Book Review: Born of Lakes and Plains
Much of the turmoil of the past five centuries in North American endured by Native Peoples and European interlopers revolves around procreation and the mixing of blood. It centers on the illusory and imprecise notion of mixed descent.
In Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West, Anne F. Hyde provides an exhaustive account of five mixed-descent families. Their lives span from the late 1600s to the early 1900s. The people are Indigenous and French and English immigrants. The European interlopers are motivated by commerce like fur trade. Hyde chronicles family relationships, ever-changing alliances, violent conflicts, failed governmental policies, broken treaties and agreements, and ever-evolving cultural norms.
The author takes the reader along with generations of Native and European families who followed the fur trade from the Great Lakes to Astoria. The book is ponderous and repetitive at times. It was challenging for me to keep track of family names and lineages. But on balance it was an illuminating and satisfying read. It reminded me that for centuries few of us have recognized that our species is, by definition, the mixing of blood, yet the deleterious notion of race continues to plague us by retarding human progress.
