Habeas in the Hands of Native Women

In 1871, eighteen year-old Yaqui women filed a habeas petition to secure custody of her three and five year-old daughters from the former territorial senator who had fathered them and then kept them from her when she left his ranch in territorial Arizona. Over the next four decades, Indigenous women persistently deployed habeas to challenge interpersonal and institutional child removal throughout the American West. This paper highlights three of these women's cases, presenting them in the context of other habeas petitioners chronicled in the Petitioning for Freedom: Habeas Corpus in the American West, 1812-1924 dataset. Audiences will also be invited to consider the parallels and distinctions between Black women's use of habeas as a freedom suit to challenge slavery on behalf of their children and Native women's use of habeas to challenge colonialism on behalf of their children and families.