Indians in the Family investigates American imperial expansion as a family matter from the end of the American Revolution through Indian Removal in the 1830s. It traces the experiences of American Indian children adopted into white homes, particularly those of prominent US officials in the American South. These children typically received a formal education in English literacy and other disciplines within the Western philosophical and religious tradition. Just as significantly, they received an informal education in patriarchy and the subjugation of African American slaves through prolonged immersion in plantation homes. Unlike the large number of Native youths targeted by later federal Indian education policies in boarding schools, adoption only affected a small number of Native children in early America. Nevertheless, the experiences of the adopted children covered in the book illuminate the complex intersecting themes of kinship, race, slavery, capitalism, masculinity, sovereignty, and nation-building.
Peterson eschews the modern legal definition of adoption and instead uses the term broadly and flexibly to describe a wide spectrum of practices that involved the placement of Native youths in white homes. Throughout the book, she examines the “unusual sympathies” that prompted white families to adopt Indian children into their households. The first chapter provides the framework for understanding how this trend emerged from settler colonial biopolitics of the post-Revolutionary United States. The belief that, unlike African Americans, American Indians showed the propensity for “civilization” prompted US officials to devise methods for systematically assimilating them into American society. Ultimately, they hoped that transforming Indigenous peoples into private landowners would lead to continued territorial expansion. Although US “civilization” policies took on a variety of forms, placing Indian children within the domestic sphere of nuclear, patriarchal families served as one facet of the overarching program.
When elite, white Americans adopted Indian youths, they sought to incorporate them “into the white national family” through an intimate education in white social, cultural, political, and economic values (p. 4). Peterson asserts that this practice provided a veneer of benevolence for the ongoing violence and dispossession inherent in American settler expansion. For instance, Andrew Jackson adopted a Creek infant named Lyncoya after he invaded Creek territory and massacred a Creek village, leaving the boy an orphan. For many children, the promise of incorporation into the mythic American family remained hollow. Instead, these children often occupied a liminal status in white households. Often, their adopted families continued to view them as “Indian” and denied them the same status and privileges white family members enjoyed, regardless of the extent to which they embraced tenets of “civilization.”
The educational components of the US “civilization” program are widely known; the experiences of adopted Indian children, as well as their wide-ranging influence upon their own nations, are much less so. As such, a clear strength of the book's framing lies in Peterson's ability to address the perspectives and intentions of Native individuals, kin networks, and nations in the narrative to reveal how and why they diverged from their white contemporaries in the United States. Peterson asks: if these adoptive practices represent an imposition of the expanding American nation-state, why then did elite southeastern American Indians often seek out opportunities to place their children in the households of US officials? To address this critical question, she argues that while Native families rejected the assimilationist goals of adoption, they recognized the potential access, power, and knowledge that the educational experience would grant their children in defending against ongoing threats to Indigenous sovereignty. Thus, the opportunity to place their children in white America served as a form of resistance rather than an endorsement of US imperialism.
Likewise, the divergent goals and motivations of parents who sought out opportunities to place their children in white households also sheds new light on the defensive strategies Native people employed across time and geographic space. In chapter two, Peterson details how the conception of American Indian placement in white families originated in the North when, in 1790, Cornplanter, a Seneca chief, requested that President Washington assume the care of nine Seneca boys and provide them with an education in the United States. Peterson argues that Cornplanter's motivations were straightforward. He recognized that such an exchange “strengthened and personalized international kinship ties that led to trust and good feeling in nation-to nation relations” (p. 50). Although Washington denied Cornplanter's request, Quaker missionaries began to experiment with the adoption and education of Native youths, in effect acting as go-betweens between US officials and Native leaders.
These early chapters in the book provide the context for the following chapters, which focus on the adoption of roughly a dozen southeast American Indian children into the homes of powerful US officials and southern plantation owners. Several chapters revolve around James McDonald, a Choctaw youth who, from the age of eleven, lived in the homes of Silas Dinsmoore, a slaveholding federal Indian agent, and Thomas McKenney, the US superintendent of Indian trade. McDonald soon ascended as a key Choctaw legal mind, diplomat, and education advocate. Meanwhile, other young males, with the support of their families and nations, attended the elite Choctaw Academy at Richard M. Johnson's plantation home in Kentucky. Although the young men represented only a small minority of their nations, their lasting influence upon their nations is immeasurable. This cohort applied their colonial education as tools to resist both southern slaveholders’ intrusion in their homelands and American society's conceptions of Indigenous peoples as “savage.” As pressure to move west escalated, they articulated clear visions of self-determined, sovereign Indigenous nations and served as intermediaries in negotiations with the United States. Despite their failure to prevent removal, these bicultural, educated leaders continued to shape several facets of their own nations for decades to come, including the expansion of national school systems.
Understanding how southeast American Indian nations conceptualized and used education to advance their own interests is a critical step toward reexamining the diversity of Indigenous educational experiences. Indians in the Family joins other recent works, such as John Demos's The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic and Christina Snyder's Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers & Slaves in the Age of Jackson, in shifting scholars’ attention to Native education during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Moreover, her attention to the interplay between formal and informal forms of education speaks broadly to issues concerning assimilation, child removal, and self-determined education in the past and present.
