Blood (19 page)

I titled my second novel
Any Known Blood
to refer to a concept that the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal identified in writing about race in America during World War II. In volume one of
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy
, published in 1944, Myrdal — with his neatly idiosyncratic, foreign phrasing that did such a concise and jolting job of holding up a mirror so that Americans (and Canadians too) could see themselves — had this to say: “Everybody having a known trace of Negro blood in his veins — no matter how far back it was acquired — is classified as a Negro. No amount of white ancestry, except one hundred per cent, will permit entrance to the white race.”

Over the course of history in Canada and the United States, people with both black and white ancestry were not excused from the burdens of slavery, segregation, or racial discrimination if they were perceived to have some white blood. In their cases, white blood didn’t exist. It didn’t matter. It had been polluted. They were judged to be black, and were treated as such, because it was black blood that counted.

The apartheid regime in South Africa built its political base by separating people along lines of blood superiority (or inferiority, if they were black). South Africa tried to keep those deemed “black,” “coloured,” and “Indian” separate in every conceivable way from whites. Marriage and sex between blacks and whites was prohibited. There was always the pencil test, for those who wanted to have their race redefined: if a pencil fell straight through your hair to the floor, you could be reclassified from coloured to white. If the same pencil fell out when you shook your hair, you could switch from black to coloured.

This way of thinking was exemplified by the words and deeds of the late American politician Strom Thurmond. An avowed segregationist, Thurmond served as a U.S. senator for forty-eight years. He switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party over his opposition to the U.S. Civil Rights Act. He is famous for having declared, in a speech in 1948: “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches . . .”

Why does the absurdity of racial definition become so clear in Thurmond’s case? Six months after he died, an African-American named Essie Mae Washington-Williams declared, and proved, that Thurmond fathered her in 1925. At the time, Thurmond was twenty-two, and he slept with and impregnated Carrie Butler, a sixteen-year-old black maid working in his parents’ house. Washington-Williams had to attend an historically
black college, and Thurmond quietly provided funds for her education. For even a man whose most noted public statement was to insist on racial separation, Thurmond must have known deep in his bones that you cannot keep people apart, and that you bear a responsibility toward the things — and the people — that you help to create.

IT HAS BEEN IN
THE
economic interests of government agencies to expand the definition of black identity in order to maximize the economic benefits associated with slave labour, but it was not considered such a valuable idea to define all people with Aboriginal identity as “Indians,” due to the costs associated with providing services to Aboriginal people or recognizing their land rights.

Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act — one legislative act among many stretching as far back as the 1700s in what would become the United States — referred to blood in defining “colored persons” and “Indians”: “Every person in whom there is ascertainable any Negro blood shall be deemed and taken to be a colored person, and every person not a colored person having one-fourth or more of American Indian blood shall be deemed an American Indian.”

The same act employed what has famously been described as the “Pocahontas exception,” declaring that when the blood was watered down, “Indians” would become white for the purposes of the rules of miscegenation: “It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this chapter, the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to such person as has no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons . . .” I have cited the Pocahontas exception to establish that, over the course of time, authorities have defined racial groups — limiting or expanding the range of people included — to suit their own needs and whims.

Defining Native Americans by means of blood quantum (the quantity of so-called Indian blood in their veins) has by no means disappeared today. Many writers and scholars have weighed in on this matter. One of them, the American Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University, notes in an article published in 2006 in the
Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics
, “The U.S. Congress passed the Allotment Act of 1887, denying land rights to those Native Americans who were ‘less than half-blood.’ The U.S. Government still requires American Indians to produce ‘Certificates with Degree of Indian Blood’ in order to qualify for a number of entitlements, including being able to have one’s art so identified. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 made it a crime to identify oneself as a Native American when selling artwork without federal certification authorizing one to make the legitimate claim that one was, indeed, an authentic (‘one-quarter blood’ even in the 1990s) American Indian.”

The problem with equating authenticity to race is that it attempts to quantify a concept that is inherently absurd. To focus on the authenticity of the blood in our veins is to repudiate deeper realities: we construct and negotiate our own identities as acts of social performance from our first to our last days on the planet.

Examples abound in the United States of close adherence to blood quantum in establishing or refuting the identity of American Indians. The Cherokee Freedmen of Oklahoma, for example, have faced an ongoing battle for years to establish that they deserve citizenship and full rights in the Cherokee Nation. Their origin is partially African-American — the Cherokee enslaved their ancestors before the American Civil War. The Cherokee Nation included both Union and Confederate sympathizers. The black slaves of the Cherokee Nation obtained their freedom after the Civil War, and many became members of the Nation. However, in the 1980s, the Cherokee Nation began revoking the citizenship of the Freedmen, unless they could prove descent from ancestors formally listed as “Cherokee By Blood.” In 2007, Cherokee Nation voters approved a constitutional amendment that fully stripped the Freedmen of citizenship status.

American scholar Circe Sturm, who is of Choctaw descent, says that — as with most other Indian nations in the United States — you must have a “certificate degree of Indian blood” (
CDIB
) issued by the U.S. government before you can register as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. In her book
Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma
, Sturm writes: “This small white card, so critical to an individual’s legal and political recognition as a Cherokee tribal member, provides some ‘essential’ information: the individual’s name and degree of Indian blood, in fractions according to tribe. For instance, a fairly typical
CDIB
in Oklahoma might describe someone with multitribal Indian and Euroamerican ancestry in the following manner: seven thirty-seconds Cherokee, two thirty-seconds Kiowa, and two thirty-seconds Choctaw.”

