Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women's Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854–1946

Abstract

Legal Codes and Talking Trees is a wonderful comparative study of indigenous women's struggle to maintain control over their bodies, lands, and legacies in the North American borderlands. Moving back and forth between Arizona and Washington territories, Katrina Jagodinsky explores how antimiscegenation and Indian indenture laws invalidated Indian-white marriages, delegitimated native women and children's inheritance rights, nullified their land claims, and created a class of unfree laborers. Comparing two regions that succumbed to U.S. control at the same time, Jagodinsky finds that gender played a significant role in colonial state formation in both cases and explores how regional racial and class hierarchies shaped those historical processes in specific ways. At first, I was a bit skeptical of her use of “historical imagination” as a research methodology. I wondered if the author's creativity would distort the women's motives and lived experiences. But Jagodinsky's approach won me over. Her meticulous archival research, exhaustive census mapping, and deft reading of legal documents provides the historical scaffolding for reconstructing the lives of six Native American women who contested the terms of U.S. colonialism from the 1850s through the 1940s. Jagodinsky constructs a compelling, composite biography for each woman, locating her within extended kinship networks and neighborhoods. Filling in the documentary gaps with ethnographic detail, she beautifully guides readers through the women's historical landscapes, their relationships to the land, and the cultural universe they inhabited. Readers will find themselves absorbed in her storytelling—like getting lost in a good legal thriller.