A Deep History of Mixing Blood: Indigenous Strategy, Fur Trade, and Race Science in North America

Anne Hyde, professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, discusses how intermarriage was a vital Native strategy using sex, diplomacy, and captivity to create a successful world of mixed-descent people who pioneered the American West. That success challenged U.S. ideas about who deserved frontier opportunities. Indian country's mixed-descent families and their Indigenous kin soon faced a sharply racist white America determined to end intermarriage. Using personal -- and sometimes painful -- stories, Hyde examines specific families who built the fur trade in the North and who ended up everywhere in the U.S. West.

This is the Rogers Distinguished Fellow Lecture.