BiblioVault - Books about Mixed descent

Africans and Native Americans

The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples

Jack D. Forbes

University of Illinois Press, 1993

Jack D. Forbes's monumental Africans and Native Americans has become a canonical text in the study of relations between the two groups. Forbes explores key issues relating to the evolution of racial terminology and European colonialists' perceptions of color, analyzing the development of color classification systems and the specific evolution of key terms such as black, mulatto, and mestizo--terms that no longer carry their original meanings. Forbes also presents strong evidence that Native American and African contacts began in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean.

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At the Hearth of the Crossed Races

A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812-1859

Melinda Marie Jetté

Oregon State University Press, 2015

Despite the force of Oregon’s founding mythology, the Willamette Valley was not an empty Eden awaiting settlement by hardy American pioneers. Rather, it was, as Melinda Jetté explores in At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, one of the earliest sites of extensive intercultural contact in the Pacific Northwest.

Jetté’s study focuses on the “hearth” of this contact: French Prairie, so named for the French-Indian families who resettled the homeland of the Ahantchuyuk Kalapuyans. Although these families sought a middle course in their relations with their various neighbors, their presence ultimately contributed to the Anglo-American colonization of the region. By establishing farming and husbandry operations in the valley, the French-Indian settlers enhanced the Willamette Valley’s appeal as a destination of choice for the Anglo-Americans who later emigrated to the Pacific Northwest via the Oregon Trail.

Upon these emigrants’ arrival, the social space for the people of the “crossed races” diminished considerably, as the Anglo-Americans instituted a system of settler colonialism based on racial exclusion. Like their Native kin, the French-Indian families pursued various strategies to navigate the changing times and Jetté’s study of French Prairie takes on the relationships among all three: the French-Indian families, the indigenous peoples, and the Anglo-American settlers.

With At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, Jetté delivers a social history that deepens our understanding of the Oregon Country in the nineteenth century. This history of French Prairie provides a window into the multi-racial history of the Pacific Northwest and offers an alternative vision of early Oregon in the lives of the biracial French-Indian families whose community challenged notions of white supremacy, racial separation, and social exclusion.

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Birding While Indian

A Mixed-Blood Memoir

Thomas C. Gannon

The Ohio State University Press, 2023

“A fascinating search for personal and cultural identity.” —Kirkus

Thomas C. Gannon’s Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author’s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon’s traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother’s devastation at racist bullying from coworkers, and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the people and other animals indigenous to the United States.

Birding has always been Gannon’s escape and solace. He later found similar solace in literature, particularly by Native authors. He draws on both throughout this expansive, hilarious, and humane memoir. An acerbic observer—of birds, the environment, the aftershocks of history, and human nature—Gannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of birding and his own mixed-blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl and his own identity. The result is a rich reflection not only on one man’s life but on the transformative power of building a deeper relationship with the natural world.

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Confessions of an Iyeska

Viola Burnette

University of Utah Press, 2018

In this autobiography, Viola Burnette braids the history of the Lakota people with the story of her own life as an Iyeska, or mixed-race Indian. Bringing together her years growing up on a reservation, her work as a lawyer and legal advocate for Native peoples, and her woman’s perspective, she draws the reader into an intelligent and intimate conversation.

The Fort Laramie treaties of 1851 and 1868 changed everything for the Sioux. When Burnette was born on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in the late 1930s, her people were still striving to make sense of how to live under the impoverished conditions created by the imposed land restrictions. Like most Native children at that time, she was forced by federal law to attend boarding school and assimilate into white culture. Her story reveals the resulting internal conflict that she and her people faced in embracing their own identity in a world where those in authority taught that speaking Lakota and being Indian were wrong. After a difficult jump into adulthood, Burnette emerged from an abusive marriage and, while raising four children, enrolled in junior college in her thirties and law school in her forties. She went on to become an advocate for women subjected to domestic violence and the first attorney general for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe.

Borne out under the far-reaching effects of the government-enforced restructuring of her people, Burnette’s inspiring narrative of strength and determination makes clear the importance of understanding history from a Native standpoint.