Sturm explains that one does not have to have a certain blood quantum to qualify as a Cherokee, but one must establish a link to Cherokee ancestry in a list (called the Dawes Roll) of Indians assembled between 1899 and 1906 by the American government. The Cherokee Nation now includes more than three hundred thousand enrolled citizens, with defined degrees of Cherokee blood ranging from “full blood” to 1/2,048th. The definitions — including the most minute fractions — of Cherokee blood do give credence to the notion of purity. If one has a higher fraction, is one more Cherokee? Is a black person with dark skin more authentically African in origin than a sibling or friend who has African heritage but lighter skin? The very existence of the Cherokee Freedmen attests to the mixing of people of indigenous and African heritage. Does being of mixed heritage make one less African or less Cherokee? I would hope not. The process of mixing cultures should add to your family ancestry, not subtract from it.

In an article in the
Kenyon Review
in 2010, Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice says, “To be Indian in the twenty-first century is to be something other than Indian, as the only ‘real’ Indians are those locked in museums and nostalgic wet dreams of an imagined and idealized nineteenth-century Wild West.” Justice, who is chair of the First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia, asserts in the article that the Cherokee Nation has the right to determine its membership, but that it also has the responsibility to honour “long-acknowledged obligations to those whose ancestors served the Nation in both captivity and freedom.”

As for the effort by the Cherokee Nation to exclude the Cherokee Freedmen, some will argue that it is racist; others say that it is right and necessary and at the very least a simple reflection of a long history of formal government policies linking blood and race. I say that the struggle proves that we continue to link blood to race in contemporary society and politics.

Canada too has employed rigid definitions of racial identity. For example, the federal government issued instructions in 1901 to Canadian census takers, with regard to racial identity. The instructions included this explanation: “The races of men will be designated by the use of ‘w’ for white, ‘r’ for red, ‘b’ for black and ‘y’ for yellow. The whites are, of course, the Caucasian race, the reds are the American Indian, the blacks are the African or negro, and the yellow are the Mongolian (Japanese and Chinese). But only pure whites will be classified as whites; the children begotten of marriages between whites and any one of the other races will be classed as red, black or yellow, as the case may be, irrespective of the degree of colour.”

In his 2008 article “From Nation to Population: The Racialisation of ‘Métis’ in the Canadian Census” in the journal
Nations and Nationalism
, University of Alberta Métis scholar Chris Andersen writes that in the very early twentieth century, the federal government had even more detailed instructions with regard to how to list Native Canadians in the census. Under a category termed Tribal or Racial Origin, Andersen refers to these detailed government instructions to census takers: “[p]ersons of mixed white and red blood — commonly known as ‘breeds’ — [who] will be described by addition of the initial letters ‘f.b.’ for French breed, ‘e.b.’ for English breed, ‘s.b.’ for Scotch breed and ‘i.b.’ for Irish breed. For example: ‘Cree f.b.’ denotes that the person is racially a mixture of Cree and French; and ‘Chippewa s.b.’ denotes that the person is Chippewa and Scotch. Other mixtures of Indians besides the four above specified are rare, and may be described by the letters ‘o.b.’ for other breed.”

Although it is accepted that the Métis people descend from intermarriages between First Nations women and fur traders (of European origins), Andersen asserts that all Aboriginal peoples in Canada — formally listed in our Constitution as Indians, Inuit, and Métis — are of mixed origins. We imagine First Nations people as full-blooded Indians and the Métis people as something approximating half of that, but Andersen argues that the distinctions between Métis and Indian have never been so neat. The derogatory notion of being half-blood or half-breed, so persistently attached to historic Métis identity in Canada, is really not all that different from the reality of Indians, who also have a significant amount of ancestral mixing but whom we tend to imagine as full-blooded or pure — or, at least, more pure than the Métis.

Although the use of the term
half-breed
has been around for as long as Canada has existed, and although the term remained in the Manitoba Act (part of the Canadian Constitution) until 1982, it would be a mistake to think that it has only recently been deemed offensive. Louis Riel, the Métis leader who negotiated Manitoba’s entry into the Canadian confederation and who was hanged for treason in 1885 after advocating for Métis rights during the Northwest Rebellion, found the word objectionable.

Canadian lawyer Jean Teillet, a Métis and Riel’s great-grandniece, wrote a 2012 annual report called
Métis Law in Canada
, published by her law firm, which quotes Riel on how his people should be described:

The Métis have as paternal ancestors the former employees of the Hudson’s Bay and North-West Companies and as maternal ancestors Indian women belonging to various tribes. The French word Métis is derived from the Latin participle
mixtus
, which means “mixed”; it expresses well the idea it represents. Quite appropriate also, was the corresponding English term “Half-Breed” in the first generation of blood mixing, but now that European blood and Indian blood are mingled to varying degrees, it is no longer generally applicable. The French word Métis expresses the idea of this mixture in as satisfactory a way as possible and becomes, by that fact, a suitable name for our race.

Riel had more to say on the subject. The intimate, conversational, respectful tone of his words is all the more striking, considering that he wrote his last memoir in a jail cell shortly before his execution. This quote from the memoir comes from Auguste Henri de Trémaudan’s book
Hold High Your Heads: History of the Métis Nation in Western Canada
, first published in 1936 and translated by Elizabeth Maquet in 1982:

A little observation in passing without offending anyone. Very polite and amiable people, may sometimes say to a Métis, “You don’t look at all like a Métis. You surely can’t have much Indian blood. Why, you could pass anywhere for pure White.”