Many recent studies have encouraged scholars of early America to expand the scale of their investigations beyond the borders of the thirteen “original” Anglo-American colonies but none have done more to demonstrate the possibilities of reconsidering colonial American history on “the largest possible scale” (1) than this outstanding collection of essays. Dedicated to the memory of David J. Weber, the contents of the volume direct its readers' attention to the southwestern region of what is now the United States to mount a challenge to the long-standing trope casting early American colonies as an aggregate of “proto-nationalist spaces whose stories are the seedbed for modern nation-states” (22). Focussing on the deceptively straightforward theme of contested spaces, the editors bring together an impressive array of contributions that integrate the stories of Native people and European arrivals in unfamiliar locales in compelling new ways.
Organized into four parts assessing the relationships between space and power, landscapes, resettlements, and memory, the individual essays transport readers to rarely seen colonial places with the intent of unsettling familiar assumptions about the historical trajectory of European contacts with indigenous nations. Pekka Hämäläinen's masterful overview of “kinetic” Native regimes that forced would-be colonists to adjust to imposed spatial and political circumstances offers an impressive summary of his own award-winning monograph on the Comanches and integrates several other fascinating examples. Echoing Hämäläinen's perspective, Cynthia Radding's instructive essay on the production of colonial space in northern New Spain demonstrates how Spanish settlement and colonial governance were not simply grafted onto the inherent natural and cultural features of the region but rather resulted from contestation with existing indigenous patterns of landscape use to yield a fluctuating, hybrid borderlands space. A provocative counterpoint to the viewpoints of Hämäläinen and Radding appears in Elizabeth Fenn's analysis of a Mandan-produced sketch map of c.1906–7 detailing six centuries of the nation's spatial history, including the unmatched degree to which they experienced a “collapse” (111) from the combined impact of introduced alien fauna, trade goods, and people.
Innovative readings of atypical sources represent another critical theme in this volume. In addition Fenn's study, Birgit Brander Rasmussen examines the pictographic captivity narrative produced c.1875–78 by Kiowa prisoner Etahdleuh Doanmoe at Fort Marion and the subsequent editorial interventions involved in its recent reconstitution as an edited scholarly text. Ned Blackhawk engages the iconic Segesser Hide Paintings to demonstrate how better attention to “anterior histories of violent transformations within and between Native peoples” sheds light on how indigenous nations “recalibrated” themselves after contact and “maintained autonomous self-governing societies” (291) for much longer than generally recognized or understood. Finally, Brian DeLay's investigation of “blood talk” – a regional tradition of discourse regarding violence in the Navajo–New Mexican borderlands – provides a detailed examination of how wars started and ended in circumstances of colonial entanglement, where borderland peoples were “more or less stuck with each other, unable or unwilling to extinguish [their] relationship through destruction or expulsion” of the other (231).
Essays by Allan Greer and Alan Taylor seek to revise traditional understandings about the early history of the American West through explicitly comparative approaches with non-US colonial regimes. Greer takes aim at the idea that Native nations lost their land through a series of straightforward “business transactions” (73), arguing instead that a fresh look at the Protestant/Catholic divide in various North American colonial endeavors shows more clearly how the British–American treaty system employed the language of the marketplace to mask “a drastic and absolutist ambition to clear Indians from the field of property” (92). Taylor assesses colonial Louisiana, Upper Canada, and Texas as “three experiments in converting Americans” that reveal far less American nationalism and more simple opportunism among borderland settlers who sought personal gain through the acquisition of private property “under any flag of convenience” (211).
Professionals seeking to freshen their syllabi for early American courses, graduate students compiling reading lists, or anyone seeking a diverse array of case-study examples of how to integrate spatial analysis into the study of colonial American settler–Native interactions will reap immense benefits from this collection of essays. In their willingness to mark out a “human geography of colonial relations” (24) the editors offer an inspirational challenge to existing normative views of early American space and demonstrate how Native peoples' spatiality and the North American landscape itself must assume a more prominent place in our reconstructions of the continent's history.
