Mixed-Blood Histories : Race, Law, and Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest

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