One Thousand White Women - Jim Fergus

This is a great Western (two words I didn't ever think I'd write next to each other about something I'd read) that centers on the women who participated in President Grant's fictional Brides for Indians program in order to try and get Native Americans to be more agreeable to reservation life and assimilation. The novel centers on the fictional journal of Mary Dodd, who volunteers for the program in order to escape the asylum she's been committed to by her family for having illegitimate children with a man below her class. the unknown life of the fronteir is better than the life she knows and she only has to commit to the program for two years. The point is to bear mixed race children afterall.

Mary is joined as the first group in the 1000 women exchange by a cast of characters who are mostly even more desperate than Mary. A ruined Southern Belle, two former prostitutes, the religious zealot who goes for the missionary potential, the former slave. Each of the women, and there are more, are vividly portrayed in their own right.

Frontier life too, if vividly portrayed. There is a frankness in the writing that is sometimes unexpected, but always appreciated. As the women, to varying degrees, assimilate into their new Native families the interactions and understandings they develop are poignant but not romaticized. There is ugliness too: drunkeness and rape, no one is idolized over another, but the attempt at understanding that happens between this small group of women and their families speaks volumes towards what could be accomplished. I read this novel the same weekend I went to anti SB1070 where I was disappointed by the lack of white faces in attendance. I couldn't help marveling over the parallels in this book and our current political climate.

Mary Dodd is an engaging narrator. She is sharp and witty and wise beyond her young years. She is pragmatic and honest and eventually transformed. This first group of women is, of course, also the last. The others never follow, instead war comes. The mindless, hateful machine backing up policies intended to exterminate what it can't understand is laid bare far more clearly than in any history class I ever took.