Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West

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. (Feb.)