Showing papers in "Western Historical Quarterly in 2016"
TL;DR: The crimes committed against American Indians have been a prominent part of the historiography of North America and more recently, the problem has been defining these crimes as discussed by the authors, and the question here is what should we call them?
Abstract: The crimes committed against American Indians have been a prominent part of the historiography of North America. More recently, the problem has been defining these crimes. This article attempts to establish a workable definition that can be applied to the period of contact and, in particular, to the American West.
If western history has a common thread, it is that conquest and violence went hand in hand. This is not to say that American history east of the Mississippi River is devoid of such a theme; the despicable treatment of black slaves in the South, the Irish in northern cities, or even specific Native groups themselves belies such an argument. But in the West, government officials, army officers, and common settlers often found themselves in disputes with American Indians, and this conflict is at the core of hundreds of books and studies. Indian tribes lost most of these contests, so it is crucial that historians look at the nature of the conflicts and try to understand what they meant—then and now. In many cases, if not most, non-Indians committed crimes against Indians. The question here is what should we call those crimes?
Beginning in the late 1980s, professors such as David E. Stannard, Ward Churchill, and Russell Thornton argued that what happened to the Indian resembled the “holocaust” and that it led to “genocide.”1 Other colonial historians, including Laurence M. Hauptman and Barbara Alice Mann, …
10 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that government officials engaged in one crime against humanity (ethnic cleansing through forced deportation and confinement to reservations) to actually prevent the more heinous crime of genocide and argued that ethnic cleansing may be a more accurate term for what transpired in other instances.
Abstract: Gary Clayton Anderson has boldly instigated a conversation on the nature of Indian-white conflict in the American West—in a nutshell he asks, was it genocide or ethnic cleansing? Anderson answers this emphatically: ethnic cleansing, which he defines as “forced dislocation with the intent to take away lands of a particular ethnic, religious, or cultural group.” He argues that we should not label what happened in the West in the late nineteenth century as genocide because relatively low numbers of Indians were killed and there was no official intent to eliminate Indians. His most intriguing argument is that government officials engaged in one crime against humanity—ethnic cleansing through forced deportation and confinement to reservations—to actually prevent the more heinous crime of genocide.
Anderson’s formulation of Indian-white conflict in the West as an either/or choice strikes me as an oversimplification of what is actually a both/and phenomenon. Scholars such as Brendan C. Lindsay and Benjamin Madley have shown—pretty incontrovertibly—that it is entirely appropriate to use the term genocide to represent what happened in California in the late nineteenth century.1 Anderson has shown that ethnic cleansing may be a more accurate term for what transpired in other instances.2 In this brief commentary, I intend to critique both genocide and ethnic cleansing as limiting concepts and discuss alternative means of understanding a broader history of Indian-white conflict that puts women and children at the center rather than at the periphery of our historical inquiry.
I have researched, written, and spoken about Indigenous child removal in the American West, Australia, and Canada for nearly twenty years, and I am often asked whether the practice should …
5 citations
TL;DR: The people of Seattle have worked long and hard to fulfill the prophet Isaiah 40:4 that every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain this paper.
Abstract: Too High & Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography . By David B. Williams. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. xxii + 239 pp. Illustrations, maps, charts, table, appendix, notes, index. $29.95.)
The people of Seattle have worked long and hard to fulfill the pronouncement in Isaiah 40:4 that “every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” The generations of very secular (earth)movers and shakers who engineered the cityscape were working to make straight the way for Mercury, god of commerce and communication. As David B. Williams demonstrates in this absorbing and accessible book, Seattleites regraded, drained, filled, and tunneled to enhance economic opportunities: “Improved transportation corridors ultimately became a fundamental way of envisioning a better Seattle and an idea that acted as a central driver for … d3ca{at}pdx.edu
5 citations
TL;DR: The organized destruction of California Indians under United States rule was not a closely guarded secret as mentioned in this paper, and mid-nineteenth-century California newspapers and private individuals, as well as state and federal officials, frequently addressed and often encouraged what we now call genocide.
