Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly
As scholars of the mixed race experience, we pride ourselves on recognizing the shortcomings of racial categories. For the most part, we agree that the constructed quality of race and ethnicity renders them inaccurate as markers of identity. These markers, by definition, are essentially incapable of portraying an individual’s or a community’s experiences. Necessarily, the emerging field of multiracial studies embodies sensitivity to racial erasure, which occurs all too frequently in the maintenance of a monoracial order common to the United States and elsewhere.1 For students and scholars of multiracial studies, to honor one’s right to identify as one chooses represents a key ideological commitment.2
It is with this self-celebratory claim in mind that I call attention to sanctioned acts of erasure taking place within the field. Simply put, when an African American asserts indigenous ancestry, glares of disbelief and giggles often accompany such identification. This rejection of identity is rooted in the assumption that many African Americans are misguided by fantastical tales of Indian princesses serving as the matriarchal heads of their families.3 Other, more critical assumptions include the belief that some African Americans are engaged in a move to betray Blackness. Refusing to recognize as authentic the progeny of such a union between Black and Red has become increasingly acceptable, particularly at the intersection of academia and popular culture.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., on his show Finding Your Roots, frequently offers crude commentary regarding the prevalence of African Americans who affirm Native ancestry. Gates suggests that most African Americans are duped by the belief that they have Native ancestors.4 In a conversation with White House Senior Advisor Valerie Bowman Jarrett, he sarcastically quipped, “Well, you and every other Negro I know claim to have Native ancestry.” Jarrett responded, “But we really do.” Gates explained that her case was in effect exceptional because she actually was 5 percent Asian/Native, as quantified by the pseudo-scientific genetic testing upon which his show relies.5 More generally, the use of genetic testing to identify racial or even ethnic identity has reemerged with a capitalistic rigor. At-home genetic test sets from 23andMe, which promise to let consumers know their true race, are flying off the shelves. As scholars who research matters of race and ethnicity, we have yet to grapple with, much less agree upon, a pedagogical path forward. For decades scholars of ethnic studies have stood before students insisting that race is not biological—it is social. Yet here was a Harvard professor pretending it was biological.6
It is no surprise that Gates would feel so free to dismiss the existence of African American Natives. Studying multiracial identity within the context of the African American experience is frequently met with resistance, even suspicion.7 The record of US slavery and Jim Crow segregation (or the reverence that history commands) often prevents mixed race African Americans from embracing multiplicity, as they might consider themselves as caretakers of a legacy. In some cases the assertion of a monoracial identity signals a loyalty to the complexity of the African American experience, both triumphant and oppressive. In other words, for some “being Black” is a calling to safeguard the historical record of the African American experience.
Met with resistance, historians and sociologists have nevertheless researched and profiled African American Indians. In the 1970s, historian Gary B. Nash’s Red, White and Black set ablaze this field of inquiry with his watershed analysis of colonial-era relationships between African Americans and Natives in North America. Since then historians like William Loren Katz, Jack Forbes, Circe Sturm, James F. Brooks, Theda Perdue, and Claudio Saunt have gone on to produce comprehensive histories specific to various eras and regions of the United States.8
In 2009, in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Gabrielle Tayac edited a beautiful anthology of the often-hidden histories of blended African American and Indian families: IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas.9 Theda Purdue, author of the landmark book “Mixed Blood” Indians, contributed a chapter to Tayac’s anthology, which directly informs this chapter. In her chapter, “Native Americans, African Americans and Jim Crow,” Perdue explained that African American and Native relationships were “neither inevitable nor uniform.” Particularly germane to my research among mixed race Makah of African descent, she stressed that during the height of Jim Crow “most Indians did not make common cause with African Americans . . . [but rather] police[d] their own racial boundaries [and] discourage[ed] unions with African Americans but generally not whites.”10
When I began this project I imagined I’d find two sets of racial rules: one set of norms functioning on the reservation and the other operating outside those territorial boundaries. Historian Carey McWilliams spoke to this phenomenon when he wrote, “there are always two nations in every nation: the dominant on-going nation, enchanted with its self-proclaimed virtues . . . and another nation that exists . . . half-buried, [and] seldom surfacing.”11 Instead, my research of mixed race Makah in Neah Bay, Washington, dismissed an oversimplistic focus on borders and replaced those related binary assumptions with a racial system that more closely resembled concentric circles of race hierarchy.
