Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. By Ned Blackhawk, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2006, pp. 372, US$35.
This review was originally published in the Australasian Journal of American Studies 26, no. 2 (Dec. 2007), 124-127.
Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West
Ned Blackhawk
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
At least since the publication of Richard White's The Middle Ground (1991), few colonial historians would be unfamiliar with the kind of tale told by Ned Blackhawk. Indeed, even before White, pioneering historians such as James Axtell, Daniel Richter, James Merrell, and others warned a subsequent generation of scholars of colonial America to ignore Native American history at their peril. But, as Blackhawk points out, the same kind of integration - even transformation - of Native American and American history after 1800 has not occurred. Indian histories have been told and continue to be told, but they often lie outside the comfortable confines of the more mainstream narrative of the development of the nation. With rare exceptions, Native Americans are not usually placed at the centre of American history. More usually, the history of Native Americans is treated as an aside - or worse, like the people of the Great Basin, they are ignored altogether. Thus, in this ambitious, provocative, and richly complex book, Ned Blackhawk seeks first and foremost to recover the lost history of the numerous peoples who inhabited the vast area encompassing much of present-day Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and eastern California. Neighbouring more well-known nations such as the Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos, the tribes we know today as the Utes, Shoshone, and Paiute Indians played a central role in the contest between European empires and in the creation of a new nation but they are rarely given their due. Instead, older historians, anthropologists, and writers such as Mark Twain and ethnographers such as Julian Steward have created and encouraged a view of the Great Basin Indians as peoples at the margins of history and civilization: the quintessential 'peoples without history,' and among the most 'primitive' peoples in the world. Yet, as Blackhawk vividly shows, the Utes, Paiutes, and Shoshones played a critical role in colonial encounters - in turns resisting and facilitating imperial expansion by Spanish, British, and American explorers, traders, settlers, priests and officials. But if Blackhawk keeps a keen eye on European- Indian encounters over the past few centuries, he is also quick to mine scarce and scanty colonial records to document inter-Indian relations in the region, including those between the Utes and the Navajos, Comanches, and Apaches, but especially between the Utes and their Great Basin neighbours, the various branches of the Shoshones and Paiutes. On the back of meticulous research, Blackhawk shows that colonial expansion was predicated on Indian help, usually to the detriment of more distant groups who lacked access to the trade goods and horses that helped facilitate Ute expansion and stability during the colonial era. But Blackhawk does not just Till in' a piece of the Native American historical mosaic. For Violence over the Land is not just a history of the Great Basin Peoples. Indeed, that would have required an entirely different perspective and approach. Instead, this is a book that makes the violence of the colonial encounter its real subject. And this is what makes it different from Blackhawk's supervisor's work. Whereas Richard White stressed the creative process involved in making the middle ground, Blackhawk takes a longer view and emphasises the destructive violence of the colonial encounter, from its dimly perceived origins in the sixteenth century, to its explosive climax in the mid-nineteenth century as Mormon settlers and Union soldiers took revenge for Indian raids borne of a long legacy of impoverishment and destitution. Yet, in addition to this longer-term perspective, Blackhawk also teases out the broader rippling effects of colonial violence in the region, noting that Utes preyed on their non- equestrian neighbours to their west to feed an increasingly voracious New Mexican market in Indian slaves. Blackhawk joins a growing group of scholars such as Brett Rushforth and James Brooks who have unearthed another layer entirely of the bloody legacy of colonialism, among Native Americans themselves. Moreover, in taking a long-term perspective and in writing a history of colonial violence rather than of the Great Basin peoples per se, Blackhawk forces Americans and their historians to acknowledge that this violence was not just central to the story of European encounters with the Utes, Paiutes, and Shoshones, but that it was also at the heart of the story of the creation and expansion of the new nation. As he notes, the fledgling nation expanded into worlds already affected by generations of European disruptions. Violence both 'predated and became intrinsic to American expansion,' enabling the 'rapid accumulation of new resources, territories, and subject peoples,' while it 'legitimated the power of migrants, structured new social and racial orders, and provided the preconditions for political formation' (p. 9). In this, Blackhawk is (coincidentally, I think) following in the footsteps of colonial American historians such as Eric Hinderaker who have put souring Indian relations front and centre of earlier expansion, and most recently, Patrick Griffin, who has put the frontier violence between Indians and Europeans in the Ohio Valley at the heart of his story of the American Revolution. Now we also have an eloquent and compelling argument that 'violence and American nationhood... progressed hand in hand' (p. 9). Finally, if Blackhawk paints a grim and harrowing picture of the founding narrative of the American nation, he also notes that recognition of the magnitude of the tragedy of this story is essential to reconciliation, co- existence and redemption. A national history shared by all is the first step toward the goal of a shared civic culture. Thus this is an ongoing battle. And indeed, one of the great strengths of this book is Blackhawk's ability to weave a story of violence with one of endurance and survival, successfully avoiding a seemingly inevitable choice between narratives that emphasise destruction, on one hand, and persistence, on the other. For Blackhawk, one suspects, there was little choice; his own family history is intimately bound up in both the violence of the region, and the ongoing Shoshone struggle for survival. Blackhawk and his work represent the enduring legacy of both.