Mixed Race Studies

Join Mixed Roots Midwest at CMRS

Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference
DePaul University
Chicago, Illinois
2012-11-01 through 2012-11-03

What Mixed Roots Midwest brings selected short films, a panel of filmmakers, and a live show featuring local and national talent whose material explores the Mixed experience to Chicago as part of the 2012 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference.

• November 1: 5:45 PM-7:15 PM – Selected Shorts: Silences, Crayola Monologues, Mixed Mexican, and Nigel’s Fingerprint
• November 2: 5:15 PM-6:45 PM – Filmmakers Panel: Kip Fulbeck, Jeff Chiba Stearns, and Kim Kuhteubl
• November 3: 5:00 PM-6:30 PM – Mixed Roots Midwest LIVE: Featuring Chicago’s own 2nd Story and many more exciting pieces from artists who meld performance art with an exploration and critical analysis of what it means to be “Mixed.”

All events are free and open to the public and will be located at DePaul’s Student Center 2250 N. Sheffield #120 A/B, Chicago, Illinois 60614.
 
For more info contact co-coordinator, Mixed Roots Midwest, Laura Kina lkinaaro@depaul.edu or 773-325-4048. View the flyer here.

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.

Métis Families and Schools: The Decline and Reclamation of Métis Identities in Saskatchewan, 1885-1980

University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon
March 2009
270 pages

Jonathan Anuik, Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies
University of Alberta

A Dissertation Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History

In the late-nineteenth century, Métis families and communities resisted what they perceived to be the encroachment of non-Aboriginal newcomers into the West. Resistance gave way to open conflict at the Red River Settlement and later in north central Saskatchewan. Both attempts by the Métis to resist the imposition of the newcomer’s settlement agenda were not successful, and the next 100 years would bring challenges to Métis unity. The transmission of knowledge of a Métis past declined as parents and grandparents opted to encourage their children and youth to pass into the growing settler society in what would become Saskatchewan. As parents restricted the flow of Métis knowledge, missionaries who represented Christian churches collaborated to develop the first Northwest Territories Board of Education, the agent responsible for the first state-supported schools in what would become the province of Saskatchewan. These first schools included Métis students and helped to shift their loyalties away from their families and communities and toward the British state. However, many Métis children and youth remained on the margins of educational attainment. They were either unable to attend school, or their schools did not have the required infrastructure or relevant pedagogy and curriculum. In the years after World War II, the Government of Saskatchewan noticed the unequal access to and achievement of the Métis in its schools. The government attempted to bring Métis students in from the margins through infrastructural, pedagogical, and curricular adaptations to support their learning.

Scholars have unearthed voluminous evidence of missionary work in Canada and have researched and written about public schools. As well, several scholars have undertaken research projects on Status First Nations education in the twentieth century. However, less is known about Métis’ interactions with Christian missionaries and in the state-supported or publicly funded schools. In this dissertation, I examine the history of missions and public schools in what would become Saskatchewan, and I enumerate the foundations that the Métis considered important for their learning. I identify Métis children and youth’s reactions to Christian and public schools in Saskatchewan, but I argue that Métis families who knew of their heritages actively participated in Roman Catholic Church rituals and activities and preserved and protected their pasts. Although experiences with Christianity varied, those with strong family ties and ties to the land adjusted well to the expectations of Christian teachings and formal public education. Overall, I tell the story of Métis children and youth and their involvement in church and public schooling based on how they saw Christianity, education, and its role on their lands and in their families. And I explain how Métis learners negotiated Protestant and Roman Catholic teachings and influences with the pedagogy and curriculum of public schools.

Oral history forms a substantial portion of the sources for this history of Métis children and youth and church and public education. I approached the interviews as means to generate new data – in collaboration with the people I interviewed. Consequently, I went into the interviews with a list of questions, but I strove to make these interviews conversational and allow for a two-way flow of knowledge. I started with contextual questions (i.e. date of birth, school attended, where family was from) and proceeded to probe further based on the responses I received from the person being interviewed and from previous interviews. As well, I drew from two oral history projects with tapes and transcripts available in the archives: the Saskatchewan Archives Board’s “Towards a New Past Oral History Project ‘The Métis’” and the Provincial Archives of Manitoba’s Manitoba Métis Oral History Project. See appendices A and B for discussion of my oral history methodology and the utility of the aforementioned oral history projects for my own research…

Read the entire dissertation here.

CONCLUSIONS.

