Bonds of Empire: Inter-Racial Intimacies and Labor in the Territorial West, 1845–89

The imperial impulses cloaked beneath the flag of Manifest Destiny linked the Pacific Northwest and Sonoran Southwest borderlands in 1845 as President James K. Polk reached for both regions simultaneously. In response to disrupted tribal kinship networks throughout Washington and Arizona, and in pursuit of economic opportunity, territorial Indian women aligned themselves and/or their children to territorial newcomers through economic and intimate relationships that resulted in blurred racial categories. In serving the labor needs of territorial newcomers, Native women and children shared intimate relations with their indenturers, guardians, and employers. These intimacies, physical and emotional, sexual and parental, exploitive and enjoyable, contradicted the legal and social barriers between Indians and Anglos, whites and non-whites, but were a fundamental component of imperial expansion in the American West. Looking at imperial intimacies through the lens of indigenous women's productive and reproductive labors links economic history with body theory, ethnohistory with critical race theory, and invites comparison to other “Wests.”