Brothers Born of One Mother: British–Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast by Michelle LeMaster (review)

Over the last two decades, we have benefited from several outstanding gender histories of early North America. With notable exceptions like the work of Theda Purdue and others, there has been comparatively less scholarship on the Southeast than on other regions. Addressing this lacuna, Michelle LeMaster’s Brothers Born of One Mother: British–Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast provides a careful analysis of the role of “both complementary and clashing understandings of masculinity and femininity” in five well-organized and clearly written chapters on the gendered nature of diplomacy, war, trade, and marriage, among other concerns (p. 2). LeMaster convincingly demonstrates that gender was fundamental to the development of cross-cultural diplomatic and trade relations. Her careful discussion of gender and colonialism is a key reason I hope the book will be released in a paperback edition better positioned to reach undergraduate and, especially, graduate students.

The colonial Southeast was a complex place. The presence of powerful native nations like the Creeks, Chickasaws, and Cherokees conditioned the evolution of Anglo-Indian relations. Such tribes were neither cowed nor dominated by the British, whose ambitions in the region were further constrained by the Spanish in Florida and the French in Louisiana. British power increased with time, of course, as the deerskin trade waned, as rice and indigo cultivation spread, and as colonial settlements in the Carolinas and Georgia spread into native homelands. LeMaster reveals a fascinating “story of mutual adaptation, dependence, compromise, and negotiation” (p. 7). Throughout, gender proved key to the messy process of “build[ing] a functioning system of diplomacy that drew on agreed-upon tropes and shared practices” (p. 7).

LeMaster’s analysis is thematically tight. For instance, she demonstrates repeatedly that family and kinship metaphors offered both the framework and the machinery for intercultural diplomacy and trade practices. While noting that British and native masculine ideals sufficiently overlapped to facilitate homosocial spaces for diplomacy and trade, she convincingly argues that historians have underestimated the importance of native women’s involvement. Matrilineal clan leaders’ authority shaped diplomacy in significant ways. Other native women served as interpreters, extended hospitality, and conducted informal negotiations. Trade similarly became enmeshed in gendered negotiation. British traders quickly recognized that their success turned on marrying Indian women, to move from outsider to kin. Failing to respect matrilineality and women’s central roles in deerskin trade economies could doom an incautious trader from the start.

Most broadly, LeMaster contends that Native Americans and British settlers sought to maintain long-standing gender ideals and systems. Yet the dynamics of colonialism forced natives and settlers to renegotiate, but not transform, feminine and masculine ideals. This was an uneven process, as pressure on Native American groups increased over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But this is no simple history of decline, and LeMaster is emphatic that “Native Americans adapted to the radical forces of European colonialism without losing the basic foundations of their culture or experiencing substantial transformation in their overall concepts of proper men’s and women’s roles” (p. 11, emphasis in original). In the end, Brothers Born of One Mother offers an engagingly nuanced account of how gender is key to understanding the colonial Southeast. LeMaster’s book should be widely read by students and scholars interested in colonial and Native American history.