Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country by Catherine J. Denial (review)

Catherine Denial’s Making Marriage supports and expands on work in American Indian history that argues against the view of the nineteenth century as a period of Indian defeat and disappearance and instead focuses on American Indian contributions to the shaping of modernity. She joins scholars like Susan Sleeper-Smith (Indian Women and French Men) in demonstrating, largely through a focus on marriage practices, that the nineteenth century was one of indigenous persistence. Focused on the Upper Midwest after the U.S. Fifth Infantry entered the region in 1819 through the 1849 establishment of the Minnesota Territory, Denial analyzes intimate relationships that had political, economic, and social consequences. Her four case studies show how European American concepts of coverture, roles of husbands and wives, slavery, and divorce were negotiated by indigenous, European American, African American, and mixed-heritage inhabitants. Making Marriage illuminates the tensions and spaces between American and Ojibwe, Dakota, and fur trade practices caused by indigenous social formations, marriage ceremonies connected to kinship networks, polygamy, and gendered divisions of labor. Like other historians of the Great Lakes borderlands and Upper Midwest, such as Rebecca Kugel and Michael Witgen, Denial demonstrates ways in which the U.S. infiltration into this space was slow, incomplete, and constantly negotiated through daily interactions and cross-cultural relationships. Her work builds on Witgen’s An Infinity of Nations, in which he argues that “serious political work” and “constant negotiation” would be necessary to make this region part of the American nation-state (21). By focusing on the making and unmaking of marriages, Denial adds another layer to this argument, similarly challenging any remaining vestiges of the triumphant narrative of European American and U.S. expansion.

Denial uses one woman’s ownership of land and Congress’s recognition of this ownership to emphasize the slow movement of the United States into indigenous spaces, demonstrating ways in which the United States recognized Dakota kinship, rights to land, gift giving, and gender roles. She builds her first chapter around the appearance of a land grant to Pelagie Faribault, a daughter of a French fur trader and a Dakota woman, in an unratified 1820 treaty between the United States and the Dakota that also granted the U.S. military the land where Fort St. Anthony (renamed Fort Snelling) would be built. After her death, the U.S. government purchased the land from her heirs. Fort Snelling was a symbol of U.S. expansion, yet at the beginning of this fort’s history, Pelagie’s landownership, recognized by the American state, contradicted the principles of coverture.

The second chapter moves three hundred miles west of Fort Snelling to Lac qui Parle and focuses on the Protestant missionary Mary Riggs, her marriage, and her expectations of the Dakota shaped by her religious beliefs. Denial views marriage as a “barometer of cultural change” and explores how the Dakota, even those associated with the mission, continued formalizing marriages through a series of rites that emphasized the importance of kinship (81). She demonstrates that marriages in “custom of the country”—fur trade marriages dictated largely by indigenous marriage practices and kinship—continued but overlapped with unions recognized through Christian and American legal ceremonies.

In her third case study, Denial argues that the experiences of slaves at Fort Snelling further demonstrate how Americans negotiated social relations as they moved into the Upper Midwest. Like the missionaries who endeavored to Christianize and “civilize” their Native neighbors, the fort and its families were also meant to be a “civilizing” influence and example of American morality. As such, these families were political units and part of the appropriation of Native space. Denial places the marriage of two slaves—Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson—within this context. She argues that Robinson’s owner, a justice of the peace and Indian agent, married Robinson and Scott largely to exemplify acceptable marriage practices (sanctified by...