Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

“You Think It Strange That I Can Love an Indian”: Native Men, White Women, and Marriage in the Indian Service

“You Think It Strange That I Can Love an Indian”: Native Men, White Women, and Marriage in the... "You Think It Strange That I Can Love an Indian"1 Native Men, White Women, and Marriage in the Indian Service cathleen d. cahill The history of intermarriage between whites and American Indians is a halftold tale. Scholars have produced an impressive body of work on the political and economic benefits that accrued from pairings between white men and Native women, but the literature on relationships between Native men and white women remains sparse.2 Studies focusing on unions between white men and Native women are often situated on frontiers where whites accepted the relationships (if sometimes grudgingly), particularly when the couples remained outside of white society. Relationships between white women and Indian men, by contrast, were more deeply interwoven into the fabric of white society because of white women's symbolic importance as the moral centers of American civilization. Through their marriages, Native husbands became "Indians in unexpected places," in the homes of white women and therefore in the bosom of white society. Such relationships also stand in striking contrast to the contemporaneous violence perpetrated against black men in the American South over the smallest threat that they might cross the sexual color line.3 The few historians who have considered http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies University of Nebraska Press

“You Think It Strange That I Can Love an Indian”: Native Men, White Women, and Marriage in the Indian Service

Cahill, Cathleen D.
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies , Volume 29 (2-3) – Sep 24, 2008
Download PDF
41 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-nebraska-press/you-think-it-strange-that-i-can-love-an-indian-native-men-white-women-j333peHju5

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Frontiers Editorial Collective, Inc
ISSN
1536-0334
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

"You Think It Strange That I Can Love an Indian"1 Native Men, White Women, and Marriage in the Indian Service cathleen d. cahill The history of intermarriage between whites and American Indians is a halftold tale. Scholars have produced an impressive body of work on the political and economic benefits that accrued from pairings between white men and Native women, but the literature on relationships between Native men and white women remains sparse.2 Studies focusing on unions between white men and Native women are often situated on frontiers where whites accepted the relationships (if sometimes grudgingly), particularly when the couples remained outside of white society. Relationships between white women and Indian men, by contrast, were more deeply interwoven into the fabric of white society because of white women's symbolic importance as the moral centers of American civilization. Through their marriages, Native husbands became "Indians in unexpected places," in the homes of white women and therefore in the bosom of white society. Such relationships also stand in striking contrast to the contemporaneous violence perpetrated against black men in the American South over the smallest threat that they might cross the sexual color line.3 The few historians who have considered

Journal

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies – University of Nebraska Press

Published: Sep 24, 2008

There are no references for this article.