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 ... The Europeans at first were treated like another tribe ... Hyde provides illuminating detail on the family networks the outsider men married into and the benefits and costs to the various parties ... Hyde’s research is impressive throughout; it is hard to imagine a pertinent document that has escaped her scrutiny. Yet her characters often remain elusive. It is in the nature of social history that the subjects leave few traces for the historian to work with. In some cases they never wrote anything down, lacking literacy or incentive. In other cases, what was written down was subsequently lost. As a result we often observe Hyde’s subjects from a distance. At times she is compelled to extrapolate ... Yet Hyde makes good use of one woman who did create a written record—an elegantly poetic one ... This fine book will help ensure that that history isn’t lost.
Hyde tries to corral her unwieldy narrative into the stories of five white men and their extended families ranging across North America from colonial times into the 20th century ... Unfortunately, as Hyde jumps from one large extended family to another, it's impossible to keep the names straight, let alone discern what makes any of them tick. In the effort to convey the wide variety of fates encountered by mixed-descent people, she has offered a huge, and hugely confusing, cast of characters. Family tree charts would have been a help.
Hyde doesn’t gloss over suffering. But in her immersive and humane new book she draws attention to the relationships between white and Indigenous people that made 'strangers into kin,' long before such unions were decried and, in some states, outlawed ... 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 ... 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 Hyde’s 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 ... Hyde wants us to see how some families found ways to endure, but there’s an irreducible grief that wends its way through this book.
A fascinating history ... 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 ... By focusing on families, Hyde has made this history relatable and personal. The engaging narrative is highly recommended for all biography and history collections.
Hyde relies on a multitude of sources to establish a broader view of what was occurring from the 1600s onward as fur traders and missionaries traveled deep into the West and engaged repeatedly with various Indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, this larger perspective frequently subsumes the more personal tales of the marriages Hyde considers, unions documented by a much smaller pool of materials. There are also reasonable concerns regarding references in the text to courtships that 'blossomed' and 'love' matches since the individuals involved left limited first-person records, while the historical circumstances raise questions about consent. That said, Hyde’s unusual history does reveal how the realities of marriages between Europeans and Native Americans have been overlooked, why these relationships matter, and what aspects of this mostly unexamined facet of Western history merit further study.
Hyde upends prevailing narratives about relations between Indigenous people and white Americans in this sweeping history ... 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.
A searching study ... 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 ... A necessary contribution to American studies for all the shameful episodes it recounts.
