Mixed-blood

The term mixed-blood in the United States is most often employed for individuals of mixed European and Native American ancestry. Some of the most prominent in the 19th century were mixed-blood or mixed-race descendants of fur traders and Native American women along the northern frontier. The fur traders tended to be men of social standing, and they often married or had relationships with daughters of Native American chiefs, consolidating social standing on both sides. They formed the upper tier of what was for years in the 18th and 19th centuries a two-tier society at settlements at trading posts, with other Europeans, American Indians and mixed-blood or Métis workers below them. Mixed-blood is also used occasionally in Canadian accounts to refer to the nineteenth century Anglo-Métis population rather than Métis, which referred to people of First Nations and French descent.

Similarly in the Southeast, the Cherokee and other tribes started having inter-generational marriage and sexual relationships with the Europeans in the early 1700s. Many Cherokee bands and families were quick to see the economic benefits of having trade, land and business dealings with Europeans, strengthened through marriages. Prominent Cherokee and Creek leaders of the 19th century were of mixed-descent but, born to Indian mothers in matrilineal kinship societies, they identified fully and were accepted as Indian and grew up in those cultures.

Renowned persons of mixed-blood ancestry in United States' history are many. One such example is Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, who guided the Mormon Battalion from New Mexico to the city of San Diego in California in 1846, and then accepted an appointment there as alcalde of Mission San Luis Rey. Both his parents worked with the Lewis and Clark Expedition, his mother Sacagawea as the invaluable Shoshone guide, and his French-Canadian father Toussaint Charbonneau as an interpreter of Shoshone and Hidatsa, cook and laborer. J.B. Charbonneau is depicted on the United States dollar coin along with his mother Sacagawea.

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