Natale A. Zappia. Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540–1859 .

Abstract

This compact book is filled to the brim with arguments, insights, and interventions. Natale A. Zappia engages almost every potential historiographical debate on his path, reorienting conventional points of observation and reversing accepted truths. The results are revelatory. In its geographic focus on the far southwestern corner of North America that centers around the Colorado River Basin and includes what today are southern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Sonora, New Mexico, and Baja California, Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540–1859 fills a gaping hole in early American historiography. While historians of early America have shed light on nearly every obscured part of the continent from the Great Lakes to the Southwest and from Florida to the Pacific Northwest, the lands in the far Southwest have remained something of a blind spot. Since James Merrell and Richard White launched the regional turn in Native American history a quarter century ago, disentangling the field from its persisting tribal history mode, region after region has been reconceptualized as a setting for dynamic Indigenous worlds typically in the form of broadly conceived and self-consciously interventionist studies. Traders and Raiders is that study for the far Southwest. It puts an entire region on the historiographical map as a cohesive and dynamic Indigenous world with a distinctive logic and historical trajectory.