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

Abstract

Borderlands are complex places, and they have inspired an equally challenging methodology. When done well, as in Katrina Jagodinsky’s Legal Codes and Talking Trees, a borderlands approach as a scholarly strategy reveals something central about a society by way of its fringes. In this case, the author uses six case studies of Indigenous or mixed-heritage women pursuing legal actions in US northern and southern borderlands—geographically distinct yet analogous places—to expose the racial codes that infused American territorial laws. These juxtaposed microhistories are informed by macrohistorical trends, and they function together, thanks to meticulous research, as an exploration of the nexus of American race, power, and law in the West.The chosen case studies diverge and align in a number of ways, and they alternate in pairs between the two regions, generally in chronological order. The main protagonists are borderlands actors to multiple degrees: off-reservation Indigenous women employing survival strategies and pursuing justice in a legal system designed to privilege the white settler patriarchy. In this way historical actors unknown to one another worked to disrupt an oppressive system rigged to control Indigenous women’s bodies.For example, in 1871, Yaqui woman Lucía Martínez sued the father of her children—Arizona territorial senator King Woolsey—for custody and was forced to navigate a treacherous legal terrain constructed to delegitimize miscegenation and prioritize patriarchy. Martínez’s case (chapter 2) provides a compelling complement to a case from Washington Territory, that of Nora Jewell (chapter 3), a daughter of a Salish mother and Danish father who sued, while pregnant, her American guardian for rape. These two examples highlight how Indigenous women, overlooked by dominant historical narratives, fought for corporeal, maternal, and human integrity. The author uses narrative strategies to bring their worlds together. In this particular case, via subtle narration, Jagodinsky thinks through each woman’s encounter with census enumerators, who recorded whitewashed information. These small, fraught interactions constituted everyday encounters between the state and its peripheral actors. Not unique to their particular region, nor to the West in general, these anecdotes link the women’s experiences to larger themes while providing fodder to careful historians.The decision to choose Indigenous women residing beyond the reservation was an astute one, given Jagodinsky’s borderlands approach. As the author argues, such protagonists skirted federal Indian laws and therefore resided in “legal borderlands” rife with “ambiguities in the law that result in inconsistent, irregular, and inexplicable applications and interpretations of statutes in western courtrooms” (13). Legal Codes and Talking Trees excels in teasing apart the tangled issues of this past. Skeptical readers might question the book’s ability to generalize from only six case studies, but the impressive depth of the individual histories—along with some authorial signaling within each chapter—substantiates the thematic connections and leads to a richer understanding of Native/newcomer relations, of regimes of legal order, and of the unending human capacity (perhaps inclination) to cross borders.These connections emerge more or less organically and build with each chapter, but Jagodinsky does not offer a cumulative comparison in the final chapter. “Rather than drawing overarching or summative claims about the worlds these women lived in,” she writes, “this conclusion does more to describe the worlds these women are remembered in” (255). The final chapter therefore presents a discussion of, and an accounting of, her work with the Indigenous groups examined (and archivists consulted) in this study. It is a fascinating recording of the promises and pitfalls of collaboration and should be assigned in graduate courses on methodology. The author’s final plea, coming after six deeply researched case studies, is as persuasive as it is energizing: Indigenous women’s voices do permeate the legal records, despite historical and structural iniquities that might suggest otherwise. The work to recover these voices, and their borderland experiences, has only begun.