Abstract: Between 1846 and 1870, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000.1 Diseases, dislocation, and starvation caused many of these deaths. However, abduction, unfree labor, mass death on reservations, individual homicides, battles, and massacres also took thousands of lives and hindered reproduction. Historian Gary Clayton Anderson claims that what happened in California during these years should primarily be defined as ethnic cleansing, or forced removal, and not genocide.2 Forced removals did occur, but ultimately this was a case of genocide, sanctioned and facilitated by state and federal officials.
The organized destruction of California Indians under United States rule was not a closely guarded secret. Mid-nineteenth-century California newspapers and private individuals, as well as state and federal officials, frequently addressed and often encouraged what we now call genocide. As early as 1890, historian Hubert Howe Bancroft called the killing “one of the last human hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all.”3 Fifty-three years later, historical demographer Sherburne F. Cook wrote the first major study of the topic. Using varied sources, he quantified the violent killing of 4,556 California Indians between 1847 and 1865, concluding, “since the quickest and easiest way to get rid of [the Northern California Indian] was to kill him off, this procedure was adopted as standard for some years.”4
In the same year that Cook published his groundbreaking article, legal scholar Raphael Lemkin coined a new word for an ancient crime. Defining the concept in 1944, he combined “the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide ,” or killing, to describe …
3 citations
TL;DR: For example, Anderson as discussed by the authors argued that the correct term to apply to the history of American Indian policy is ethnic cleansing, and that the 1998 Rome Statute provides the singularly correct bureaucratic entity to determine such matters.
Abstract: For scholars Gary Clayton Anderson, John Mack Faragher, and Guenter Lewy, among many others, genocide appears to be a term reserved for Turks, Nazis, Cambodians, Rwandans, and other truly evil peoples but is unsuitable for application to American history.1
Anderson has decided that the correct term to apply to the history of American Indian policy is ethnic cleansing , and that the 1998 Rome Statute provides the singularly correct bureaucratic entity to determine such matters. He glosses in passing that “[t]he Rome Statute does not specifically outline the crime of ‘ethnic cleansing,’” his own preferred term. He also incorrectly states that the United States has “accepted” the International Criminal Court; in fact, the United States continues to reject the jurisdiction of the ICC as a matter of state policy.2
The historian’s task is to interrogate, frame, and contextualize terminology rather than assert (or dismiss) terms as if the meaning of these representations was precise or self-evident.3 I heartily concur with Anderson that ethnic cleansing is an excellent term to describe what happened in the colonial encounter. In American Settler Colonialism: A History , I employed it liberally, but I also argued that the United States “pursued a continuous ‘foreign-policy’ of colonial genocide targeting indigenous North Americans.” I added that, through centuries of borderland conflict, Americans “internalized a propensity for traumatic, righteous violence, and a quest for total security, which came to characterize a series of future conflicts.4
Anderson rejects the definition adopted in the 1948 United Nations convention on genocide, which …
3 citations
TL;DR: The Imagined Frontiers: Contemporary America and Beyond by Carl Abbott as mentioned in this paper explores the ways that visions of frontiers have shaped American culture in the second half of the twentieth century and argues that it remains useful precisely because it has so many nested or overlapping meanings that artists can play with in different ways.
Abstract: Imagined Frontiers: Contemporary America and Beyond . By Carl Abbott. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. x + 259 pp. Illustrations, maps, table, notes, index. $19.95, paper.)
“A frontier,” Carl Abbott proclaims in Imagined Frontiers , “is an edge—a line on a map and the territories and communities that surround that line.” (3) From this definition, Abbott explores the ways that visions of frontiers—whether in South Florida, Portland, Oregon, or even the planet Mars—have shaped American culture in the second half of the twentieth century. Though he acknowledges scholarly critiques of the frontier concept, he argues that it remains “useful precisely because it has so many nested or overlapping meanings that artists can play with in different … dabnet{at}fullerton.edu
3 citations
TL;DR: In the movie "Lone star" as discussed by the authors, the author describes a scene in which the author compresses the social and spatial boundary lines of western history, including the border between the United States and Mexico.
