Mixed Race Studies

2011 Southern Arizona Asian American & Pacific Islander Conference

“Reach, Inspire, Connect”
 
Pima Community College – West Campus
2202 West Anklam Road
Tucson, Arizona 85709
Saturday, 2011-03-19 from 08:00 to 14:00 MDT (Local Time)

Conference Program…

09:00-09:50 –  Session “A”

Workshop 4:  Mixed Race – A popular 2009 workshop returning this year.  The presenter will talk about how she and others grew up as mixed race children, how the experiences shaped her adult professional life, how to grow positively with the lessons learned, and how they integrate into society.

Presenter:  M. Craig, Japan-America Society of Tucson

For information, click here.

Miengun’s Children: Tales from a Mixed-Race Family

Mrs. Jessie W. Hilton of Albuquerque, N.M., who summers at her cottage Mi-en-gun Walszh (Wolf’s Den) in Northport, was hostess at 5:00 o’clock Wednesday at Schuler’s of this city honoring Mrs. C. Stuker of Oak Park, III., house guest of her sister, Mrs. Basil Milliken of Oklahoma City, Okla., summer resident at Northport.

Traverse City [Michigan] Record Eagle, July 7, 1954

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 29, Numbers 2/3, Intermarriage and North American Indians (2008)
pp. 146-185
DOI: 10.1353/fro.0.0016

Susan E. Gray, Associate Professor of History
Arizona State University

At the time of this gathering of summer society in a northern Michigan resort town, Jessie Milton was eighty-nine years old. For more than fifty years, she had been a summer resident of Northport, on the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula, north and west of Traverse City, leaving her home in Oklahoma City every June and returning from Michigan in October, events noted in the society pages of newspapers in both places. The only break in this pattern occurred in 1947, when she moved from Oklahoma City to her daughter’s house in Albuquerque, from which she continued to commute each summer to the Leelanau. Despite Jessie’s social standing, however, her annual pilgrimages differed from most sojourns of the genteel and well-heeled to northern Michigan. Twice divorced, she was long accustomed to supporting herself, and she ran a shop in Northport during the summer tourist season, selling Indian handicrafts and pies that she made from the cherries for which the Traverse region is famous. The silverwork for sale at the “Cherry Buttery” came from New Mexico, but the sweet grass and split ash baskets were the work of local Odawa and Ojibwe people, some of whom Hilton had known far longer than she had been summering on the Leelanau. Indeed, the annual arrival of Jessie Hilton, society matron and purveyor of Indian handicrafts, at the Wolf’s Den signaled the complexity and fluidity of a mixed-race identity that she, like her twelve brothers and sisters, had spent a lifetime negotiating.

Read or purchase the article here.

Hybrid Knowledge

History Workshop Journal
Published online 2011-02-25
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbq062

Anna Winterbottom, Tutorial Fellow in Early Modern History
Sussex University, Brighton, England

The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820, ed. Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, James Delbourgo; Science History Publications, Sagamore Beach MA, 2009; 552 pp.; 0-88135-374-4.

As the editors of this volume note, the terms ‘broker’ and ‘go-between’ tend to evoke back-room introductions and the shuffling of suspicious papers, rather than the traditionally triumphal images of Enlightenment knowledge. The people who embodied the global connections through which information flowed between cultures have only relatively recently become a focus of English-language scholarship. This is in part the legacy of dualistic conceptualizations of race, empire and science in Anglo-American colonial discourse. In an imagined world divided between black and white, ruler and ruled, modern and traditional, scientific and emotional, rational and spiritual, the people or ideas that crossed boundaries posed not only an administrative headache, but also a threat to the cosmic order. A rejection of the idea of mixing, physically or intellectually, also came from many of those who opposed colonialism. For example, Anglo-Indians were generally sidelined rather than celebrated in the Indian independence movement. Writing from a colonial gaol, Nehru argued that despite the efforts of a few more enlightened individuals, opportunities for cultural, social and scientific exchange were deliberately quashed and that European and Asian systems of knowledge remained more or less separate.  During the colonial period, therefore, people who crossed the borders of knowledge, like those who transgressed racial categories, were characterized on all sides as untrustworthy and potentially treacherous.

In Spanish, Portuguese and French, the words for the intermingling of cultures and those who are the agents of this process have a longer history of academic discussion and cultural politics. While fears concerning the dangers of cultural and racial…

Read or purchase the article here.