Mixed Race Studies

“I’ve Never Heard of the Métis People”: The Politics of Naming, Racialization, and the Disregard for Aboriginal Canadians

ActiveHistory.ca
2012-10-18

Crystal Fraser
University of Alberta

Mike Commito
McMaster University

The controversial selection of a hamburger name by a Toronto restaurant had customers and critics raising their eyebrows this past August. Holy Chuck Burgers, located on Yonge Street, specializes in gourmet hamburgers, some of which sport clever titles like “Go Chuck Yourself” and “You Fat Pig.” Recently, the restaurant has come under criticism, not for its indulgent offerings, but because of the names of two of its items: “The Half Breed” and “The Dirty Drunken Half Breed.” It was not long before Twitterverse exploded, slamming Holy Chuck Burgers for its use of racially-charged, insensitive discourse that has had a longstanding history against Canada’s Indigenous peoples. While the criticism was well deserved, the apparent disconnect to Aboriginal issues is unfortunately part of a much larger and longer colonial mentality of indifference.

Like many racial designations in Canada, the term ‘half-breed’ is both complex and problematic. Historically, the designation was used to describe people of ‘mixed’ descent whose lineage originated from intimate relationships between non-Aboriginal newcomers and Aboriginal people. The racial designation of ‘half-breed’ was applied not only to Métis people, but also to other Aboriginals as a way to essentialize and deauthenticate all forms of indigenity. Today, by way of colonial discourse, the Métis are sometimes linked to the historic understanding of ‘half-breed.’ This was demonstrated when Holy Chuck Burgers’ racist food names were viewed as a direct attack on Métis people. But the equation of ‘half breed’ to Métis is intrinsically problematic, since many Indigenous peoples are of ‘mixed’ ancestry but not labelled as such. Nevertheless, Holy Chuck Burgers’ owner explained that the poor selection in burger names originated from the fact that the burger patties consist of a mixture of ground pork and beef. In “The Dirty Drunken Half Breed,” “dirty” refers to the chili that was poured all over the burger and “drunken” denotes the wine that was used in the cooking preparation. When considering Holy Chuck Burgers’ choice of language, it is difficult not to think about racial stereotypes about Aboriginal people that have been historically imposed and, to some extent, continue to be used…

Read the entire article here.

Colour Coded Health Care: The Impact of Race and Racism on Canadians’ Health

Wellesly Institute: advancing urban health
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
January 2012
30 pages

Sheryl Nestel, Ph.D.

Scope and Purpose of the Review

Canada is home to a much-admired system of universal health care, understood as a central pillar of this nation’s overall commitment to principles of social equity and social justice. Such an understanding makes it difficult to raise the issue of racial inequities within the context of the Canadian health-care system. Indeed, as a number of Canadian health scholars have argued, with the exception of the substantial data on First Nations health, very little research has been conducted in Canada on racial inequality in health and health care (Health Canada, 2001; Johnson, Bottorff, Hilton, & Grewell, 2002; O’Neill & O’Neill, 2007; Rodney & Copeland, 2009). This literature review attempts to bring together data published between 1990 and 2011 on racial inequities in the health of non-Aboriginal racialized people in Canada. The decision not to include data on Aboriginal people in this review is by no means intended to obscure or minimize the appalling health conditions among Aboriginal people and the central role of colonialism and racism in their creation and perpetuation. It is clear, as Kelm (2005) has argued, that “social and economic deprivation, physical, sexual, cultural and spiritual abuse” (p. 397) underlie inexcusable inequities in Aboriginal health. Aboriginal health inequities were not included in this review because we chose not to subsume under an umbrella of racial inequities in health the unique history and continuing injustice of Aboriginal health conditions.

We begin our review with a discussion of the concept of race and its relationship to health outcomes and then move to a discussion of the significance of racial inequities in health and the relationship of these inequities to other forms of social inequality. We also examine mortality and morbidity data for various racialized groups in Canada and explore evidence of the role of bias, discrimination, and stereotyping in health-care delivery. Unequal access to medical screening, lack of adequate resources such as translation services, and new and important research on the physiological impact of a racist environment are also explored. This review concludes with a discussion of the limitations of available data on racial inequities in health and health care in Canada. It also surveys the challenges faced by other jurisdictions, such as the United States and Great Britain, in collecting racial data to monitor the extent of such inequities, understand their causes, and address the consequences of unequal access to health care. Finally, it offers recommendations related to the collection of racial data…

Read the entire report here.

