Love stories, especially those between Native peoples and newcomers, are usually left out of national histories. But the story of people connecting, pairing, having families, departing, dividing up, and doing it all over again is central to how the world’s peoples and cultures came to be. So why is love, so clearly at the core of human experience, or, more specifically, love across cultural boundaries, a missing plot line?
Historically, in both the United States and Australia, these unions became like state secrets that had to be kept under wraps since they posed problems for nations on both sides of the frontier. These integrated families blurred the dividing line between colonizer and colonized and countered colonialists’ dreams of seizing new lands and subjugating Indigenous people.