Abstract
In this article we bring together the entangled histories of immigrants and Indians, a project rarely undertaken in historiography or theoretical efforts to frame the past, to ask how and in what ways gender was important in obtaining and losing land. Studies have been conducted of homesteaders, women settlers and rural workers, and of Dakotas as a group. But, with only a few exceptions, no study has encompassed both groups of women in a particular place and time to chronicle their connections with the land and their attitudes towards each other. The distinctive situation at Spirit Lake integrated immigrant settlers and Native peoples, both of them displaced and profoundly poor, creating conditions of coexistence as well as the seeds of dispossession. We seek to understand how two groups of women who came to share the same geographic space could use it similarly while holding overlapping as well as profoundly different interpretations of it. We explore how gender, race-ethnicity, and landtaking that exacerbated dispossession affected their use of that land. Adapted from the source document.