Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887-1937
by Katherine Ellinghaus
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Book Summary Information
Author: Katherine EllinghausEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-11-01
ISBN: 080321829X
Number of pages: 278
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Book Reviews of Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887-1937
Book Review: Magnificent and Necessary
Summary: 5 Stars
Not enough books discuss race, gender, class, and nationality simultaneously. Not enough authors produce comparative work on indigenous peoples. Not enough work looks at less common interracial pairings. Dr. Ellinghaus' book is a strong intervention and contribution in so many ways.
Paula Gunn Allen once wrote something to the effect that people focus upon Native Americans' disappearance and not enough on their survival. The author here emphasizes that Natives and Aborigines did not die off as colonizers expected, thus Australians tried to "absorb" Aborigines and Americans tried to "assimilate" Natives. She goes on to say Aborigines were given educations and thus weren't desirable as marriage partners they way educated Native Americans might have been. Then she states that white Americans of the time period were so busy trying to prevent Black-white unions that they didn't give Native-white unions as much thought, but Australia had no group of color as numerous and with the history of African Americans.
Many readers ignore beginning pages written in Roman numbers and start with pages that have Arabic numbers. That would be a mistake here: the introductory chapter is the most informative. This reminds me of how professors only assigned the introduction to Sedgwick Kosofsky's "Epistemology of the Closet" when I was in college. Rushed students can get away with just reading that chapter and skimming the rest.
In the book "Interracial Intimacy," Rachel Moran totally dismisses interracial couples based upon partners of color. Here, Ellinghaus writes that Australians did fear that Aborigines would marry Asians and that Native Americans at Hampton would marry African Americans. I appreciate the way this author moved beyond thinking that race can only involve two groups.
Honestly, the author's ideas about assimilation and absorption are not clear cut. She mentions sundry Aboriginal men that were still oppressed by the larger white society though they had married white women. The author purposely excludes white man-indigenous woman marriages and non-marital copulation of any kind. That's great in focusing upon this coupling, however, I sometimes wish she had made comparisons. She includes the photo seen in "Rabbit-Proof Fence" where an Aboriginal line becomes whiter by the generation, but they focus upon women/mothers, not Aboriginal men. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, white men forced Black women to engage them sexually while forbidding Black men to get with white women. In the Australian context, I really wonder if Australian men believed they could get with Aboriginal women, but Aboriginal men should get with no one. Keeping men of color away from white women plays a large role in anti-miscegenation movements in many countries. That double standard is not adequately addressed here.
Ellinghaus only discusses a handful of marriages. She doesn't emphasize how rare these couplings may have been. It may feel like gleaning to some without the basis for solid conclusions (too small a sample). Further, if I recall Wilma Mankiller, the first female Cherokee chief, never mentioned whether society was biased against her Native father and white mother. I think I read that Elias' Boudinat's white wife's family first objected to her interracial marriage, but then accepted it. The first anecdote happened after the period in this book; the second example happened before it. Still, I wish the author could have stated whether matters and dynamic changed before 1880 and after 1930.
If you look carefully, there are photos of Native men, but none of Aboriginal men. The author includes Australian marriage certificates, but no photos. I wonder if that means Americans embrace photography before Australians or if Australians made a point not to photograph Aboriginal men.
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