Culture and practice defined identity categories for most tribes, more so than color, but they certainly could perceive 'color' in some instances. Purdue's book may seem harsh at times to all the parties involved in the capturing, buying, and trading of human beings, and it is hardly representative of all tribes -- her focus is mainly on the Southwest. However, her work does highlight a fundamental problem with Martin's rather homogenizing analysis of Native American life, which fails to take into consideration different ways that tribes may have perceived the human/non-human divide. Rather than seeing fluidity between the self and the environment, Purdue highlights the importance of kinship delineating different classes of people between tribes, and how quickly Indians internalized the discourse of race yet translated it into their own terms. At times, race might be recognized -- for example, many tribes kept black slaves. However when a captive white child was assimilated into the tribe, and took up the tribal ways, as was the case with one Caucasian woman taken by the Chickasaw, the individual was fully accepted as a member of the tribe.

This runs counter to the idea that Indian-white relations, as described by Martin in his essay "The Metaphysics of Writing Indian-White History" were "five hundred years of talking past each other, of mutual incomprehension" (Martin 34). Natives could assimilate and reject aspects of white culture, depending upon their needs, and this translation was not mere 'mutual incomprehension' but often quite practically and politically expedient for one of the parties involved. Also, native alterations of white ideology were often unpredictable -- 'half breeds' at times seemed to have undifferentiated...

Purdue eschews easy sentimentality or essentialization of Native-White relations, and is willing to look at such cultural negotiations in all of their complexity, such as when she examines the status of white captive women who went on to marry Native men. It does emerge as a trend in her text that it was whites who tended to focus more on divisions of color, although natives did not entirely ignore racial appearance, as in the cause of blacks. But natives were much more likely to define race in terms of culture as well as blood heritage, unlike that of whites. Ultimately, Purdue's work shows that the concept of the human and the inhuman, both in terms of the environment and the racial 'other' are fluid and neither whites nor native people are blameless in terms of their history in terms of their use of oppressive techniques based upon culture and race.
Works Cited

Fixico, Donald Lee. The American Indian Mind. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Martin, Calvin, editor. The American Indian and the Problem of History. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1986.

Purdue, Theda. Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003