For mixed-descent people on America’s frontier, acceptance and suspicion

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2022-03-15 15:01Z by Steven

For mixed-descent people on America’s frontier, acceptance and suspicion

The Washington Post
2022-03-11

H.W. Brands

Marguerite Waddens, pictured in the 1850s. Her father was a White fur trader, and her mother an Indigenous woman in Canada. Waddens herself married White men, including Alexander McKay, who worked for the North West Company. Often, unions between traders and native women were expected by both parties to be temporary. (National Park Service )

In the late 19th century, Frederick Jackson Turner lit up the historical world with his frontier thesis of American history. He asserted that American democracy owed its distinctiveness to the existence of an advancing frontier, where American institutions reinvented themselves every generation. By no means did all historians accept Turner’s views, but his approach framed debate on the subject far into the 20th century.

More recently the concept of frontier has given way to the idea of borders and borderlands, where peoples and cultures have intermingled and interacted. In “Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West,Anne F. Hyde examines family life in the borderlands; her carefully wrought portrait of five families reveals the peculiar challenges faced by these quintessential people of the border…

Read the entire review here.

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

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Native Americans/First Nation, United States, Women on 2022-03-08 02:50Z by Steven

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

W. W. Norton & Company
2022-02-25
464 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-63409-9

Anne F. Hyde, Professor of History
University of Oklahoma

A fresh history of the West grounded in the lives of mixed-descent Native families who first bridged and then collided with racial boundaries.

Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using intermarriage to link disparate communities and create protective circles of kin. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Native peoples—Ojibwes, Otoes, Cheyennes, Chinooks, and others—formed new families with young French, English, Canadian, and American fur traders who spent months in smoky winter lodges or at boisterous summer rendezvous. These families built cosmopolitan trade centers from Michilimackinac on the Great Lakes to Bellevue on the Missouri River, Bent’s Fort in the southern Plains, and Fort Vancouver in the Pacific Northwest. Their family names are often imprinted on the landscape, but their voices have long been muted in our histories. Anne F. Hyde’s pathbreaking history restores them in full.

Vividly combining the panoramic and the particular, Born of Lakes and Plains follows five mixed-descent families whose lives intertwined major events: imperial battles over the fur trade; the first extensions of American authority west of the Appalachians; the ravages of imported disease; the violence of Indian removal; encroaching American settlement; and, following the Civil War, the disasters of Indian war, reservations policy, and allotment. During the pivotal nineteenth century, mixed-descent people who had once occupied a middle ground became a racial problem drawing hostility from all sides. Their identities were challenged by the pseudo-science of blood quantum—the instrument of allotment policy—and their traditions by the Indian schools established to erase Native ways. As Anne F. Hyde shows, they navigated the hard choices they faced as they had for centuries: by relying on the rich resources of family and kin. Here is an indelible western history with a new human face.

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On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American

Posted in Anthologies, Books, History, Law, Native Americans/First Nation, United States, Women on 2020-07-08 22:52Z by Steven

On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American

University of California Press
July 2012
366 pages
Illustrations: 19 b/w photographs, 1 map, 1 table
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520272385
Paperback ISBN: 9780520272392
eBook ISBN: 9780520951341

Edited by:

David Wallace Adams, Professor of History
Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio

Crista DeLuzio, Associate Professor and Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor of History
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

Embracing the crossroads that made the region distinctive this book reveals how American families have always been characterized by greater diversity than idealizations of the traditional family have allowed. The essays show how family life figured prominently in relations to larger struggles for conquest and control.