In the preceding pages, the author has endeavored to make plain the following propositions, and, as they are the very reverse of those laid down by the author of “Miscegenation,” he adopts the mode of that writer in summing up, in order the more successfully to present the contrast:

1. That as by the teachings of science, religion, and democracy the human family is composed of different races or species, distinct in color and other physical as well as mental peculiarities, it follows that there should be distinctions in political and social rights, corresponding with such physical and mental differences.
2. That the doctrine of human brotherhood should be accepted in its entirety in the United States, and that it implies the equality of all whom God has created equal, and the inequality of all whom He has made unequal.
3. That a solution of the negro problem will not have been reached in this country until public opinion universally sanctions negro Subgenation.
4. That, as the negro ought not to be driven out of the country or exterminated, and as for wise purposes he has been placed side by side with the white race, there should be severe laws passed punishing any sexual intercourse between the race.
5. That the mingling of diverse races, or Miscegenation, is a positive injury to the progeny, producing a weaker and a hybrid race, which rapidly perishes, as proved by the history of all nations, from that of Egypt to this day.
6. That, as the war has been caused by the Miscegenationists striving to force their revolting and disgusting doctrines on the people of the South, it follows that perfect peace and Union can soonest be restored to our country by the North adopting negro Subgenation at once, by each State amending its Constitution to that effect, and then accepting the Confederate Constitution as the basis of a Federal Government.
7. That it is the duty of Democrats everywhere to advocate Subgenation, or the normal relation of the races on this continent, as a great humanitarian reform.
8. That as the last Presidential election was carried by the Miscegenationists, and has brought four years of blood, suffering, and untold taxation upon the country, the next Presidential election should be carried by the Subgenationists, who will thus restore order, peace, and commercial prosperity.
9. That a society founded on Subgenation produces the highest type of mankind—the most consummate statesmen and generals, the highest type of womanhood, and the most exalted morality and virtue.
10. That the Millennial future is to be ushered in through a complete understanding of the laws of Subgenation, by which an equality of condition is to become universal—thus realizing the instinct of an equality of creation; and that whoever helps to achieve this result, helps to make the human family the sooner realize its great destiny.

John H. Van Evrie, Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the Races; an Answer to “Miscegenation,” (New York: John Bradburn Publishing, 1864): 67-69.

Portuguese and Luso-Asian Legacies in Southeast Asia, 1511-2011, Volume 2: Culture and Identity in the Luso-Asian World: Tenacities & Plasticities

Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
2012
368 pages
Soft cover ISBN: 978-981-4345-50-7
See Volume 1 here.

Edited by:

Laura Jarnagin, Visiting Professorial Fellow
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore
also Associate Professor Emerita in the Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies at Colorado School of Mines (Golden, Colorado)

“In 1511, a Portuguese expedition under the command of Afonso de Albuquerque arrived on the shores of Malacca, taking control of the prosperous Malayan port-city after a swift military campaign. Portugal, a peripheral but then technologically advanced country in southwestern Europe since the latter fifteenth century, had been in the process of establishing solid outposts all along Asia’s litoral in order to participate in the most active and profitable maritime trading routes of the day. As it turned out, the Portuguese presence and influence in the Malayan Peninsula and elsewhere in continental and insular Asia expanded far beyond the sphere of commerce and extended over time well into the twenty-first century.

Five hundred years later, a conference held in Singapore brought together a large group of scholars from widely different national, academic and disciplinary contexts, to analyse and discuss the intricate consequences of Portuguese interactions in Asia over the longue dure. The result of these discussions is a stimulating set of case studies that, as a rule, combine original archival and/or field research with innovative historiographical perspectives. Luso-Asian communities, real and imagined, and Luso-Asian heritage, material and symbolic, are studied with depth and insight. The range of thematic, chronological and geographic areas covered in these proceedings is truly remarkable, showing not only the extraordinary relevance of revisiting Luso-Asian interactions in the longer term, but also the surprising dynamism within an area of studies which seemed on the verge of exhaustion. After all, archives from all over the world, from Rio de Janeiro to London, from Lisbon to Rome, and from Goa to Macao, might still hold some secrets on the subject of Luso-Asian relations, when duly explored by resourceful scholars.”

—Rui M. Loureiro
Centro de Historia de Alem-Mar, Lisbon

“This two-volume set pulls together several interdisciplinary studies historicizing Portuguese ‘legacies’ across Asia over a period of approximately five centuries (ca. 1511-2011). It is especially recommended to readers interested in the broader aspects of the early European presence in Asia, and specifically on questions of politics, colonial administration, commerce, societal interaction, integration, identity, hybridity, religion and language.”