“I am an Iyeska and I am assimilated, but on my own terms. I choose when, where, and how I use the knowledge and skills I have learned. As long as we continue to teach our children and grandchildren the language, values, and traditions of the Lakota people, we will survive.”—from the book

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Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds

The African Diaspora in Indian Country

Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland, eds.

Duke University Press, 2006

Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds explores the critically neglected intersection of Native and African American cultures. This interdisciplinary collection combines historical studies of the complex relations between blacks and Indians in Native communities with considerations and examples of various forms of cultural expression that have emerged from their intertwined histories. The contributors include scholars of African American and Native American studies, English, history, anthropology, law, and performance studies, as well as fiction writers, poets, and a visual artist.

Essays range from a close reading of the 1838 memoirs of a black and Native freewoman to an analysis of how Afro-Native intermarriage has impacted the identities and federal government classifications of certain New England Indian tribes. One contributor explores the aftermath of black slavery in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, highlighting issues of culture and citizenship. Another scrutinizes the controversy that followed the 1998 selection of a Miss Navajo Nation who had an African American father. A historian examines the status of Afro-Indians in colonial Mexico, and an ethnographer reflects on oral histories gathered from Afro-Choctaws. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds includes evocative readings of several of Toni Morrison’s novels, interpretations of plays by African American and First Nations playwrights, an original short story by Roberta J. Hill, and an interview with the Creek poet and musician Joy Harjo. The Native American scholar Robert Warrior develops a theoretical model for comparative work through an analysis of black and Native intellectual production. In his afterword, he reflects on the importance of the critical project advanced by this volume.

Contributors. Jennifer D. Brody, Tamara Buffalo, David A. Y. O. Chang, Robert Keith Collins, Roberta J. Hill, Sharon P. Holland, ku'ualoha ho’omnawanui, Deborah E. Kanter, Virginia Kennedy, Barbara Krauthamer, Tiffany M. McKinney, Melinda Micco, Tiya Miles, Celia E. Naylor, Eugene B. Redmond, Wendy S. Walters, Robert Warrior

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Detroit's Hidden Channels

The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century

Karen L. Marrero

Michigan State University Press, 2020

French-Indigenous families were a central force in shaping Detroit’s history. Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century examines the role of these kinship networks in Detroit’s development as a site of singular political and economic importance in the continental interior. Situated where Anishinaabe, Wendat, Myaamia, and later French communities were established and where the system of waterways linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico narrowed, Detroit’s location was its primary attribute. While the French state viewed Detroit as a decaying site of illegal activities, the influence of the French-Indigenous networks grew as members diverted imperial resources to bolster an alternative configuration of power relations that crossed Indigenous and Euro-American nations. Women furthered commerce by navigating a multitude of gender norms of their nations, allowing them to defy the state that sought to control them by holding them to European ideals of womanhood. By the mid-eighteenth century, French-Indigenous families had become so powerful, incoming British traders and imperial officials courted their favor. These families would maintain that power as the British imperial presence splintered on the eve of the American Revolution.

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Earthquake Weather

Poems

Janice Gould

University of Arizona Press, 1996

It’s unmistakable, that strangely calm air and sky that signals big change ahead: earthquake weather. These are familiar signs to Janice Gould, a poet, a lesbian, and a mixed-blood California Indian of Koyangk’auwi Maidu descent. Her sense of isolation is intense, her search for identity is relentless, and her words can take one’s breath away. Sometimes accepting, sometimes full of anger, Gould’s work is rare, filtered through the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of a lesbian of Indian heritage. Over and over again, she speaks as an outsider looking in at the lives of others—through a doorway, out of a car window, or from the shambles of a broken relationship.

Showing a steady courage in the midst of this alienation, her words are also stark testimony to the struggle of an individual caught in social and emotional contexts defined by others. In Earthquake Weather, as in an evolving friendship, Gould opens herself to the reader in stages. "I did not know how lonely I was / till we began to talk," she writes in an opening section, setting the introspective tone of what’s to come. She begins with a focus on those universal truths that both bind us and isolate us from each other: the pain of loss, the finality of death, our longing to see beneath the surface of things. Next, the poet turns to her growing-up years during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. She describes a family in turmoil and an Indian heritage that, oddly, was one of the factors that made her feel most disconnected from other people. And she writes poignantly about her increasing alienation from prescribed sexual roles. "What’s wrong with me? / Where do I belong? Why / am I here? Why can’t I / hold on?" Finally, as in a trusting friendship, Gould offers the reader vivid word portraits of relationships in her life—women she has loved and who have loved her.