Table of Contents

  • List of Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction / David Wallace Adams and Crista DeLuzio
  • PART ONE. DIVERSE FAMILIES AND RACIAL HIERARCHY
    • 1. Breaking and Remaking Families: The Fostering and Adoption of Native American Children in Non-Native Families in the American West, 1880–1940 / Margaret Jacobs
    • 2. Becoming Comanches: Patterns of Captive Incorporation into Comanche Kinship Networks, 1820–1875 / Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez
    • 3. “Seeking the Incalculable Benefit of a Faithful, Patient Man and Wife”: Families in the Federal Indian Service, 1880–1925 / Cathleen D. Cahill
    • 4. Hard Choices: Mixed-Race Families and Strategies of Acculturation in the U.S. West after 1848 / Anne F. Hyde
  • PART TWO. LAW, ORDER, AND THE REGULATION OF FAMILY LIFE
    • 5. Family and Kinship in the Spanish and Mexican Borderlands: A Cultural Account / Ramón A. Gutiérrez
    • 6. Love, Honor, and the Power of Law: Probating the Ávila Estate in Frontier California / Donna C. Schuele
    • 7. “Who has a greater job than a mother?” Defining Mexican Motherhood on the U.S.-Mexico Border in the Early Twentieth Century / Monica Perales
    • 8. Borderlands/La Familia: Mexicans, Homes, and Colonialism in the Early Twentieth-Century Southwest / Pablo Mitchell
  • PART THREE. BORDERLAND CULTURES AND FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
    • 9. Intimate Ties: Marriage, Families, and Kinship in Eighteenth-Century Pueblo Communities / Tracy Brown
    • 10. The Paradox of Kinship: Native-Catholic Communities in Alta California, 1769–1840s / Erika Pérez
    • 11. Territorial Bonds: Indenture and Affection in Intercultural Arizona, 1864–1894 / Katrina Jagodinsky
    • 12. Writing Kit Carson in the Cold War: “The Family,” “The West,” and Their Chroniclers / Susan Lee Johnson
  • Selected Bibliography
  • List of Contributors
  • Index
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“Western Zombies and Their Killers: Exceptionalism, the Empty West, and Mixed Race Families” a lecture by Dr. Anne Hyde

Posted in History, Live Events, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2014-11-15 17:59Z by Steven

“Western Zombies and Their Killers: Exceptionalism, the Empty West, and Mixed Race Families” a lecture by Dr. Anne Hyde

Colorado State University
Cherokee Park Ballroom, Lory Student Center
Fort Collins, Colorado
2014-12-04, 16:30-18:30 MST (Local Time)

Please join us for a public lecture and book signing/reception by Dr. Anne Hyde, William R. Hochman Professor of History at Colorado College. The title of her talk is drawn from her prize-winning book, Empires, Nations, and Families: The North American West, 1800-1860, which won the 2012 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for a Pulitzer…

For more information, click here.

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“Hiding in Plain Sight: Mixed Blood Families and Race in the 19th-Century United States West”

Posted in Audio, History, Interviews, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2014-04-01 02:23Z by Steven

“Hiding in Plain Sight: Mixed Blood Families and Race in the 19th-Century United States West”

Public Radio Tulsa
Studio Tulsa
Tulsa, Oklahoma
2014-03-25

Rich Fisher, General Manager & Host

Our guest on ST is Anne Hyde, the William R. Hochman Professor of History at Colorado College. She’ll be giving the 2014 H.G. Barnard Distinguished Lecture, which is presented annually by the TU Department of History, tonight (Tuesday the 25th) at the Gilcrease Museum Auditorium here in Tulsa. The lecture begins at the 7pm and is free to the public. Prof. Hyde, who mainly teaches courses on the history of Native America as well as that of North America, received her A.B. degree in American Studies from Mount Holyoke College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Berkeley. She has published widely on the history of the American West, has served on editorial boards for the Pacific Historical Review and the Western Historical Quarterly, and has been elected to the Councils of the Western Historical Association and the American Historical Association. Her address at Gilcrease tonight is entitled “Hiding in Plain Sight: Mixed Blood Families and Race in the 19th-Century United States West” — and it’s derived from her book, “Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860.” A reviewer for the Western Quarterly Review has called this text: “Ingenious. A magnificent scholarly achievement. A sweeping new narrative account of [western] history. A book to ponder and plunder.”

Listen to or download the interview (00:28:58) here.

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Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860

Posted in Books, History, Monographs, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2014-04-01 01:35Z by Steven

Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860

University of Nebraska Press
2011
648 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-2405-6

Anne F. Hyde, William R. Hochman Professor of History
Colorado College

  • Winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize
  • 2012 Pulitzer Prize Finalist

To most people living in the West, the Louisiana Purchase made little difference: the United States was just another imperial overlord to be assessed and manipulated. This was not, as Empires, Nations, and Families makes clear, virgin wilderness discovered by virtuous Anglo entrepreneurs. Rather, the United States was a newcomer in a place already complicated by vying empires. This book documents the broad family associations that crossed national and ethnic lines and that, along with the river systems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis for a global trade in furs that had operated for hundreds of years before the land became part of the United States.

