Mixed Race Studies

Who Gets To Decide Who Is Native American?

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2012-08-09

Michel Martin, Host

Rob Capriccioso, Washington Bureau Chief
Indian Country Today Media Network

Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies
University of Michigan

A controversy about identity has erupted in the race for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. News outlets revealed Democrat Elizabeth Warren claimed Cherokee ancestry during her academic career, and critics say Warren isn’t providing enough documentation to prove her identity. Host Michel Martin discusses just who is Native American.

Listen to the story here. Download the story here. Read the transcript here.

Ancestry isn’t the issue in Warren race

Concord Monitor
Concord, New Hampshire
2012-06-04

Monitor staff

The flap over Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren’s claim of Native American ancestry would be a tempest in a teepee if, that is, the Cherokee she claimed to be on some college forms lived in teepees, which they didn’t. The Cherokee didn’t have princesses either, which hasn’t stopped plenty of people over the years from claiming to be descendants of one.

Warren is in a close race with Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown for Teddy Kennedy’s old seat. The Brown campaign, as any campaign could be expected to do, is using her claim of Native American ancestry to question her honesty. But nothing suggests that the fiery consumer advocate ever sought any advantage from her claim. Whether Warren is or isn’t Native American is irrelevant in the context of a run for the Senate. It’s distracting voters from the economic issues voters care about, but it has focused attention on questions about race and identity that society hasn’t resolved…

…Since Warren’s roots are in Oklahoma, a state with 310,000 Cherokee residents, it’s quite likely that she does have a Native American ancestor. So do millions of other people. But there’s a difference between ancestry and ethnicity, culture and identity. One can do nothing about one’s ancestry, but ethnicity and identity require some degree of participation in a group culture and tradition. By that standard, Warren and countless others with a Native American ancestor are not Native American.

The United States has come a long way since states had laws specifying, for example, what proportion of African American ancestry a person could have and be considered legally white – one-quarter to one-half in some states, not one drop of black blood in Tennessee…

…In 2000, the Census Bureau recognized that by allowing people to check more than one box when asked to identify their race. Though collecting reliable demographic information about race is important to measure the fairness of elections, the targeting of government programs, for medical research and other reasons, it’s debatable how valuable the census information is when millions of people can legitimately check maybe a half dozen or more boxes. Some of the boxes don’t even indicate race but ethnicity. The bureau specifies, for example, that people who think of themselves as Hispanic, Spanish or Latino can be of any race.

By one expert’s estimate, about one-third of America’s population is multi-racial and that percentage is increasing. Intermarriage has made for some amusing family histories. President Obama considers himself black, but according to the New England Historic Genealogical Society he’s related to Warren’s opponent, Scott Brown, and according to other genealogists, to former vice president Dick Cheney, both of whom are white…

Read the entire editorial here.

The Myth of Native American Blood

The Hyphenated Life
The Boston Globe
2012-06-01

Francie Latour

The African-American grandmother of a friend of mine once summed up the laws that govern black identity in this country. “If you ever want to know if someone’s black or not,” she would say, “go ask their white neighbor.”

That succinct, small-town Georgia wisdom essentially outlines the rule of hypodescent, also known as the one-drop rule. The one-drop rule emerged during slavery and hardened in Reconstruction, automatically classifying as black anyone with any trace of African ancestry. It is the reason why, in the 1800s, the extremely light-skinned offspring of white fathers and black mothers were deemed slaves. It’s also the reason why, in 2011, the actress Halle Berry, who is biracial but identifies as black, became a lightning rod of controversy for maintaining that her own daughter, with white Canadian actor Gabriel Aubry, is also black.

The fact that Americans with vastly different complexions know they are black by the number of cab drivers who don’t stop for them as much as by any internal measure is a dilemma on many levels. But for Kim Tallbear, an enrolled member of South Dakota’s Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe and a UC Berkeley professor who studies race, genomics and Native American identity, the tyranny of the one-drop rule poses a specific problem in the ongoing controversy surrounding US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren and her shifting, dubious claims of Native American identity…

…“If you want to understand Native American identity,” Tallbear said, “you need to get outside of that binary, one-drop framework. Native Americans do not fit in that binary. We have been racialized very differently in relationship to whites.”

