Irrevocable Ties and Forgotten Ancestry: The Legacy of Colonial Intermarriage for Descendents of Mixed AncestryPosted in Anthropology, Canada, Dissertations, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Women on 2012-07-26 01:57Z by Steven |
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
April 2008
56 pages
Kim S. Dertien
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Anthropology)
The identities of mixed Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descendents in British Columbia is as varied as it is complex. In this paper I examine what caused some people of mixed Native and non-Native ancestry not to identify as Aboriginal while others did. The point of fracture for those who identify with their Aboriginal origins and those who do not can be traced to a specific time in our history. More importantly, specific variables were instrumental in causing that divergence of identity, spurred by a pervasive social stigma in colonial society. For many of mixed ancestry, the disassociation from their Aboriginal identity led to generations of silence and denial and eventually to a ‘complete disappearance of race’. It was a deliberate breeding out of cultural identity through assimilative ideology and actions in order to conform to European norms.
Determining what factors caused this divergence of identity for mixed-descendents entails considering why many Aboriginal women married non-Native partners in B.C. during the mid-19th century, how intermarriage affected identity formation for offspring, and what the multi-generational effects have been on the identities of mixed descendents. Today, this leaves a dilemma for those in-between who are eligible for status, and for those who are not but who choose to reconnect with, acknowledge and learn more of their ancestry. Both assertions of First Nations identity and choices to reconnect with a First Nations heritage while maintaining a non-Native identity, challenge the assumed inevitability of assimilation, and the federal government’s continuing reluctance to understand the cultural significance of identification as ‘Indian’.
Read the entire thesis here.