Introduction: Intermarriage

Feminist scholars have always been concerned with the problem of classification. As the anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons put it in 1915 human beings have a passion for classification and a fear of anomalies: they fear, in other words, the unclassified and the unclassifiable. Classification, Parsons wrote, has important consequences. Above all it is eminently conservative: It has, she pointed out, the effect of arresting innovative thought. In addition, it is an important means of social control. Social categories are "an unparalleled means of gratifying the will to power," she wrote in Nietzschean terms in 1916. "The classified individual may be held in subjection in ways the unclassified escapes." ¹

The articles in this special issue of Frontiers all deal with this question of classification: that urge to tidy up the untidiness of human desires and actions, and in the process to force people to desire and act in certain ways and not in others. But the focus of these articles is on the actual untidiness of many colonial situations. By looking between the categories of Native and white, colonizer and colonized, the authors reveal a rich field of intimate interracial interactions that are not always exploitative or even unusual.

The normality of some of these interracial interactions is conveyed by the phrase "the custom of the country," a somehow pleasing term, redolent of negotiation, trial and error, and pragmatic experimentation. Sylvia Van Kirk's and Patricia Grimshaw's papers are valuable in elucidating the circumstances in which such indigenous arrangements could develop: in the context of North American trade among well-organized Native communities where intermarriage benefits both trader and Native, husband and wife; and, in the context of New Zealand whaling and other trades, among similarly well-organized Native communities trained in warfare. The customs that developed were different because they were, after all, the customs of the country, but in each case Natives and their children were able to maintain contact with, and status within, both communities. They also had some choice in deciding what elements of each culture to borrow or discard.

Settler societies, with their desire for land and their need for different skills in women, brought with them a different economic relationship with Native populations. They brought European women, supposedly more skilled in farm work, and, to validate dispossession, they brought a more virulent ideology of racial separation and superiority. In British Columbia and the British colony of New Zealand, the legacy of the former trading society protected to some extent those who straddled the racial categories. As Sylvia Van Kirk points out, for example, British Columbia never passed antimiscegenation laws in the way that new states south of the border did. In New Zealand, as Patricia Grimshaw notes, Jane Foley—herself the daughter of a Maori mother and an Irish sea captain—married first a Maori and then an Irishman and was an active member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the most prominent women's organization in the colony. Maori women, along with their menfolk, were given the vote in 1893.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand's neighboring British colony of Victoria—a settler society without the benefit of a previous history of trade and with a Native hunter-gatherer society not organized to defend its interests—Bessy Cameron, another well-educated Native woman married to a so-called "half-caste," was bereft of community, bereft of status, bereft of the vote, bereft even of her children. Indeed, she was stripped completely of identity and of the means to maintain life.

Bessy Cameron's story is a classic of colonial expropriation. But it is not the only story. By focusing on interracial marriages across a range of colonial situations, Grimshaw and Van Kirk have given us a much more nuanced and unstable view of the colonial project—what Ann Stoler has called "the precarious vulnerabilities of imperial systems of control"—and have shown us that the policing of sex to maintain racial and colonial boundaries was a highly contingent and constantly...