UC Davis

This dissertation intersects three main disciplinary threads—federal Indian law, intimate colonialism, and queer Indigenous studies—to develop theoretical tools and archival reading practices that describe the convergence and contestation of U.S. federal-state-Indigenous governance around marriage policy. Part I, “Bureaucratic Kinship,” explores the framing of “domesticity” in Indigenous-settler relations in the U.S. Following this, Part I traces the development of Bureau of Indian Affairs policy influencing the proliferating categories of marriage, during the period 1900-1940. This analysis illustrates how the selective recognition and non-recognition of marriages became a key vehicle for settler theft of Indigenous lands. Part II, “Allotmentality,” builds upon texts within Native American and Indigenous studies theorizing and critiquing settler colonial land relations, alongside a legislative genealogy of U.S. allotment policies. This section culminates in a case study of Carney v. Chapman (1918), where the U.S. Supreme Court deployed its authority to interpret marriage statutes to decide the contested ownership of a Chickasaw allotment. Part III, “The Overhead of Legitimacy,” examines contemporary (2004-Present) legal documents and critical scholarship surrounding same-sex marriage policy in U.S. Indigenous jurisdictions, observing how civil marriage laws encode settler colonial ideologies about land, race, and gender. In sum, this study provides a theoretical and methodological backdrop that reveals how contemporary conflicts over marriage law in Indigenous jurisdictions emerge from the history of U.S. marriage policy as a central instrument of settler colonial land theft.