Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion by Dawn Peterson (review)

In Dawn Peterson's nuanced study of "Indian adoption," Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion, the politics of antebellum expansion, constructions of masculinity, and differing conceptions of family intersect in the lives of boys and men from the Seneca, Oneida, Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee Nations (p. 313). Roughly chronologically organized, the book covers the colonial period to Andrew Jackson's presidency through the stories of a series of families. Peterson argues that Native families strategically sent their children to live among and be educated by white people in hopes that they would become linguistically and culturally fluent and return prepared to advocate for their own people as they resisted land encroachment. For a time, this strategy proved effective; these boys became men who successfully defended their families' assets and their tribe's land against the challenges of the federal government and federal agents. But over time, their very fluency worked against them, as federal Indian agents, emboldened under the Jackson administration, defined them as "'half-breeds'" lacking a right to ancestral lands, while the president deemed true Indians insufficiently assimilated to live among white people, rejecting Thomas Jefferson's plan for integration in order to justify Indian removal (p. 280).

This is a book about men and boys, and women and girls play only minor roles due to their almost complete absence from the documentary records. Peterson argues that for individual boys, learning masculinity in white culture involved asserting control over black women's bodies. Some tribes, most notably the Choctaws, sought to use slave ownership as a marker of assimilation and therefore of their right to exist within the U.S. body politic. In some cases, the federal government denied Native property rights by rejecting their rights to slave ownership while also seeking to deprive black Americans of their liberties.

In this environment, Native boys served as a battleground where white men and Native leaders fought each other for control over black people. Peterson flexibly and unconventionally defines adoption as "an array of practices focused on the assimilation of Indian youths … held together by declared desires on the part of U.S. whites to situate Indian people as members of the U.S. body politic" (p. 3). Her definition is inherently communal and is focused less on individual children than on what they represented. She contrasts this definition of adoption with the modern understanding of the legal incorporation of a child into an individual family. We learn relatively little about the daily lives of most of the children who lived among white people or how these children felt about their experiences, but in a few cases, we learn more. For instance, Thomas McKenney, the U.S. superintendent of Indian trade, adopted James Lawrence McDonald, a central figure in the book, in an attempt to bolster a political agenda. In an epilogue, Peterson analyzes the likely apocryphal tale of the adoption and subsequent rejection of a Cherokee boy by Jackson's secretary of war, further underscoring the symbolic function of these boys within the politics of and resistance to expansion rather than as individual members joining actual families.

This is an exhaustively researched book that draws on an impressive breadth of sources, including federal and tribal legal documents, personal papers, official correspondence, and religious records. Readers searching for a history of the conventional adoption of Indian children should look elsewhere, but those seeking insight into the complex racial and gender politics surrounding the education of Native boys need look no further. Peterson has woven together dozens of stories and threads to offer a new way of understanding American antebellum expansion and the resulting Native losses of land and power.