Erotic and deeply personal, these poems serve as both a reconciliation and affirmation of her individuality. "Yet would you deny / that between women desire exists / that in our friendship a delicate / and erotic strand of fire unites us?" The poems in this book, says critic Toby Langen, are most powerful for their "courageous drawing on experience and feelings." They will speak to many general readers as well as anyone interested in questions of gender and identity, including students of literature, lesbian/women’s studies, social/cultural studies, or American Indian studies.

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The Founding Mothers of Mackinac Island

The Agatha Biddle Band of 1870

Theresa L. Weller

Michigan State University Press, 2021

Drawing on a wide array of historical sources, Theresa L. Weller provides a comprehensive history of the lineage of the seventy-four members of the Agatha Biddle band in 1870. A highly unusual Native and Métis community, the band included just eight men but sixty-six women. Agatha Biddle was a member of the band from its first enumeration in 1837 and became its chief in the early 1860s. Also, unlike most other bands, which were typically made up of family members, this one began as a small handful of unrelated Indian women joined by the fact that the US government owed them payments in the form of annuities in exchange for land given up in the 1836 Treaty of Washington, DC. In this volume, the author unveils the genealogies for all the families who belonged to the band under Agatha Biddle’s leadership, and in doing so, offers the reader fascinating insights into Mackinac Island life in the nineteenth century.

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Indigenous Mestizos

The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991

Marisol de la Cadena

Duke University Press, 2000

In the early twentieth century, Peruvian intellectuals, unlike their European counterparts, rejected biological categories of race as a basis for discrimination. But this did not eliminate social hierarchies; instead, it redefined racial categories as cultural differences, such as differences in education or manners. In Indigenous Mestizos Marisol de la Cadena traces the history of the notion of race from this turn-of-the-century definition to a hegemony of racism in Peru.

De la Cadena’s ethnographically and historically rich study examines how indigenous citizens of the city of Cuzco have been conceived by others as well as how they have viewed themselves and places these conceptions within the struggle for political identity and representation. Demonstrating that the terms Indian and mestizo are complex, ambivalent, and influenced by social, legal, and political changes, she provides close readings of everyday concepts such as marketplace identity, religious ritual, grassroots dance, and popular culture, as well as of such common terms as respect, decency, and education. She shows how Indian has come to mean an indigenous person without economic and educational means—one who is illiterate, impoverished, and rural. Mestizo, on the other hand, has come to refer to an urban, usually literate, and economically successful person claiming indigenous heritage and participating in indigenous cultural practices. De la Cadena argues that this version of de-Indianization—which, rather than assimilation, is a complex political negotiation for a dignified identity—does not cancel the economic and political equalities of racism in Peru, although it has made room for some people to reclaim a decolonized Andean cultural heritage.

This highly original synthesis of diverse theoretical arguments brought to bear on a series of case studies will be of interest to scholars of cultural anthropology, postcolonialism, race and ethnicity, gender studies, and history, in addition to Latin Americanists.

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Killing Time with Strangers

W. S. Penn

University of Arizona Press, 2000

Young Pal needs help with his dreaming.

Palimony Blue Larue, a mixblood growing up in a small California town, suffers from a painful shyness and wants more than anything to be liked. That's why Mary Blue, his Nez Perce mother, has dreamed the weyekin, the spirit guide, to help her bring into the world the one lasting love her son needs to overcome the diffidence that runs so deep in his blood. The magical (and not totally competent) weyekin pops in and out of Pal's life at the most unexpected times—and in the most unlikely guises—but seems to have difficulty setting him on the right path. Is there any hope for Palimony Blue?