This chapter is based on interviews with several members of a racially complicated family—mainly Black, Indian, and Filipino—though it is centered on an account of the racial experiences of one individual: Landon Zendell Wimberly. The people I interviewed navigated various racial spaces as they maintained complex racial and ethnic consciousness. Indeed their experiences were impacted by racial norms within and beyond various geographic boundaries, but were also ameliorated by the interactions they had with different racial or ethnic groups. On the Makah Reservation (“the rez”) in Neah Bay, mixed race Natives of African descent in particular grappled with tribal relations and racism from within. Beyond the rez extending to the larger communities of the Olympic Peninsula, they confronted racism not exclusively related to their Native ancestry but as a result of their African American heritage as well.12 Each of the mixed race Makah I interviewed had previously lived in Oxnard, California, for a significant amount of time. In California, the increased presence of Black and Brown people rendered both positive and negative receptions, which became more welcoming over time.13
While conducting the interviews, I was quite surprised to learn how prominent the calculation of “blood quantum” remained in their everyday lives.14 Landon Wimberly, an enrolled member of the Makah nation, has African American roots, which extend to the states of New Jersey and Georgia. According to family records and his testimony, Landon’s Makah mother, Jo Ann Della, was one-eighth Makah, one-eighth Quileute, one-quarter Irish, and one-half Filipino. Landon’s father, Ritchie Wimberly, who identifies as African American, has a family lineage that includes ancestors from Portugal, Germany, and the Cherokee Nation. Landon’s maternal cousin Natalie Aguirre, who is also an enrolled member of the Makah Nation, shared the same maternal heritage but indicated that she was half Puerto Rican. She explained that when she visits her family in Puerto Rico the racial norms are further complicated by a language barrier.
This study is not about two nations, one on the rez and one off. Rather it is about the ways in which these mixed race Makah experienced the multiple points of identity formation and reinforcement, as they interacted with different peoples in different regions of the world. One can think of their identities as a series of concentric circles having one central space in common. At the center of this layered system stands the consciousness of successful mixed race Makah cousins whose commitment to family trumps loyalties to race, class, nation, or tribe.
I waited to interview Landon in Daleena’s Wellness Center. Daleena, the mother of Landon’s three children and his life partner, is also an enrolled member of the Makah Nation. Her Wellness Center, which is attached to their very large two-story home, smelled of lemon grass, lavender, Himalayan salt, and smoke from the wood burning in their potbelly stove. As I readied my voice recorder, notes, and questions I felt mesmerized by a picture of Daleena’s great-grandmother taken in 1915 by Edward Curtis, who titled the photo, “Makah Maiden.” The same picture adorns the main entrance of the Makah Cultural and Research Center, a museum located on the rez.15 The Makah are one of the few tribes that host and control their own museum.16 The museum houses artifacts collected during the 1960s and 1970s from the Ozette archeological excavation project, which unearthed over fifty-five thousand artifacts from a five-hundred-year-old Makah village. It is the pride of the fourteen hundred Makah who live in Neah Bay today.17
Landon and I immediately began joking about the unique considerations endemic to maintaining a mixed race identity. We talked about the old joke that serves as a sort of caveat to mixed folks of African descent, which warns, “When the revolution comes, you better know where you stand! You’re Black”! As a mixed race woman of African American and Irish descent, I laughed and said, “But when the revolution comes, what am I going to do with my White father? Hide him in the basement? These are real people we’re talking about.” We identified with each other and homed in on a key theme of this chapter: the notion that both internal and external pressures to maintain monoracial identity may indeed result in a sort of intellectual racial erasure, but more importantly it discounts the relevance of really important people—our loved ones, our families.18
At this point, the reader may question the familiar tenor between Landon and me. He is my stepson. The fact that I am married to his father might raise ethical concerns in some readers’ minds. Could I be an unbiased observer in a family of which I am a part? In stark contrast to my work, anthropologist Elizabeth Colson stayed with the Makah in 1941, she said, to “collect life histories.”19 Colson expressed no remorse when she admitted to interviewing the Makah under false pretenses. She admitted to conducting phony “‘formal interviews’ to maintain the fiction that [she] was interested in the old times.”20 She had no problem lying to the Makah while paying informants. It’s no wonder that she did not feel that she “was ever in complete confidence of any member of the group.”21
By contrast, I sensed strongly that both Landon and Natalie felt completely comfortable to be honest with me. This project was not necessarily about the Makah per se; it was about giving voice to people who lived as a minority within a minority. To ensure integrity, they each maintained complete control over which parts of the interviews would make it into this chapter. I follow the lead of Janine Bowechop, director of the Makah Cultural and Research Center, who explained, “I always felt it was more meaningful to offer criticism from within than to wage a blind war from afar.”22 As a member of this Makah family, I am telling their story from within.
Landon has a cornucopia of ethnic possibilities. His mother, Jo Ann Della, was born to Beverly Violet Daniels Della and Eulalio Della in 1953. Beverly’s mother, Lucille Kallappa, was half Makah and half Quileute and her father was Irish. Beverly’s husband Eulalio was Filipino. Lucille’s intermixture of Makah and Quileute is not out of the ordinary, as coastal Natives practiced intermarriage oftentimes to reinforce peace treaties and tribal alliances. The Makah and Quileute also shared what Makah elder Melissa Peterson-Renault calls “resource acquisition areas.”23 The seas and land of the Olympic Peninsula fed and supported various groups governed by intertribal arrangements. One can perceive a kind of identity agency operating among Native peoples. That is, individuals with complicated ancestry may assert Indian identity even while they also may have non-Native ancestors. This assertion may bring a measure of social and economic mobility to mixed race Natives.
