An Immersive History of Mixed-Descent Native Families – The New York Times

Born of Lakes and Plains begins in earnest in the 1600s and revolves mainly around five mixed-descent families, whose stories stretch from the Great Lakes down through the Midwest to the Southern Plains. The history she recounts is both sweeping and intimate, allowing her to trace larger developments while also showing how families responded differently to changing circumstances.

From the beginning, intermarriage between white and Native peoples was connected to the fur trade. For European settlers, there were obvious advantages to such unions, including access to the protection and knowledge of Ojibwes and Crees who for generations had weathered the harsh winters around the Great Lakes and Hudsons Bay. Native peoples, Hyde says, had their own stakes in this trade; they knew that European strangers presented both opportunity (information, goods, new allegiances) and peril (war, disease, theft). Making such traders into family could lessen the dangers, giving them a stake in the clan.

For the French, these arrangements were not only accepted but even encouraged by an official edict that governed mariage la faon du pays, or the custom of the country. European men became known as hivernants winterers who spent the cold months in Native forts and villages. Sometimes, when an hivernant married a Native woman, he was already married to a white woman. Or an hivernant might abandon his Native family once he became more established in the fur trade, calculating that entry into the Canadian elite required a white wife. Some hivernants continued to provide for their Native families, and some didnt. Abandonment was so common that there was an actual phrase for the process to turn off, as in, When Alexander McKay retired, he turned off Marguerite.

Marguerite, who was born in 1775 to a Cree mother and a Swiss father, would eventually remarry another man involved in the fur trade. Hyde follows the stories of Marguerites family and others through the ensuing decades of American expansion, Andrew Jacksons policy of Indian Removal and the Civil War. Trading fur with Europeans turned out to be profoundly destabilizing to long-established relationships between Native nations; an expanded market brought guns and disease.

The proliferating narratives can make it hard to keep track of all the threads a number of Georges and Johns and Williams within and across families means that a set of family trees would have been a welcome and clarifying addition to Hydes book. But the profusion of stories is part of her point, as she shows how the same events could affect people in disparate ways, with some adapting or even flourishing while others escaped or resisted or got crushed. Many mixed-descent people worked for the U.S. government as translators and military scouts; they were often mistrusted by others, their ability to switch between languages and cultures arousing suspicions, their loyalties held in doubt.

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An Immersive History of Mixed-Descent Native Families - The New York Times