Mixed Race Studies

Feminist Readings of Native American Literature: Coming to Voice

University of Arizona Press
1998
181 pages
6.0 x 9.0
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-1633-9

Kathleen M. Donovan, Professor and Department Head of English
South Dakota State University, Brookings

Who in a society can speak, and under what circumstances? These questions are at the heart of both Native American literature and feminist literary and cultural theory. Despite the recent explosion of publication in each of these fields, almost nothing has been written to date that explores the links between the two. With Feminist Readings of Native American Literature, Kathleen Donovan takes an important first step in examining how studies in these two fields inform and influence one another. Focusing on the works of N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Paula Gunn Allen, and others, Donovan analyzes the texts of these well-known writers, weaving a supporting web of feminist criticism throughout. With careful and gracefully offered insights, the book explores the reciprocally illuminating nature of culture and gender issues. The author demonstrates how Canadian women of mixed-blood ancestry achieve a voice through autobiographies and autobiographical novels. Using a framework of feminist reader response theory, she considers an underlying misogyny in the writings of N. Scott Momaday. And in examining commonalities between specific cultures, she discusses how two women of color, Paula Gunn Allen and Toni Morrison, explore representations of femaleness in their respective cultures. By synthesizing a broad spectrum of critical writing that overlaps women’s voices and Native American literature, Donovan expands on the frame of dialogue within feminist literary and cultural theory. Drawing on the related fields of ethnography, ethnopoetics, ecofeminism, and post-colonialism, Feminist Readings of Native American Literature offers the first systematic study of the intersection between two dynamic arenas in literary studies today.

Read an excerpt here.

Earthquake Weather

University of Arizona Press
1996
87 pages
5.5 x 8.5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-1630-8

Janice Gould

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.

Itch Like Crazy

University of Arizona Press
2002
121 pages
6.0 x 9.0
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-2177-7

Wendy Rose

Among Native American writers of mixed-blood heritage, few have expressed their concerns with personal identity with as much passion as Wendy Rose. A mainstay among American Indian poets whose work addresses these issues, she is a writer with whom readers of diverse ethnic backgrounds have consistently identified. In her latest work, Rose returns to these major motifs while exploring a new dimension: using poetry as a tool to delve into the buried secrets of family history—and all of American history as well. Confronting questions of personal history that itch like crazy—the irritations that drive human existence—she acknowledges and pays tribute to her Indian and European ancestors without hiding her anger with American society. Rose’s poems are strong political and social statements that have a distinctly narrative flavor. Here are Europeans who first set foot on America’s shores while Taíno Indians greeted them as if they were visiting neighbors; Hopi and Miwok “Clan Mothers, grand-daughters, all those the missionaries erased”; and European forebears who as settlers pushed their way relentlessly west. Through her vivid imagery, she speaks to and for these ancestors with a sense of loss and an itching caused by the biases provoked by ethnic chauvinism. Itch Like Crazy is a finely crafted literary work that is also a manifesto addressing contacts and conflicts in the history of Indian-white relations. By presenting another view of U.S. history and its impact on the Native Americans who are her ancestors, it offers a new appreciation of the issue of “tribal identity” that too often faces Native peoples of the Americas—and is too often misunderstood by Euro-American society.

Read an excerpt here.

`For Venus smiles not in a house of tears’: Interethnic relations in European cinema

European Journal of Cultural Studies
2003
Vol. 6, No. 1
pages 55-74
DOI: 10.1177/1367549403006001470

Anneke Smelik
University of Nijmegen

In the 1990s, several European filmmakers addressed the Romeo and Juliet motif of `impossible love’ in the context of multiculturalism. A heterosexual love affair between people of different ethnic backgrounds allows filmmakers to address issues of racism and deconstruct racial stereotypes. In the films discussed in this article, the tragic love affairs point to the unwillingness of European countries to become pluralistic and multiethnic societies. Some films have attempted to represent interethnic love relations more hopefully, celebrating happy endings of mixed race couples. The success of such films may indicate that the genre of comedy has won over the tragedy of the Romeo and Juliet topos in cinematic representations of interethnic love relations. Perhaps European cinema is ready to embrace constructions of European identity as hybrid, diverse and multiple.