Don't ask his father, La Vent Larue; La Vent is past hope, past help, a city zoning planner and a pawn in the mayor's development plans who ends up crazy and in jail after he shoots the mayor in the—well, never mind. Better to ask Pal's mother, who summons the weyekin when she isn't working on a cradle board for Pal and his inevitable bride. And while you're at it, ask the women in Pal's life: Sally the preacher's daughter, Brandy the waitressing flautist, Tara the spoiled socialite. And be sure to ask Amanda, if you can catch her. If you can dream her.

Using comic vision to address serious concerns of living, Penn has written a freewheeling novel that will surpass most readers' expectations of "ethnic fiction." Instead of the usual polemics, it's marked by a sense of humor and a playfulness of language that springs directly from Native American oral tradition.

What more can be said about a book that has to be read to the end in order to get to the beginning? That Killing Time with Strangers is unlike any novel you have read before? Or perhaps that it is agonizingly familiar, giving us glimpses of a young man finding his precarious way in life? But when the power of dreaming is unleashed, time becomes negotiable and life's joys and sorrows go up for grabs. And as sure as yellow butterflies will morph into Post-It notes, you will know you have experienced a new and utterly captivating way of looking at the world.

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Outside the Hacienda Walls

The Archaeology of Plantation Peonage in Nineteenth-Century Yucatán

Allan Meyers

University of Arizona Press, 2012

The Mexican Revolution was a tumultuous struggle for social and political reform that ousted an autocrat and paved the way for a new national constitution. The conflict, however, came late to Yucatán, where a network of elite families with largely European roots held the reins of government. This privileged group reaped spectacular wealth from haciendas, cash-crop plantations tended by debt-ridden servants of Maya descent. When a revolutionary army from central Mexico finally gained a foothold in Yucatán in 1915, the local custom of agrarian servitude met its demise.

Drawing on a dozen years of archaeological and historical investigation, Allan Meyers breaks new ground in the study of Yucatán haciendas. He explores a plantation village called San Juan Bautista Tabi, which once stood at the heart of a vast sugar estate. Occupied for only a few generations, the village was abandoned during the revolutionary upheaval. Its ruins now lie within a state-owned ecological reserve.

Through oral histories, archival records, and physical remains, Meyers examines various facets of the plantation landscape. He presents original data and fresh interpretations on settlement organization, social stratification, and spatial relationships. His systematic approach to "things underfoot," small everyday objects that are now buried in the tropical forest, offers views of the hacienda experience that are often missing in official written sources. In this way, he raises the voices of rural, mostly illiterate Maya speakers who toiled as laborers. What emerges is a portrait of hacienda social life that transcends depictions gleaned from historical methods alone.

Students, researchers, and travelers to Mexico will all find something of interest in Meyers's lively presentation. Readers will see the old haciendas—once forsaken but now experiencing a rebirth as tourist destinations—in a new light. These heritage sites not only testify to social conditions that prevailed before the Mexican Revolution, but also remind us that the human geography of modern Yucatán is as much a product of plantation times as it is of more ancient periods.

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Racial Revolutions

Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil

Jonathan W. Warren

Duke University Press, 2001

Since the 1970s there has been a dramatic rise in the Indian population in Brazil as increasing numbers of pardos (individuals of mixed African, European, and indigenous descent) have chosen to identify themselves as Indians. In Racial Revolutions—the first book-length study of racial formation in Brazil that centers on Indianness—Jonathan W. Warren draws on extensive fieldwork and numerous interviews to illuminate the discursive and material forces responsible for this resurgence in the population.
The growing number of pardos who claim Indian identity represents a radical shift in the direction of Brazilian racial formation. For centuries, the predominant trend had been for Indians to shed tribal identities in favor of non-Indian ones. Warren argues that many factors—including the reduction of state-sponsored anti-Indian violence, intervention from the Catholic church, and shifts in anthropological thinking about ethnicity—have prompted a reversal of racial aspirations and reimaginings of Indianness. Challenging the current emphasis on blackness in Brazilian antiracist scholarship and activism, Warren demonstrates that Indians in Brazil recognize and oppose racism far more than any other ethnic group.
Racial Revolutions fills a number of voids in Latin American scholarship on the politics of race, cultural geography, ethnography, social movements, nation building, and state violence.

Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.

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