This is a talk I gave at Diversity Conference in Łódź not long ago. I am going to develop it into a decently publishable piece.
Let's start with some names first:
Jimi Hendrix - his grandmother was Cherokee, Edmonia Lewis - her mother was Ojibwe, James Brown - part Apache, Langston Hughes - part Native American, Michael Jackson - Choctaw ancestry on his father's side and Blackfoot ancestry on his mother's, Rosa Parks - descended from a Native American slave, Will Smith - part Native American, Tina Turner - identified as Cherokee and Navajo, Oprah Winfrey - part Native American.
Since the early days of US history, Native Americans and
African Americans have been linked by fate, by choice, and by blood. Generalizations
about relationships between American Indians and African Americans are
difficult to make. Time, place, and circumstance shaped the overall parameters.
The nature of relations was neither inevitable nor uniform, and interactions varied from amity to enmity. European power in the South rested
initially on African labor and Indian land, so from the very beginning
colonizers had a vested interest in regulating the races. By the time the United States
emancipated its slaves, a pattern of interaction had developed that pitted the
two peoples against each other. It has to be remembered that Native Americans, African Americans and Whites, built America together. Their
contributions and their interrelationships have filled libraries with scholarly
studies, and history texts. The relationship between Europeans and Native
Americans and between Europeans and Africans have been thoroughly studied. But
one relationship has not. The relationship between red and black people has
been neglected. Historian Carter G. Woodson called it “one of the longest
unwritten chapters in the history of the United States.”
In 1986, William Katz’s book Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage shed light on the existence of
individuals of blended Native American and African American cultural and racial
heritage. Black and Indian were terms that seemed to cancel one another out in
the minds of some potential readers. These two words and the conceptualizations
that accompanied them appeared divorced to critics – as areas of personal and
community identity as well as fields of intertwined intellectual inquiry. Black
Indian was therefore a category akin to ghost in the 1980s, barely visible,
threatening yet incredible, haunting the edges of the American imaginary.
The incredulity of
this public reaction was due to the logical establishment of separate
historical literatures about Native Americans and African Americans since the
turn toward production of scholarly work on black and native people in the
1960s. It was also due to the long tradition and ongoing tendency for major works
in African American history and Native American history to analyze these groups
in relation to white historical actors and the U.S. government rather than in
relation to other groups of color. Pernicious cultural definitions of race also
structured this division, as blackness has been capaciously defined by various
state laws according to the legendary one-drop rule, while Indianness has been
defined by the U.S.
government according to the many buckets rule. While one drop of black blood
makes a person black in American legal and commonsense culture, Indianness can
only be demonstrated by an overwhelming amount of Indian blood, quantified in
the formula of blood quantum. In practical terms set forth by American
officials, “Black” did, in fact, cancel “Indian” out. Anthropologist Circe
Sturm has effectively described this difference between systems of racial
categorization for blacks versus native people, writing: “The rules of
hypodescent played out in such a way that people with any degree of African
American blood were usually classified exclusively as Black.” What Sturm is
trying to say here is that a Black/Indian multiracial combination yields
“Black,” while a White/Indian multiracial combination yields “Indian.”
The expulsion of
the Cherokee Freedmen have risen some questions about whether individuals of
Native and African American heritage are “wannabe Indians.” Jack Forbes, a
noted authority on the relationship between the political manipulation of
ancestry and the racial classification of African Americans, Native Americans,
and “red-black” people, alludes to a less entertained idea, particularly that
the right to self-determination and definition is the right of not only groups
but also individuals. For the sake of discussion we need to as the following
questions. First, what is a Black Indian?, Second, What motivates some African
Americans to claim Native American heritage? The definition of a Black Indian
remains unclear and the diversity of what it means to be a black Indian elusive
if we do not have answers from the people themselves. Therefore, using a
person-centered ethnographic approach allows us to address some general racial
expectations of individuals with blended African American and Native American
heritage. So, what motivates people who look “black” to claim to be Indian?
