Black Rock: A Zuni Cultural Landscape and the Meaning of Place (review)

Most landscape studies of the federal presence in the American West have focused on atomic, military, or recreational sites, but parts of the region were also dramatically re-shaped by the government’s colonial agenda as embodied in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). William Dodge focuses on one such instance in his exemplary book Black Rock: A Zuni Cultural Landscape and the Meaning of Place. Although the title may highlight a Zuni landscape, Dodge is primarily interested in a site that is located in Zuni territory but was peripheral (though not unimportant) to the main Zuni village of Halona:Itiwana or the Middle Place. Black Rock developed as the federal administrative center for the Zuni reservation in the twentieth century, but Dodge takes us through a deep history of this place situated on an escarpment of black volcanic basalt four miles to the east of Halona:Itiwana. As he states, “It is a story about landforms, ancestral settlements, culturally significant Zuni sites, a town created by the federal government and its eventual transition into a modern housing suburb of the Pueblo” (3).

The book’s central question involves what makes a place and how people relate to it. Black Rock opens with a chapter meditating on these questions in which Dodge frames his narrative by carefully explaining how he is using the concepts of place-making, identity, and cultural landscape. He is particularly interested in “the multiple meanings of place given to this landscape” by the different groups who have lived in and moved through it (3). He investigates this issue in different historical moments by dividing his study into three periods of varying length: before the place became Black Rock, its development as the federal village of Black Rock, and its more recent role as a site of the Zuni Nation’s economic development.

Dodge draws upon geology, archaeology, the accounts of early Europeans, and Zuni oral traditions to give us a sweeping history of what the Zuni call kya’wan:nah, the place where the water flows. He uses these ways of knowing to explore how different people create different meanings of place. For example, both the scientific narratives and Zuni oral traditions refer to forms on the landscape to make sense of the place, but they tell different stories: the former about the natural history of the landforms, the latter about the history of the Zuni people. As Dodge explains, for the Zuni, the question of how the black rocks were created is not important: “The landforms need not be explained in and of themselves, but instead are important in transmitting the stories so culturally significant to the Zunis” (28).

Dodge continues to reveal the layered and multivocal nature of the place as he turns to his second period, the development of a federal administrative town at the turn of the twentieth century. This began with the building of the Zuni Dam in 1904 and continued with the erection of a BIA boarding school in 1905. These compelling chapters focus on the architecture of conquest. The school and the dam were both part of a federal effort to remake this place into an American space. Federal officials imagined the Zuni River Valley as a landscape of irrigated modern farms worked by Zunis who had been educated in the boarding school. Both projects, as well as the landscape of support that grew up around them—administrative buildings, employee housing, recreation facilities, and infrastructural developments such as the power house and dairy barn—were a locus of federal colonial efforts to remake the Zuni in their image. These efforts were also, Dodge asserts, ways that non-Zunis changed the place to make it comfortable for themselves.

These middle chapters are especially strong, expertly detailing how the federal landscape changed over the course of the twentieth century as buildings were added, converted, and replaced in...