How do we know Native Americans are racialized differently, Tallbear said? Because a white person—say, Elizabeth Warren, for example—can absorb a Native American ancestor and still maintain an identity as white. If Warren had a black ancestor, that fact would threaten her white identity…

Read the entire essay here.

Does The Heritage Controversy Tell Us More About Warren Or The Media?

Radio Boston
WBUR
2012-05-22

Dan Mauzy, Associate Producer

Hosts

Meghna Chakrabarti, Co-Host

Anthony Brooks, Co-Host

Guests

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law (member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma)
Syracuse University

David Catanese, National Political Reporter
Politico

Here’s a bit of a problem that political reporters have to contend with: How should we handle those stories that appear to distract from what most regard as the big, important issues of the day? When a particular campaign or a political party fans the flames of one of these sidebar stories in an effort to keep a controversy alive, what should the media do?
 
The story about Elizabeth Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry presents one of those challenges.
 
The Harvard law professor who’s challenging Sen. Scott Brown has talked proudly about her Native American heritage, and we’ve learned that she listed herself as a “minority” for nearly a decade back in the late 1980s and early 90s. Warren has tried to explain why and there’s no evidence that Harvard, or any other university, hired her because of her claim…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview (00:25:32) here. Download it here.

Elizabeth Warren’s Birther Moment

The New York Times
2012-05-04

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

If you are 1/32 Cherokee and your grandfather has high cheekbones, does that make you Native American? It depends. Last Friday, Republicans in Massachusetts questioned the racial ancestry of Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senate candidate. Her opponent, Senator Scott Brown, has accused her of using minority status as an American Indian to advance her career as a law professor at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas. The Brown campaign calls her ties to the Cherokee and Delaware nations a “hypocritical sham.”

In a press conference on Wednesday, Warren defended herself, saying, “Native American has been a part of my story, I guess since the day I was born, I don’t know any other way to describe it.” Despite her personal belief in her origins, her opponents have seized this moment in an unnecessary fire drill that guarantees media attention and forestalls real debate…

…The Republican approach to race is to feign that it is irrelevant — until it becomes politically advantageous to bring it up. Birthers question Obama’s state of origin (and implicitly his multiracial heritage) in efforts to disqualify him from the presidency. They characterize him as “other.” For Warren, Massachusetts Republicans place doubts on her racial claims to portray her as an opportunistic academic seeking special treatment. In both birther camps, opponents look to ancestral origins as the smoking gun, and ride the ambiguity for the duration…

Read the entire opinion here.

Elizabeth Warren says she’s Native American. So she is.

The Washington Post
2012-05-04

David Treuer

Suddenly many Americans wonder what it means that Elizabeth Warren, who is vying for Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s U.S. Senate seat, has identified herself as having Cherokee and Delaware Indian heritage. The claim wasn’t sudden, but the furor is.

Some 20 years ago, she listed herself as a minority in a directory of law professors. Recently the authenticity of her heritage, and her reasons for claiming it, have been called into question on the campaign trail. However, the debate should not be about whether she deserves this minority status, but whether we live in a meritocracy…

…An Indian identity is something someone claims for oneself; it is a matter of choice. It is not legally defined and entails no legal benefits. Being an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, however, is a legal status that has nothing to do with identity and everything to do with blood quantum. Members must meet requirements set by the tribe in consultation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (Elizabeth Warren is not enrolled in a tribe and doesn’t seem to have sought such status. She doesn’t claim an Indian identity, just Indian ancestry.) Indians who are not enrolled in a tribe aren’t eligible for the aforementioned programs and benefits, including casino profits, education assistance, hunting privileges and housing…

…My father is Jewish, but I didn’t really grow up around any of my Jewish relatives, so claiming a Jewish identity — despite that heritage — would feel strange, presumptuous, disrespectful. On my mother’s side we have an ancestor by the name of Bonga, who was African and ended up at Leech Lake in Minnesota, where he married a woman of the Ojibwe tribe, and where I grew up. Despite this heritage, it would likewise feel very odd to claim that I am African or African American. (I am something like one-156th African.)…

Read the entire opinion here.

