Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720–1877 by Ryan Hall (review)

Two traditions, ethnohistory and the New Indian History, have dominated Indigenous historiography in the United States since World War II. Ethnohistory has pre-war roots but was heavily influenced by the adjudications of the Indian Claims Commission, which demanded anthropological and historical evidence. Ethnohistorians assume that the histories of Indigenous societies are significant and interesting for their own sake. The many publications of John C. Ewers on the history of the Blackfoot peoples are exemplars of ethnohistory.

The New Indian History emerged during the 1960s together with other “new” histories geared toward the marginalized (women, ethnic and racial minorities, working classes, and regional populations, for example) with the aim of integrating the histories of previously neglected groups into mainstream historiography. Ryan Hall’s history of the Blackfoot is in this second tradition. Hall asserts that Blackfoot history is “essential to understanding the history of the U.S. and Canadian West” (5). Hall likewise argues that Blackfoot history “forces us to expand our framework for ‘early’ North America to include regions that have long been considered remote or peripheral” (5).

Of course, North American Indians did not always fit the social historian’s “bottom-up” approach. In some contexts, they were the dominant peoples. That was the case for the Blackfoot during most of the period discussed in Hall’s history. So, Hall explicitly places his history in a growing body of recent work that portrays western Indian communities such as the Comanche, Lakota, and others as powerful “empires” or nations. Most of those studies focus on the United States–Spanish/Mexican borderlands, but Hall turns his attention to the northern borderlands. His central argument is that “from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, the Blackfoot were among the most powerful, prosperous, and geographically expansive polities in all of North America. The Blackfoot accomplished this in large part by recognizing and mastering the transnational dimensions of their homeland” (4–5). Unfortunately, in his attempt to demonstrate the significance of Blackfoot history in the history of the United States and Canada, Hall obscures and ignores what makes the history of the Blackfoot so fascinating and significant in its own right.

The most important weakness of this book is that it depicts the Blackfoot as an almost state-like nation, and its leaders as powerful leaders. For example, it opens by describing Bull Back Fat as “one of the most powerful chiefs in the three Blackfoot nations, which made him one of the most powerful Indigenous people of all of North America” (1). Abundant historical evidence, long acknowledged by anthropologists and historians, shows that the Blackfoot of the time comprised many autonomous bands with no central authority, and that its leaders wielded no coercive power even over their own bands.

Because Hall assumes that the Blackfoot were always a nation with powerful leaders he fails to recognize evidence that the Blackfoot bands may have been experiencing dramatic internal political changes in the 1870s. Hall mentions (172) the Blackfoot Council of 1875, after which fifteen Siksika, Kainai, and Piegan submitted a petition to the Canadian government, but not that these chiefs may have set a precedent by styling themselves as chiefs of the “Chokitapix.” Other documents suggest that the Blackfoot were developing new political strategies in the 1870s, to address the challenges of dealing with the American and Canadian governments. If so, the development reflected a fascinating process that occurred in Indigenous societies around the world. Hall also fails to mention the impact that the Chokitapix petition had on Canadian government officials. Ignoring the history of Blackfoot (or Lakota or Comanche) political evolution obscures important historical processes as much is it would to assume that the 1789 United States Constitution was in effect in 1781, 1776, and 1763.

This book implies that, since 1720...