Don’t miss Hapa-Palooza 2013: Celebrate mixed ethnicity and third culture in Vancouver

Vancouver Observer
Vancouver, British Columbia
2013-09-13

Jordan Yerman

Celebrate the whole you with literature, film, art, and dance. This is Hapa-Palooza.

The third annual Hapa-Palooza Festival kicks off on September 18, once again bringing three days of art and culture to Vancouver. Focusing on mixed-race identity, this is a celebration of what makes us… us.

Anna Ling Kaye, Hapa-Palooza’s Artistic Director, says, “The big thing that’s different this year is that we’re incorporated as our own society. We’re making a big push for a bigger festival.”…

Read the entire article here.

One of the Family: Métis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan by Brenda Macdougall (review)

Canadian Ethnic Studies
Volume 44, Number 3, 2012
pages 147-148
DOI: 10.1353/ces.2013.0012

Frits Pannekoek, President and Professor of History
Athabasca University, Athabasca, Alberta, Canada

Brenda Macdougall, One of the Family: Metis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010)

For the last several decades, scholarship in Métis genealogy has matured to the point that it can proudly claim a leading position in the field of prosopography, a field first identified in medieval studies. It has become an instrument to divine an understanding of Métis society, its construction, its past and its continuity. Macdougall has built carefully on the scholarship of amongst others: Jennifer Brown, Sylvia Van Kirk, John Foster, Gerhard Ens, Doug Sprague, Heather Devine, and Nicole St. Onge. Her book deals with Métis culture in 19th century Northwestern Saskatchewan largely around Ile a La Crosse, a real and symbolic centre to the people of the Northwest. It is organized into seven chapters with introduction and conclusion, for a total of nine chapters.

The book argues that the Métis families of the Northwest are “wahkootowin.” This, according to Macdougall, is a Cree “worldview linking land, family, and identity in one interconnected web of being.” The first chapter deals with the social landscapes of the Northwest, the second with the social construction of the Métis family, the third with residency and patronymic connections across the Northwest, the fourth with family acculturation and Roman Catholicism, and the fifth with family labor and the Hudson’s Bay Company. Two later chapters deal with free trade and the culture it contributed.

Macdougall’s contributions are significant and considerable. As noted, she used “wahkootowin” to explain the complex set of interrelationships amongst a people. She explains how marriage patterns, work lives, and religion were all mutually reinforcing and how these complex relationships or “wahkootowin” defined life. Family mattered a great deal and a study of the family structures evidences a pattern that persisted and deepened over four generations. The volume is rich in detail and anyone with roots in Northern Saskatchewan will leave with a deeper understanding of themselves. It is, to a degree, an insider’s study, but for the scholar of Métis genesis, it is now the best explanation of how a people and an identity emerged in the Saskatchewan interior.

The book is, however, not without its problems, although some will consider these its greatest strengths. First, it will be very difficult for people outside the region or new to Métis studies to read the book with any real enjoyment. The genealogical data is dense and will be in the eyes of some a major obstacle to understanding “wahkootowin.” Others, however, will find the nuanced tapestry of family information a highly compelling background to the family networks that Macdougall argues are so foundational to an understanding of the Métis. Most Métis scholars will ponder these connections and will use the questions Macdougall asks to further their own family reconstructions regardless of region or Aboriginal cultural roots.

The real question that will be posed by many is whether the findings are replicable. Are the complex interconnections of Northwestern Saskatchewan to be found in Northern Manitoba at Rossville for example? Macdougall rightfully makes much of the Catholicism of the Ile a La Crosse community, and points out how Protestant mixed bloods were probably purposefully excluded. Would the Methodist community at, for example, Rossville, the community at White Fish Lake, or that at Stanley mission have been equally exclusionary to Catholics? Would English-speaking, Protestant mixed-blood communities have differing structures? Would “wahkootowin” take on a different texture in these communities? Would the Hudson’s Bay Company have a different relationship given the dominance of Protestants in its hierarchy? Would there be Protestant Catholic intermarriages? Macdougall, I would suggest, would likely say not, but were Irene Spry still alive she would suggest that intermarriages would and did occur. A more careful reading of Anglican and Methodist archives might pose new questions. What is important is that Macdougall has moved the discussion on Métis culture from one of class, or one focusing on ethnicity to one that requires an understanding of complex Aboriginal cultural norms rather than one requiring a complex understanding of European or Euro American ones. Macdougall demands much of her readers, and those who accept the challenge will be well rewarded…

