An 1824 federal treaty set aside a parcel of land in what is now southern Iowa for individuals with one Sauk or Meskwaki parent and one Euro-American parent. Scholars have looked at the convoluted legal history of this tract of land, but none have attended to the role of gender and intimate relations as they intersect with changing perceptions of gender, ethnicity, and nation. This presentation will recover the stories of some of the women who laid claim to this land, and whose stories have been overwritten by laws that subsume women’s identities in their husbands’, by sentimental notions of Native sexuality or romance that cover up financial motives, by a public mythology of the “Vanishing Indian,” and by histories that privilege men’s public and legal transactions over women’s private and intimate ones.
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