Nonetheless, my suggestion of the potential power of Indian or Native identity in no way diminishes the decimation or destructive reeducation suffered by the vast majority of indigenous peoples in North America. Like many other states, Washington instituted compulsory “Indian Education,” and Beverly was forced into an Indian Boarding School as a young teenager. The conditions were so horrible that Beverly ran away from school and eventually made her way to Seattle. Anthropologist Carolynn J. Marr conducted extensive research on the horrors Indians in the Pacific Northwest endured. In one interview she captured the type of brutality one would suffer if one attempted to run away from the Chemawa Boarding School in Salem, Oregon, where many of the Makah resided. A Makah woman named Helma Ward described such consequences to Marr: “Two of our girls ran away . . . but they got caught. They tied their legs up, tied their hands behind their backs, put them in the middle of the hallway so that if they fell, fell asleep or something, the matron would hear them and she’d get out there and whip them and make them stand up again.”24
Beverly eventually met her considerably older, soon-to-be husband Eulalio Della, a Filipino sailor whom the US Navy recruited from Subic Bay, Philippines, in the early 1930s.25 Eulalio was also a runaway of sorts as he had literally jumped ship to leave the Navy and settle in Seattle. The couple for a time moved back to the reservation, but, according to family lore, life proved terribly difficult there. While the federal government initiated restrictions on their fishing rights, the reservation’s remote location hampered economic development. Moreover, the terrain was not suitable for commercial agriculture, like so many other reservations in the United States.26 Despite the fact that the state constructed a public school at Neah Bay in 1932, the assimilation policy of Natives remained so abusive that the school forbade any expression of Makah culture, especially the use and retention of language.27
In addition, as the 1930s came to a close, war loomed in the Pacific. Members of another Filipino family, the Pasquals, who lived on the rez at that time, were often mistaken as Japanese men and as such were detained on the Air Force base located nearby.28 By the early 1940s, out of frustration and fear, Eulalio and Beverly moved to Oxnard, California, a small agricultural town where Eulalio worked as an agricultural laborer for the remainder of his life.29
How did the lives of Makah and Filipinos intersect? From a macro-analytical view there are two key patterns that fostered relationships between Natives and Filipinos: agricultural migratory patterns from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest and land lease agreements, which allowed Filipinos to circumvent alien land laws.30 Rick Baldoz explained how Indian “sovereignty over reservation land” in Washington provided a loophole through which Filipinos could experience potential economic and social mobility.31 According to Baldoz, the incidents of Filipinos settling on reservations and leasing or buying Indian land raised two important concerns among those Whites interested in maintaining social and economic control. That is, the legal relationship between Indian tribes and Filipinos over the leasing of land alarmed White officials, who understood these “alliances as a threat to their domination over both populations.”32 Essentially, land agreements had the potential to undo a monoracial order. Vigilantes, anti-immigrant Grange organizations, and elected officials in Washington accused Filipinos of “alien subterfuge,” when Filipino men accessed land through intermarriage with Indian women.33 In the case of the Della couple, leasing land may not have been the central issue. However, because of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, no matter what her other obstacles, Beverly enjoyed US citizenship whereas Eulalio did not.34 In that sense, her Indian identity would provide Eulalio a legal position he would not enjoy otherwise. In other words, in comparison to Eulalio, she had identity power. Interwoven cultural traditions of Filipinos and Indians when banded together had the potential to create something stronger, something impenetrable. Like a tightly braided basket, an Indian and Filipino couple together might be better suited to bear the weight of restrictive US policy.
Rudy Guevarra Jr., in Becoming Mexipino, also explored the ways in which Filipino and Mexican labor migratory patterns (from the Pacific Northwest to San Diego) resulted in interethnic couplings. Guevarra described the relationship between Filipinos and Mexicans in twentieth-century California as one characterized by “cooperation and disagreement.” Guevarra contends that an ethnic group’s ability to selectively assert Whiteness is a powerful differential in terms of comparative power and mobility. In Guevarra’s study Filipinos could not claim social power by asserting Whiteness, while those of Mexican descent could.35 In this case study, it is the Makah who get to selectively assert Whiteness or Indianness, which directly impacts the social reception of African-descended, mixed race Makah.
My interview with Landon provided important insights into the cost of affirming a mixed identity in rez life and also revealed how the addition of African ancestry impacted the ways in which people received him both on and off the rez. Over the course of several days we explored his experiences of racial reinforcement as a child: the fear and courage he felt in the face of racism, the impact of his relationship choices, the importance of blood quantum in Makah life, and finally what he considers to be the “long-term genocide” of Native peoples. Landon is a successful commercial fisherman and does well financially. His work ethic is geared toward productivity, but not as a means of simple wealth accumulation. Rather, he prides himself on being a source of support for his family. Many of his extended family members rely on him as a paternal figure. As an educated man, he has put many of his younger Makah relatives through college. In his role as a football and basketball coach Landon works with Makah youth extensively. Landon is the provider for his family, but his most treasured role is that of a father to his two sons and daughter.
