Surviving Conquest: A History of the Yavapai Peoples (review)

Surviving Conquest is a model study of cultural adaptation and persistence. Joining the tradition of ethnohistorical writing about Native Americans that began in the late nineteenth century with Mooney and has included both historians and anthropologists, Braatz's monograph contains all the elements of the genre: a careful survey of the ethnographic literature, consultation with living members of the community, close reading of the relevant historical documents, and a clear focus on the continuities of Yavapai life.¹ The ways in which ethnography, history, oral tradition, and "tradition" combine to produce monographs changes with topics, geographical regions, and academic fashions, but these elements remain central to the enterprise. Braatz deploys them well, if somewhat uncritically, and herein lies both the strength and the limitation of his work.

Braatz's study is a powerful corrective to previous scholarship on both Yavapai and Arizona history. Actually to refer to "scholarship" on the Yavapai is misleading. Braatz demonstrates that government officials and local historians have long misidentified these Upland Yuman peoples as "Apaches" and ignored the fact that the "Yavapai" comprise four groups—Tolkepayas, Yavapés, Wipukepas, and Kwevkepayas—each with its own distinctive homeland, subsistence pattern, and traditions. Braatz also indicts conventional Arizona histories for assuming that all of the region's Native peoples shared a common antipathy to whites. These historical assumptions have supported the self-serving tales of border violence and conquest that pass for history across the West. "A basic tenet of [this] imperialist history," Braatz writes, "is that Yavapais . . . were uncivilized, violent psychopaths who necessarily came into contact with American attempts to spread civilization" (14). Surviving Conquest offers the alternate view that the Yavapais were "complex humans rather than stereotypical caricatures," not backward primitives battling progress but resourceful, flexible communities struggling to survive "the U.S. invasion" (17).

Two Yavapai (actually Kwevkepaya) intellectuals hover over Braatz's narrative. One is Wassaja, a boy captured and enslaved by Pimas in 1871. The second is Hoomothya, who in 1872 survived a military attack on his uncle's camp by running into the desert and hiding "all the night long without a cover nor a shirt of any kind on my body" (2). Redeemed from slavery and raised by whites, Wassaja grew to become Dr. Carlos Montezuma, a physician and outspoken critic of U.S. Indian policy. Hoomothya was also taken from his homeland and renamed (Mike Burns), but he too became an articulate leader and Indian advocate. Braatz uses the words and memories of these two figures—and a substantial set of written commentaries produced by Burns—to create a window on the violent world of their youth. He allows us to imagine Wasaja's and Hoomothya's version of events and thereby enables us to reimagine this chapter of Arizona history.

Thanks to Braatz, our "reimagined" Arizona history includes a portrait of Yavapai resource management and geographical adaptation, a narrative of Yavapai relations with neighboring groups (from long-standing hostility with slave-raiding Pimas to cooperation with Quechans and Tonto Apaches), a portrait of courageous leaders trying to find common ground with American officials, and a vivid tableau of gruesome attacks on undefended camps. The most haunting of these attacks was the assault on Skeleton (or Skull) Cave in 1872. As a boy, Hoomothya visited the cave a few days after the attack and recalled years later that "a little gulch [that] led from the cave was running down with blood" (3). Braatz helps us replace apochryphal stories of frontier heroism with a gripping portrait of the Yavapai's seemingly futile campaign to return to their Verde River homeland following their forced removal to the San Carlos Apache reserve in 1874. Many Yavapais returned informally and secretively during the 1880s and 1890s, but resourceful and persistent tribal leaders finally gained a new reservation at Fort McDowell in 1903.

Stories of heroism and cultural persistence often beg new questions. Surviving Conquest leaves us with several: Is this a story of "Yavapai" persistence or...