Abstract: Figure 1.
Elizabeth Jameson. Fifty-fourth president of the Western History Association. Photo by Dave Brown.
There is a scene in my favorite movie, Lone Star (1996), which compresses the social and spatial boundary lines of western history. Lone Star , according to writer/director John Sayles, is “a story about borders.” “In a personal sense,” Sayles elaborated, “a border is where you draw a line and say ‘This is where I end and someone else begins.’ In a metaphorical sense, it can be any of the symbols that we erect between one another—sex, class, race, age.”1 Eagle Pass, Texas, where Lone Star was filmed, becomes the fictional town of Frontera—“frontier” in the sense of border. In Frontera, the Anglo minority has long dominated the ethnic Mexican majority and the smaller African American community. Borders there both exclude and protect: the international border, the racial neighborhoods and cafes, local class lines, the intimate boundaries of sex, the narrative lines of contested histories, of personal lives and public stories.
At one point in the film, Sheriff Sam Deeds drives across the bridge to Mexico to speak to Chucho Montoya, El Rey de las Llantas (King of the Tires), who, he has heard, once witnessed a long-buried murder. As they chat at one of El Rey’s tire lots, Deeds broaches the murder. Montoya responds, “You the sheriff of Rio County, right? Un jefe muy …
3 citations
TL;DR: The 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition relied on female bodies and beauty to solidify the city's and state's imperial claims as mentioned in this paper, and used women's bodies to advertise the city, fair, and state at the same time amusement concessions displayed them in ways that reaffirmed racial hierarchies.
Abstract: San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition relied on female bodies and beauty to solidify the city’s and state’s imperial claims. Publicists and exhibitors used women’s bodies to advertise the city, fair, and state at the same time amusement concessions displayed them in ways that reaffirmed racial hierarchies. In a reflection of the expansion of white women’s claims to public space, the fair’s Woman’s Board worked to make the fair safe for unaccompanied women and affirmed their status vis-a-vis nonwhite women. Economic interests and changing gender ideals intertwined to expand white women’s public presence at the exposition while simultaneously celebrating American expansionism and the contemporary racial hierarchy.
2 citations
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TL;DR: For example, the authors argues that the discussion of genocide in American Indian history is not only about criminal justice but also about genealogies of violence, the enduring legacy of the past in the present for all of us today.
Abstract: Discussions of genocide make me melancholy. What are we really talking about when we talk about genocide in American Indian history? Are we preparing legal briefs for international courts and tribunals? Are we weighing evidentiary standards and admissibility requirements? Are we debating jurisdiction and the applicability of various criminal statutes? Or are we talking about genealogies of violence, the enduring legacy of the past in the present for all of us today? Are we trying to name the unnameable? Are we gesturing toward a larger truth about what Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen poet Deborah A. Miranda calls “the End of the World” and the “great holocaust” or what historian Gary Clayton Anderson calls elsewhere “The Crime That Should Haunt America”?1 When we talk about genocide, are we talking, ultimately, about criminal justice or historical justice?
As a kid, I remember loving stories about California Indians. In the fourth grade we learned how to grind acorns. We visited the Santa Barbara mission, with its beautiful white walls and green lawns and blue water. There were no Indians at the missions—not as I recall—only dioramas and abandoned tools, as if the childlike dwellers of the padres’ haciendas had left their hoes and spades in the fields of their joyful toil.
My favorite book back then was Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960), with its romantic story of a female Robinson Crusoe, the last of her vanished race on San Nicolas Island. But there was no mention or discussion of the Tongva, who were, at that moment, …
2 citations
TL;DR: The history of California's Channel Islands is described in this article as a history, and it is a remarkable book in its completeness of research, its format, and its elegant writing style.
Abstract: California’s Channel Islands: A History . By Frederic Caire Chiles. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. xiv + 282 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $19.95, paper.)
