APRIL 2022 - AudioFile
Tanis Parenteau’s narration skills are on display in this production of Hyde’s book. Hyde delves into the mixing of races and cultures during the settlement of the New World and the process of the intermingling of cultures. While this information is not new, it may not have been discussed much until now. Parenteau recounts the story of five intermingled families as they live through 250 years of history. Her enunciation is precise, and her pace is deliberate but not boring. Her inflection is always appropriate. Those who enjoy histories of the settlement of North America by Europeans and histories of the Native peoples of this continent will not be disappointed. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 12/06/2021
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. (Feb.)
The New Yorker
"A new way of looking at the American West emerges in this history of the mixing and marrying of Indigenous people and settlers."
Kathleen DuVal
"A stunningly rich history of family and survival in the midst of war, forced removal, broken treaties, and racist policies."
H.W. Brands
"[Hyde’s] carefully wrought portrait of five families reveals the peculiar challenges faced by these quintessential people of the border."
Alan Taylor
"Through stories that are vivid, humane, and powerful, Anne F. Hyde deftly explores families that mixed native and settler cultures in the heart of North America. Sometimes coercive, but often mutual, these intimate relations helped diverse peoples coexist in American borderlands."
Brian DeLay
"Powerful, engrossing, and humane."
Philip J. Deloria
"Born of Lakes and Plains puts Native people at the heart of a timely new consideration of the ways that intermarriage has confounded—and demanded—the creation of racial categories. It is not to be missed."
Colin G. Calloway
"Anne F. Hyde deftly reconstructs personal lives and relationships, charting the shift from an Indigenous and fur-trading world where marriage, kinship, and community building transcended racial differences to a world dominated by race and divided by ‘blood.’"
Claudio Saunt
"Hyde tells stories that are gripping, tragic, inspiring, and, as she shows, essential to understanding the history of this vast region."
Richard White
"Anne F. Hyde’s gripping account of mixed-descent families shows how tangled the real story of this country actually is. It puts our simple stories to shame."
Missouri Historical Review - Jay Gitlin
"In this ambitious and utterly successful book, historian Anne F. Hyde has rewritten the story of the American West.…This book is a tour de force. The stories here are poignant—often sad and disturbing, but also inspiring and always thought-provoking.…In short, this is western history retold with families and women at the heart of the narrative."
Elizabeth A. Fenn
"Anne F. Hyde writes compelling, boots-on-the-ground history, telling stories that are personal, poignant, and powerful. This is the way people really lived."
Andrew R. Graybill
"A tour de force—poignant and beautifully written."
Library Journal - Audio
06/01/2022
Bancroft Prize winner Hyde (history, Univ. of Oklahoma; Empires, Nations, and Families) highlights a little-discussed group of mixed-descent people in the Americas whose dual heritage allowed them to bridge boundaries between Indigenous peoples and European colonizers for generations. She writes that in the earliest days of contact between Indigenous Americans and European settlers, Native peoples—Ojibwes, Otoes, Cheyennes, Chinooks, and others—viewed intermarriage as a means of creating bonds and social obligations between groups. Children produced from these unions provided links of kinship that cemented alliances and garnered cooperation. Early European settlers sought marriage into Indigenous nations in order to secure the familial ties that created trust, cooperation, and trade. With the wealth created by successful trading, the children of these unions could receive Western educations in the U.S. or Europe, while kinship links and obligations maintained their ties to Indigeneity as well, Hyde argues. This first generation of children gained positions of responsibility and trust linking European and Indigenous American worlds, and their own intermarriages continued this process until more European settlers flooded into the Americas, upsetting that balance. Narrator Tanis Parenteau navigates the many names, tribes, cultures, and time periods, making Hyde's narrative come alive. VERDICT Recommended for all collections.—Joanna M. Burkhardt
Library Journal
★ 12/10/2021
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.
APRIL 2022 - AudioFile
Tanis Parenteau’s narration skills are on display in this production of Hyde’s book. Hyde delves into the mixing of races and cultures during the settlement of the New World and the process of the intermingling of cultures. While this information is not new, it may not have been discussed much until now. Parenteau recounts the story of five intermingled families as they live through 250 years of history. Her enunciation is precise, and her pace is deliberate but not boring. Her inflection is always appropriate. Those who enjoy histories of the settlement of North America by Europeans and histories of the Native peoples of this continent will not be disappointed. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-11-30
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.
