Half-Breed Tract - Overview

Overview

In this context, mixed-blood people were the descendants of marriages or relationships between American Indian and white Europeans or European Americans. Also known as "half-breeds" in the U.S. or métis in Canada, these people were most often descended from American Indian women and French-Canadian, Scots, and Orkney Island fathers, who dominated early fur trapping and trade. The men lived far from other Europeans. Others had fathers who were American trappers and traders. The children typically grew up in their mother's tribes, where the fathers and families were offered protection if not full membership.

As relations between the United States government and the tribes became more complex, the mixed-race children often were excluded from benefiting both from the federal laws governing Indians and the political rights of their fathers because of discrimination on both sides. The tribes had their own kinship systems and rules of descent and inheritance. For instance, the Omaha had a patrilineal system, and considered mixed-race children of European or "white" fathers to be white unless formally adopted into the tribe by a man. Other tribes had matrilineal systems, and children were considered born into the mother's clan and took their status from her. Due to hypodescent and the fact that many of the mixed-race children grew up in tribes on the frontier, Europeans tended to classify them as being more Indian than white. (Their fathers' living "outside" civilized society as mountain men was part of this idea.) The Omaha and other tribal leaders advocated setting land aside for the mixed-blood descendants; usually the intent was to award land to male heads of families.

The relationship between mixed-bloods and their ancestral tribes particularly affected the descendants when the tribes ceded communal lands to the U.S. government in exchange for payment. The rights of mixed-blood descendants to payments or a part in decisionmaking were not usually acknowledged. In 1830 the federal government acknowledged this problem by the Treaty of Prairie du Chien, which effectively set aside a tract of land for mixed-blood people related to the Oto, Ioway, Omaha, Sac and Fox and Santee Sioux tribes. The treaty granted these "Half-Breed Tracts" as sections of land in a form similar to Indian reservations.