CANYON, Texas — An Oklahoma historian officially will be awarded a prestigious honor from West Texas A&M University’s Center for the Study of the American West at a Jan. 23 event.
Dr. Anne F. Hyde, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, was selected as the 2023 winner of CSAW’s Bonney McDonald Outstanding Book Award in September.
“Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West” explores generations of intermarriages between whites and Indigenous populations — and how and why they were celebrated, then hidden.
Hyde will give a lecture and accept her award at 7 p.m. Jan. 23 event in the Hazlewood Lecture Hall in Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, 2503 Fourth Ave. in Canyon. A light reception will begin at 6 p.m., and copies of the book will be on sale at the event for Hyde to sign.
“This talk presents some communities that intermarriage created. We’ll meet Oto, Omaha and French families living along the Missouri River as well as the Cheyenne and Arapaho Bent family network in Colorado, Texas and Indian Territory,” Hyde said. “We’ll explore another question: Why did this strategy, so common and serving so many personal and economic needs, become so dangerous it was made illegal in the 20th century?”
CSAW has given the Bonney McDonald Outstanding Western Book Award annually since 2019.
“Born of Lakes and Plains,” also a finalist for the 2023 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize and a 2023 American Book Award winner from the Before Columbus Foundation, tracks five American families across generations as they “first bridged then collided with racial boundaries,” according to Hyde’s publishing house, W.W. Norton.
The book is “an empathetic examination of the lives of ethnically mixed individuals across the North American West,” said Dr. Tim Bowman, chairman of WT’s Department of History and member of CSAW’s award committee. “People often to tend to draw distinct lines between the various groups who encountered one another in the west over the course of the last several centuries. Hyde’s work shows a more believable lived reality—the dividing lines between Native and non-Native peoples were oftentimes so blurred that the differences between them became nearly impossible to distinguish.”
Promoting regional research is a key aim of the University’s long-range plan, WT 125: From the Panhandle to the World.
That plan is fueled by the historic One West comprehensive fundraising campaign, which reached its initial $125 million goal 18 months after publicly launching in September 2021. The campaign’s new goal is to reach $175 million by 2025; currently, it has raised more than $150 million.
