Where US history has spilled across – and often violently combusted across – various geographies and borderlands, intimate relationships between American citizens and non-American citizens have been a consistent form of colonial engagement. Communities and individuals whose land and resources were coveted and eventually incorporated into the US body politic, typically by deception or force, were literally courted by Americans wanting to form colonial liaisons. Colonial intimacies made social pariahs out of some, and vital agents of empire out of others. At the same time, interethnic intimacies and encounters could offer necessary resources, companionship, and anticolonial possibilities in the face of imperial oppression that delineated who was fit or unfit for citizenship, where one could live or work, or whom one could have sex with or marry.