Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. By Ned Blackhawk. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. xii, 372 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-02290-4.)

Abstract

Two complementary agendas organize this book. The first fills gaps in the history of the intermountain West and especially of the Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone peoples. The second views colonization and displacement of native peoples through four lenses of violence. The first lens shows how violence shifted and disrupted the lives of both natives and Spanish settlers. The second examines how shifting patterns of violence “remade Native worlds” (p. 7). The third explores how violence connects native and imperial histories. Those three lenses combine for a fourth lens, which is an “alternative paradigm” for understanding nineteenth-century history (p. 9). The first two substantive chapters review the history of the northernmost Spanish borderlands with an emphasis on relations between the Comanche and Ute (Yuta in Spanish) peoples. The account emphasizes the complexity of slave raiding, noting that the Spaniards were not the only ones taking or trading slaves. Slave raiders preferred children and women, which altered gender relations throughout the region. The narrative shows how those patterns gave rise to genízaros, a group of “mixed-blooded Indians” (p. 57). Throughout, Ned Blackhawk mines primary and secondary literature to extract often overlooked information on Great Basin natives.