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Full-Text Articles in American Studies

Claiming The Best Of Both Worlds: Mixed Heritage Children Of The Pacific Northwest Fur Trade And The Formation Of Identity, Alanna Cameron Beason May 2015

Claiming The Best Of Both Worlds: Mixed Heritage Children Of The Pacific Northwest Fur Trade And The Formation Of Identity, Alanna Cameron Beason

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, a region encompassing Oregon, Washington, Idaho, the western half of Montana, and British Columbia, supplied the needed ingredients for the formation of a distinctive identity to form among the mixed heritage children born to indigenous women and men of the fur trade. This thesis examined how this identity formed in some the leading families of the time. The MacDonald’s, McKay’s, and the Tolmie’s all embraced both sides of their parental cultures and used them to create and defend their own sense of identity and community. Language was an important aspect of this new …


A Contested Future: Buffalo Bill's Wild West, Native American Performers, And The Military's Struggle For Control Over Indian Affairs 1868-1898, Alexander Erez Echelman Jan 2015

A Contested Future: Buffalo Bill's Wild West, Native American Performers, And The Military's Struggle For Control Over Indian Affairs 1868-1898, Alexander Erez Echelman

Senior Projects Spring 2015

My project explores how and why William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody glorified the military's wars against Native Americans on the Great Plains through his career as a showman in the United States and in Europe. The military's and the Interior Department's competition for control over Indian Affairs allowed Buffalo Bill to support the army's image by adhering to popular white supremacist ideas in the nation. I look at how Buffalo Bill used his Native American performers to exemplify the military's peace keeping skills in the West while devaluing the Interior Department's authority in Indian Affairs.