Cue Lazarus

University of Arizona Press
2001
76 pages
6.0 x 9.0
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-2074-9

Carl Marcum

A ’77 Pinto. Two boys “a few months from their driver’s license.” And in the back seat, a ghost of the present observing this scene refracted by memory.  In this collection of poetry by Carl Marcum, a young man traces his rise to consciousness, his coming of age in the Southwest as a medio, an individual of mixed race. Displaying his Hispanic heritage as fact, emblem, and music in his poems, Marcum balances hip humor with larger themes of loss and reinvention to paint a work of seriousness and imagination, wrestling sense from the giddy rush of experience. The lead poem, “Cue Lazarus,” conveys the sense of loss that permeates the collection, revisiting time the author spent with a friend he now knows will die. It sets the tone for the explorations to follow as the poet haunts his past: death, traumatic experience, the uneasiness that comes from being unable to forestall tragedy, all combine to create a sense of paradox, that he who endures becomes a ghost compelled to haunt his own life. As poetry becomes a subtle game of language, experience is refigured as an array of possibilities; Marcum finds meaning and epiphany through close observation as he revels in images of constant motion and sustained search. Here is a suite in celebration of Chevys (“That Camaro ran nearly on machismo alone”) and a prayer for breakfast (“I’d like to renounce the salt and pepper shakers / of this life. But the eggs are here / twelve lines into this poem / and getting cold”). He dreams of himself as Pancho Villa, “my poetry at the end of a pistol,” and invokes the spirits of poets past, “beggars on the media of Limbo, holding shabby signs: WILL WORK FOR TRUTH.” Ultimately, Cue Lazarus is about resurrection—of the spirit, of a life, of an identity. It marks the emergence of a vital new voice that, in baring his soul, reveals lessons as old as time.

Read an excerpt here.

‘After all, I am partly Māori, partly Dalmatian, but first of all I am a New Zealander’

Ethnography
Volume 6, Number 4 (December 2005)
pages 517-542
DOI: 10.1177/1466138105062477

Senka Božić-Vrbančić
The University of Auckland, New Zealand

This article explores the complexity of the processes of identity construction for ‘mixed-race’ individuals in New Zealand. It focuses on two life stories told by Māori-Croatian women in order to analyse how individuals of Māori-Croatian background constitute their own identity within the heterogeneous discursive practices (race, ethnicity, gender, class, nation) that have operated in New Zealand from colonial times to the bicultural New Zealand of the present. Experience of the hybridization of identity is placed within a framework of power relationships and the varieties of social struggles which help to constitute it from below.

Read or purchase the article here.

Maya Ethnolinguistic Identity: Violence, Cultural Rights, and Modernity in Highland Guatemala

University of Arizona Press
2010
192 pages
6.0 x 9.0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8165-2767-0

Brigittine M. French, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Grinnell College

In this valuable book, ethnographer and anthropologist Brigittine French mobilizes new critical-theoretical perspectives in linguistic anthropology, applying them to the politically charged context of contemporary Guatemala. Beginning with an examination of the “nationalist project” that has been ongoing since the end of the colonial period, French interrogates the “Guatemalan/indigenous binary.” In Guatemala, “Ladino” refers to the Spanish-speaking minority of the population, who are of mixed European, usually Spanish, and indigenous ancestry; “Indian” is understood to mean the majority of Guatemala’s population, who speak one of the twenty-one languages in the Maya linguistic groups of the country, although levels of bilingualism are very high among most Maya communities. As French shows, the Guatemalan state has actively promoted a racialized, essentialized notion of “Indians” as an undifferentiated, inherently inferior group that has stood stubbornly in the way of national progress, unity, and development—which are, implicitly, the goals of “true Guatemalans” (that is, Ladinos).

