At the Hearth of the Crossed Races: A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth- Century Oregon, 1812–59 by Melinda Marie Jetté

Abstract

108 OHQ vol. 117, no. 1 enough to create quite a detailed portrait from Equi’s childhood until her drift into relative obscurity during the 1920s. He did benefit from recently available oral histories containing memories of Equi, but much of the biography was unearthed from disparate documents and years of local newspapers. Much of the limited previous work on Equi, none of it near this length, has focused on her anti-capitalist and antiwar politics in the 1910s. To Helquist’s great credit, almost half of the biography traces her life prior to the 1913 cannery strike. This predates much of the fascination of the newspapers with Equi, and Helquist’s research took considerable effort and ingenuity. Helquist is more assured when researching and writing about Equi the lesbian, doctor, and suffragist and is less focused on source material connecting her to the labor movement. His prodigious newspaper research does not include any of the union or revolutionary newspapers that were plentiful in the region during the 1910s. This is, on the whole, a fruitful strategy and successfully creates a much more multifaceted portrait than we had previously. Revolution may well have been just a component of Equi’s longer commitment to women’s rights in the interlocking realms of sexuality, medicine, and politics. Helquist is particularly drawn toward Equi’s relationships with other women, both romantic and political, with strong results for both the narrative and our understanding of how these connections enabled and sustained such an unconventional life. In addition, when source material is lacking , the author ably compensates by providing excellent context. In the chapter on abortion, perhaps his best, we learn a great deal about the legal and political environment in which Equi practiced medicine, while the author brings in his subject whenever the record allows. The centrality of her medical work emerges much more clearly than ever before as a result. Helquist sets out primarily to recover the notorious yet elusive Dr. Marie Equi and he succeeds, but he may have redefined our basic understanding of her as well. This biography deserves wide readership and much debate. Adam J. Hodges University of Houston-Clear Lake AT THE HEARTH OF THE CROSSED RACES: A FRENCH-INDIAN COMMUNITY IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY OREGON, 1812—59 by Melinda Marie Jetté Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2015. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 360 pages. $22.95 paper. Melinda Jetté’s study of cross-cultural relationships across pivotal decades in the Willamette Valley is a strong contribution to the literatures on Oregon history, on Native-White relations and colonial processes, and on the complexities of human relationships, adaptations, and identities within colonial histories. Her work tells familiar narratives of contact, the shift from cross-cultural intermarriage and the development of a shared sense of community to experiences of racism and dispossession, and the imposition of settler control, as seen through a closely focused lens: a group of families of complex French and Native heritages in French Prairie in the Willamette Valley between 1812 and the advent of Oregon’s statehood in 1859. As Jetté notes, the work is more locally focused than other recent works on Métis in the Pacific Northwest interior, and the tight focus enables her to present a strong synthesis of perspectives and material from the diverse archival sources for this population. The work is detailed in its use of such sources to show how the community came together, faced challenges, and eventually began to disperse in various directions, while also engaging with key issues in the historical development of the region and showing their relevance to this group of families. Purchase back issues of the Quarterly. Call 503.306.5230 or send an e-mail to museumstore@ohs.org. 111 Reviews Jetté’s terms for the families she focuses on and the people who eventually overwhelmed them seem awkward, emerging from her microhistorical focus rather than readily falling in line with broader literatures on ethnogenesis or settler culture. Her choice of “French-Indian” to identify this group of families, rather than Métis or metis, is influenced by Tanis Thorne’s statement that families of mixed ancestry “may have shared a collective identity as...