Are you ‘diverse’?

The Boston Globe
2012-05-05

Dante Ramos, Deputy Editorial Page Editor

In the mid-’90s, around the time Elizabeth Warren’s name was appearing on a list of minority law professors, I was applying for entry-level reporting jobs at dozens of newspapers. In a few cases — one of which involved a summer job at a paper tartly critical of affirmative action — something odd happened. First came the nibble of interest; later, the bashful questions: What, exactly, was my ethnic background? Perhaps I’d like to be considered for a minority internship?

At the time, I was in my early 20s, underemployed, and eager to please. But did I qualify? It was hard to say. One of my parents is Filipino; the other is white; my surname is Spanish. Still, I disliked the implication that my dull, dutiful stories, which I’d clipped to my resume, were suddenly fascinating if their author were less ambiguously ethnic. What grated most — what steered me away from these strange, unbidden opportunities — was that no one asked: Are you actually disadvantaged in some way? Does your ethnicity relate in any way to what you’ve written?

Which brings us back to Elizabeth Warren. We may never know whether she played up her scant Native American ancestry to advance her academic career. But whatever the flap says about the Harvard law professor’s US Senate campaign, it also reflects badly on the ham-fisted, box-checking approach that many employers once took toward diversity — and that some still use today…

…Yet if Warren handled this subject badly, let’s admit that it’s impossible to handle well. The question still lurks: Are you “diverse” or not? For mixed-race Americans who mean neither to exploit their ancestry nor minimize it, politely brushing aside the issue is harder than it seems.

Meanwhile, the usual ethnic categories keep blurring at the edges; the 2010 census counted over 9 million Americans as multiracial. Yet as The New York Times reported last summer, many elite colleges still can’t say how multiracial applicants fit in with their diversity goals. So applicants are left to fret: Check every box that applies, or hope that skipping the question entirely won’t keep you from getting in?…

Read the entire article here.

Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England

University of Minnesota Press
2010
296 pages
25 b&w photos, 2 tables
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-6578-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-6577-8

Jean M. O’Brien, (White Earth Ojibwe) Professor of History
University of Minnesota

Across nineteenth-century New England, antiquarians and community leaders wrote hundreds of local histories about the founding and growth of their cities and towns. Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the cradle of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England’s original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled.

In Firsting and Lasting, Jean M. O’Brien argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, as well as censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations, O’Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness.

In order to convince themselves that the Indians had vanished despite their continued presence, O’Brien finds that local historians and their readers embraced notions of racial purity rooted in the century’s scientific racism and saw living Indians as “mixed” and therefore no longer truly Indian. Adaptation to modern life on the part of Indian peoples was used as further evidence of their demise. Indians did not—and have not—accepted this effacement, and O’Brien details how Indians have resisted their erasure through narratives of their own. These debates and the rich and surprising history uncovered in O’Brien’s work continue to have a profound influence on discourses about race and indigenous rights.

Are You an Indian?

Public Broadcasting Service
Independent Lens
Premiere Date: 2011-11-17
Duration: 00:05:25

Though their ethnicities are mixed, the Wampanoag take pride in their tribal heritage.

In this companion piece to the documentary film We Still Live Here—Âs Nutayuneân, Wampanoag tribal members discuss how their multicultural heritage both complicates and enriches their identities as Native American people.

Watch Are You an Indian? on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

The first mixed race student is admitted to Wheaton

Wheaton College History
Wheaton College, Newton, Massachusetts
2011-02-02

Deanna Hauck

The first African-American student to attend Wheaton probably did so unbeknownst to the school. In 1856-57, Mary E. Stafford of Cumberland Island, Georgia attended Wheaton. She was the daughter of a white father [Robert Stafford] and an African-American mother [Elizabeth Bernardey], and seems to have been able to pass as white, since it was not known that she was of mixed race until many years after she had actually attended Wheaton.

Source: General Files: 1856-1857: J. Ehrenhard and M. Bullard, “Stafford Plantations, Cumberland Island National Seashore, Georgia,” p. 16.

Also see: Robert Stafford of Cumberland Island: Growth of a Planter