Mixed Race Studies

The Elizabeth Warren Situation Is More Complicated Than Many Think

Indian Country Today Media Network
2012-10-10

Laura Waterman Wittstock
Seneca Nation

A ton of ink has been spilled on the subject of the Elizabeth Warren run for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Most of the writing on the Indian side of opinion is whether or not Warren has a legitimate claim to her Delaware and Cherokee ancestry. Strong language has emerged on the subject, rightly due to the fact that so many Americans claim Indian heritage without any idea of what being an Indian is all about.

But between the Indian and non-Indian sides of the coin are a million slices of what-ifs and others. Example one: I met a woman whose husband was enrolled in Coweta Creek and got support for his considerable higher education costs. Beyond that, he knew next to nothing about his tribe. He was born into an African American family, married an African American and had a couple of wonderful children. His wife’s question to me was how she could get the children enrolled after they had been informed the children lacked sufficient blood quantum. This mother was interested in her children’s education and wanted them to have all the benefits they might be due as a result of their father’s heritage. I did not have good news for them…

Read the entire article here.

“Native American people is the only race in America that has to prove that they’re Indian,” she [Dwanna L. Robertson] quoted one study participant. “If you’re black and you say, ‘I’m black,’ and nobody will question it. If you’re white, you say, ‘I’m white” and nobody questions it, but if you’re Indian they want to see your CDIB [Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood] card. ‘Well, you say you’re Indian (but) let’s see your card.”…

Carol Berry, “Dwanna L. Robertson: Indian Identity Still Controversial,” Indian Country Today Media Network, (August 28, 2012). http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/08/21/dwanna-l-robertson-indian-identity-still-controversial-130176.

Dwanna L. Robertson: Indian Identity Still Controversial

Indian Country Today Media Network
2012-08-21

Carol Berry

If she’d planned to tackle some of the most contentious issues in Indian country, a Mvskoke (Creek) sociologist couldn’t have done a better job.

Blood quantum, lineal descent, tribal membership, federal recognition, sovereignty—all came under the scrutiny of Dwanna L. Robertson, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Massachusetts and contributor to Indian Country Today Media Network, who spoke at the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) annual meeting August 17-20 in Denver that drew some 6,000 members.

Robertson addressed the Indigenous Peoples session of the ASA meeting on the topic “A Necessary Evil: Framing an American Indian Legal Identity.” She described interviews with 30 Natives, only half of whom had legal identities in terms of tribal enrollment or other federal validation.

“Native American people is the only race in America that has to prove that they’re Indian,” she quoted one study participant. “If you’re black and you say, ‘I’m black,’ and nobody will question it. If you’re white, you say, ‘I’m white” and nobody questions it, but if you’re Indian they want to see your CDIB [Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood] card. ‘Well, you say you’re Indian (but) let’s see your card.”…

Read the entire article here.

Indigenous Nationalities and the Mestizo Dilemma

Indian Country Today Media Network
2012-07-24

Duane Champagne, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles

Mestizo. Métis. Mixed bloods. Though clearly different, all these terms are used to racially classify people with Indian ancestry. However, the definitions vary—and none is wholly satisfactory.
 
Part of the problem is the widely varying histories of these people. The U.S. and Canada, for example, are settler states, where immigrants who took the land went on to form the majority. There, Indian and mixed-blood populations are a distinct minority.
 
However, many other countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Peru and Ecuador have majority mixed-blood and indigenous populations, or mixed-blood leadership over indigenous majorities. Here, indigenous and mixed-blood identities and political relations come into sharper focus.
 
Officially, racial classifications were officially discouraged in so-called Latin America after Spain lost control over most of its colonies there in the early 1800s. Just the same, many governments, like Mexico’s, promoted a mestizo national identity based on a mix of European and indigenous heritages. In the United States and Canada, we call this process assimilation.
 
In Mexico, by contrast, it is called mestizaje. Mestizaje policies ask Indigenous Peoples to join the national community and economy, adopt the Spanish language, and abandon their traditional tribal communities, culture, language and dress.

Read the entire article here.

Racist Tendencies Common in Too Many Tribes

Indian Country Today Media Network
2012-05-23

Cedric Sunray, MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians
Alabama, USA

Last month’s racially motivated killings in Oklahoma, perpetrated by Cherokee Indian Jake England and his white roommate against members of North Tulsa’s black community, once again bring to light the prejudicial tendencies held by many in our Indian communities.
 
This reality is the literal “Negro Elephant in the Room,” which many tribal communities attempt to pass off as issues of sovereignty, enrollment decision making, “and, well we had it as bad as them” rhetoric. However, the real effect is that our children grow up in environments where tribal governments and tribal members broadcast their racist ideologies — such as in the more recent case of the Cherokee Freedmen—to an audience of young people who are not provided with the full histories and realities of their historical connections to the black community.
 
I have seen one too many times where the half-black grandchildren of Indian people are even marginalized by their own Indian families or are viewed as the “lone exception” to their prejudicial leanings due to their blood connection.

In 1978, Terry Anderson and Kirke Kickingbird were hired by the National Congress of American Indians to research the issue of federal recognition and present a paper on their findings to the National Conference on Federal Recognition which was being held in Nashville, Tennessee. Their paper, “An Historical Perspective on the Issue of Federal Recognition and Non-recognition” closed with the following statement:
 
“The reasons that are usually presented to withhold recognition from tribes are 1) that they are racially tainted with the blood of African tribes-men or 2) greed, for newly recognized tribes will share in the appropriations for services given to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The names of justice, mercy, sanity, common sense, fiscal responsibility, and rationality can be presented just as easily on the side of those advocating recognition.”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Indians and Diversity

Indian Country Today Media Network
2012-05-03

Steve Russell, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice
Indiana University

This term, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case about affirmative action in university admissions, where my alma mater is on the side of diversity for a change. Most observers agree diversity is likely to lose, but if that happens it does not mean Indians have to quit banging on the doors of higher education.
 
Indians know diversity, and knew it before Columbus got lost. My people, woodland hunters and farmers, traded with salt water fishermen on the coast and some copper ornaments smelted in Cherokee country turned up in Southwestern pueblos, where they grew the “three sisters” crops on dry land farms and built with stucco. When the Spanish proved unable to keep track of their livestock, many tribes took up the buffalo culture on the Great Plains. Athabascan speakers live in icy Alaska and desert Utah. We know diversity.
 
To the colonists, we are all “Indians,” one of the most exotic minorities in modern politics. We all have this experience at some point if we leave home: “Do you want to be called Indian or Native American?” Tribal identity requires explanation, and it does get tiresome.
 
African-Americans, by the tragedy they have endured, belong in any discussion of diversity in the United States. The Civil War was, much as the Confederates denied it afterward, about slavery…

…Homer Plessy’s case was particularly ironic. Plessy was one-eighth African-American by blood quantum, and so considered himself a white man—but the Court found he was not white enough to sit where he pleased on public transportation. There things stood until Rosa Parks came along not claiming to be a white woman, but insisting she was a human being…

Read the entire article here.