Peace Weavers: Uniting the Salish Coast through Cross-Cultural Marriages by Candace Wellman (review)

candace wellman's Peace Weavers: Uniting the Salish Coast through Cross-Cultural Marriages exposes a disregarded history of intermarriages in the Pacific Northwest Coast Salish Territory during the mid-1800s. Wellman uses the metaphor of weaving to describe how four Native women who married white settlers acted as "peace weavers," blending ties across people and cultures. She uses four primary methods for this book: public and private archival collections, research by professional historians, the work of independent historians and scholars, and perfectionist family historians and genealogists. The result is a multilayered approach to exposing these women's histories with great attempts to gather information from various sources.

Peace Weavers consists of an introduction to Coast Salish territory during this time period, with four chapters (one for each woman) focusing on their lives during that time and a conclusion. Historians of Native America, as well as those interested in the history of early intermarriage between white Americans and Native Americans, will find this book especially interesting. By focusing on the lives of four Coast Salish women, Wellman provides intimate knowledge of their lives, detailing various hardships and specifics of life at this time. Wellman analyzes layers to their lives, which include stories of numerous births and deaths, separations, community politics, securing land rights, and, of course, marriage. Each chapter centers on one of four Native women: Caroline Kavanaugh (Samish and Swinomish), Mary Phillips (S'Klallam), Clara Tennant (Lhaq'temish/Lummi), and Nellie Carr (Sto:lo). Every marriage is uniquely described, with detailed stories from archival research and family history filling in information on their lives.

Wellman exposes the power dynamics involved in legitimating marriages, including prohibiting intermarriage based on religion. She describes how the Catholic Church banned Spanish marriage to non-Catholics, leaving people living in the Northwest Coast Salish territory with the only option of tribal custom marriage. Rather than analyze the reasons why intermarriage was discouraged, Wellman provides background to the meaning making of tribal custom marriages. The tribal custom marriages relied heavily upon cultural gifting systems, with the wedding being the setting to exchange gifts between families. Native beliefs of family obligations were significant to the marriage ceremony, meaning the gifts a husband provided represented the wife's value to the community and her family. When a Native woman married, the family understood this as the loss of a valuable contributor in the way of gathering plants, cultivating crops, and making cedar mats and baskets, for which restitution must be paid.

The most valuable contributions of the book are those rooted in Indigenous epistemologies, including the representations of Native women as beneficial to family and community and the meaning making of tribal custom marriages. Wellman addresses a specific cultural clash within the social understandings of marriage, given that Native people and Americans understood marriage differently at this time. Despite compelling cultural implications for marriage, there are examples of custom marriages being treated as not "real" or on par with civil or religious authorities that provided marital paperwork. "Legitimate" marriages dominated and coincided with charges of "fornication" for couples outside of marriage and heavy fines to control and discourage intermarriage.

Wellman notes that her work is meant to bring to light "untold" stories of women's lives, given the lack of attention given to Native women's histories in the United States and active attempts to erase Native peoples from US history. Wellman specifically addresses attempts to keep hidden Native presence as she exposes how at the time many newspapers would exclude the names of Native wives in family obituaries. Despite being married for many years to early settlers, Native wives were largely made invisible as long-term wives, mothers of children, and formidable and well-known members of the local community.

Regardless, the women had valuable knowledge of how to live off the land all while maintaining hereditary resource claims, as was part of Caroline's story. Wellman clearly shows the agency Native women possessed in their abilities to...