Alix Christie is the author of the novel The Shining Mountains, which is now available in paperback. She also has written the novel Gutenberg's Apprentice. She lives in San Francisco and in Berlin.
Q: What inspired you to write The Shining Mountains, and how much is the novel based on your family history?
A: The novel follows very closely my own family history and is as factually accurate as I could make it. I have known about my fur trading ancestors since my childhood shuttling back and forth between California and British Columbia.
Then after my first novel was published, my brother, a scholar, gave me a pile of books about the Scots-Native experience in pre-settlement North America. He’d just written a scholarly article on Duncan McDonald, our distant cousin, the son of the last Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader in the U.S., Angus McDonald, and his Nez Perce-French-Mohawk wife Catherine Baptiste.
At first I planned only to write a novel about Duncan, an amazing man caught between two cultures who had an outsized impact in late 19th century Montana. Then I learned more about his parents, and their incredible lifelong love story, and knew I had to write a multi-generational saga.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: After some general reading I went straight to my cousins on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, all descendants of Catherine and Angus, enrolled members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, as well as other descendants enrolled in the Nez Perce tribe. Without their support I could not have researched and written the book, nor known how to ask for and receive formal approval from both tribes.
I learned all I could from them, then spent hours in Western archives reading Angus and Duncan’s letters and newspaper and eyewitness accounts of the trading practices and conflicts and wars between the colonizing Americans and Native peoples.
Luckily, both McDonald men were prominent and left writings that survive; I relied on oral stories, Native friends and cousins, and anthropological sources to depict Catherine’s peoples’ lives.
What surprised me most—and what few Americans realize—is how thoroughly multicultural the pre-American world of the Northwest was. It was a bubbling mix of Natives and Europeans all trading and intermarrying. The peoples of what would become the United States have always been radically diverse!
Q: The writer Susan Straight said of the book, “I especially loved the women, their bravery and clear-eyed vision of this world, from ancestral legends to the danger of the new.” What do you think of that description?
A: I was pleased to read this, as I think most histories are terribly skewed toward the recorded exploits of men. On the pre-colonial continent, in hundreds of different Native tribes, men and women together managed their peoples’ affairs. In some cases this was through matrilineal structures, in others not.
Among the Nez Perce, Catherine’s people, for example, women managed all economic affairs and thus held significant power. Catherine herself was an exceptional woman who trapped beaver with her father and birthed all 12 of her children alone, as was the tradition.
I pictured her and her mother as powerful women who fully grasped the risks to their people of the invading settlers, and were willing to fight to preserve their homelands and families. Above all, they saw their duty as preserving the culture for future generations.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope readers gain some appreciation for the incredible courage and resilience of the Native inhabitants of this country. They were very nearly wiped out over decades of genocide, but as their saying goes today: “We are still here.” Very few Americans descended from immigrants were taught any of this real history in school—and it is sadly once again being contested.
I hope that by reading about this one specific place and people, readers will see the precise steps the U.S. government and settlers took to dispossess the tribes and force them onto reservations. We need to recognize that “history” is essentially a series of decisions made by people much like ourselves.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have just finished a new novel set in the immediate aftermath of World War II in Berlin. Called “Rubble Women,” it’s the story of a half-dozen German women thrown together in 1945, forced to clear the rubble of war to survive — and more importantly, forced to examine the choices each one of them made during 12 years of Nazi dictatorship.
I’m pleased that the opening chapters won a gold prize from the Historical Novel Society in the 20th century category, and hopeful it will soon find a great publishing home!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I found it so hard to separate from “my” Rubble Women that I am now working on a collection of linked short stories examining their later lives and descendants in both the United States and Germany.
It’s all part of my secret dream to one day be a writer who can say “she divides her time between…”—in my case San Francisco and Berlin, as is actually now printed on the paperback of The Shining Mountains!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. A previous version of this Q&A can be found here.
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