Belle [World Premiere]

Toronto International Film Festival 2013
TIFF Bell Lightbox
Reitman Square
350 King Street West
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2013-09-05 through 2013-09-15

Film Information:

Directed by Amma Asante
2013
105 minutes

Gugu Mbatha-Raw takes the title role alongside Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson and Canada’s Sarah Gadon in the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate, bi-racial daughter of a Royal Navy admiral in 18th-century Britain.

Fans of English period drama are accustomed to its gorgeous settings, social graces, and sophisticated language. But what’s often missing from those adaptations of Jane Austen or the Brontës is the institution at the foundation of that refined life: slavery. Austen wrote about how the slave trade made British gentry wealthy, but until now no film has brought both the glory and the contradictions of that life to the screen in such a powerful fashion.

In late eighteenth century England, Dido Elizabeth Belle is born to a white British admiral and a black Caribbean slave. The admiral’s well-bred family is appalled, but when he returns to sea, custom dictates that they raise his child as an aristocrat. Britain’s imposing Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) is both Dido’s uncle and the family patriarch, and instructs this biracial young woman (Gugu Mbatha Raw) to respect both the law and the social codes of her station. She is a lady, but an embarrassment. How is she ever to marry?…

For more information, click here.

Hapa-Palooza: A Celebration of Mixed Roots, Arts and Ideas

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2013-09-18, 2013-09-19, and 2013-09-21

Hapa-Palooza: A Vancouver Celebration of Mixed-Roots Arts and Ideas is a new cultural festival that celebrates the city’s identity as a place of hybridity, synergy and acceptance. A vibrant fusion of music, dance, literary, artistic and film performances, Hapa-Palooza places prominence on celebrating and stimulating awareness of mixed-roots identity, especially amongst youth.

For more information, click here.

The Debate: Multiracial Identity

The Agenda with Steve Paikin
TVO (TV Ontario)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2011-07-22, 20:00 EDT (Local Time)
Also at: 2011-07-25, 05:00 EDT (Local Time)

Piya Chattopadhyay, Host

Guests (in order of appearance)

Rainier Spencer, Director of the Afro-American Studies Program
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
(Author of three books on multiracialism including, Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, 2011)

Minelle Mahtani, Professor of Geography and Journalism
University of Toronto

Ravi Jain,  Immigration Lawyer
Green and Spiegel, Toronto

Sarah Grzincic, Graduate Student
Ontario Institue for Studies in Education
University of Toronto

Jean Teillet, Partner (and the great grand niece of Louis Riel)
Pape Salter Teillet

Producers

Stavros Rougas, Associate Producer

Walk down the street in any Canadian city. The face of Canada is changing, no longer predominantly white and of European descent. How does being multiracial shape your identity? What policy changes are needed to best reflect the changing face of our society?

For more information, click here.

Who is an Indian?: Race, Place, and the Politics of Indigeneity in the Americas

University of Toronto Press
August 2013
272 pages
Paper ISBN: 9780802095527
Cloth ISBN: 9780802098184

Edited by:

Maximilian C. Forte, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Who is an Indian? This is possibly the oldest question facing Indigenous peoples across the Americas, and one with significant implications for decisions relating to resource distribution, conflicts over who gets to live where and for how long, and clashing principles of governance and law. For centuries, the dominant views on this issue have been strongly shaped by ideas of both race and place. But just as important, who is permitted to ask, and answer this question?

