Comparative racial formations: Chinese exclusion, assimilating Native Americans, and racial ideology in the United States

This dissertation examines critical contexts in the history of Chinese Americans and American Indians from a racial formations perspective. Following the key concepts used to construct these racial formations develops a common ground on which to build a more comprehensive understanding of racial discourse in the United States from 1812 to the year 1925. Chapter two examines the legal contexts leading up to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the parallel context leading up to the Dawes Allotment Act. Treaty rights, court cases, and other government documents offer the common ground for comparing anti-Chinese and anti-Indian racially based policies. Chapter three establishes connections between the racial ideologies leading to white supremacy within missionary discourse about saving heathens abroad through Christian civilization and the parallel educational ideologies directed toward American Indians at home in the form of mission activity and boarding schools designed to "civilize" Indians by removing them from "savagery." It also examines the shift into scientific racialism as a key component of the dominant framework in the 1920's for continuation of these policies during the height of eugenics in the United States.;Chapter four analyzes strategic racialism in the short stories by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and the autobiography of Pardee Lowe that highlights strategies and pitfalls of using mainstream racial constructions to counter dominant anti-Chinese stereotypes. Chapter five examines similar uses of strategic racialism as a critique in the autobiographical writing of three American Indian authors, Charles Eastman, Francis LaFlesche, and Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), who were educated in boarding schools. Chapter 6 concludes by re-contextualizing the work of these authors against the backdrop of the white supremacist entrenchment of dominant American racial formations. Racial constructions of American Indians and Asian Americans offer one comparative context that highlights the persistance of racial essentialism in the dominant racial order of U.S. race relations, and the ways that alternate constructions of race served to both resist this essentialism and may have unintentionally contributed to its persistance.