Foreword

Dear Readers,

This special double issue of Frontiers had its origins in a session at the 2005 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women devoted to the topic of intermarriage and North American Indians, in which three soon-to-be intrepid guest editors participated. When Frontiers editor Susan Gray solicited submissions from the session, Cathleen Cahill and Kerry Wynn offered not only their own contributions but their labor for this special issue, and they persuaded Jacki Rand to do so as well. It did not take the Frontiers editor long to accept their generous, if rash, offer. Not only is the topic near and dear to her heart, but as the many references to Frontiers in the notes for this issue attest, the journal has played a leading role in developing the topic as a field of inquiry for feminist scholars. Readers wishing to consider some of these pathbreaking works in relation to the present issue will find two earlier special issues of the journal particularly relevant—Frontiers 23, no. 3 (2002), which draws together essays on intermarriage in four settler societies, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; and Frontiers 28, no. 1–2 (2008), which is more generally focused on domestic colonization, primarily in the US and Australia. In her introduction to the present issue, Tanis Thorne ably documents how the works collected here build on their predecessors while breaking new ground with their scrupulous attention to time and place.

Once the guest editors committed themselves to the project, the issue grew like topsy. Some of the works in this issue came to Frontiers as a result of a call for papers; others were solicited; and still others fortuitously appeared as regular submissions to the journal. We feel particularly fortunate in the artwork we were able to assemble: Carolyn Butler Palmer’s illustrated essay on photographer David Neel and his family of Kwaguitl carvers and a series of images telling the stories of Canadian Indigenous women by Métisse artist Sherry Farrell Racette. Beautiful as it is in graytone, Racette’s work is brilliant in color, so we are also featuring it on our web site: www.asu.edu/clas/history/frontiers .

As we discovered with earlier guest-edited issues, even in this age of global IT, collaboration with far-flung editors and contributors is never a simple process. We would therefore like to thank Cathleen, Jacki, and Kerry for their hard work. As always, we also salute the home team who kept everything on track: Bonnie Thompson, an ASU graduate student in American Indian and women’s history, who served as assistant editor for the volume; Emily Lewis, our editorial assistant; Victoria Hay, editor of the ASU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Journals Office, and Kim Engel, the Journals Office assistant editor in charge of Frontiers.

Susan E. Gray

Gayle Gullett

Tempe, Arizona State University

April 2008