This collection examines the changing roles of race and place in the politics of defining Indigenous identities in the Americas. Drawing on case studies of Indigenous communities across North America, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, it is a rare volume to compare Indigenous experience throughout the western hemisphere. The contributors question the vocabulary, legal mechanisms, and applications of science in constructing the identities of Indigenous populations, and consider ideas of nation, land, and tradition in moving indigeneity beyond race.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: “Who Is an Indian?” The Cultural Politics of a Bad Question / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Sociology and Anthropology)
• Chapter One: Inuitness and Territoriality in Canada / Donna Patrick (Carleton University, Sociology and Anthropology and the School of Canadian Studies)
• Chapter Two: Federally-Unrecognized Indigenous Communities in Canadian Contexts / Bonita Lawrence (York University, Equity Studies)
• Chapter Three: The Canary in the Coalmine: What Sociology Can Learn from Ethnic Identity Debates among American Indians / Eva Marie Garroutte (Boston College, Sociology) and C. Matthew Snipp (Stanford University, Sociology)
• Chapter Four : “This Sovereignty Thing”: Nationality, Blood, and the Cherokee Resurgence / Julia Coates (University of California Davis, Native American Studies)
• Chapter Five: Locating Identity: The Role of Place in Costa Rican Chorotega Identity / Karen Stocker (California State University, Anthropology)
• Chapter Six: Carib Identity, Racial Politics, and the Problem of Indigenous Recognition in Trinidad and Tobago / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Anthropology)
• Chapter Seven: Encountering Indigeneity: The International Funding of Indigeneity in Peru / José Antonio Lucero (University of Washington, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies)
• Chapter Eight: The Color of Race: Indians and Progress in a Center-Left Brazil / Jonathan Warren (University of Washington, International Studies, Chair of Latin American Studies)
• Conclusion: Seeing Beyond the State and Thinking beyond the State of Sight / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Sociology and Anthropology)
• Contributors
• Index

Research Project on “Mixed Race” Identity: Call for Participants

University of Alberta
2013-08-23

Jillian Paragg, Ph.D. Student
Department of Sociology

Are you of mixed racial background? Do you/have you identified as “mixed race”, “multiracial”, or with other “mixed” self-identifications (i.e. biracial, mulatto, eurasian, happa, creole etc.)? Do other people identify you as “mixed”?

I am looking for residents in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) to participate in life story interviews who:

• are 40-60 years of age
• are of mixed racial parentage
• have been in Canada since the 1970s

I am conducting a project on mixed race identity for my doctoral dissertation in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. The purpose of the project is to explore respondents’ experiences growing up and living as “mixed race” during the multicultural era in Canada.

Interviews will involve a minimum of two sittings, each taking at least 1 to 1.5 hours – for a total time commitment of 2 to 4 hours.

If you would like to be part of this study or have questions, please contact Jillian Paragg (paragg@ualberta.ca) by early November 2013 (will be in the GTA until end of November). This project is supervised by Dr. Sara Dorow, who can be contacted at sara.dorow@ualberta.ca.

Rereading Pauline Johnson

Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes
Volume 46, Number 2, Spring 2012
pages 45-61
DOI: 10.1353/jcs.2012.0018

Carole Gerson, Professor of English
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

This essay argues for a broader appreciation of Pauline Johnson’s creative range and poetic accomplishment. Rereading her work in relation to some of J. Edward Chamberlin’s ideas about narrative and about home brings fresh perspectives to her writing and reception in relation to her reversal of the White masculine gaze in her representations of Native peoples, Canadian history, wilderness, and gender. Her first Euro-Canadian audience used her work to assist with their own indigenization and help them feel at home in Canada. Because most current readers construct Johnson as figure of resistance, concentrating on a small selection of her poetry on Native topics, they continue to ignore her poems that invoke a female voice to possess the wilderness, along with her innovative erotic verse that reinhabits the female body by empowering the female gaze.

Having written extensively about Pauline Johnson in the past—most recently in relation to celebrity (Gerson 2012)—I welcome the opportunity created by this collection of essays associated with the Grand River Forum to bring some of J. Edward Chamberlin’s observations about storytelling to bear on my current interest in returning approaches to Johnson. My goal is to bring fresh attention to the craft and range of her poetry and to the complexity of her reception. Chamberlin’s analysis of narrative as essential to human experience, however contradictory the stories on a given topic might seem, is amply borne out by the unusual life and career of Emily Pauline Johnson (1861-1913). The well-known part-Mohawk poet was closely associated with the Grand River region, where she honed her skills in canoeing and authorship, her talents converging in…