Born of Lakes and Plains

Starred review from December 6, 2021
Bancroft Prize winner Hyde (Empires, Nations, and Families) upends prevailing narratives about relations between Indigenous people and white Americans in this sweeping history of “the families and relationships that enabled Native peoples to survive into the present.” Tracking five families descended from white traders and Native wives, Hyde’s narrative stretches from the 1700s to the first half of the 20th century and demonstrates that by “mixing heritage and blending families,” Native Americans “showed creativity and resourcefulness in using family making to secure their lives and heritage.” Profile subjects include Alexander McKay, a Scottish American fur trader and explorer in northwestern Canada who married the daughter of a Cree woman and a Swiss trader, and William Bent, whose marriage to three Cheyenne women helped keep his trading post in present-day Colorado open for decades. Hyde documents how such intermarriages initially benefitted both Indigenous and white communities, but later embroiled mixed-descent families in conflicts between the two groups. By the end of the 19th century, “blood quanta” laws and court rulings forced mixed-descent people to choose between being “white” or “Indian” (or took the choice away from them), and Indigenous peoples in the U.S. had lost 1.5 billion acres of land. Hyde’s meticulous research and lucid prose bring her subjects and their complex worlds and canny survival strategies to vivid life. The result is an essential reconsideration of Native American history.

Starred review from December 10, 2021

Award-winning historian Hyde (Univ. of Oklahoma; Empires, Nations, and Families) weaves a fascinating history of Indigenous peoples in North America and the people with whom they traded, clashed, and created families. Five mixed-descent families form the core of the book. The McKay family, of Anglo, Cree, Chinook, and Cayuse descent in the Pacific Northwest; the Johnson and Schoolcraft families in the Great Lakes region; the Drips and Fontenelle families, of Anglo, Otoe, and Omaha descent, who expanded their fur business along the Platte River and into the Rocky Mountains; and the Bent family of Anglo and Cheyenne descent, including William Bent, whose fort along the Arkansas River operated for decades. As Hyde expertly tells, these families and their descendants are often overlooked in history and their lives were greatly impacted by federal policy relating to Indigenous peoples. The book includes extensive maps that show trade routes, military forts, and European settlements in what the author refers to as "Native North America" (present-day United States and Canada), particularly the Missouri River region. VERDICT By focusing on families, Hyde has made this history relatable and personal. The engaging narrative is highly recommended for all biography and history collections.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2022
Hyde continues her inquiry into the American West. Here her focus is on the significance of marital relationships between Native American women and men of European descent and the impact the resulting blended families and their descendants have had on American culture and society. Hyde relies on a multitude of sources to establish a broader view of what was occurring from the 1600s onward as fur traders and missionaries traveled deep into the West and engaged repeatedly with various Indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, this larger perspective frequently subsumes the more personal tales of the marriages Hyde considers, unions documented by a much smaller pool of materials. There are also reasonable concerns regarding references in the text to courtships that "blossomed" and "love" matches since the individuals involved left limited first-person records, while the historical circumstances raise questions about consent. That said, Hyde's unusual history does reveal how the realities of marriages between Europeans and Native Americans have been overlooked, why these relationships matter, and what aspects of this mostly unexamined aspect of Western history merits further study.

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Starred review from December 15, 2021
A searching study of the role of mixed-descent people, with Indigenous and other ancestry, over 400 years of American history. University of Oklahoma history professor Hyde, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860, turns her attention to an overlooked aspect of the peopling of North America: the union of Native Americans with people from other continents, their descendants often derided as "half-breeds" and worse. It's a bitter irony that whereas many Americans are quick to declare Indigenous ancestry today, it was not so long ago that mixed-descent people tried to hide their Native ancestry simply to survive. "Like boy thrown at a Black man, the word half-breed became poison intending to kill," writes the author, adding that "renaming Half-Breed Lake in Minnesota and Montana, or Half- Breed Road in Iowa and Nebraska, also covers up a long history of intermarriage." Hyde closely examines the lineages of people such as a half-Swiss, half-Cree woman who fought for civil rights for Native people. The author takes a particularly deep dive into the history of George Bent and his descendants; Bent was a White trader who arrived on the Colorado frontier and married a succession of Cheyenne wives and "lost dozens of family members at the Sand Creek and Washita massacres in the 1860s." Some Native groups, Hyde writes, were welcoming of newcomers; the Ojibwe, for instance, had intermarried with French trappers for generations before Americans arrived. Other groups were more reluctant--but, as Hyde allows, biology usually wins out over culture. This was of little interest to the federal, territorial, and state governments, however, all of which formulated laws to make intermarriage illegal, laws that remained in force until very recently and required mixed-descent people, who knew that "White America couldn't tolerate reminders of the racial mixing that anchored American history," to disguise their heritage. A necessary contribution to American studies for all the shameful episodes it recounts.

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