Landon recalled his first recollection of his racial or ethnic self. “It had to be when I was really young. Probably kindergarten or first grade . . . when all the little Mexican kids [in Oxnard were] talking about ‘Negroes.’” I asked if there was context to this memory. Was his class learning about some related issue like slavery or the civil rights movement? With humor in his heart he responded, “No! I was like, I’m not one.” Landon first heard the term “Negro” while living in Oxnard with both his parents. He recalled being dropped off at school by his father: “That’s when they started calling me that. It made me feel a little bit different. I was a little timid and shy of who would drop me off. [The students] didn’t know I was Black. Maybe they thought I was Mexican. A lot of older guys called me ‘choncho’ because I could pass as a Spanish cat or a Mexican. So they made up their own little name.”
Landon had moved to and from the rez several times during his life. He lived in Oxnard until he was about seven or eight years old, when he, along with his entire Makah family (with the exception of Eulalio who had died), moved up to the rez in the early 1980s. Landon explained that life in Oxnard became tough personally and the entire family considered the rez a safe haven. This is consistent with Paul Spickard and W. Jeffrey Burroughs’s observation, which pointed to the data provided by the 1970 and 1980s censuses that demonstrated a huge increase in the number of people who identified as Indian. As a result of the political mobilization of the 1960s, native groups throughout the country began to win “substantial new benefits” that led to an increase of people who “flooded back . . . to reservations” while embracing the new “social cachet” of being Indian.36 Landon returned to Oxnard while he attended the ninth and tenth grades, made his way back to the rez for eleventh grade, and then moved back yet again to Oxnard to complete his senior year. He stayed in Oxnard until 2005 and then made his final move back to Neah Bay, where he lives today. When I asked about what it felt like to be called “Negro” and about his identity, he emphasized the importance of location: “You know everywhere I went it was just different. Over here [in Washington] there’s mixed Natives. In Cali there were a lot of Mexicans and Blacks that I hung out with. Everybody knew what I was. My mom would always tell me: ‘This is what you are . . . and set me straight [as to] who I am.’ She would tell me that I’m half Black, Filipino, Indian and Irish. She would tell me constantly. So I told everybody that. This is what I am. [However,] up here it’s a little more racist.”37 Because of the racism in Neah Bay, Landon explained that as a child he was sometimes “scared of being Black.” This is consistent with Claudio Saunt’s study of mixed race Oklahoma Creek Indians. Saunt argued that Creeks mixed with Black ancestry “bore the heavier burden,” when compared to those whose ancestors included Whites and Creeks.38
“When you moved back to the rez in the 1980s did you feel pressure to go one way or the other?” He replied, “No. I just came here [to the rez] and now it was Indians instead of Mexicans. The Indians were telling me the same thing. ‘You’re Black.’ I always told everybody what I was.” Landon didn’t yearn for approval from the Makah so much because he had it from his parents. “I didn’t need anybody else’s approval as long as my mom and my grandmother told me I was good, I was good. But it was weird. Their generation would say ‘niggers,’ all while hugging me.” Landon’s temperament is extremely confident. One would be hard-pressed to find any evidence of self-pity. Rather than to internalize racism, Landon receives racial slurs as challenges to prove others wrong. But for this interview he was willing to open up about the harmful impact of racism: “I never liked being called a nigger. I got called it a lot. I used to tell my mom, ‘I got called a nigger today.’ It made me mad. She raised me to stand up for myself. It hurt. It always hurt but she’d say, ‘You just got to be strong—be stronger than these guys.’ . . . I got called it by grown people.”39
As a young child Landon recalled being “scared to be Black because I didn’t want the N-word coming.” He recounted an exchange between himself and his PE teacher. “I was in third or fourth grade. We were playing hockey with my class and the PE teacher said, ‘give me the ball, you little fucking nigger.’ It stuck with me until today.” He recalled another incident with a fourth grade substitute teacher from Crescent, Washington: “His name was Mr. Phillips and everybody was talking [while] it was quiet time and he just came and grabbed me by the back of my head and just hit it across the desk. He came all the way to me and just slammed my head. I thought, ‘how do they let these guys teach?’ The kid sitting next to me was crying and I just whispered [in a reassuring tone,] ‘you’re all right man. Be quiet.’”40
Landon gained his strength as a protector, a caretaker of his family, his tribe, and friends. I identified and shared that I too felt shielded from racism by becoming a protector. He responded, “I never liked bullies. I’d protect people. I always have.” Another incident that occurred at a football jamboree, also in Crescent, proved to be a turning point for the remainder of Landon’s life. From thence forward he committed to confronting racism directly. He recalled, “I had made varsity at the age of thirteen. We went to a jamboree at Crescent Loggers, which is a town (near Clallam) about fifty miles from the rez. It was the beginning of the season and everything was packed. There were four to six teams present.” He was with his fifteen-year-old maternal cousin Jazz Aguirre, who also had an African American biological father. Landon reveled in the memory of having a very successful football showing. He was involved in a lot of tackles. “When I was running the ball I could hear players calling me ‘nigger.’ . . . I’d make a tackle and I’d hear, ‘nigger.’” I asked him if hearing that slur bothered him, and he unequivocally said, “No. I just wanted to make another tackle. I wanted to feel my fire. Other team members were like seventeen or eighteen years old and I was an eighth grader.” It was a sunny Saturday afternoon and as the games finished at two o’clock fights broke out: “All you heard was players [standing] by their parents yelling out ‘nigger.’ Jazz was on the sideline and when the game ended we walked over to the boys [and said] . . . ‘Oh, you calling people “niggers”? You wanna do something.’ These towns hate each other. They don’t like Indians; they don’t like niggers and we were both. Cooler heads prevailed and somehow the fights settled.”