This is a remarkable book in its completeness of research, its format, and its elegant writing style. Author Frederic Caire Childs, himself a descendent of a Santa Cruz Island family, describes California’s Channel Islands as a history, and it is surely that: an exhaustively researched history (despite the relative brevity of the book) based in an array of sources, its narrative enlivened by family histories, similar to his own family history, in each of the eight islands of the channel. As such, this history—which moves from island to island, from San Miguel to San Clemente, through successive eras of geological …
kstarr{at}usc.edu
TL;DR: The Electric Edge of Academe: The Saga of Lucien L. Nunn and Deep Springs College as discussed by the authors is an interesting blend of biography and institutional history, which traces the life of L. Jackson Newell, who developed a means of transmitting alternating electric current over extended distances.
Abstract: The Electric Edge of Academe: The Saga of Lucien L. Nunn and Deep Springs College . By L. Jackson Newell. Foreword by William T. Vollmann. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015. xxii + 455 pp. Illustrations, maps, table, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.)
In this intriguing blend of biography and institutional history, L. Jackson Newell traces the life of Lucien L. Nunn and the history of Deep Springs College, which Nunn founded in 1917. Newell’s previous work on innovation in higher education and his experiences as student, trustee, and president of the college enable him to contextualize the college’s developments and provide insight into the workings of a close-knit community.
The first section of the book chronicles the life of Nunn, who developed a means of transmitting alternating electric current over extended distances … michellemorgan{at}missouristate.edu
TL;DR: The authors reconstructs the life and times of Peter Biggs, a free African American man in 1850s and 1860s Los Angeles, revealing the social and economic niche that he fashioned between the U.S.-Mexican War and the Civil War.
Abstract: This article reconstructs the life and times of Peter Biggs, a free African American man in 1850s and 1860s Los Angeles, revealing the social and economic niche that he fashioned between the U.S.-Mexican War and the Civil War. Biggs’s little-known biography illuminates a forgotten moment in the temporal and spatial history of American racial construction.
In April 1865, a group of pro-Confederate Angelenos was arrested for celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and transported to the local Union headquarters at Drum Barracks. One man stood out from the group. Identified in newspaper accounts as “Peter Biggs, a negro,” the free African American barber was, according to one memoir, placed in the charge of six Union cavalrymen and “made to foot it” some twenty miles south to Drum Barracks, with “an iron chain and ball attached to his ankle.” The ball and chain highlighted this former slave’s “uncertain position” …
TL;DR: Cameron et al. as discussed by the authors argue that lack of immunity to novel diseases was only one component of the explanation for population decline, and they aim to if not overturn then at least dislodge virgin soil epidemics as the principle explanation for the cause of American Indian population decline.
Abstract: Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America . Amerind Studies in Anthropology. Edited by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund. Foreword by John Ware. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015. xi + 276 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, chart, notes, index. $60.00.)
B eyond Germs will appeal to historians of early America, the West, American Indians, and those interested in the history of disease. Determined to demonstrate that lack of immunity to novel diseases was only one component of the explanation for population decline, these scholars aim to if not overturn then at least dislodge virgin soil epidemics as the principle explanation for the cause of American Indian population decline. Their view is that virgin soil is both simplistic and, I would add, lazy. The claim that American Indian population demise is principally explainable because of their supposed lack of immunity to Old World … Cwm6w{at}eservices.virginia.edu
TL;DR: From Treaties to Reserves: The Federal Government and Native Peoples in Territorial Alberta, 1870-1905 as discussed by the authors analyzes Canadian treaty making and its results in the province of Alberta during the last third of the nineteenth century.
Abstract: From Treaties to Reserves: The Federal Government and Native Peoples in Territorial Alberta, 1870–1905. By D. J. Hall. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. xxii + 477 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $110.00, CAN$110.00, cloth; $34.95, CAN$34.95, paper.)
