Native Homes of Violence and Hope

Abstract

In Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West, Ned Blackhawk presents a deeply felt meditation upon a most refractory topic. Surely there are realms more resistant to historical scrutiny than violence. But is there another subject that is at once so central to how we understand the past and so impervious to historical methods of analysis? The oldest of all topics in a tradition of inquiry reaching back to Thucydides' studies of the Peloponnesian Wars, violence nonetheless among the freshest of historical subjects-and the most needful of deeper understanding. Historians do not only study violence, of course; as literary theorists remind us, we also commit it. And so it is only fitting that a book which gracefully integrates representations and material realities starts with an attack on historical narratives that consign native to marginality or invisibility. Despite an outpouring of work over the past decades, Blackhawk charges, those investigating American Indian history and U. S. history more generally have failed to reckon with the violence upon which the continent was built (p. 3). If Blackhawk too casually dismisses James Merrell's grim portrayal of the Pennsylvania frontier as an American heart of darkness, Elliott West's heart-wrenching epic of Cheyenne cataclysm, and four decades of studies by American Indian activist-intellectuals and new Indian historians detailing the manifold traumas European colonialism inflicted upon Native the question he asks at the end of this excellent study of Indians and empires in the Great Basin as pertinent as ever: Is there adequate space within the wellspring of American history to begin discussing the pain of America's indigenous peoples (p. 293)?1 Reconciling the dispossession of millions with the making of America, as Blackhawk admits, remains a sobering challenge, an endeavor that requires re-evaluation of many enduring historical (p. 3). Wallace Stegner articulated one of these assumptions in his classic, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. Stegner's Great Basin lay sealed off from the winds of time. A wasteland