I asked if these sorts of exchanges happened frequently. He replied, “Yes, it still happens. They still call us names.” Again, I sought clarification as to whether this was regional. He reasoned that it occurred more often in northern Washington “because there are not too many Black people up here.” In contrast, he explained, “In Oxnard, you know them all. It’s like you know all the Black kids in every school. You know them. It seems like there were a lot.” What was most important about this story was Landon’s ability to confront racism directly. “The football thing made me feel good because you hold people accountable for what they say.” Landon would have plenty more opportunities to continue to hold people accountable. In both Washington and California he committed to confronting racism directly: “I was tired of everybody disrespecting Black people. So I was like what’s up? I checked so many people . . . even up here.”
When Landon lived in Oxnard he lived with his father. I sensed that his father definitely modeled Black manhood for him. We discussed him watching his dad “shave” with Magic Shave, a lye-based powder used commonly in the Black community to remove facial hair. Landon traveled with his father frequently to the East Coast to visit the Black side of his family in Paterson, New Jersey. From Landon’s perspective, his Black identity was deeply rooted in positive experiences, enough to combat those rumbles with racism. Nonetheless, I asked if he ever felt that he had to prove his Blackness. He answered, “No. I was very proud of being Black. [Especially in] Cali, I embraced my Blackness. All my friends were Black.” You never had brothas test your Blackness? “Well, a couple of times, but I was told that I was the Blackest mixed kid anybody ever knew.” He described it as sort of a state of mind. “It’s like going to Africa and telling them, ‘Yo, I’m Black.’ They might say, ‘Yeah right.’ But I say, ‘It’s not how much you have in you [that matters], it’s if you’re proud of it. It’s about how you walk [figuratively], and how you carry that thing.’” Here in the most elegant, concise manner Landon laid out the social constructedness of racial identity. However, his identity was also influenced by region. He explained that when he was in California “I’d be straight Negro there.” His choice of the term “Negro” was not rooted in the lexicon of outdated, racist terms from the mid-twentieth century, but rather he spoke from a place of deep esteem and pride. It’s difficult to convey this cultural cue in print, but it was clearly a term of endearment. His description of being “straight Negro” I understood as an uninhibited, unencumbered expression of identity, rather than some shift in racial consciousness. He made it clear that for all his various heritages—Black, Native, Filipino, White—“I consider myself to be 100 percent of each.”41
“Over here there’s something about it. I say, ‘us Natives or us Indians . . . and they say, ‘who you trying to fool?’” I asked Landon if he had ever been called a “paper Indian,” a derogatory reference to those born off the reservation but who were enrolled later in life. He replied, “They’ve called me an adoptee.” When Landon returned to the rez in the early 1980s his Aunt Susan included him in what is known as a “blanket adoption.” He explained, “When I am here, I say ‘I got Native in me.’ Most people don’t buy that I am Native.” I asked if that were true off or on the rez. He answered, “On the rez.” Despite the fact that the entire tribe knows the Della name, and that Landon is enrolled, with his BIA card tucked safely in his wallet, he admitted, “I still have to prove that I am Native. A lot of people still confuse me with Jazz. They’ve known us for thirty years.” Jazz Aguirre is Landon’s maternal cousin whose biological father is also African American but whose Dad is Puerto Rican. Earlier that same day, Natalie, Landon’s maternal cousin and Jazz’s sister, confirmed how racist it was on the rez, and that it was more difficult for Jazz and Landon, ostensibly because they both have Black fathers. In fact, she said, “It’s like they’re one.”42 Landon said with assurance, “It’s just more comfortable saying that I am a Black man. That’s what most people on the West Coast see me as. I get a different thing on the East Coast. [There,] I am a mixed Black man.”
We discussed how all Makah are mixed, but that only those who are conspicuously mixed, like himself, experience it as such. I asked him if he ever wished that there were more mixed Black people in Neah Bay. “No, I never wished it. I always thought I was special. That’s what my mom always told me. Anything I did I approached it with extreme confidence. Everything came easy for me. That’s because of my mixedness. That’s because of my allness.” With these types of studies on mixed race consciousness, it might be tempting to envision the people as psychologically divided. This is not the case with Landon. He is a well-rounded, whole person whose term “allness” captures that essence.
