Mixed Race Studies

“Employing discredited biological over cultural definitions of who is an Indian and who is not is an assault on our self-determination. We have endured 450 years of forced assimilation which included slavery and post slavery intermarriage, making our walk one of plurality. We are therefore all multiracial. Blood mixing is also believed to be the reason certain phenotypes (physical characteristics) common within Native people also occur in African American populations.”

Julianne Jennings, “The Institutional Racism Against Black Indians,” Indian Country Today Media Network.com (July 4, 2014). http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/07/04/institutional-racism-against-black-indians.

The Institutional Racism Against Black Indians

Indian Country Today Media Network.com
2014-07-04

Julianne Jennings

Black Indians are constantly confronted with the fact that they do not fit any of society’s stereotypes for Native Americans. Those stereotypes are imposed by both whites and sadly, other Indians. This lack of understanding of another nation’s history has interwoven ignorance thus extinguishing fact. Nevertheless, despite their own distortions and mutations of the past, it is interesting to note how the right to remember or forget are not going unnoticed; where personal biographies have intersected with historical watershed events (i.e. slavery, blood-mixing, cultural blending) is now producing historically-conscious discourse about race, racism, and who is a “real” Indian.

Raymond H. Brooks, 72, Montaukett Nation, Long Island, New York, was made furious from a recent posting he read on Facebook. The post read, “My good friend is a real Indian because he lives on an Indian reservation and the government gives him money. That’s how you can tell who a real Indian is.”

Those who hold the power, get to set the rules; and according to Brooks, “Our tribe had its status taken away in 1910 because a New York State county Judge Abel Blackmar said, “We were no longer a tribe because we had intermarried with blacks and whites. And that when he looked around the court room, He didn’t see any Indians” The tribe has been fighting to get their State recognition restored ever since. You can go to the tribes website and read their history and what is currently happening with their Bill (montauktribe.Org).

…Employing discredited biological over cultural definitions of who is an Indian and who is not is an assault on our self-determination. We have endured 450 years of forced assimilation which included slavery and post slavery intermarriage, making our walk one of plurality. We are therefore all multiracial. Blood mixing is also believed to be the reason certain phenotypes (physical characteristics) common within Native people also occur in African American populations…

Read the entire article here.

Mulatto: Less than Human

Indian Country Today
2012-01-16

Julianne Jennings
Arizona State University

Race is not simply about the physical description of human variation. Since its origin in Western science in the eighteenth century, race has been used both to classify and rank human beings according to inferior and superior types. Although race as a concept developed in the West during the age of Enlightenment, prominent Enlightenment thinkers—Carolus Linnaeus, Johann Blumenbach, Lewis Henry Morgan and Samuel George Morton, among others—greatly influenced European ideas about economics, government and science as well as race. Concepts of race eventually spread to many parts of the non-Western world through international commerce, including the slave trade, and later colonial conquest and administration—which have used it as a tool of social division, even among “mixed-race” peoples.

For centuries, a great amount of blood-mixing has occurred, creating “Creole,” “Mestizo,” and other “colored” populations of the New World colonies and possessions of Europe. But what do these labels mean? Haitian anthropologist, Antenor Firmin observes “that human beings have always interbred whenever they came in contact with one another, so that the very notion of races is questionable. Indeed, if not for this fact of the essential unity of humanity, it would be difficult to explain the eugenic crossbreeding that have made the planet sparkle with more human colors than there are nuances in a rainbow”…

Read the entire article here.

My Experience on the Indian-Negro Color Line

Indian Country Today
2011-12-27

Julianne Jennings
Arizona State University

Growing-up on the Indian-Negro color line (I am the daughter of a European mother and a black and Indian father), I lived with mixed signals and coded information by the dominant culture. It had determined that white European culture and people were superior in contrast to those who were generally classified as darker, “primitive” and “uncivilized.” Applying the adage “write what you know,” my master’s thesis was titled “Blood, Race and Sovereignty: The Politics of Indian Identity.” This work would not have been possible without the professors in the Department of Anthropology at Rhode Island College (RIC). They taught me how to challenge racial paradigms and stereotypes that Western society has about Indians; and how to brave racial orthodoxy and search new ways of thinking about our country’s seemingly insoluble problems with race.

Classroom discussions about race motivated me, at the age of 46, to reclaim my Indian ancestry by having my birth certificate changed from “Negro” to “American Indian.” The experience was emotionally overwhelming as I had been denied my birthright as an E. Pequot–Nottoway. Changing my birth certificate was not because I was ashamed of my multiracial identity; it was an affirmation of my survival as an Indian and an act of self-determination in a country that has gone so far to erase my ancestry from history. I assert my tri-racial identity, but most of America’s forms, like birth certificates, at present allow listing only one race. To employ biological over cultural definitions of American Indians reflects a fundamental ignorance of American history and its unprocessed shame of slavery and American Indian traditions. Thus, issues about race are especially important to me, as “mixed-blood” Indians are not considered “authentic” by mainstream society. We have to dress in buckskin; feathers and beads to be taken seriously, yet those with European ancestry do not have to wear tall black hats or buckled shoes to convince others of their ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

Julianne Jennings: The mixed blood of Indians explained

The Providence Journal
Providence, Rhode Island
2009-01-30

Julianne Jennings
Willmantic, Connecticut

EUROPEAN EXPLORERS discovered a land inhabited by an agricultural people who grew corn, beans and squash and who had a sophisticated system of government that, some would argue, would later be adopted by the United States. The settling of a hostile “wilderness” and the near-extinction of Native Americans is now an annual American celebration called Thanksgiving. Every year, school-age children are taught the legend of the first encounter between Indians and the Pilgrims.

Included in the mythical story is a description of what an “authentic” Indian looked like and how he or she behaved. These false images are promulgated in children’s literature and in film and have become the death of many Native Americans who do not fit the popular stereotype, especially Indians who live along the Eastern Seaboard and whose physical features reflect blood mixing.

In New England, after the Pequot War (1636-1637) and the King Philip’s War (1675-1676), the Pequots were either executed, forced into indentured servitude in colonial households, divided among other Eastern tribes, or shipped to Bermuda and the Caribbean as slaves. Today, eight out of ten Native Americans are of mixed blood as a result of slavery and post-slavery intermarriage, particularly in New England. Further, the infamous “one-drop rule,” which is also tied to the colonial slave system, decreed that a single drop of black blood, or a single ancestor who was African, in an individual of mixed race defined that person as black.

After the Pequot War and the King Philip’s War, slavery was a booming business in Bermuda in the late 1600s. The English conducted a census of the population living on the island. There were five categories of race: white, negro, Indian, mulatto and mustees. Mustees were people who were of mixed race but passed for white. During the late 1700s another census was conducted. There were still five categories; however, Indians were now classified as “colored.” After emancipation in 1834, the classification of mustees were dropped, people of color were either negro, colored or mulatto, depending on their features, skin color and hair texture…

Read the entire article here.