Ancestral Places: Understanding Kanaka Geographies

Description

National Book Award winning histories such as The Hemingses of Monticello and Slaves in the Family have raised our awareness about America s intimately mixed black and white past.
Award-winning western historian Andrew R.
Graybill now sheds light on the overlooked interracial Native-white relationships critical in the development of the trans-Mississippi West in this multigenerational saga.
Beginning in 1844 with the marriage of Montana fur trader Malcolm Clarke and his Piegan Blackfeet bride| Coth-co-co-na| Graybill traces the family from the mid-nineteenth century| when such mixed marriages proliferated| to the first half of the twentieth| when Clarke s children and grandchildren often encountered virulent prejudice.
At the center of Graybill s his is the virtually unexamined 1870 Marias Massacre| on a par with the more infamous slaughters at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee| an episode set in motion by the murder of Malcolm Clarke and in which Clarke s two sons rode with the Second U.S.
Cavalry to kill their own blood relatives.”