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Podcast: NBN Book of the Day
Episode: Jameson R. Sweet, "Mixed-Blood Histories: Race, Law, and Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
Description: Historical accounts tend to neglect mixed-ancestry Native Americans: racially and legally differentiated from nonmixed Indigenous people by U.S. government policy, their lives have continually been treated as peripheral to Indigenous societies. Mixed-Blood Histories: Race, Law, and Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest (U Minnesota Press, 2025) intervenes in this erasure. Using legal, linguistic, and family-historical methods, Dr. Jameson R. Sweet writes mixed-ancestry Dakota individuals back into tribal histories, illuminating the importance of mixed ancestry in shaping and understanding Native and non-Native America from the nineteenth century through today.
When the U.S. government designated mixed-ancestry Indians as a...