This excellent study analyzes Canadian treaty making and its results in the province of Alberta during the last third of the nineteenth century. Anchored on thorough research and a wide familiarity of existing scholarship, it builds on J. R. Miller’s Compact, Contract, Covenant (2009). The text focuses primarily on the Nizitapi (Blackfoot) groups of southern Alberta and traces the early tension-filled relations between band members and federal officials, the bands’ changing economic situation, education and public health policies, the Indian … nichols{at}email.arizona.edu
TL;DR: The City in Texas: A History of Texas as mentioned in this paperocusing on cities in the Lone Star State, McComb developed two main strategies for narrating the emergence of Texas's dynamic urban system: technological and economic transformations that have urbanized the world brought urban modernity to Texas.
Abstract: The City in Texas: A History . Bridwell Texas History Series. By David G. McComb. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. ix + 342 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliographical essay, index. $35.00.)
The author of this first-ever urban history of Texas is a revered figure among those who write about cities in the Lone Star State. In Houston: The Bayou City (1969) and Galveston: A History (1981) David G. McComb developed the two main strategies for narrating the emergence of Texas’s dynamic urban system. In Houston , McComb emphasized how the technological and economic transformations that have urbanized the world brought urban modernity to Texas. He flipped the equation for Galveston , stressing regional factors—environment, geography, and resources—that reshaped those worldwide forces.
Written … ahlesso{at}ilstu.edu
TL;DR: Little Business on the Prairie: Entrepreneurship, Prosperity, and Challenge in South Dakota as discussed by the authors is a history of the state in the context of Robert E. Wright's "entrepreneurship growth model".
Abstract: Little Business on the Prairie: Entrepreneurship, Prosperity, and Challenge in South Dakota . Prairie Plains Series. By Robert E. Wright. (Sioux Falls, SD: Center for Western Studies, Augustana College, 2015. x + 340 pp. Illustrations, map, charts, table, notes, bibliography, index. $16.95, paper.)
From the title, I expected this book to explore how a single business survived and even thrived in the wilds of South Dakota. Instead, I discovered it to be a sweeping economic history of the state in the context of Robert E. Wright presenting his “entrepreneurship growth model” (p. 8). Basically, this model states that with more freedom comes more innovation and growth, and Wright sees South Dakota as the exemplar of freedom: “it is a free port in a sea of high taxes, ubiquitous regulatory shoals, and …
TL;DR: Using a cane as mentioned in this paper was a prisoner at Camp Kearney, in Davenport, Iowa, for his alleged role in the Dakota War of 1862, where the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), as well as camp elders, taught him to read and write in the Sioux language.
Abstract: At the age of twenty-three, Mr. Uses a Cane was imprisoned at Camp Kearney, in Davenport, Iowa, for his alleged role in the Dakota War of 1862. At Camp Kearney, missionaries affiliated with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), as well as camp elders, taught him to read and write in the Dakota language. With his newfound knowledge, he penned a letter to Stephen R. Riggs, an ABCFM missionary, on behalf of the prisoners. He wrote, “We are writing this letter seeking your help … we want to see our relatives, and we need your help to talk for us.”1 Mr. Uses a Cane entreated Riggs to fight for his release from prison and reunite him with his family, who he had not seen for over three years. Other letters by Dakota prisoners made similar demands.
ABCFM missionaries, however, viewed literacy from a different perspective. At the time these missionaries first established stations (consisting of schools, churches, mission family homes, and plowed fields) in Minnesota in 1835, they planned to use literacy to promote the Dakotas’ Christianization and civilization. But Dakotas had other goals in mind when they appropriated the missionaries’ plan in the years following the U.S.-Dakota War.2 In the postwar era, Dakota kin found themselves separated from each other by hundreds of miles at Camp Kearney and at the Crow Creek Indian Reservation in Dakota Territory. (See figure 1.) From these two locations, literate Dakotas demanded better …
TL;DR: People Before the Park as discussed by the authors was written under a contract from Glacier National Park to provide park visitors with insights into the histories and cultures of the two tribes who have called its mountains home for centuries.
Abstract: People Before the Park: The Kootenai and Blackfeet Before Glacier National Park . By Sally Thompson, Kootenai Culture Committee, and Pikunni Traditional Association. (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2015. xvi + 248 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95, paper.)