—Associate Professor Peter Borschberg
Department of History, National University of Singapore

Table of Contents

• Preliminary pages with Introduction
• PART I: CRAFTING IDENTITY IN THE LUSO-ASIAN WORLD
  • 1. Catholic Communities and their Festivities under the Portuguese Padroado in Early Modern Southeast Asia, by Tara Alberts
  • 2. A “Snapshot” of a Portuguese Community in Southeast Asia: The Bandel of Siam, 1684-86, by Rita Bernardes de Carvalho
  • 3. The Colonial Command of Ceremonial Language: Etiquette and Custom-Imitation in Nineteenth-Century East Timor, by Ricardo Roque
  • 4. Remembering the Portuguese Presence in Timor and Its Contribution to the Making of Timor’s National and Cultural Identity, by Vicente Paulino
• PART II: CULTURAL COMPONENTS: LANGUAGE, ARCHITECTURE AND MUSIC, by Alan Baxter
  • 5. The Creole-Portuguese Language of Malacca: A Delicate Ecology
  • 6. Oral Traditions of the Luso-Asian Communities: Local, Regional and Continental, by Hugo C. Cardoso
  • 7. Verb Markings in Makista: Continuity/Discontinuity and Accommodation, by Mario Pinharanda-Nunes
  • 8. From European-Asian Conflict to Cultural Hertiage: Identification of Portuguese and Spanish Forts on Ternate and Tidore Islands, by Manuel Lobato
  • 9. The Influence of Portuguese Musical Culture in Southeast Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Christian Storch
• PART III: ADVERSITY AND ACCOMMODATION, by Roderich Ptak
  • 10. Portugal and China: An Anatomy of Harmonious Coexistence (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
  • 11. “Aocheng” or “Cidade do Nome de Deus”: The Nomenclature of Portuguese and Castilian Buildings of Old Macao from the “Reversed Gaze” of the Chinese, by Vincent Ho
  • 12. Enemies, Friends, and Relations: Portuguese Eurasians during Malacca’s Dutch Era and Beyond, by Dennis De Witt
• Appendix: Maps
• Bibliography
• Index

Local Filmmaker to Give Voice to Biracial Issues

News Release
Nashville, Tennessee
2012-10-10

Jefferey Martin
615-918-8688

James Southard, Director/Producer

Native Nashville, [Tennessee]  filmmaker, James Southard aims to tackle the subject of what it means to be biracial in his forth-coming documentary, “Half-Caste.” The documentary comes from a mixture of personal experience with being biracial, a desire to help other people tell their story, and a need to increase awareness on the subject.
 
Half-Caste will explore the poignant issues of people who come from multi-racial backgrounds throughout society. This documentary will tackle issues such as personal identity, social identity, basic desire to belong to one group, race identification, government classification, racism, stereotypes, family, dating, difficulties of interaction within races and many other issues specific to the loose multi-racial community.
 
Southard is currently filling new interviews and gathering footage even while in the midst of trying to raise money, using Kickerstarter.com. Southard is aiming to raise awareness on the subject and has set his sights on making an incredible film that will bring this subject into the Public’s focus.

Southard is available for interviews, and can be contacted at: 615-918-8688

For more infomation, click here.

The Métis

Métis National Council
Ottowa, Ontario, Canada
2011

Prior to Canada’s crystallization as a nation in west central North America, the Métis people emerged out of the relations of Indian women and European men. While the initial offspring of these Indian and European unions were individuals who possessed mixed ancestry, the gradual establishment of distinct Métis communities, outside of Indian and European cultures and settlements, as well as, the subsequent intermarriages between Métis women and Métis men, resulted in the genesis of a new Aboriginal people—the Métis.

Distinct Métis communities emerged, as an outgrowth of the fur trade, along part of the freighting waterways and Great Lakes of Ontario, throughout the Northwest and as far north as the McKenzie river…

Read the entire report here.

MASC’s Thomas Lopez Discusses Mixed Latina/o Identity

Mixed Race Radio
Wednesday, 2012-10-17, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT, 09:00 PDT, 17:00 BST)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Thomas Lopez

Thomas Lopez continues to amaze me. He has held various positions with Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC), Los Angeles, CA since 1995 and continues to organize numerous conferences, workshops and events such as “Race In Medicine: A Dangerous Prescription” and “A Rx for the FDA: Ethical Dilemmas for Multiracial People in Race-Based Medicine” at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, DePaul University, 2010.

Thomas is also a filmmaker, having produced, Mixed Mexican: Is Latino a Race? which was shown at the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival (2010), Readymade Film Festival (2010), and Hapapalooza Film Festival (2011)

On today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio, Thomas will announce the start of a new program by Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC) called: Latinas/os Of Mixed Ancestry (LOMA).

The purpose of the LOMA project is to:

• Provide space for expression of mixed Latina/o identity.
• Provide culturally relevant material to the mixed Latino community.
• Raise awareness of this community to society at large.

