Contested Spaces of Early America

As an organizing principle, space is about as broad a theme as one can employ in historical analysis. It is too broad, in fact, a problem that the editors of this worthwhile collection of essays recognize by gathering the 12 contributions into 4 parts. Fittingly, Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman introduce the rest of the contributions with an excellent examination of how maps represent worldviews and ideals and misrepresent realities. Not surprisingly, they conclude that the very maps that we use in our classrooms represent a European perspective that obscures the indigenous reality of “early” America, by which they mean the Western Hemisphere as it was understood up until the nineteenth-century consolidation of the modern nation-states. In this sense, they are reaching beyond what in US historiographical circles is usually meant by “early America,” which is typically analogous to British North America.Part 1, “Spaces and Power,” contains contributions from Pekka Hämäläinen and Allan Greer. Hämäläinen is interested in using three American Indian polities — Iroquois, Comanche, and Lakota — to argue against what he calls the “fragmentation of early American history,” which “reflects the relativist mood of our times” (p. 33). For varying lengths of time, from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century, these three native nations organized and controlled spaces that allowed them to exercise considerable power in relation to European rivals. In his essay, Greer looks at the power of the market. Focusing mostly on the English experience, he traces the evolution of the way in which English Americans purchased or negotiated land cessions and concludes that the seemingly voluntary transfers hid coercive forces detrimental to American Indian interests.In part 2, “Spaces and Landscapes,” three essays draw out how contact between indigenous peoples and Euro-Americans affected the former's relationship to their homelands. Elizabeth Fenn's exploration of Mandan settlement in North Dakota, drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary sources, is a sophisticated analysis of the multitude of factors that contributed to the collapse of what had once been a small but thriving horticultural Plains society. Cynthia Radding's study of a northwestern portion of colonial Mexico called San Ildefonso de Ostimuri focuses on how the ephemeral province — it did not outlast Mexican independence — was the product of interactions among Spanish miners, Jesuit missionaries, local native groups, and other indigenes brought to the mining centers that defined the region. In the only essay exploring a topic outside North America, Raúl José Mandrini traces the changes that a growing Spanish presence on the edge of the Pampas brought to the region as its indigenous peoples became dependent on Spanish-introduced cattle, only to find themselves in competition for the stock with later generations of Spaniards determined to control the area.“Spaces and resettlements” is the theme of part 3, which includes three essays wrestling with the effects of migration on both indigenous societies and Euro-Americans. In his examination of the late eighteenth-century Spanish experiment with an Apache reservation system, Matthew Babcock concludes that the later US experience with the Mimbreños in the 1850s resulted directly from Apache-Spanish interactions in the previous century. Moving a bit farther to the south, Chantal Cramaussel studies how some of the Apaches who resisted Spanish efforts at control found themselves laboring alongside other indigenous peoples that were forcibly removed from closer or farther away to the mining centers of Nueva Vizcaya and Sinaloa. Turning from American Indians to European Americans, Alan Taylor explores the transformation of three North American spaces, post–American independence Louisiana and Upper Canada and post–Mexican independence Texas, as settlers from the United States took up residence.The four essays in part 4, “Spaces and Memory,” tackle how people choose to construct historical spaces. Brian DeLay analyzes Navajo–New Mexican interaction through the prism of “blood talk,” a complex interplay of views on the nature and need for intergroup violence, individual and collective. There follow two essays based on analysis of nonprint sources. Birgit Brander Rasmussen takes a literary criticism approach to the picture book produced by a young Kiowa warrior exiled to Florida's Fort Marion in the 1870s. Ned Blackhawk turns his attention to a reinterpretation of the Segesser I hide painting, one of two large canvases depicting scenes from the southern Plains produced in the 1720s. Samuel Truett's essay on the “lost worlds” of early America makes a fitting conclusion to the volume, as he examines how early historians and naturalists, including Thomas Jefferson, appropriated the pre-Columbian archaeological and historical record to serve a new imperial ethos.Contested Spaces is not without its problems. For instance, Mandrini's comparison of the 1758 Comanche-Norteño attack on the isolated Franciscan mission of San Saba in Texas with the Pampas Indian attack on the Buenos Aires area in 1740 is an overreach. And the fact that his essay is the only one representing South America, where contestations over space followed distinct dynamics in the Andean world, is to be lamented. Nevertheless, all the essays are worth careful consideration, offering fresh evidence that the revitalized field of borderlands studies continues to flourish. The book is a fitting memorial to David J. Weber's vision.

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