Mixed Race Studies

Why Chelene Knight wrote letters to the current occupants of the houses she lived in growing up

CBC Books
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
2018-03-06

Ryan B. Patrick, Associate Producer

Chelene Knight is an author based in Vancouver. (Chelene Knight/BookThug)

Chelene Knight is a Vancouver-based writer and editor. Of Black and East Indian heritage, Knight’s Dear Current Occupant mixes poetry and prose to tell a story about home and belonging, set in the 1980s and 1990s of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

The book plays with genre by way of a series of letters addressed to the current occupants now living in the 20 different houses she moved in and out of with her mother and brother. Knight tells CBC Books how she wrote Dear Current Occupant.

A bus ride beginning

“The first draft was originally all poetry, but my publisher suggested I rewrite it as creative nonfiction. I tried to write this book in generic memoir form. I sat down wanting to write about some of my childhood experiences. But it couldn’t come out. I thought maybe it’s not the right time.

“Then I was on the bus one snowy day and I passed by one of the houses that I lived in as a child and something sparked in me. I got off the bus and I stood in front of this house. I had a notebook with me and I started scribbling. The memories were coming back to me — flooding in — and it was this visceral thing where I needed to be in that place and then be transported back to those times.”…

…Writing for others

“We always hear people say there are no Black people in Vancouver, but there are. I identify as a Black woman. I know there was a larger Black community in Vancouver many years ago, but people have been displaced. I definitely want to reach people who not only are of mixed ethnicity but who also identify as Black.

“I’m writing this for the community that I wish were here now. So whether you are Black, of mixed race or can identify with the trauma parts of the book, I think there are different layers in the work where you can see something different every time. That’s what I like with the hybrid form, of poetry and prose.”

Read the entire article here.

Joseph Boyden Won’t Find Indigenous Identity In A Test Tube Of Spit

Canadaland
2017-08-04

Robert Jago

photo by Bryan McBurney

To be First Nations, you must first belong to a nation.

In anticipation of a fall book tour for his new novel, Seven Matches, Joseph Boyden is back in the pages of Maclean’s magazine with an article restating his claim of First Nations ancestry, and anchoring that in the results of a DNA test.

Boyden’s ancestry first came into question late last year when I, along with APTN and a number of other Indigenous activists, questioned Boyden’s right to speak on our behalf. We looked at his shifting claims of ancestry — covered here on CANADALAND — and his misuse of basic First Nations concepts like being “two-spirit,” and we presented the questions to the public for them to decide.

Broadly speaking — though with many notable exceptions — Indigenous people on social media took the position that he was not Indigenous. And broadly speaking, non-Natives, especially those in the media, claimed that he was, and that we had no right as Indigenous people to determine who belonged to our communities…

In his 4,000-word Maclean’s piece, “My name is Joseph Boyden,” Boyden presents several cases for his First Nations bona fides. The article is presented as being addressed to Indigenous critics — but the enthusiastic support of a dwindling number of media figures, like “Appropriation Prize” ring-leader Ken Whyte, perhaps reveals the real intended audience: white Canadians looking for an excuse to turn the page on this controversy and take Boyden back as the leading voice of Indigenous Canada…

Read the entire article here.

He searched for his Japanese birth mother. He found her — and the restaurant she had named after him.

The Washington Post
2018-05-08

Kathryn Tolbert

Bruce Hollywood with his mother, Nobue Ouchi. (Courtesy of Bruce Hollywood)

It began with a heart attack in the Pentagon parking lot in pre-dawn darkness. Air Force Col. Bruce Hollywood was on his way to work and found himself on the ground, thinking: “This is where it ends.”

Later, as he lay in the ambulance racing to Walter Reed Army Hospital, two regrets popped into his head. One was that he wouldn’t be able to help his son with his college applications. The other was that he never thanked the Japanese woman who gave birth to him, then gave him up for adoption in 1960.

Hollywood was adopted by an American couple who were stationed in Japan with the U.S. military and who could offer him a good life in America.

It took that heart attack in 2005 for Hollywood to set out to find his birth mother, something his adoptive mother, who had passed away, had repeatedly encouraged him to do. Before that, he said, he never felt something was missing. His adoption was not something he had reflected on much.

“I always knew I was adopted because I had Asian features and [my father] was an Irishman and [my mother] was a Norwegian lady,” said Hollywood, 57. “And they always told me, ‘…We picked you out special. So you’re even more special than everyone else.’”…

Read the entire article here.

Museum buys 1882 painting by African-American artist who worked in Victoria

The Times Colonist
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
2018-04-24

Louise Dickson

Giant’s Castle Mountain: A.L. Fortune Farm, Enderby B.C. Oct. 6, 1882, painted by Grafton Tyler Brown while he was living in Victoria. Photograph By via Royal B.C. Museum

The Royal B.C. Museum has purchased an major landscape painting by 19th-century African-American artist Grafton Tyler Brown.

