School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemTaking assimilation to heart: marriages of white women and indigenous men in Australia and North America, 1870s-1930s( 2001)This thesis examines marriages of white women and indigenous men which took place in Australia and the United States between the 1870s and 1930s. While this form of interracial marriage was unusual during this period, the instances which occurred are revealing of the policies of assimilation which operated in both nations during this period. From the middle of the nineteenth century, the ideology of assimilation, generated by a Christian humanitarian belief system, became increasingly popular among European settlers in Australia and the United States. This thesis demonstrates that "assimilation" could mean two very different things: biological absorption, in which indigenous identity would be dissolved through interracial relationships; and cultural assimilation, involving the alteration of indigenous people's lifestyle rather than their physical appearance. Although both forms of assimilation were current in Australia and the United States, I argue that they were weighted differently. Due to the absence of a powerful humanitarian reform movement and the presence of an ethnically more homogenous population, the Australian government put in place policies which emphasised biological absorption. By contrast the United States, h01ne to a larger non-white population as well as influential organisations interested in Native American reform, put in place policies which emphasised cultural assimilation. This difference is crucial to the understanding of respective attitudes towards interracial marriages between white women and indigenous men. In the United States emphasis on cultural assimilation led to an accent on education as a means to solving the "Indian problem." In boarding and reservation schools across the country attempts were made, by means which were often cruel and insensitive, to inculcate Native American children with white ways of living. A select few were encouraged to be "leaders" and "examples" to their people. Reformers assisted some Native American men to gain a tertiary education and enter middle-class professions. They often married white women, and it is these couples and their negotiations with mainstream American society that dominate the American section of this thesis. In Australia, on the other hand, the importance placed on segregating and controlling the Aboriginal population led to a lax system of indigenous education which produced no tertiary-educated Aboriginal men during the period encompassed by this study. Consequently the Australian marriages I discuss were between working-class white women and Aboriginal men whose attempts to acculturate were met with a distinct lack of interest by white authorities. The case studies of white women married to indigenous men discussed in this thesis, therefore, reveal the very different ways in which ostensibly similar ideas about indigenous people and assimilation were played out at a personal level in different national settings.