French shows, with useful examples, how constructions of language and collective identity are in fact strategies undertaken to serve the goals of institutions (including the government, the military, the educational system, and the church) and social actors (including linguists, scholars, and activists). But by incorporating in-depth fieldwork with groups that speak Kaqchikel and K’iche’ along with analyses of Spanish-language discourses, Maya Ethnolinguistic Identity also shows how some individuals in urban, bilingual Indian communities have disrupted the essentializing projects of multiculturalism. And by focusing on ideologies of language, the author is able to explicitly link linguistic forms and functions with larger issues of consciousness, gender politics, social positions, and the forging of hegemonic power relations.

Read an excerpt here.

In-between Places

University of Arizona Press
2005
119 pages
6.0 x 9.0
2005
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8165-2385-6
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-2387-0

Diane Glancy, Professor of Native American Literature and Creative Writing
Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota

“There is a map you decide to call a book. A book of the territories you’ve traveled. A map is a meaning you hold against the unknowing. The places you speak in many directions.” In-Between Places would be enjoyed by anyone interested in thoughtful, careful prose that investigates complex issues of the self and the world. Energetic and beautifully constructed prose.  For Diane Glancy, there are books that you open like a map. In-between Places is such a book: a collection of eleven essays unified by a common concern with landscape and its relation both to our spiritual life and to the craft of writing. Taking readers on a trip to New Mexico, a voyage across the sea of middle America, even a journey to China, Glancy has crafted a sustained meditation on the nature and workings of language, stories, and poems; on travel and motion as metaphors for life and literature; and on the relationships between Native American and Judeo-Christian ways of thinking and being in the world. Reflecting on strip mines in Missouri (“as long as there is anything left to take, human industry will take it”) and hog barns in Iowa (writing about them from the hogs’ perspective), Glancy speaks in the margins of cross-cultural issues and from the places in-between as she explores the middle ground between places that we handle with the potholder of language. She leaves in her wake a dance of words and the structures left after the collision of cultures. A writer who has often examined her native heritage, Glancy also asks here what it means to be part white. “What does whiteness look like viewed from the other, especially when that other is also within oneself?” And in considering the legacy of Christianity, she ponders “how it is when the Holy Ghost enters your life like a brother-in-law you know is going to be there a while.” Insightful and provocative, In-between Places is a book for anyone interested in a sense of place and in the relationship between religion and our stance toward nature. It is also a book for anyone who loves thoughtful writing and wishes to learn from a modern master of language.

Collecting and tabulating race/ethnicity data with diverse and mixed heritage populations: A case-study with US high school students

Ethnic and Racial Studies
September 2003
Vol. 26 No. 5
pp. 931–961

Alejandra M. Lopez-Torkos, Social Scientist
SRI International

The increasing diversity of the US coupled with the continuing need for information gathered about race/ethnicity require us to reexamine our practices of collecting and tabulating such data, particularly from individuals of mixed heritage. In the context of Census 2000, which allowed people for the first time to identify with multiple race groups, this article focuses on the context of education and looks at high school students’ selfidentification practices on forms. Survey data gathered from 638 freshmen during 1999–2000 at a diverse, public high school in California indicate: there can be high levels of inconsistency in students’ individual identifications depending on question format and response options provided; and, overall demographic counts can greatly vary depending on how multipleresponse data are tabulated. Students’ responses raise questions about whether it is possible to attain a high level of measurement reliability when working with a diverse population that includes individuals of mixed heritage.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-Race School-Age Children: A Summary of Census 2000 Data

Educational Researcher
Volume 32, Number 6 (2003)
pages 25-37
DOI: 10.3102/0013189X032006025

Alejandra M. Lopez-Torkos, Social Scientist
SRI International

On the 2000 Census, people were allowed to identify themselves and their children by more than one race. This article examines these data to document the mixed-race population of children in the United States. Using data from California as an example, I consider various methods for tabulating or “counting” multiple-response race data, noting the impact of each strategy on demographic conclusions. I also discuss how federal guidelines on race classification will influence the collection and organization of race data in the field of education. Given the increasing prevalence of mixed-race youth, it is critical that we examine our ways of talking about and studying race and ethnicity in schools, allowing for fluidity and multiplicity in racial-ethnic identification.

Read or purchase the article here.