"Mixed Blood" Indians: Racial Reconstruction in the Early South (review)

"Mixed Blood" Indians is another of Perdue's path-breaking studies of the southern tribes. In this work, she sheds further light on indigenous-white relations in early United States' history. The book's contributions to both U.S. and indigenous history together discredit the misplaced European fascination with racial designations—only heightened by recent world conflicts—and instead re-position the indigenous perspective on behavior at the center of identity.

The study is grounded in an examination of indigenous views of race. The southern Indian nations judged others by their hospitality, reciprocity, and willingness to participate in native life, not by their physical appearance. In the Cherokee nation, for instance, women enjoyed sexual autonomy and controlled tribal contacts with outsiders. White traders and foreigners depended on Indian women for food, translation, and cultural instruction, as well as on their family networks for economic profits. Despite infidelity to their Indian wives, many whites eagerly joined native society. The result of such intermarriages was that a large number of whites inhabited the southern indigenous nations by 1800, along with a growing number of racially mixed children. One strength of the book is the light that it sheds on the relations of indigenous cultures with Europeans in a historical context.

Indians chose some "mixed bloods" who worked within tribal practices of group concensus as leaders to interact with the United States. The analysis of the early nineteenth-century is particularly insightful in its explanation of how such mixed bloods emerged as leaders. At this point, the intricate relationship between tribes, missionaries, and the U.S. government became the framework for subtle changes that saw native people grow more individualistic and acquisitive as a result of increasing economic investments in the new republic. Some Indians of mixed blood became wealthy through the ownership of taverns and slaves. Past studies have criticized leaders of mixed racial heritage for pushing their nations to move west while they remained on ample landholdings in the South. This study shows instead that the vast majority moved west of the Mississippi, with varying results.

Obsessed by race, U.S. politicians attributed skin color to behavior and focused on intermarriage as a way to "redeem" the Indians, place them on a path to civilization, and thus save them from destruction. Missionaries and politicians joined forces to alter indigenous peoples and their cultures. To these determined efforts indigenous people responded as they often had to outside influence: They accepted ideas that they viewed as useful and ignored the rest. When adherence to Christianity did not save them from expulsion from their lands, southern Indians left the churches in droves. Contrary to some earlier studies, Perdue's sources reveal that many mixed bloods resisted displacement and opposed President Jackson. Perdue expresses no surprise that earlier studies that fixated on race derived from the antebellum South, where power, in fact, rested on the enslavement of one race over another.

Discarding earlier studies founded on patrilineal assumptions, this book instead concludes that a more accurate appraisal of indigenous cultures and experience provides evidence that the use of the language of blood simply "makes bad history." The lives of the children born from the intermarriage of southern Indians and whites demonstrate that actions are much more important than titles, economic status, and racial heritage.