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3 Acknowledging Indians in a Bipolar South Shifting Racial Identities On May 16, 1981, Norman Billiot sat in an overcrowded cellblock in Louisiana ’s violent and tense Angola Prison. He was drafting a distressed letter to the state Indian affairs office appealing to Helen Gindrat, LOIA’s new director and fellow Houma community member. He wanted Gindrat to help him with the “racial problem” he was experiencing. Billiot complained that despite the supposed decline of Jim Crow, prison officials continued to segregate inmates according to their race. African American and white inmates were housed in separate cellblocks, creating an uncomfortable situation for Billiot, who did not fit neatly into the prison’s racial categories. He complained that guards forced him into the rigid biracial system by refusing to recognize him as an Indian. “I told them upon my arrival here . . . that I am Indian,” Billiot explained. “The classification officer classified me as ‘white’ anyway.” The prison’s race-based inmate counting procedures exacerbated Billiot’s problems. Depending on the guard on duty, Billiot was frequently counted as African American during the daily counts despite his assignment to a white cellblock. He explained that “if the officer who makes the count is unfamiliar with me, he would count me as black. During the summer I get a really dark complexion, and with my hair being as bushy as it is I can easily be mistaken for black.” On the occasions when Billiot was included in the African American counts, a panic stirred among the prison officials when discrepancies arose in the numbers, and recounts were issued until officers discovered the problem. This practice not only made Billiot unpopular with other inmates, who had to endure repeated headcounts, but it also led to intimidation from prison officials. “I’ve had officers stare at me a minute trying to Shifting Racial Identities 71 figure out if I was black or white,” he wrote. “I’ve had some walk in front of my cell back and forth three and four times trying to figure me out. Others even ask other inmates about my race. I could see in some officers’ facial expressions that they were irritated by trying to figure my race.” Billiot’s anxiety prompted him to give himself the nickname “Indian” so inmates and prison officials would realize that he was neither black nor white.1 Billiot’s situation reflected the continued invisibility of Indians in many areas of the South. He occupied an ambiguous racial space for which the region ’s political and social culture did not easily account. But even within a biracial system not designed to include them,Indians remained part of political and historical processes. As Alexandra Harmon points out in her study of the Puget Sound region,Indian identity is fluid and vulnerable to changing social conditions.2 In the South, the perception that Indians no longer populated the southern states prevailed following the campaign that forced thousands of people to Indian Territory in the 1830s. Indians who returned or simply never left their homelands were accounted for in historical records in a variety of ways,depending on the locale.Most commonly,however,they were given the classification of “free people of color”to designate them as non-white but distinguish them from black slaves.3 When the Jim Crow system of racial segregation took center stage in the 1890s, the category “free people of color” took on a different meaning and blurred the line that once divided Indians and African Americans. Particularly in communities where racial mixing had occurred , the postwar racial hierarchy had no other mechanism with which to deal with those of mixed heritage than to call them “colored.”4 Under the pressures of Jim Crow, southern Indians were left to navigate through a system that either marginalized or mislabeled them. Most Indians rejected the stigma of being associated with African Americans, but others concentrated their efforts on “passing” as white to gain access to white privileges .5 As the director of the Northwest Florida Creek Indian Council explained , “passing as white was seen as a matter of survival for generations.”6 But this was not always an option, much less a desire, of Indians who learned to live under the ill-defined racial category of “other.” Billiot’s experience with the de facto segregation system within Angola Prison—one that continued into the 1980s—reveals the broader impact of the southern Indian movement of the 1970s and 1980s.7 Billiot refused to embrace...

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