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Ethnohistory 49.1 (2002) 205-218



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Review Essays

Violence, Exchange, and Renewal in the American Southwest

James F. Brooks, University of California, Santa Barbara


Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest. By Steven A. LeBlanc. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999. xi + 400 pp., preface, introduction, tables, maps, figures, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth.)

The Archaeology of Regional Interaction: Religion, Warfare, and Exchange across the American Southwest & Beyond. Edited by Michelle Hegmon. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000. xvi + 467 pp., foreword, preface, maps, figures, tables, bibliographies, index. $65.00 cloth.)

The Kachina and the Cross: Indians and Spaniards in the Early Southwest. By Carroll L. Riley. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999. xvi + 336 pp., preface, maps, figures, bibliographic essay, glossary, index, index of initial citations. $34.95 cloth.)

The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention. By Gary Clayton Anderson. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. viii + 375 pp., introduction, figures, maps, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth.)

Massacre at Yuma Crossing: Spanish Relations with the Quechans, 1779–1782. By Mark Santiago. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. xv + 220 pp., preface, maps, bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth.)

Our Prayers Are in This Place: Pecos Pueblo Identity over the Centuries. By Frances Levine. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. xxii + 212 pp., introduction, figures, tables, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth.) [End Page 205]

Picuris Pueblo through Time: Eight Centuries of Change at a Northern Rio Grande Pueblo. By Michael A. Adler and Herbert W. Dick. (Dallas, TX: Clements Center for Southwestern Studies, Southern Methodist University, 1999. xix + 229 pp., preface, illustrations, figures, bibliography, appendix. $22.50 paper.)

Taken collectively, these works span two millennia of social change among indigenous and colonizing peoples in the American Southwest. This chronological sweep makes immediate one conclusion: however great the catastrophes triggered by Spanish explorations and invasions after 1536—which initiated the region's "historical" eras—the inhabitants of the Southwest were emphatically not "peoples without histories" prior to those grim events. Indeed, a long view suggests that the advent and imposition of Spanish colonial power in the Southwest, while original in style and ominous in consequence, constituted only one of many significant moments in a series of crises experienced and responses elaborated by Native peoples over the course of some two thousand years. An extended narrative, therefore, might seem to diminish the tragedy of Euroamerican conquests in the Southwest but only insofar as it highlights the capacity of Indian peoples to participate in an extraordinary range of conflicts, resolutions, and renewals with their families and communities reduced, reorganized, yet nominally intact.

Among the casualties of this recent Southwestern scholarship is the widespread notion that the Indian peoples who engaged with the Spanish conquest inhabited a timeless world of peaceful coexistence and social egalitarianism that ended abruptly in the colonial era. So too its idealistic extension that saw the Native American experience with colonialism as largely uniform—a relentless, if hotly contested, subordination to Euroamerican power. Archaeological studies like those offered by Steven LeBlanc and the contributors to Michelle Hegmon's collection now depict an indigenous Southwest haunted by inter- (and intra-) group conflict, sustained in some times and muted in others by widespread material, social, and spiritual exchange economies, all of which found expression in cycles of cultural collapse and regeneration that anticipated in some respects the variegated experiences the Indian peoples of the region would relive as they struggled to cope with Euroamerican intrusion. Current ethnohistorical works like those of Carroll L. Riley, Gary Clayton Anderson, Mark Santiago, Frances Levine, and Michael A. Adler and Herbert W. Dick clearly show that certain precolonial patterns of violence, alliance, and regeneration carried forward into relations among and between village-dwelling [End Page 206] "Pueblo" peoples; nomadic Querechos, Teyas, Apaches, and Comanches; semisedentary Jumanos, Quechans, and Maricopas; and the colonizing friars, soldiers, and settlers of the Spanish Empire. Synthesizing the indigenous history of the American Southwest has become, therefore, a matter of tracing continuities and noting originalities in the matrices of violence, exchange, and survival that traversed its valleys, plateaus, and mountains.

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