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Strategies for Survival Throughout the long and complex history of Indian-white relations (see Washburn 1988), Native Americans have been forced to employ diverse strategies for cultural survival. These ranged from armed con®ict, migration, and concealment , as was the case for the Seminoles who sought refuge in the swamps of southern Florida (Wright 1986), to pleas for supernatural intervention and salvation , as exempli¤ed by the Ghost Dance Religion of 1890 (Mooney 1896; see also DeMallie 1982 and Utley 1979). More recent endeavors for betterment have centered around Indian-controlled education (Szasz and Ryan 1988), litigation in state and federal courts (Deloria and Lytle 1983), and increased political activism (Olson and Wilson 1984:157–178). Even legalized gaming on reservations should be viewed as a quest for empowerment—and for tribes such as the Pequot of Connecticut it certainly has been a successful quest. Earnings from their Foxwoods Resort Casino are reported to be $480 million annually (Moore 1996:1A). There is a commonality found in each of these reactions to white domination: they are, or were, collective phenomena, frequently involving hundreds, at times thousands, of individuals (see Champagne 1989). Many Native Americans, however, pursued another avenue for maximizing their self-interests, one that was extremely personal in nature and one typically restricted to women. The strategy in question, of course, was that of marriage. Signi¤cant social and economic gains could be achieved by marrying non-Indian men. This was especially true during the 19th century, when public opinion concerning Native Americans probably reached its lowest ebb. The intensity of racial hatred some whites harbored for Native Americans is revealed painfully in the published remarks of L. Frank Baum, the author of the beloved children’s classic The Wizard of Oz. On January 3, 1891, Baum, the editor of the Aberdeen Sunday 12 Hypergamy, Quantum, and Reproductive Success The Lost Indian Ancestor Reconsidered Michael H. Logan and Stephen D. Ousley Pioneer, called for “the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries,” Baum declared, shortly after the slaughter at Wounded Knee, “we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth” (Venables 1990:37). Of course, not all Euro-Americans of his day, or earlier, shared Baum’s hatred. Many men, in fact, eagerly sought Native American wives. Most often their motives for intermarriage were legitimate (e.g., respect and romantic attachment). Yet some unions arose solely out of greed, whereby whites took Indian wives to gain resources these women controlled. This was particularly true for the oil-rich Osage in Oklahoma (Huff 1993; Wilson 1982, 1985). While intermarriage conferred certain advantages upon individual Native Americans, such unions greatly undermined their ability to perpetuate longstanding cultural traditions. And the number of Indian women who married white men, irrespective of their motives, was not small. By 1910 nearly 80 percent of the 29,610 Cherokees in Oklahoma had a non-Indian ancestor (Dixon 1915:33). This trend of increasing admixture continued throughout the 20th century for the Cherokee and other tribal nations. And for some tribes, such as the Catawba of South Carolina, intermarriage was nearly universal: 96 percent of their marriages involved a Euro-American spouse (Moore and Campbell 1995:504). The U.S. Congress recently estimated that by the year 2080 only 8 percent of the Indian peoples living in the United States will have a quantum level (proportion of American Indian ancestry) of one-half or more (Bordewich 1996:46). Aside from social and economic rewards, another bene¤t arose from Indianwhite marriages, although it probably remained unknown to the couple. As will be demonstrated momentarily with data collected by Franz Boas and his coworkers , admixed females at the close of the 19th century enjoyed greater reproductive success than their full-blood counterparts. Interestingly, as quantum level declines , the fecundity (number of births) of adult females and survivorship of their offspring increase. And the correlation between quantum and reproductive success is highly signi¤cant statistically. This ¤nding makes the frequently heard claim that someone’s great-grandmother was an Indian all the more understandable (Logan 1990; Thornton 1990:172–174). Hypergamy The term hypergamy means that marriage serves as a vehicle for upward social mobility for either the bride or the groom. The more common variant of hyperCulture Contact and Exchange 185 gamous unions is hypergyny, in which a woman realizes social, economic, and...

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