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

since the emergence of the New Indian History fifty years ago, scholars have documented the dispossession of Native people through martial violence. The best new work builds on this by explaining how ideological warfare proved equally insidious. Historian Dawn Peterson ably describes how the reconceptualization of American settler colonialism as the inclusion of American Indian people in the Anglo-American sociopolitical family through adoption ultimately justified their exclusion and removal.

In an introduction, nine chapters, and an epilogue, Peterson reveals how adoption served as a metaphor for assimilation and a strategy through which whites assumed authority over American Indian land and resources, including children. Peterson begins by elucidating how American leaders engaged in "reproductive philanthropy" (29). Proponents of the civilization policy predicted that once American Indians conformed to Anglo-American gender roles, their birth rates would soar. In the second chapter, she explores the popularity of Indian adoption, transcending regional and religious divisions within Anglo-American society. Military leaders, including Andrew Jackson, and Quakers, whose pacifism precluded their participation in campaigns against Indian confederacies, advocated the adoption of Indian children into white families. For their part, American Indian leaders seized opportunities to create mediators and place their children in settings where they would learn useful skills and develop bonds with prominent American men.

In chapter 3 Peterson focuses on Silas Dinsmoor, agent to the Choctaws, to show how US officials established patriarchal households in Indian communities that included American Indian people, in this case, Choctaw James McDonald. Dinsmoor justified extending American sovereignty into Choctaw lands by correlating subjugating whole peoples with parenting their children. Peterson next turns her attention to James's mother, Molly, who she argues was representative of elite southern Indians who arranged for the education of their sons in white plantation homes as a form of diplomacy in order to train them in the "soft skills" of plantation patriarchy and to adapt to the spread of cotton agriculture. In chapter 5 Peterson characterizes Andrew Jackson's adoption of a Creek child, Lyncoya, as a rebranding of his conquest of Creeks into an act of benevolence. By describing the boy as the last of his people and bringing him into his home, Jackson created the perfect poster child representing the spread of American patriarchal control. Peterson then shifts to Thomas McKenney, a Quaker bureaucrat who held multiple positions in Indian affairs from 1816 to 1830 and who opened his home to several boys. He promoted the assimilationist ethos of the civilization policy as the political tide turned toward the views of separationist Jacksonians.

In chapter 7 Peterson turns back to the boys like James McDonald who indeed returned to their families as men adept at mediation and who sought to maintain traditional homelands while advancing the civilizing mission, including the spread of chattel slavery. Peterson next explains how Choctaw Academy, a boarding school located on an Anglo-American plantation, facilitated the centralization of the Choctaw government and reinforced the values of elites. The author concludes with a chapter explaining how adopted Native sons disappointed their host families when they returned home to become staunch and skillful opponents of removal. Those who predicted their wards would facilitate the disappearance of Native people realized they had inadvertently helped raise tribal nationalists.

Peterson skillfully draws evidence from missionary records, government documents, and personal papers, and she weaves together intellectual history and biography. Although the focus on a handful of prominent and perhaps representative historical agents makes for an enjoyable read, the discussion of the "relatively small" (5) number of adoptees should have been addressed in the text rather than buried in a footnote. Early chapters at times read like an echo chamber of a small number of voices; there was no shortage of those in the US government who denied the humanity of Indian people even during the peak of this movement encouraging the inclusion of their children in Anglo-American homes. At the same time, the emphasis on natalism and...