Margaret D. Jacobs

The Eastmans and the Luhans: Interracial Marriage between White Women and Native American Men, 1875–1935

At a lavish wedding and reception in New York City in 1891 Elaine Goodale, daughter of a prominent New England family, married Charles Eastman, a member of the Wahpeton band of the Santee Sioux (Dakotas). Writing in her memoirs Elaine declared, “I gave myself wholly in that hour to the traditional duties of wife and mother, abruptly relinquishing all thought of an independent career for the making of a home. At the same time, I embraced with a new and deeper zeal the conception of life-long service to my husband’s people.” Charles, a medical doctor, described himself a few months before their marriage by writing, “I was soon to realize my long dream—to become a complete man! I thought of little else than the good we two could do together.” 1Both Charles and Elaine were members of a group of reformers who sought to solve the so-called Indian problem through assimilation, and they portrayed their marriage as a natural means to overcome Indian “backwardness” and poverty. The white woman would further uplift her already civilized Dakota husband, and the couple would work diligently to serve his people. Fifty years later New York socialite Mabel Dodge moved to Taos, New Mexico, with her Russian émigré husband, the painter Maurice Sterne. Mabel soon became entranced with Tony Luhan, a Taos Pueblo Indian. Describing her feelings, Mabel wrote in her memoirs:

Stimulating and Resisting Transborder Indigenous Adoptions in North America in the 1970s

This chapter probes the underlying class, race, and colonial dynamics of transborder Indigenous adoption in North America in the late twentieth century. It focuses on the 1970s case of three Metis foster children in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, who had been living with their foster parents for eight years when provincial authorities removed them and placed them with a white adoptive couple in Michigan. These three children were among thousands of Indigenous Canadian children whom authorities scooped up in the 1960s and 1970s and placed in non-Indigenous homes both within Canada and over the border in the United States. This removal was different, however. It became very public and generated fierce resistance from the local Metis community, which led to an investigation by a provincial Ombudsman. The Ombudsman’s report provides a rare glimpse into the official reasoning behind Indigenous child removal. Saskatchewan Social Service administrators considered the Metis children’s foster family to be fit and loving but justified removal on the grounds that the children lacked “stimulation” and needed “permanency.” The chapter analyzes how these ill-defined concepts served as a code for unexamined class, racial, and colonial biases that enabled authorities to intervene in and undermine Indigenous families and communities.