Karen Hansen

In this article the author explores the interconnections between the social and the material-as people move to a space on the land, coexisting with one another. By focusing in on one specific place-the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation (formerly called the Devils Lake Sioux Indian Reservation) in North Dakota-the author analyzes what happened when white immigrants came to homestead and live on land historically reserved for Dakotas. Against the backdrop of Native dispossession, this illustrative case reveals the ways everyday interactions created entanglements through landownership, the gendered division of paid work, neighboring practices, and leasing land. It challenges us to uncover gendered processes, probe denials, and interrogate silences.

In rural societies, equity in land is key to women's position, much as wage labor is in urban, industrial society. Access to productive property is especially important to women in marginalized, subjugated, or newly arrived racial-ethnic groups. The ownership of land shapes the resources that women and men can differentially obtain, control, and utilize. Native American, African American, and immigrant women obtained land in a variety of ways: allotment, purchase, homesteading, and inheritance. Ownership enabled them to cultivate land to support the family, rent it out for income, and exercise the leverage it provided them throughout their lives. Using cases spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we explore landholding from the perspectives of Dakota and Scandinavian immigrant women on the Northern Plains and African American women in the South. Through careful attention to what women made of the land they owned, we can better understand gender and power in a settler colonialist society.

With territorial expansion of the US came dispossession of Native Americans, supported by policies that made white immigrants settler colonists. On Indian reservations, the federal government encouraged land-taking by allotting land to Indians and making land available to homesteaders, many of them recent immigrants. Few scholars have studied relationships between Natives and newcomers. This paper draws on the concept of boundary work to analyse intergroup relations at the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation, where white settlers (principally Scandinavians) lived alongside Dakotas. To survive and coexist, Indians and immigrants marked and interpreted boundaries of belonging and exclusion. By establishing common practices, they enacted a mutuality that both reflected and subverted racial-ethnic hierarchies.

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.

Once Spirit Lake Dakota Reservation was opened to white homesteading in 1904, the turnover of land from Dakota to Euro-American hands was rapid. Scandinavians, the largest foreign-born group in the state, took advantage of this land-taking opportunity and moved onto the reservation in great numbers, acquiring approximately 25% of the land within six years. In effect, while the Scandinavians lived as neighbors with the Dakota, they also became the harbinger of the dispossession of Dakota land. Using quantitative analysis of landownership specified in plat maps of the reservation in 1910, this article analyzes the gender and ethnicity of the landowners. Oral histories contextualize the processes of land taking and land dispossession. The article then takes stock of landownership in 1929, finding that Dakota landownership declined 50% in less than two decades.

This article enumerates those unspoken but observed conventions, “the asking rules,” by which people abide when they are engaged in relations of give and take. By studying networks that employed parents construct to help them care for and raise their school-age children, this article analyzes the dynamics of reciprocity. It explores a distinction in Gouldner's theory between status obligation and normative reciprocity. Based on the evidence, the article argues that kinship status and class location shape the ways that asking rules are interpreted and invoked.

Correspondence comprising 120 letters, written between 1859 & 1869 by Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, chronicle the open romantic relationship of the two women & provide a different perspective of nineteenth-century lesbianism. A review of the letters demonstrates the erotic & romantic nature of their relationship, as well as the general acceptance & support of friends & family, who viewed the relationship as a natural outgrowth of their friendship, while often reminding that it should not interfere with the possibility of marriage. While most literature on nineteenth-century lesbianism focuses on middle-class whites, the correspondence suggests new areas of study & demands a reevaluation of categories & concepts. 99 References. M. Piciocchi