MIXEDBLOOD HISTORIES

An unprecedented study that puts mixed-ancestry Native Americans back into the heart of Indigenous history

Historical accounts tend to neglect mixed-ancestry Native Americans: racially and legally differentiated from nonmixed Indigenous people by U.S. government policy, their lives have continually been treated as peripheral to Indigenous societies. Mixed-Blood Histories intervenes in this erasure. Using legal, linguistic, and family-historical methods, Jameson R. Sweet writes mixed-ancestry Dakota individuals back into tribal histories, illuminating the importance of mixed ancestry in shaping and understanding Native and non-Native America from the nineteenth century through today. 

When the U.S. government designated mixed-ancestry Indians as a group separate from both Indians and white Americans—a distinction born out of the perception that they were uniquely assimilable as well as manipulable intermediate figures—they were afforded rights under U.S. law unavailable to other Indigenous people, albeit inconsistently, which included citizenship and the rights to vote, serve in public office, testify in court, and buy and sell land. Focusing on key figures and pivotal “mixed-blood histories” for the Dakota nation, Sweet argues that in most cases, they importantly remained Indians and full participants in Indigenous culture and society. In some cases, they were influential actors in establishing reservations and negotiating sovereign treaties with the U.S. government.

Culminating in a pivotal reexamination of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, Mixed-Blood Histories brings greater diversity and complexity to existing understandings of Dakota kinship, culture, and language while offering insights into the solidification of racial categories and hierarchies in the United States.

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Jameson R. Sweet (Lakota and Dakota, unenrolled) is assistant professor of American studies at Rutgers University.