When answered in a manner divorced from lived experience, this question
produces many misplaced expectations about black and Indian mixed-bloods and
demonstrates the fixity with which American race-making practices ascribe
blackness. The question is of vital importance because it engages the
problematic American cultural practice of assessing and assuming identity from
skin color. It also lies at the intersection of what Americans – including
other Native Americans – expect of people who look “black,” and how Afro-Natives
are raised and socialized within their families to understand themselves.
Racial expectations have affected how black and Indian mixed-bloods have been
understood and why some are motivated to forcefully assert their culturally
specific or generic Native American heritage despite their “black” appearance.
One set of
expectations urges black and Indian mixed-bloods to accept that they are black
and stop “pretending” to be Indian. This scenario requires individuals to
forget that they have Indian relatives and remember that it is skin color that
determines who they are. Other expectations suggest that African American and
Native American mixed-bloods are only trying to claim that they are Indian
based on a remote ancestor, since some Native Americans were historically known
for providing sanctuary for runaway slaves. These expectations about African
and Native American mixed-bloods create several misconceptions, such as
1)
assessments of heritage from
skin color are viable and accurate;
2)
family composition and lived
cultural practices can be determined from an individual’s skin color; and
3)
skin color may indicate
personal motivational forces.
Anthony Wallace and Raymond D. Fogelson draw our
attention to the importance of understanding the types of identities Americans
create to cope with inconsistencies between self-understanding and racial
recognition. They suggest that individuals are simultaneously themselves and
extensions of groups, and the combination may create “an ideal identity, an
image of oneself that one wishes to realize; a feared identity, which one
values negatively and wishes to avoid; a ‘real’ identity, which an individual
thinks closely approximates an accurate representation of the self or reference
group; and a claimed identity that is presented to other for confirmation,
challenge, or negotiation in an effort to move the ‘real’ identity closer to
the ideal and further from the feared identity.”
Thus, while navigating the racial expectations of others
– particularly from peers invested in the maintenance of “real Indianness” and
“real blackness” – within the contexts of everyday interpersonal interactions,
a black and Indian individual with a real identity as one-eighth Cherokee, for
example, may assert an ideal identity as three-quarter Cherokee when around
Native Americans or Caucasians who do not like black people or believe “real”
Indians have high blood quanta. This individual might also claim to be a
half-blood Cherokee raised traditionally in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, out of fear of
being seen as a black “wannabe Indian” when surrounded by other African
Americans or Native Americans who believe black people cannot also be Indians
and do not look “Indian enough.” Despite a thorough illustration by Wallace and
Fogelson of the dynamic nature of identity struggles among Native Americans,
serious misunderstandings regarding whether or not individuals of blended
African American and Native American heritage are really “Indian” continue in
academics and society.
Robert Keith
Collins using examples from ethnographic research with African American and
Choctaw mixed-bloods enumerates three primary categories of Afro-Native
American identity – “blooded” Indians, Freedmen, and reclaimers – and
illustrates the salience of American Indian blood-quantum policies and the
importance of kinship in the lives of African American and Native American
mixed-bloods.
It is also worth
mentioning that no other group better demonstrates the misplaced expectations
that black and Indian mixed-bloods
should be regarded as black than those who were tribally enrolled by their
families at birth, possess a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB) card,
or both. This group consists of individuals with varying degrees of Native
American blood above and below the one-quarter blood marker: this is the degree
that is commonly used by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and many tribal nations
to recognize an individual as Native American. In practical terms, this means
that some black and Indian individuals may be of one-quarter or more Native
American blood (verified by a CDIB card) and enrolled in a federally recognized
nation (verified by a citizenship enrollment card). Others may possess CDIB
cards reflecting blood quanta less than one-quarter Indian, which may make them
nonstatus Indians and ineligible for services in the eyes of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs. In a similar manner, individuals with blood quanta below
one-quarter may find themselves ineligible for enrollment – even though they
possess a CDIB card – in nations that require a blood quantum of one-half. For
example, among the Oklahoma Choctaw and Cherokee, tribal members trace their
lineage through descent from one or more enrollees from the Dawes Roll of 1906
to prove citizenship eligibility. It means that any degree of Indian blood can
be possessed be descendants from the final Dawes Rolls.
