The American West: A Very Short Introduction by Stephen Aron

Author:Stephen Aron [Aron, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199858934
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Reconstructing races and rights

Struggles over the place of Indians were entwined with broader debates about race, rights, and the relationship between individuals, states, and the federal government that convulsed the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In the case of Indians, their champions, while envisioning a path to citizenship, assumed that they would remain on the lower rungs of American society for the foreseeable future. Accordingly, boarding schools emphasized vocational training that would prepare Indian girls for domestic service and boys for menial labor. In many respects, the prospects for Indians in the American West paralleled the projects designed for uplifting emancipated African Americans in the postbellum American South. But sorting economic opportunities and setting racial orderings proved far simpler in the South than the West. In the former, race was largely a matter of black and white. With the advent of Jim Crow laws and the implementation of “one drop of blood” rules (which designated individuals with any African ancestry as black), stark demarcations came to rule most aspects of southern life. By contrast, the demography of the West defied easy bifurcations. As Pablo de la Guerra’s query highlighted, the diverse origins of the West’s population and the mixings among them produced a variety of complexions that complicated determination of who was white, who was not, and how to order such a motley assortment of peoples.

The presence of so many shades of skin among the population of the West owed to migrations and minglings both old and new. Long before any map showed the region as a “West” or as “American,” relations between Spanish and French men and Indian women had made mestizos and métis more and more common. Add to that the long history of intercourse in Mexico with men and women of African descent, and it becomes clear how more than “nature” had made de la Guerra’s fellow Californios so various in their complexions. American mountain men joined in the tradition of mixing. Many of the children of mountain men and Indian women moved back and forth between the cultures of their parents, taking advantage of the possibilities for brokering exchanges that came from having a place in two worlds. Although subsequent generations of American emigrants disdained such unions, the flow of people into the West, coming as it did from all directions in the second half of the nineteenth century, furthered the diversification of the population and compounded the challenge of racial ordering.

One way to simplify the complexities of a multiracial region was to lump those seen as not white or just deemed nonwhite together. This was the tactic taken by Hugh Murray, chief justice of the California Supreme Court, who ruled in the 1854 case People v. Hall that Chinese immigrants could not testify against white Americans. He based that decision on an 1850 provision that prohibited blacks and Indians from giving evidence against whites. Murray reasoned that “Indian” referred to anyone of the “Mongoloid” race and “black” to anyone who was not white.

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