Empires, Nations, and Families shows how the world of river and maritime trade effectively shifted political power away from military and diplomatic circles into the hands of local people. Tracing family stories from the Canadian North to the Spanish and Mexican borderlands and from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Anne F. Hyde’s narrative moves from the earliest years of the Indian trade to the Mexican War and the gold rush era. Her work reveals how, in the 1850s, immigrants to these newest regions of the United States violently wrested control from Native and other powers, and how conquest and competing demands for land and resources brought about a volatile frontier culture—not at all the peace and prosperity that the new power had promised.

Table of Contents

  • List of Illustrations
  • List of Maps
  • Acknowledgments: Adventures in the Land of the Dead
  • Introduction: The Geography of Empire in 1804
  • Part I: Replacing a State: The Continental Web of Family Trade
    • Chapter 1: Families and Fur: The Personal World of the Early
    • Chapter 2: Fort Vancouver’s Families: The Custom of the Country
    • Chapter 3: Three Western Places: Regional Communities
  • Part II: Americans All: The Mixed World of Indian Country
    • Chapter 4: The Early West: The Many Faces of Indian Country
    • Chapter 5: Empires in Transition: Indian Country at Midcentury, 1825–1860
  • Part III: From Nations to Nation: Imposing a State, 1840–1865
    • Chapter 6: Unintended Consequences: Families, Nations, and the Mexican War
    • Chapter 7: Border Wars: Disorder and Disaster in the 1850s
    • Chapter 8: The State and Its Handmaidens: Imposing Order
  • Epilogue: How It All Turned Out
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Read an excerpt here.

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Negotiating Racial and Ethnic Lines in the Borderlands: Mixed Peoples in Transitional North America

Posted in Caribbean/Latin America, Family/Parenting, History, Media Archive, Mexico, Native Americans/First Nation, Papers/Presentations, United States on 2012-11-22 18:22Z by Steven

Negotiating Racial and Ethnic Lines in the Borderlands: Mixed Peoples in Transitional North America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 108
Friday, 2013-01-04, 10:30-12:00 CST (Local Time)
Cornet Room (Sheraton New Orleans)

Chair: Stephen Aron, University of California, Los Angeles

Papers:

Comments: Margaret Jacobs, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The 2000 U.S. census revealed that an increasing number of Americans identified themselves as multi-racial and the recent 2010 census indicates the same trend. President Barak Obama’s 2008 election also called into question debates about multi-racial identities and the validity of racial categories given the long history of intimate mixing in the United States. This panel attempts to historically situate processes of identity-formation by people of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds in North America, focusing particularly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that some mixed-race and multi-ethnic individuals and families struggled against mainstream racial discourses that discouraged any acceptance of complex identities. Some mixed individuals faced pressures to select and perform one racial identity in public and even within their communities and families. However, the research of this panel demonstrates that individual identities remained contested, negotiated, and in some cases fluid, especially in the American west where racial paradigms extended beyond black and white to include Native Americans and Mexicans in the evolution of racial categories and ideologies.

The first paper by Erika Perez evaluates how the offspring of Spanish-Mexican and European ancestry struggled to find their niche in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of California in the wake of the Gold Rush. Mixed offspring soon discovered that their options for social mobility were shaped largely by gender, class, education and racial identity, and despite the presence of a European or Anglo-American father, this did not necessarily guarantee mixed offspring success in a changing social climate in American California. While mixed girls experienced increasing social and marriage options in California society, their brothers expressed fear and frustration that they would never attain the success of the previous generation. Anne Hyde’s paper demonstrates how U.S. bureaucrats and policy-makers of Indian affairs attempted to impose their own concepts of gender and the nuclear family upon Native American communities towards the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, Hyde shows that these bureaucratic efforts were contested by indigenous-influenced meanings of family and kinship, thereby contributing to confusion about racial categories, legal identities, and legitimacy in Indian country. Finally, Andrew Graybill’s paper tells the story of one man, John L. Clarke, a Montana artist, who held fast and firm to an Indian identity throughout his life and in his art despite the potential for him to lay claim to some white privilege because of his marriage and mixed heritage. Although other members of Clarke’s family claimed an “in-between” identity, affirming both their Indian and European roots, he remained determined to express himself as an Indian. As this abstract makes clear, all of these papers touch upon identity-formation and developing ideas of race in the North American borderlands and how this process was not always geared towards assimilation but entailed great complexity and negotiation among mixed individuals and even members of the same family. Members interested in racial identities, borderland studies, and the American West will find this panel useful.

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