ABSTRACT
Patrick Minges's Black Indian Slave Narratives addresses the experiences of former African slaves and their descendants during and immediately after the Civil War. The unsignified presence of 'whiteness' as a basal race matrix, from which all other racial categories seem to be derived, is notable in the former slave women's narratives, as well as in the first two narrative strands of Dorris's novel. The narratives from former slave women address kinship and family structures, domestic affairs and spaces, social interaction and interpersonal relationships, as well as more personal issues of beauty and marriage. The blood quantum concept is a codification of racial identity in particularly Native American contexts to confer and claim tribal membership in registered Native American nations. The central issue surrounding the Radmilla Cody debacle in 1998 was the contested position of people of African and Native descent within Native American communities.
