Andrew Graybill's latest book is narrative history at its best, in which the narrative is supported by meticulous research, rich historical analysis, and tied to the larger events that unfolded in the American West and the nation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, Graybill examines the Clarke family—its progenitor Malcolm, his Piegan Blackfoot wife Coth-co-co-na, their son Horace and daughter Helen, and Horace's son John—to understand the peoples who lived at the peripheries of Native and Euro-American worlds in the West, and to see how those peoples “walk[ed] in two worlds—one red, the other white” (245). Graybill also argues that the Clarke family “offer[s] a rich historical lens through which to view the shifting grounds of race in the West and the wider nation,” in which “race was not necessarily the intractable issue for the Clarkes,” but “the very attribute” that allowed them to ascend “near the pinnacle of the social order on the Upper Missouri, serving as brokers between white and native societies” (5, 244). Ultimately, though, by the turn of the twentieth century, the Clarke family illustrates how “hybrid peoples were pushed increasingly to the margins by white newcomers” on account of their race, a “process laden with physical as well as emotional violence” (245).

The beauty of Graybill's work is how he weaves the Clarkes's story into the broader narrative of the American past. For instance, Graybill uses the lives of the fur trader Malcolm Clarke and his Piegan mate Coth-co-co-na to demonstrate how Native and white worlds in the West intersected in very intimate ways, a product of the “cultural confluence generated by the fur trade” (53). In addition, Graybill deploys Malcolm and Coth-co-co-na's relationship to talk about U.S.-Blackfeet relations during the nineteenth century, the onset of the market and transportation revolutions that funneled white settlers onto Native lands, and such events as the Louisiana Purchase, Corps of Discovery expedition, War of 1812, Texas Revolution, California gold rush, and the Civil War. Moreover, Graybill charts—over the course of the nineteenth century—how white Americans came to perceive cross-cultural intimacies like those shared by Malcolm and Coth-co-co-na as a corruption of white society and identity, because such peoples and their children “were difficult to place within the schemes of racial classification that emerged in the nineteenth century, complicating matters surrounding property and citizenship” (82).

Graybill then shifts gears to look at the violence that emerged within this cross-cultural context during the late nineteenth century, which led to the death of Malcolm Clarke at the hands of a group of Piegan Blackfeet, and in turn fed into what became known as the Marias Massacre, one of several mass killings that were characteristic of the so-called Indian Wars. To get at the heart of this violence and its aftermath, Graybill recounts the story of Malcolm's son Horace, and his quest to avenge his father's death. At the same time, Horace's narrative “was merely the opening act in a larger drama” that revolved around the Department of War's attempts to steal away control of federal Indian policy from the Department of the Interior, while white reformers and humanitarians—like Lydia Maria Child and William Lloyd Garrison—waged a “battle for public opinion” against the “military establishment in the wake of the Piegan [Marias] massacre” (137–38).

But it is Helen Clarke's story that truly stands out in Graybill's book, who illustrates the “plight faced by mixed-blood individuals” in the United States and “the racial, gender, and social politics at the turn of the twentieth century” (154). During her lifetime, Helen was an actress in New York, a schoolteacher, and later the Montana superintendent of schools, allotment agent in Oklahoma, and finally, activist for the Piegan Blackfeet. But because of her mixed-race ancestry and gender, she was at times fetishized by white Americans who attended her performances, while at other times subjected to a racial hatred that produced “emotional distress” and “psychic wounds” (165). Through Helen, readers understand how race was molded into a weapon used to subjugate the peoples of two worlds, which severely limited the opportunities that had characterized the Clarke family's existence during the nineteenth century.

The story does not end there, but instead with John L. Clarke, Horace's deaf son, who became a renowned artist during the early to mid-twentieth century. At the core of John's story is the fact that “it had become harder for peoples of mixed ancestry to negotiate life beyond the reservation boundaries … [as] the gulf between the races was [now] most obvious” (197). As a consequence, though, John “identified more with Coth-co-co-na's people than with Malcolm Clarke's, and thus chose to walk primarily in one world, not two” (198). In particular, Graybill uses John's narrative to demonstrate how Native Peoples struggled with assimilation and the boarding school experience, the gross poverty of the Great Depression, and the trauma of termination after World War II. But in concluding his work, Graybill deploys John as an example of Native agency and resilience as he continually reinvented himself, either by advertising his craft to white Americans such as John D. Rockefeller Jr. as part of the early twentieth century “Indian craze”; seeking economic opportunities with New Deal agencies amid the Depression; or utilizing his artistic abilities to articulate Native identity, sovereignty, and self-determination (216).

While Graybill briefly situates the Clarke family within the centuries-long span of cross-cultural relationships between Native and Euro-American peoples, there is little to no discussion about how such intimacies figured into the much larger colonial experience. In this vein, it seems only natural to talk about American imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how an imperial context was central to transforming race into a restrictive category used against the peoples of two worlds. To take Graybill's work even one step further, the Clarke family's story could speak to the global phenomenon of cross-cultural intimacies that were born out of the colonial, imperial project.