 2012
pages 7 & 11

Dr. Bruce Twyman

On October 28th, 2011 Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa honored the Native American community of Southern California by hosting the cities’ annual American Indian Heritage Month celebration at city hall. A noteworthy and historical addition to this year’s celebration was for the first time a Black Indian was invited. A representative of the Black Seminole, Phil Pompey Fixico attended the event. Webster’s Dictionary defines heritage as something transmitted by or acquired from a  predecessor. From the start of the European conquest and colonization of the Americas, there has been a symbiotic nexus between Black and Indian people. This nexus is variously reflected in culture, ancestry and law. Millions of Black Americans acknowledge this heritage. As a proud and active member of these millions, Fixico’s selection is apropos.

Black Americans awareness of their own personal Indian heritage ranges from precise knowledge to legendary rumors. Fixico’s knowledge is precise and has been documented in the Smithsonian Institution publication, Invisible-African Native American Lives in the Americas, and in The Journal of the American Society for Ethno-History. As a Black Seminole, Fixico is a member of a people with a 200 year documented successful resistance to slavery in North America.

Scholars and tribal members disagree to some extent about the precise origin of the Seminole people. Nonetheless the word Seminole has a genesis as a British corruption of the Spanish term Cimaron. Columbus referred to domesticated cattle which escaped from ranches as Cimarons; but, the term became fixed upon slaves who successfully resisted enslavement…

Read the entire article here.

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Phil Wilkes Fixico to be featured guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Posted in Audio, Identity Development/Psychology, Interviews, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2011-09-14 03:53Z by Steven

Phil Wilkes Fixico to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #225-Phil Wilkes Fixico
When: Wednesday, 2011-09-14, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 16:00 CDT, 14:00 PDT)

Phil Wilkes Fixico, Seminole Maroon Descendant, Creek and Cherokee Freedmen Descendant


From “Mixed Race in the Seminole Nation,” in Ethnohistory, Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011):

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.

Selected Articles about Phil Wilkes Fixico

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

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