Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women's Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854–1946 by Katrina Jagodinsky (review)

IN LEGAL CODES AND TALKING TREES, Katrina Jagodinsky brings together a keen understanding of Indigenous, borderlands, gender, and western legal studies to fill a critical gap in our historical understanding of the role of Indigenous women in challenging American settler colonialism. Jagodinsky argues that control of Indigenous women's production, reproduction, and property was critical to the success of the settler-colonial project in the American West; because of this, complex legal regimes developed in the region designed to insure white male supremacy. It was through these territorial court systems themselves, however, that Indigenous women waged their battle against the very assumptions of white male supremacy that served as their foundations.

Legal Codes and Talking Trees examines how Indigenous women utilized territorial courts in attempts—sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful—to defend their bodies, progeny, lands, and lives. Jagodinsky works to recover the preexisting legal philosophies that these Indigenous women drew upon in their confrontations with settler-colonial legal regimes. She argues that historians should take seriously Indigenous traditions and stories as a "form of 'case law' that makes up the legal traditions of Indigenous people" (2). In other words, Indigenous peoples did more than try to understand and navigate the complex web of territorial and federal legal codes to which they suddenly found themselves subjected. Rather, they challenged fundamental assumptions regarding law and justice within the American system with their own sense of how law and justice ought to operate in a good society.

The core of Legal Codes and Talking Trees is the stories of six Indigenous women living in the Arizona and Washington borderlands from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Stories from each region are paired together to explore three different themes: "sex and servitude; gender and family property; and space, race, and gender" (6). While readers might be surprised to see the Sonora and Puget Sound regions examined together, the pairing allows for rich comparative work. Jagodinsky demonstrates important similarities between the cultural practices utilized by Indigenous groups in each region to interact with and incorporate outsiders. Furthermore, Jagodinsky anchors her analysis in the reality of each region not only as borderlands (Indigenous, legal, and political) but also as transnational borderlands. The six women whose stories form the core of this book, then, faced remarkably similar challenges and opportunities arising from their location near the edges of state control and near international borders. Finally, as Jagodinsky demonstrates, the demands of American settler colonialism upon Indigenous women do not differ greatly, even if the legal codes they design to enshrine their pursuit can have meaningful differences.

However, in making these larger comparisons, Jagodinsky does not downplay or ignore the differences between the two regions either. Her nuanced understanding of the differences in both Indigenous and legal cultures in each region is superb. Scholars interested solely in the history of either the Sonora borderlands or the Puget Sound borderlands will find Jagodinsky's work just as valuable as those who wish to benefit from her rich comparisons.

That Arizona's and Washington's territorial legal codes were designed to enshrine white male supremacy is not a surprising revelation, but Jagodinsky's careful and nuanced analysis allows for important insights. Without reducing the agency of the Indigenous women at the heart of her study, Jagodinsky pays careful attention to the white male allies who often assisted the women as they confronted territorial courts. In addition, Jagodinsky analyzes how several of the Indigenous women self-identify as white in various contexts (e.g., census records) not as a betrayal of their own people but as further evidence of these women's conscious attempts to navigate and challenge settler-colonial supremacy.

Jagodinsky's last chapter relates her experiences researching and writing Legal Codes and Talking Trees. It provides a fine blueprint for those who wish to follow her in reclaiming the experiences of Indigenous women...