Contested Spaces of Early America ed. by Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman (review)

INSPIRED BY THE LONG AND INFLUENTIAL CAREER of renowned Spanish colonial historian David Weber, this wide-ranging collection moves us toward a critical revisioning of the first four hundred years of European colonialism in the Americas. “We have consciously chosen,” Barr and Countryman state in their introduction, “to define early America as a single unified space defined by Indigenous experiences with colonialism. At the heart of this book is a search for a human geography of colonial relations” (23). This is no small task given the bewildering complexities and diversities of Indigenous and colonial peoples, places, and processes across the hemisphere.

After a well-illustrated introduction focusing on European and Indigenous mapping practices, the first two essays in the volume work to set out some broad contours. Pekka Hämäläinen, after some handwringing about the “atomization” of colonial American history, attempts to craft something of a master narrative, arguing that projections of power by the Haudenosaunee, Lakota, Comanche, and other Indigenous polities laid the groundwork for later Anglo-American expansion, and making a compelling case for the centrality of Indigenous territoriality and agency in any account of European colonization. Allan Greer, meanwhile, offers a comparative study of British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese practices of land dispossession, arguing that despite their claimed moral superiority, British legal efforts to appropriate Indigenous land “concealed a drastic and absolutist ambition to clear Indians from the field of property” (92). Together, these two essays establish a critical attentiveness to power that is sustained throughout the rest of the volume.

The book’s second section brings the focus down to the local. Elizabeth Fenn, Cynthia Radding, and Raúl José Mandrini delve deeply into the lived experiences of Indigenous and settler populations in spaces as far-flung as North Dakota, northwestern New Spain, and the region around Buenos Aires. In all three cases, the authors show Indigenous people responding creatively to biological, economic, military, and demographic incursions into their territories in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. Even though the authors limit their research to colonial archives and their interpretation to European theorists, their works challenge nationalist American, Mexican, and Argentine narratives and show both Indigenous and settler societies as deeply dynamic and inextricably interwoven.

A third section, organized around the idea of “resettlement,” emphasizes not so much Indigenous agency as colonial processes designed to delimit and minimize that agency, whether at the legislative or vernacular level. Matthew Babcock’s work examines the experiences of Apache peoples under both Spanish and Mexican reservation systems, which, while arising in part out of negotiation with Apache communities, also laid the groundwork for the American system that would come later. Chantal Cramaussel, meanwhile, focuses her attention on systems of forced labor in northern New Spain, including long-distance transfers of individuals and entire communities. Alan Taylor’s contribution takes us north into Texas, Louisiana, and Upper Canada, where Mexican, Spanish, and British authorities actively sought American settlers who, through migration and settlement, could make good on those nations’ territorial claims on Indigenous land.

The fourth and final section, loosely assembled around the concept of memory, brings us perhaps closest to Indigenous-centered perspectives on the colonial past, and goes the furthest toward linking historical events to present-day forms of colonialism. Brian DeLay’s analysis of “blood talk”—the justifications for violence—in the American Southwest deftly and powerfully illustrates the ways in which historical conflict can inform later actions. The next two pieces emphasize Indigenous sources. First, Birgit Brander Rasmussen gives a literary reading of a little-known but fascinating and moving sketchbook created by a nineteenth-century Kiowa captive, and second, Ned Blackhawk uses a pair of hide paintings depicting colonial conflicts between and among Indigenous, Spanish, and French factions to speak both to the destruction of Indigenous communities and to potential commemorative practices—and thus modes of survivance—represented by such works. A final essay by Samuel Truett looks at American fascination with Indigenous ruins in...