While interviewing Landon I wondered whether his racial identity influenced his choice of romantic partners. Apparently, he was quite the ladies’ man, but identified three central romantic relationships. His first love was African American, his next love was Filipina, and his life partner, Daleena, is Makah. I asked if their ethnic or racial identities impacted his own identity, and he said “No” but explained that sometimes his mixed identity allowed a particular woman’s family to accept him more easily. Thus, when his Filipino girlfriend’s family found out that he was mixed with Filipino, they were much more approving of their relationship. However, at the end of the day, he explained, “In a way, I could relate with all of them: Black, Filipino and Indian.” I asked if having children with a Makah woman reinforced his Makah identity. He responded, “I am what I am. With her it made it stronger because my kids have a little more blood quantum of Makah.”
Circe Sturm examined the prominence of proving fractions of blood among Native peoples; however, it still shocked me that discussions of blood quantum were part of everyday conversations on the rez. It is ironic that fractions of blood were used to subjugate African Americans in the Jim Crow era and that Natives still rely so heavily on the same system. Landon offered some clarity: “They look at it as land and money. Who’s more deserving? I know Natives here that were half Makah twenty years ago but now they are on the books as five-sixteenths. It’s politics. It’s who’s working the books. . . . [It’s] who has the [authority] to change things.” I asked if council members change the numbers. He said, “They are not supposed to but record keepers can change things.”
Trying to get a better sense of the logic, I proposed that if someone were to alter a Makah’s ancestral record, wouldn’t it behoove the tribe to increase “blood quantum”? Landon elaborated on the complexity of “blood politics” and how class tensions impact the whole system. That is, financially insecure Makah tend to tout having more Makah blood. Those, like Landon, who are financially stable don’t really think about it as often. This was more than some esoteric conversation we were having. He recently tried to get his brother adopted by the tribe and class jealousy derailed the adoption. At the tribal council meeting when Landon and other supporters attempted to advocate on behalf of his brother getting adopted and thereby enrolled, another Makah man “showed up and argued that you have to have one-quarter Makah blood to vote at council.” A tribal elder shut the man down, but the tribe still voted to not adopt David. Landon is convinced that class jealously was the main reason for the denial.
While discussing the requirement to prove Native identity and the significance of blood quantum we stumbled on a question: How does the Makah Nation continue to survive while members continue to intermarry with non-Makah? With a limited number of tribal members, could emphasizing one’s mixedness threaten the survival of the Makah? We discussed Natalie’s observation that “some people want you to be one-quarter Makah to vote at council.” She warned, “What? Do you want people to go back to incest . . . to keep the blood line high?”43 Many tribes have faced this conundrum and some have resorted to approving marriage among cousins. But for today’s Makah that option is considered taboo.
Looking at the larger picture, Landon said, “It’s not that complicated. It’s genocidal here.” He was definitely not advocating incest but went on to say, “The only way the Makah are going to survive is to stay with each other. It’s long-term genocide unless Natives figure out a way to stay together. This is how it works for me: [We’re] all Coastal Natives. In order to conquer people, you divide and then start giving them names: Makah, Quileutes, Quinaults, Hoh, etc. It’s all the same thing. You just start dividing to say you’re better.” Landon went on to assert that tensions among tribes reduced intertribal marriages and then rhetorically asked, “How [do] you do that and keep your blood high? Once they gave us names, and we were no longer Coastal Indians, it became just long-term genocide. You could change a whole nationality in one generation.”
He offered me a new perspective, one different from the widespread concern among academics who fear that using terms like “Native” or “Indian” suggests cultural homogeneity and results in panethnic cultural genocide. Here, Landon suggested that by identifying separate tribes, we unwittingly encourage competition and disunity. Eventually, each group is less apt to intermarry because of tensions between tribes, which ultimately results in shrinking populations among all Coastal Indians. He ended with, “Everybody is going to look like Sean Penn in another thirty years.”
