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"In Family Way": Guarding Indigenous Women’S Children In Washington Territory, Katrina Jagodinsky

Department of History: Faculty Publications

The cases discussed here represent very few of the guardianship arrangements that characterized intergenerational and interracial households in territorial Washington, yet the patterns they illustrate correspond with other evidence that allows historians to track the distribution of Indian and mixed- race children in the Puget Sound region. Th e 1880 federal census schedules for counties bordering the Puget Sound reveals the informal guardianship of Native women’s children in ninetytwo households. Among these extralegal arrangements were forty- two households headed by white men, some single like Ed Boggess and others married to white women like Phoebe Judson, who classified the indigenous …