People Before the Park was written under a contract from Glacier National Park to provide park visitors with insights into the histories and cultures of the two tribes who have called its mountains home for centuries—the Kootenai on the west and the Pikunni, or Blackfeet, on the east. The authors hope to overturn long-standing stereotypes regarding the relationship of Indians to the park. The book consists of four brief overview chapters by Sally Thompson, two lengthy chapters by the Kootenai Culture Committee and the … Dave.beck{at}mso.umt.edu
TL;DR: Jette's At the Hearth of the Crossed Races: A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812-1859 as discussed by the authors is the latest of a series of recent publications focusing on the combined Canadien (i.e., French Canadian) and indigenous roots of communities in the Pacific Northwest.
Abstract: At the Hearth of the Crossed Races: A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812–1859 . First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies Series. By Melinda Marie Jette. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015. xix + 337 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $22.95, paper.)
Melinda Marie Jette’s At the Hearth of the Crossed Races is the latest of a series of recent publications focusing on the combined Canadien (i.e., French Canadian) and indigenous roots of communities in the Pacific Northwest. These revisionist studies challenge and refute the prevailing narratives that portray this region’s history as a strictly Anglo-American phenomenon. Unlike Jean Barman’s French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest (2014), which has a much broader geographic focus, Jette has … Heather.devine1{at}gmail.com
TL;DR: Based on legal and genealogical records, this microhistory chronicles the difficult choices between whiteness and Indianness made by two Salish sisters and their biracial children in order to maintain their kinship networks throughout the Salish Sea borderlands between 1865 and 1919 as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Based on legal and genealogical records, this microhistory chronicles the difficult choices between whiteness and Indianness made by two Salish sisters and their biracial children in order to maintain their kinship networks throughout the Salish Sea borderlands between 1865 and 1919. While some of these choices obscured individual family members from historical records, reading their lives in tandem with other family members’ histories reveals remarkable persistence in the midst of dramatic racial and political transformation. Focused primarily on San Juan Island residents, this article suggests that indigenous and interracial family histories of the Pacific Northwest and other borderland regions in the North American West can be more fully understood when examined collectively rather than in isolation. Such a model emphasizes the importance of personal borderlands histories and allows historians to overcome the archival silences so common among people living on the margins.
Family histories from the San Juan Islands are as distinctive as the slow-growing Garry oaks native to the valleys and meadow slopes of the island chain. One of those knotted and gnarled oaks stands near the center of San Juan Island, on a slight rise that yields a panoramic view of the valley farmed by Danish immigrant Peter Jewell and his Strait Salish wife, Fanny, in the 1860s and 1870s. (See figure 1.) Standing beneath its more than sesquicentennial branches, one can imagine the laughter of Fanny’s daughters as they played in its shade with maternal cousins who lived a mile or so away. Fanny might have served lunch under the tree to day laborers between …
TL;DR: Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518-1824 as discussed by the authors. New Directions in Native American Studies Series, 2015.
Abstract: Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824 . New Directions in Native American Studies Series. By Paul Kelton. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. xiv + 281 pp. Illustrations, maps, chart, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)
In 1857 an elderly Tennessee man named John Carr wrote in his memoirs about a smallpox outbreak seventy-seven years earlier, when a group of Cherokee warriors captured a boat full of ailing settlers on the Tennessee River. The Cherokees, Carr wrote, paid for their capture with an epidemic and paid more heavily when they treated the fever with sweats and bathing. Carr’s version of the familiar story of indigenous peoples’ exposure to new diseases, incompetent treatment, and seemingly inevitable decline as a result of germs, made its …
TL;DR: Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West as discussed by the authors explores the historical origins of the western obsession with fly-fishing for trout and finds that this activity essentially amounts to glorified "bug puppetry" with a centuries-old global history.
Abstract: Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West . Emil and Kathleen Sick Book Series in Western History and Biography. By Jen Corrinne Brown. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. x + 238 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.)
