Indians in the Family

Among the anecdotes told about Andrew Jackson is his adoption of a young Creek boy orphaned in the devastation of the general's military victory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. In Indians in the Family Dawn Peterson places this apparent paradox into an insightful historical context in which the promotion of and resistance to American expansion and native dispossession occurred through more than just violence and warfare. Though Jackson's adoption of the boy he named Lyncoya often receives the most attention, it was not the only example of an Indian child incorporated into a white home in the early nineteenth century. Lyncoya's experience stands as one of many similar situations that together “reveal how a subset of whites and Southeast Indians used adoption, kinship, and slavery to impose and resist U.S. imperial rule” (p. 5). Through domestic incorporation as well as principled rhetoric, white Americans used family as another prong in the larger imperial project that framed the removal of eastern Indians in the 1800s

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