Identity Politics of Difference: The Mixed-Race American Indian Experience - Hardcover

Montgomery, Michelle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1607325438 ISBN 13: 9781607325437

Publisher: University Press of Colorado, 2017

Synopsis

In Identity Politics of Difference, author Michelle R. Montgomery uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine questions of identity construction and multiracialism through the experiences of mixed-race Native American students at a tribal school in New Mexico. She explores the multiple ways in which these students navigate, experience, and understand their racial status and how this status affects their educational success and social interactions.

Montgomery contextualizes students’ representations of their racial identity choices through the compounded race politics of blood quantum and stereotypes of physical features, showing how varying degrees of "Indianness" are determined by peer groups. Based on in-depth interviews with nine students who identify as mixed-race (Native American–White, Native American–Black, and Native American–Hispanic), Montgomery challenges us to scrutinize how the category of “mixed-race” bears different meanings for those who fall under it based on their outward perceptions, including their ability to "pass" as one race or another.

Identity Politics of Difference includes an arsenal of policy implications for advancing equity and social justice in tribal colleges and beyond and actively engages readers to reflect on how they have experienced the identity politics of race throughout their own lives. The book will be a valuable resource to scholars, policy makers, teachers, and school administrators, as well as to students and their families.

About this title

About the Author:

Michelle R. Montgomery is assistant professor in American Indian Studies and Ethnic, Gender and Labor Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Tacoma. An American Indian (Haliwa Saponi/Eastern Band Cherokee) with more than ten years of cultural and traditional values-based stakeholders’ experience in teaching, administering, and developing educational programs, Montgomery focuses her research on action-based aims to put transformed, decolonized educational and research methods into practice through critical race theory, tribal critical race theory, indigenous cultural autonomy, indigenous identity politics, and environmental ethics connected to land-based indigenous identities.

Review:

"A fascinating account of the very complex landscape mixed-race students navigate. . . . This is a very important empirical and theoretical contribution."
—Nancy López, University of New Mexico

“Seeing beyond the essentialist notion of mixed-raced people as tragic racial victims, Michelle Montgomery reveals how they are complex social actors within a dynamic system of racial hierarchy predicated on whiteness. Her study of a New Mexico tribal college breaks new ground in mixed-race studies by showing how mixed-race Native students experience racial hierarchy in interactions with their Native peers. Ultimately, this book exposes the painful and fragmenting hegemonic impact of whiteness as ideology and white supremacy as a social system, both of which need to be critically examined as part of any coherent decolonization effort.”  
—Ricky Allen, University of New Mexico

"Montgomery provides a unique analysis of the mixed-race experience in the American Indian community. Moving beyond the politics of exclusion, Montgomery offers insight into the ways that different identities are valued and performed. Moreover, she allows the participants to describe their own racial assertions, negotiations, and redefinitions in ways that highlight the evolving contours of racial politics in the twenty-first century. This book is a central contribution to anyone serious about studying the changing nature of race in the United States."
—Margaret Hunter, Mills College

“Montgomery’s  book is a much  needed addition to  the literature on Native  Americans in education. Most significantly, Montgomery’s book gives voice to a population often erased from the research and allows mixed-race Native Americans to recognize they are not alone in their experiences.”

—New Mexico Historical Review

About this edition

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1607325438
• ISBN 13: 9781607325437
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 166