“Johnson suggested that as non-white peoples being oppressed by Southern whites, they should empathize with black slaves. In reality, his suggestion would have greatly offended Cherokee leaders, whose claim to civilization had become about not being black. In an 1829 article in the Cherokee Phoenix, Elias Boudinot wrote that “Indians…are red, not black, and therefore cannot be treated with gross injustice like negro slaves.” Cherokee leaders used an emerging racial hierarchy to distinguish themselves from all blacks. In the end, Johnson did not directly condemn the ownership of slaves by Cherokees, but he criticized them for their willingness to support the institution through publication. He felt that they unwittingly assisted white slaveholders who wanted them removed to western lands.”
Cherokee Slaveholders and Radical Abolitionists: An Unlikely Alliance in Antebellum America” by: Natalie Joy
This map is taken from Edward T. Price’s 1953 article “A Geographic Analysis of White-Negro-Indian Racial Mixtures in Eastern United States.” Like Johnson, Price groups “Croatans” in with other “mixed-blood” or “tri-racial isolate” groups. In fact, his article directly cites Johnson’s 1939 piece, “Personality in a White-Negro-Indian Community.” Note too that Price categorizes Lumbees with groups with such names as Moors and Cubans. In the text of the article, Price also mentions the “Turks” of South Carolina. The attribution of Latin or Middle Eastern ancestry was a common theme in the naming/classification of ambiguous, darker-skinned, nonblack groups in the Southeast. Lumbees were sometimes said to have Portuguese ancestry, for example.
(Source: jalwhite)
As for those who “mingled their blood” with African-Americans, they, too, would be absorbed—though they might not like the consequences. Let us consider the example of the Gingashins. This eastern tribe had two strikes against it: Its members refused to give up their traditional lifeways; even worse, they intermarried freely and unashamedly with blacks.
This was anathema to Virginia elites. Intermarriage with whites could be, and was, tolerated. Intermarriage with blacks, however, was an intolerable challenge to the arbitrary color line that had been in place since the first chattel slavery law passed in 1661. Thus, in 1813, the Gingashins made their way into the history books, becoming the first U.S. tribe to be terminated.
Needless to say, Gingashin identity did not die with the legal decree. As late as 1855, Rountree notes, county maps showed an “Indian Town,” an Indiantown Creek, and a settlement of seven houses. Eventually, however, white antagonism, not to mention opportunism, forced the Gingashins to merge into a sympathetic African-American community. Tribes such as the Pamunkeys, Mattaponis, Upper Mattaponis, Nansemonds, Rappahannocks, and Chickahominies took note of the lesson—and learned how to resist.
A century later, armed with the awesome power of the state, Plecker declared war on these people. Consulting a listing of surnames associated with Native American ancestry— such as Beverly (from beaver), Sparrow, Penn or Pinn, Fields, Bear, and so on—and drawing his authority from century-old census records that were likely to list Indians as “mulattoes”—particularly if the census were taken in summertime, Houck notes— Plecker embarked on a crusade to re-classify every Native American in the state as an African-American.
Battles in Red, Black, and White: Virginia’s Racial Integrity Law of 1924
This beautifully written book tells the haunting saga of a quintessentially American family. It is the story of Shoe Boots, a famed Cherokee warrior and successful farmer, and Doll, an African slave he acquired in the late 1790s. Over the next thirty years, Shoe Boots and Doll lived together as master and slave and also as lifelong partners who, with their children and grandchildren, experienced key events in American history—including slavery, the Creek War, the founding of the Cherokee Nation and subsequent removal of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War. This is the gripping story of their lives, in slavery and in freedom. Meticulously crafted from historical and literary sources, Ties That Bind vividly portrays the members of the Shoeboots family. Doll emerges as an especially poignant character, whose life is mostly known through the records of things done to her—her purchase, her marriage, the loss of her children—but also through her moving petition to the federal government for the pension owed to her as Shoe Boots’s widow. A sensitive rendition of the hard realities of black slavery within Native American nations, the book provides the fullest picture we have of the myriad complexities, ironies, and tensions among African Americans, Native Americans, and whites in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Circe Sturm takes a bold and original approach to one of the most highly charged and important issues in the United States today: race and national identity. Focusing on the Oklahoma Cherokee, she examines how Cherokee identity is socially and politically constructed, and how that process is embedded in ideas of blood, color, and race. Not quite a century ago, blood degree varied among Cherokee citizens from full blood to 1/256, but today the range is far greater—from full blood to 1/2048. This trend raises questions about the symbolic significance of blood and the degree to which blood connections can stretch and still carry a sense of legitimacy. It also raises questions about how much racial blending can occur before Cherokees cease to be identified as a distinct people and what danger is posed to Cherokee sovereignty if the federal government continues to identify Cherokees and other Native Americans on a racial basis. Combining contemporary ethnography and ethnohistory, Sturm’s sophisticated and insightful analysis probes the intersection of race and national identity, the process of nation formation, and the dangers in linking racial and national identities.
In Becoming Indian, author Circe Sturm examines Cherokee identity politics and the phenomenon of racial shifting. Racial shifters, as described by Sturm, are people who have changed their racial self-identification from non-Indian to Indian on the US Census. Many racial shifters are people who, while looking for their roots, have recently discovered their Native American ancestry. Others have family stories of an Indian great-great-grandmother or -grandfather they have not been able to document. Still others have long known they were of Native American descent, including their tribal affiliation, but only recently have become interested in reclaiming this aspect of their family history. Despite their differences, racial shifters share a conviction that they have Indian blood when asserting claims of indigeneity. Becoming Indian explores the social and cultural values that lie behind this phenomenon and delves into the motivations of these Americans—from so many different walks of life—to reinscribe their autobiographies and find deep personal and collective meaning in reclaiming their Indianness. Sturm points out that “becoming Indian” was not something people were quite as willing to do forty years ago—the willingness to do so now reveals much about the shifting politics of race and indigeneity in the United States.
Excerpt available online (PDF).