Nonetheless, both Landon and Natalie agreed that the irony of the Makah is that they are all mixed. Both insisted that there were no pure Makah. In terms of the cost of identifying as mixed, I asked if there existed a status hierarchy. Despite the fact that Natalie believed Neah Bay to be “very racist,” she concluded that in terms of ethnic or racial status the order would be something like this: “mixed White-Makah, mixed Filipino-Makah, mixed Black-Makah, and mixed Mexican-Makah.” Some of the race hierarchy may be based on tribal survival. For example, pitting the plight of Indians against African Americans was fairly common, particularly in the 1960s. The Seattle Times in 1968 ran an article titled “State Indians Worse Off Than Negroes.”44 It is tempting to conclude that influences from beyond the reservation were solely to blame for this stratification, but Melissa Peterson-Renault argued that status hierarchy is not new to the Makah social structure. She explained that “the Makah classes [of] chieftain, commoner, and slave [have long] established a specific hierarchy of duties and responsibilities.”45
Concerns for tribal survival impacted whether one would or should emphasize one’s mixed identity. Clearly, mixed race people have a more or less difficult time identifying as mixed depending on where they live and among whom. Among the Makah, emphasizing mixedness has higher costs. That is, if I identify as Black there’s no loss, real or imagined, to the Irish. For the Makah, there are treaties depending on quantifiable population trends; their very survival as a people is at stake. Treaties governing land, residences, health care, education, fishing, and hunting rights are at stake. According to Makah elder Peterson-Renault, the “main goal of the tribe . . . is to protect treaty rights, as these rights are constantly being challenged.”46
Peterson-Renault’s interpretation is consistent with Alexandra Harmon’s argument in Indians in the Making that “more than any other group, Indians . . . have had to defend their claims [of identity] with a frequency and rigor seldom demanded of people in other ethnic or racial classes.”47 Harmon explained that this phenomenon is of tremendous importance because the US government through its treaty obligations “reserves valuable resources to Indians but lacks a single definition of Indian.”48
This chapter has examined the perceptions and experiences of some members of the Makah nation who identify as mixed race, and one man in particular who identities as both African American and Indian. He is a Black man, a mixed man, a Native, and an Indian. As researchers we might struggle with this sort of messy plurality of identity, but it is the voice of a real person who stands as an expert on his own life. My central focus in this chapter has been to examine and redeem the existence of the African Native American through the eyes of one man. We participated in the traditional sort of interview, but I was also able to peek in and enjoy what it means to be Makah and what it means to stay Black while being Native. When Landon first picked up my husband, our youngest son, our daughter, and me from the airport we were on a mission to get ham hocks. It was the day after Christmas, and we flew in for these interviews but more importantly we came to spend time with our family. Landon wanted collard greens and fried chicken. We laughed at this bizarre stereotype some might find offensive. I remember, out of ignorance, asking where on earth we could get ham hocks along the five-hour drive from Seattle to Neah Bay. Landon explained that it was no problem. We were going to “Tacoma, the Compton of Washington.” In Tacoma, we found everything we needed and had a splendid southern New Year’s Eve dinner: fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and collards with ham hocks. I knew there were Black communities that settled all throughout the Pacific Northwest, particularly during the nineteenth century, but that fact resonated only in historical terms. I didn’t consciously factor in the existence of contemporary Black communities located in various cities from Seattle to the rez.49 When we arrived many hours later, we settled into our four-year-old granddaughter’s room. The next morning as I awoke I realized we had slept in a little princess room, but it wasn’t Disney’s version of Pocahontas that I saw. Instead, the walls were adorned with Princess Tatiana, Disney’s first African American princess. Despite the fact that Landon’s children do not appear to be of African descent, he and Daleena have made it their business to teach them about their entire identity. When our eight-year-old grandson sees other Black children he just assumes they are related to him. Landon shared with me that his son often says, “Dad I want to get brown” and with pride he continues, “Dad, I’m browner than this cousin or that cousin.” It seems that racial self-loathing is nowhere to be found in their home.
The days that followed on the rez were filled with cheer. Friends and family paraded through every day. Landon’s Korean fishermen friends dropped by for the New Year’s party, the children on New Year’s Day broke out in a traditional Makah dance with a drum that beat in sync with their little feet and warrior poses. Daleena cooked Filipino adobo and rice and reminded me that Landon needed rice at every meal. All these cultures were ever-present, at every minute, and yet standing in relief was this larger, more important idea: the vital role of family. Landon’s central identity was and remains rooted in the term family. In fact, he’s tattooed with the word. This value transcends tribal, ethnic, or racial affiliation, but it is also a very Makah choice to make. As Peterson-Renault insisted, “family [is] the fabric of Makah life.”50
This chapter is dedicated to Jo Ann Della, Landon Zendell Wimberly, Ritchie Wimberly, Natalie Aguirre, and Jazz Aguirre. I am eternally grateful to the Makah Cultural and Research Center and to author, proprietor of Raven’s Corner, and Elder Melissa Peterson-Renault.
1. For a discussion of “monoracism,” see Marc P. Johnston and Kevin L. Nadal, “Multiracial Microaggressions: Exposing Monoracism in Everyday Life and Clinical Practice,” in Microaggressions and Marginality: Manifestation, Dynamics, and Impact, ed. Derald Wing Sue (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2010), 123–144.
2. Maria P. P. Root, “A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People,” in The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier, ed. Maria P. P. Root (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 3–14.
3. In this chapter I use the word “indigenous” as an umbrella term. Because I aim to refer to people in the manner in which they prefer, I employ the term “Indian” or “Native” interchangeably when recounting a story or when writing a general description. I use the term “Makah” when I refer to a self-described member of the Makah tribe.
4. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “High Cheekbones and Straight Black Hair? 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro: Why Most Black People Aren’t ‘Part Indian,’ Despite Family Lore,” Root, April 21, 2014, http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2014/04/why_most_black_people_aren_t_part_indian.4.html.
5. “We Come from People,” in Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (KOCE, October 28, 2014, DVD). It is unclear which ethnicities constitute the so-called “Asian/Native” group.
6. Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World, rev. ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2007); Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994); Paul Spickard and W. Jeffrey Burroughs, eds., We Are a People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999); Jonathan Marks, Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995); Paul Spickard, “The Return of Scientific Racism? DNA Ancestry Testing, Race, and the New Eugenics Movement,” in Race in Mind: Critical Essays (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 142–173.
7. Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Michele Elam, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999).
8. Gary B. Nash, Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974); Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); William Loren Katz, Black Indians: The Hidden Heritage (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); James F. Brooks, ed., Confounding the Color Line: The Black-Indian Experience in North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Theda Perdue, “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Claudio Saunt, Black, White, Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
9. Gabrielle Tayac, Ed., IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2009). See also Theda Perdue, “Native Americans, African Americans and Jim Crow,” in Tayac, IndiVisible, 21–33.
10. Perdue, “Native Americans,” 21–25.
11. Carey McWilliams, “Introduction,” in America Is in the Heart, by Carlos Bulosan (1946; repr., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), xxi.
12. Here, my use of the term “Native” serves two functions. First, it reflects what the people of Neah Bay call themselves. Second, it reflects an inclusive impulse to recognize that many self-described Makah are a mixture of various tribes indigenous to the Olympic Peninsula, including the Quinault, Quileute, Hoh, Makah, etc. See Melissa Peterson-Renault, “‘Makah’: Melissa Peterson and the Makah Cultural and Research Center,” in Native People of the Olympic Peninsula: Who We Are, by the Olympic Peninsula Intertribal Cultural Advisory Committee, ed. Jacilee Wray (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 151–167.
13. Landon Wimberly, interview by Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, Makah Reservation, Neah Bay, WA, January 2, 2014; Natalie Aguirre, interview by Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, Makah Reservation, Neah Bay, WA, December 30, 2013.
14. See Sturm, Blood Politics for a comprehensive examination of the prevalence of blood quantum politics among Native tribes in the United States generally and among the Cherokee in particular.
15. I employ the term “rez” when referring to the Makah reservation.
16. Greg Kolfax, Makah Cultural and Research Center, interview by Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, Makah Reservation, Neah Bay, WA, January 3, 2014; Ann M. Renker, “Makah Tribe: People of the Sea and the Forest” (University of Washington Digital Collections), https://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/renker.html.
17. There are 2,303 enrolled members of the Makah Nation. Eighteen hundred people live in Neah Bay, but of those only fourteen hundred are Makah. See Peterson-Renault, “Makah,” 159.
18. Wimberly interview.
19. Elizabeth Colson, The Makah Indians: A Study of an Indian Tribe in Modern American Society, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1977), v.
20. Ibid., vii.
21. Ibid., vii.
22. Janine Bowechop, “Preface,” in Voices of a Thousand People, ed. Patricia Erikson, with Helma Ward and Kirk Wachendorf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), xi.
23. Peterson-Renault, “Makah,” 151.
24. Carolyn J. Marr, “Assimilation through Education: Indian Boarding Schools in the Pacific Northwest” (University of Washington Digital Collections, n.d.), https://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/marr.html#bibliography.
25. Wimberly interview.
26. Marr, “Assimilation through Education.”
27. By the 1960s and 1970s a move to reintroduce the Makah Language found its way back through elementary and secondary curricula; the movement flourishes today. See Peterson-Renault, “Makah,” 160. For a thorough history of Indian assimilation, see David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: The American Indian Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).
28. Colson, Makah Indians, 27.
29. Wimberly interview. For a biographical examination of the migrant labor pattern from Washington to California, see Bulosan, America Is in the Heart.
30. Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946 (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 67, 108; Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 6–7.
31. Baldoz, Third Asiatic Invasion, 106–107.
32. Ibid., 108.
33. Ibid., 108.
34. Peterson-Renault, “Makah,” 161.
35. Guevarra, Becoming Mexipino, 6.
36. Paul Spickard and W. Jeffrey Burroughs, “We Are a People,” in Spickard and Burroughs, We Are a People, 11.
37. Wimberly interview.
38. Saunt, Black, White, Indian, 210.
39. Wimberly interview.
40. Wimberly interview.
41. Landon Wimberly, telephone interview by Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, Chicago, November 16, 2014.
42. Aguirre interview.
43. Aguirre interview.
44. Don Hannula, “State Indians Worse Off Than Negroes,” Seattle Times (July 26, 1968): 9, reprinted in Alexandra Harmon, Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 222.
45. Peterson-Renault, “Makah,” 156.
46. Peterson-Renault, “Makah,” 161.
47. Harmon, Indians in the Making, 3.
48. Ibid., 252n7.
49. For excellent histories on Black settlement of the Pacific Northwest, see Esther Hall Mumford, Seattle’s Black Victorians, 1852–1901 (Seattle: Ananse Press, 1980); Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994); Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). For films, see Shaun Scott, producer and director, “The End of Old Days” (Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project, January 3, 2015), http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/film_end_days.htm.
50. Peterson-Renault, “Makah,” 156.