In Trout Culture , Jen Corinne Brown deploys cultural, social, and environmental analysis to explore the historical origins of the Rocky Mountain West’s infatuation with fly-fishing for trout. Noting that this activity essentially amounts to glorified “bug puppetry,” and that it has a centuries-old global history, Brown seeks to understand how and why its western enthusiasts have come to perceive fly-fishing as a nearly religious, transformative experience with a special connection to their region (p. 3). She attributes this development to a prevalent understanding of … Miles.Powell{at}ntu.edu.sg
TL;DR: Exploring and Mapping Alaska: The Russian America Era, 1741-1867 by Alexey Postnikov and Marvin Falk as discussed by the authors is an English translation and revision of Russian America in Geographical Descriptions and Maps, published in St. Petersburg in 2000.
Abstract: Exploring and Mapping Alaska: The Russian America Era, 1741–1867 . Historical Translation Series. By Alexey Postnikov and Marvin Falk. Translated by Lydia Black. (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2015. ix + 525 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $75.00, £52.00.)
This book is an English translation and revision of Alexey Postnikov’s Russian America in Geographical Descriptions and Maps, 1741–1867 , first published in St. Petersburg in 2000. The eighteen-year effort to publish this book in English is a testament to both scholarly endurance and international collaboration. It is also a fitting memorial to two distinguished scholars from the University of Alaska Fairbanks—Richard A. Pierce and Lydia Black—who devoted their lives to educating the English-speaking world about Russian America.
From 1972 until his death in 2004, Dick Pierce was a one-man publishing dynamo. As editor and publisher (as well as copyboy, typist, and mailroom clerk) of Limestone …
Terrencemcole1{at}gmail.com
TL;DR: Carte has used her cultural linguistic skills to undertake this task, providing us with a careful, theoretically informed reading of Obregon's history of the "greater northwest" that reconciles his purposes as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Capturing the Landscape of New Spain: Baltasar Obregon and the 1564 Ibarra Expedition. Southwest Center Series. By Rebecca A. Carte. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015. xiv + 168 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00.)
Baltasar Obregon’s Historia de los descubrimientos de Nueva Espana (1584) has been published in two Spanish-language editions (1989, 1997) and one in English (1928) translated by George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey. Since the noted geographer of Mexico’s northwest, Carl O. Sauer, complained in 1932 that Obregon’s text was confused and lurid, no one has attempted a critical cultural reading of it until now. Rebecca A. Carte has used her cultural linguistic skills to undertake this task, providing us with a careful, theoretically informed reading of Obregon’s history of the “greater northwest” that reconciles his purposes … Susan.deeds{at}nau.edu
TL;DR: Beyond Two Worlds: Critical Conversations on Language and Power in Native North America as discussed by the authors is a collection of essays from the American Indian Nation Building Series (AINB) focusing on the relationship between modernity and Native identity.
Abstract: Beyond Two Worlds: Critical Conversations on Language and Power in Native North America . Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building Series. Edited by James Joseph Buss and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014. xvi + 331 pp. Illustrations, charts, notes, index. $95.00.)
For well over a decade, scholars in Native American studies have steadily dismantled the false divide between indigeneity and authenticity, which goes something like this: Native people can be modern or they can be Native—but never both. If they embrace modernity, they cease to be “real Indians.” If they reject modernity, then they fade into the past, unable to navigate the changing tides of contemporary societies. Beyond Two Worlds aptly brings critiques of this idea, which have thus far come from a variety … kwhalen{at}morris.umn.edu
TL;DR: This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, Redress, and Redress in Canada and the United States by Andrew Woolford as mentioned in this paper is a seminal work in this regard.
Abstract: This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States . Indigenous Education Series. By Andrew Woolford. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. xv + 432 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $90.00.)
One of Andrew Woolford’s vital contributions in this work is his convincing argument that the distinction between cultural genocide and biological genocide is unsustainable. If genocide is the conscious destruction of a group, then, Woolford argues, taking culture seriously as a group marker means acknowledging that destruction of existing culture, as well as the ability to create new culture, means the death of a group just as readily as the physical death of all of its members. In short, forced assimilation is genocide.
This assertion is particularly helpful in the context of …
johnrgram{at}missouristate.edu