This will be accomplished by:

• The establishment of a website with blog and forum discussions.
• Social media campaign.
• Attendance at conferences.
• A public relations awareness campaign.
• MASC seeks to broaden self and public understanding of our interracial, multiethnic, and cross cultural society by facilitating interethnic dialogue and providing cultural, educational, and recreational activities. In 2009 MASC celebrated twenty years of incorporation.

As a part of our mission, MASC has always worked to raise awareness of the impact of multiracial identification. During the 1990’s, we successfully worked to revise the Census to allow multiple racial classifications.

For more information, click here.

Jazz, Race Collide With War In 1930s Europe

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2012-03-26

Jacki Lyden, Host

The novel Half Blood Blues explores an often overlooked slice of history: black jazz musicians in Germany on the eve of World War II. The book moves from 1992 to 1939, from Baltimore to Berlin to Paris. It’s told by an elderly black jazz musician and his friend who survived the war. Guest host Jacki Lyden speaks with author Esi Edugyan.

Transcript:

This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I’m Jacki Lyden. Michel Martin is away this week. Now we’re going to take a trip back in time with the help of a prize-winning novelist.

The novel, “Half Blood Blues,” considers a slice of history that often gets overlooked: black jazz musicians and their fate in Germany just before World War II. The novel moves back and forth from 1992 to 1939, from Baltimore to Berlin, Berlin to Paris and it’s told through the eyes of an elderly Baltimore black jazz musician, Sid Griffiths, and his lifelong friend, Chippewa Jones, all in invented period slang.

The novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize this year and won the Giller Prize in Canada and its author, Esi Edugyan, joins us now from member station KUOW in Seattle. Welcome.

ESI EDUGYAN: Thank you.

LYDEN: Esi, just to establish, you are a Canadian author.

EDUGYAN: I am.

LYDEN: And you live in…

EDUGYAN: I was born and raised in Calgary.

LYDEN: Born and raised in Calgary, of Ghanaian parents and you live in Victoria?

EDUGYAN: Yes.

LYDEN: Well, please tell us about this novel, which has had so much success. Tell us about the men at the center of your story. They’re jazz musicians from a group called the Hot Time Swingers. We meet them in Paris. They already have escaped from Berlin. They’ve met Duke Ellington and at the center of the group is this really intriguing character you’ve invented called Hieronymus Falk. And he is eventually picked up by the Gestapo in June of 1940. Tell us about these fellows and Hieronymus.

EDUGYAN: Well, essentially, the novel is told in two parts and the first part centers around the Hot Time Swingers who, you know, are a jazz band who’s had quite a bit of success playing in Berlin. And, you know, now the Third Reich has been ushered in and they’re trying to decide exactly how to proceed now that they’ve been prohibited from playing in public.

And so the band consists of two African-American players, Sid and Chip from Baltimore, as well as the German players, Paul, who’s a pianist who has a Jewish background, and Ernst. And then Hieronymus Falk, who is an Afro-German, the child of a French colonial soldier and a German mother, and he’s the trumpet prodigy.

LYDEN: Hieronymus Falk really intrigued me, Esi Edugyan. He is, you say in the novel, the German word was mischling. He is of mixed race and there really were such Afro-Germans prior to the Nazis taking power…

Read the entire transcript here. Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.

Children of the Occupation

NewSouth Publishing
2012-07-01

Walter Hamilton, Journalist and Author

Towards the end of an eventful life, George Budworth, who served with the Australian Army in Japan after the war, wrote an account describing the first time he saw his son, Peter. It was not in a hospital maternity ward but on the streets of Kure one chilly night in 1954:

In broken English, the woman said, ‘Please, you look my baby, he sick’. She turned her back to Quietly [George’s fictional alter ego]. The baby was tied on her back in a kind of carryall. Quietly reached down and flipped back the lid. Looking up at him was the pinched, undernourished white face of a very young baby. Quietly could see at a glance that the child was half Japanese ­– certainly not a full blood. ‘He now six weeks; he Goshu (Australian) baby-san,’ was all she said through her sobs.

George gave the woman all the money he was carrying. She later sought him out to return the change; they started a relationship; and George formed a close bond with the child, Hideki, whom he renamed Peter and formally adopted.

In 1956, as the British Commonwealth Forces Korea prepared to pull out of Japan, George was among a handful of soldiers and civilians seeking permission to take adopted children back to Australia. In the decade since the first Australian troops arrived in Occupied Japan, such a thing had never been allowed (though war brides were admitted after 1952). In George’s fictionalised memoir, Peter’s mother, Fusako, surrenders custody of her child because she fears for his future in Japan: ‘They could never go to school, never marry, or hold any job but as labourers, in other words a life worse than death was the best these children could expect’…

…Walter Hamilton’s book Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story will be published by NewSouth in June.

Read the entire article here.