Book focuses on family formation on the frontier

Born of Lakes and Plains, by University of Oklahoma history professor Anne F. Hyde, looks at five different families, over a period of a couple hundred years, from the late 1600s to the late 1800s, each founded by the union of a Native American woman and a European man. The men were traders and trappers (initially beaver trappers) and the women were, with perhaps varying degrees of personal enthusiasm, but in accordance with their duties to their parents and their cultural norms, helping to cement the loyalty and assistance of the European men for their respective tribes. Born of Lakes and Plains tracks the descendants of these unions as they struggled to perserve their property and their culture.

As with all family stories, if told over such a long stretch of time as is involved here, there are conflicts, triumphs and tragedies, people that seem likable, and people that seem loathsome, heroes and villians both in the same or succeeding generations. In this sense in particular, the scope of the work, trying to keep track of so many for so long, left a lot of seemingly interesting stories untold, or told only in outline form.

Perhaps a lot of effort is wasted trying to convince the reader that connubial contact betweeen cultures, and the families resulting, was normal, frequent, and as necessary to European expansion into tribal territories as the erection of forts and the deployment of troops. Perhaps more necessary.

I suppose that the typical reader may not realize how frequently, left to their own devices, Europeans and tribal peoples mixed and began to forge their own cultures, or adopt, more or less, the culture of one of the parties to the union.

Today's history students have heard of the Trail of Tears. the forced removal of the Cherokee and other tribes to Oklahoma from their homes in what is now the American Southeast. They probably don't know that the principal Chief of the Cherokee during this dark chapter in American history, John Ross, was, by 'blood', roughly seven-eighths European. This biographic sketch, on the Oklahoma Historical Society website, does not even mention this. Wikipedia notes that Ross was the son of a Scots trader and a mixed-blood Cherokee woman. Ross's great-grandmother, Ghigooie, was a full-blooded Cherokee; she married William Shorey, a Scottish interpreter. Their daughter Anna, Ross's grandmother, married John McDonald, a Scots trader.

But, because Cherokee society was matrilineal, Ross was considered Cherokee by the Cherokee. This was the case with other tribes also, as Hyde explains in Born of Lakes and Plains. This cultural fact explained how and why persons of mixed-descent could, at least initially, move fairly easily between European and tribal societies.

This changed, in time, as Hyde documents. I thought one story in particular illustrated this: Hyde recounts how one mixed-descent person in one of the families she followed, in the Pacific Northwest, could get elected to local office -- but could not vote for himself because he had been branded an 'Indian.'

I read a book a couple of years back, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, by Jill Lepore, which explored the conflict between Indian tribes and English colonoists in New England in the 1670s (a war that, for a time, seemed as if it might result in the conquest of the not-yet-so-well-established English settlers). It occurred to me then that the war resulted because the ministers of Boston and Salem were alarmed that some of their congregants were 'going native' just as tribal chieftains were getting concerned that their subjects were getting too chummy with the English: Leaders on both sides faced loss of status and their respective subjects mixed and mingled and started creating a distinctly American culture... one in which the existing leaders might not play the central role.

We don't have competing cultures clashing on a frontier in our modern day and age... but we seem to have no end of 'leaders' looking to divide us from our neighbors over issues of identity. Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven indeed, as Milton had Lucifer put it in Paradise Lost. But however it may benefit some 'leaders' today, it doesn't help the rest of us one bit.

That process of cultural separation divided some of the families Professor Hyde follows in Born of Lakes and Plains. It virtually destroyed some others. It forced people to choose one world or another -- but both worlds were changed, irrevocably, by the personal choices made by persons in proximity to one another, whether the leaders of those worlds recognized it or not. More than tribal place names survive in our world, too, whether you or I carry any mixed-descent heritage or not, or whether we as a society acknowledge it or not. That's not what Hyde's book is about; she's just providing a foundation for people to realize how much adjacent cultures shared, and for how long. But it's important to realize that foundation exists, and Hyde's book is important for that reason.