Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887-1937

Introduction

Introduction When, only a few weeks after our first meeting, I promised to marry Dr. Eastman, it was with a thrilling sense of two-fold consecration. I gave myself wholly in that hour to the traditional duties of wife and mother, abruptly relinquishing all thought of an independent career for the making of a home. At the same time, I embraced with a new and deeper zeal the conception of life-long service to my husband’s people. Elaine Goodale Eastman, Sister to the Sioux When white, middle-class schoolteacher Elaine Goodale made the decision to marry Dakota doctor Charles Eastman in 1891, she did so, she later remembered, with “a thrilling sense of two-fold consecration.” Eastman was aware that her marriage was more than simply the natural consequence of strong feelings between a young man and woman. It was also part of the United States’ project of finding a long-term solution to its “Indian problem.” While she loved Charles, she was also conscious that her marriage would be a public demonstration of the possibilities of Native American assimilation. More than that of most white women at the time, her marriage had meaning in both the private and public spheres. As Kevin J. Mumford has pointed out, “Sex across the color line always represents more than just sex.”1 This book explores what marriages between white women and indigenous men reveal about race relations in two settler societies, the United States and Australia, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which both nations were imagining ways in which indigenous people were to be assimilated into the mainstream. Finding out who participated in such marriages, what happened to them, and what others thought about it enlightens us with a peculiar directness about the racial, social, and national contexts in which they took place. Scholars have paid increasing attention to the history of interracial sex, particularly the shameful story of the casual, often exploitative, relationships between white men and indigenous women, but there have been few in-depth studies of interracial relationships that involved white women.2 Apart from Martha Hodes, who has written an influential history of nineteenth-century marriages and sexual relationships between white women and black men in the American South, few American scholars have focused with any detail on relationships between white women and nonwhite men.3 In Australia, too, histories deal with the subject of interracial relationships mainly in terms of the exploitative sexual relations between Aboriginal women and white men.4 Many historians have recognized how seldom relationships involving white women and indigenous men occurred. Australian historian Henry Reynolds, for example, has described the “almost impenetrable barriers of prejudice preventing intimacy between Aboriginal men and European women.” Future research “may uncover evidence of relationships of even marriages between Aboriginal men and European women, but they seem to have been rare.”5 This book proceeds from the premise that rare events and exceptions to the rule such as marriages between white women and indigenous men can tell historians much about the rules themselves. I am, of course, not the first to argue this about cross-cultural associations. A number of studies of interracial relationships explore their role in the colonial project , and there is a growing body of scholarship on the ideology of miscegenation in general.6 Postcolonial theorist Ann Laura Stoler has recently identified a need for scholars to address “how intimate domains—sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement, and child rearing—figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule.”7 Interracial relationships have much to tell about racial hierarchies, colonial culture, and social mores. My aim, then, has been to investigate marriages of white women and indigenous men in Australia and the United States and then employ them x | introduction to explore and compare the settler societies in which they took place. I have not tried to comprehensively unearth examples of relationships between white women and indigenous men in a certain time or place, nor to write a broad history of sexual relations between colonizers and colonized. This book, I hope, is more than an exploration of individual lives or a tally of couples who came together despite the odds. I have made some deliberate choices about how to approach this topic. While there are moments in the book where marriages of white men and indigenous women are touched on, I...