The painting — Giant’s Castle Mountain: A.L. Fortune Farm, Enderby B.C. Oct. 6, 1882 — is considered by University of Victoria history professor John Lutz to be the most important of Brown’s B.C. paintings. The painting, bought for $44,000 from Uno Langmann Fine Art Ltd. in March, shows Alexander Leslie Fortune’s farmstead on the edge of a forest. The agrarian foreground is dwarfed by a looming mountain.

The Royal B.C. Museum holds the greatest number and most significant of Brown’s Canadian works. Giant’s Castle Mountain is considered to be a work of artistic and historical significance to British Columbians. It was painted in Victoria after Brown visited the southern Interior…

Read the entire article here.

My family had never seen a Kenyan: The Chinese making a new life in Africa

BBC News
2018-05-10

Rajeev Gupta
BBC World Service, Nairobi, Kenya

Xu Jing and Henry Rotich fell in love a decade ago

“We fell in love but it was very difficult at first,” Xu Jing explains from the courtyard of the Fairmont Hotel in Nairobi.

“My family didn’t know much about Africa at all. They hadn’t even seen a Kenyan before so they were very worried.”

Henry Rotich – the Kenyan in question – was just as concerned.

The pair had fallen for each other after Henry was sent to China to learn Mandarin as part of his government job.

It took him many weeks to get his language skills good enough to meet Jing’s father over a nerve-filled lunch, at which he asked for his blessing.

“Her father didn’t say much so I was really worried about what he was thinking, whether or not he even liked the food we were serving him,” Henry recalls.

Apparently his mastery of Mandarin was enough: a decade later, the couple are living in the Kenyan capital, proud parents to two children.

Jing now teaches Mandarin at the Confucius Institute based at the University of Nairobi, one of an estimated 10,000 Chinese nationals who have moved to the East African state.

Their family provides one snapshot of the growing links between Chinese and Kenyans – propelled somewhat by China’s massive investment in the country…

Read the entire article here.

Dear Current Occupant: A Memoir

BookThug
2018-04-01
132 pages
5 x 1 x 8 inches
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1771663908

Chelene Knight

From Vancouver-based writer Chelene Knight, Dear Current Occupant is a creative nonfiction memoir about home and belonging set in the 80s and 90s of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Using a variety of forms including letters, essays and poems, Knight reflects on her childhood through a series of letters addressed to all of the current occupants now living in the twenty different houses she moved in and out of with her mother and brother. From blurry and fragmented non-chronological memories of trying to fit in with her own family as the only mixed East Indian/Black child, to crystal clear recollections of parental drug use, Knight draws a vivid portrait of memory that still longs for a place and a home.

Peering through windows and doors into intimate, remembered spaces now occupied by strangers, Knight writes to them in order to deconstruct her own past. From the rubble of memory she then builds a real place in order to bring herself back home.

Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California

Pasadena Museum of California Art
490 East Union Street
Pasadena, California 91101
(626) 568-3665
2018-04-04

2018-06-17 through 2018-10-07

Bridget R. Cooks, Curator; Associate Professor of Art History and African American Studies
University of California, Irvine

Grafton Tyler Brown, Grand Canyon and Falls, 1887. Oil on canvas. 30 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art. Photo ©John Wilson White Studio

Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California is organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art and curated by Bridget R. Cooks Ph.D.. The exhibition is supported by the PMCA Board of Directors, PMCA Ambassador Circle, and the California Visionary Fund.

Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918) was a painter, graphic designer, and lithographer in the 19th century. A talented artist and entrepreneur, Brown was the only documented African American in his field in the western United States at the time.

Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Brown learned about lithography while working for a printer in Philadelphia at the age of fourteen. The gold and silver mining boom in the 1800s encouraged him to venture West to establish a business and home. In 1865, Brown founded his first lithography business in San Francisco, where he served the emerging business communities in the area, designing stock certificates for a wide variety of companies ranging from ice to mining corporations, as well as admission tickets, maps, sheet music, advertisements, and billheads…

Read the entire article here.

My name is Joseph Boyden

Maclean’s
2017-08-02

Joseph Boyden

Joseph Boyden (Photograph by Jacob C Boynton)

Being Indigenous isn’t all about DNA. It’s about who you claim, and who claims you.

My name is Joseph Boyden. Late last December I had a hard time wrapping my head around what a Cree Elder I’ve known and respected for 25 years told me when we spoke about the firestorm that questions concerning my ancestry had sparked in Canada over the holidays. This elder told me that I was experiencing a rite of passage. I wanted to tell him that I’d not long ago turned 50, and weren’t rites of passage something geared more toward the teenage years? But I knew to listen and not interrupt. He told me that what I was experiencing was actually a gift.

A gift? People I did and didn’t know were questioning my family’s history, our creation stories, our ancestry. People were questioning me as a fiction writer and a journalist and a vocal activist for Indigenous rights in our country as an honorary witness of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Now, from these months of hindsight, I understand it was the perfect storm brewing. Last October I’d spoken up publicly to demand accountability by a university and its conduct in the treatment of a friend—and the complainants— embroiled in an ugly and horribly mishandled controversy that ended up sending shockwaves beyond literary Canada…

Read the entire article here.