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After Pocahontas: Indian Women And The Law, 1830 To 1934, Bethany Berger

Faculty Articles and Papers

The story of Pocahontas, simultaneously celebrated and contained, presents the favored path for Native American women in the newer legal culture: absorption into the Euro-American race and ultimate disappearance of the non-European element. The alternative path was reserved for women whose assimilation did not reach this level of absorption and disappearance but retained their allegiance to both the Indian and white society. Federal and state legislatures and courts marginalized such women, denied them the treaty rights accorded their male companions, and denied them stable marriages, rights of descent, and the power within the family that they had had within Indian …