“Blooded”
individuals are often raised with a broader sense of self and consider their
blackness part of their Native American history. Self-understanding as an
“Indian”, as Robert Keith Collins tells us, may be more associated with
immediate, extended, and adopted family ties – such as mother, father, friends
of family, clan, and moiety kin – than with their tribe or blood-quantum card.
Robert Keith Collins’ studies of black
Choctaw life experiences, conducted in southeastern Oklahoma and the San Francisco Bay Area,
have revealed that knowledge of what one’s skin color represents to social
peers is usually acquired during interpersonal interactions with nonfamilial
peers. Consequently, parents and grandparents (even those without black blood)
raised black Choctaw children with a variety of life strategies needed to cope
with the prejudices of others. These strategies involved speaking English and
Choctaw at home, reinforcing both Choctaw and African American cultural
practices at home (i.e. attending local Juneteenth celebrations and Stomp
Dances, going to an English-speaking Pentecostal church, singing Christian
hymns at home in Choctaw).
A second type of
Black Indian is the Indian Freedman, or Freedmen descendant. They are most
commonly found among the Five Civilized Tribes – Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw,
Creek, and Seminole. These individuals were slaves, or descendants of slaves,
owned by Native American masters. Freedmen possess varying degrees of Indian
blood; the amount is often below one-quarter and they are usually not
recognized with CDIB cards. Their slave status and visible African American
heritage (as determined by Dawes enrollment agents) originally relegated them
to the Freedmen rolls, regardless of their degree of Indian blood. Some
nations, such as the Choctaw and Creek, have nonetheless allowed movement from
the Freedmen rolls to the blooded rolls for those disenfranchised during an
enrollment process that did not recognize the children of Indian men and slave
women. Chickasaws, on the other hand, outright expelled their Freedmen in the
late 1800s and subsequently refused to recognize them.
Freedmen
descendants have recently been the source of great media controversy,
particularly because the Cherokee and Seminole nations have sought legislation
to expel their Freedmen descendants and dissolve their Freedmen rolls, claiming
these people possess no Indian blood and no longer practice Cherokee or
Seminole culture.
The reclaimers, as
a third type of Black Indian, represent individuals of varying degrees of
Native American blood who are seeking to reclaim this ancestry by asserting a
cultural-specific (sometimes several) or generic Native American identity. The
cultural-specific Native American background for many of these individuals is
as elusive as their culture-specific African background; many know only that
“grandmother was an Indian.” On the other hand, some individuals know their
cultural-specific Native American heritage but simply are not enrolled, while
others are members of state-recognized tribes that are not recognized by the
federal government.
Another type of reclamation can be found among one of
the least-discussed populations of Native America: the ever-growing number of
Native American individuals and families who are refusing to enroll their
children or seek CDIB cards because they disagree with enrollment and/or blood
quantum assessment procedures.
Nowadays, Black and Indian mixed-bloods are under heavy
suspicion. In interpersonal interactions with nonfamilial others they are
expected to be consistent as far as their skin colors and self-understanding
are concerned. When they are not consistent, other people may feel free to
challenge their assertions of Native heritage. In a way, this practice of
identity negation helps motivate such individuals to challenge the misplaced
assumption that they should “just be black.”
Being a Black Indian may be examined in terms of three
defining conditions: “blooded” Indians, Freedmen, and reclaimers. These
conditions involve a range of personal experiences of black and Indian
mixed-bloods which, in turn, might motivate individuals to assert their
American Indian heritage despite social forces that encourage them to “just be
black.” Robert Keith Collins suggest that the motivational forces behind
self-understanding and identity should be an area of central importance to
scholars investigating Native American and African American identities and
interactions.
These three types of Black Indian identity raise more
questions for consideration, such as: how class aspiration influence the way a
mother chooses to raise her children, the advantages that she may seek for
them, and how the children translate these desires into their own lives.
Brak komentarzy:
Prześlij komentarz