ABSTRACTThis article examines the role of grassroots actors in regions of violent conflict where competing governance systems exists. Specifically, it focuses on those living in the borderlands of South America, where alternative forms of governance may be created in response to violence between state and criminal organizations. In this context, how can grassroots actors overcome protracted armed violence and establish new, legitimate forms of social governance? To explore this question, our methodology employs data triangulation, combining literature, news reports, and fieldwork data collected in two violence‐prone territories: the borderlands of Cúcuta (Colombia)/Táchira state (Venezuela) and Pedro Juan Caballero (Paraguay)/Ponta Porã (Brazil). We argue that grassroots actors can develop innovative and alternative governance structures that differ from those of the state and criminal groups. This research also contributes to the ongoing discussion about the agency of local actors in violent conflicts between nonstate actors and the state. The findings demonstrate that grassroots actors in violent border regions can actively transform conflicts and build peace, particularly in areas such as migration, security, health, and education.

Abstract The media plays a central role in the dissemination of information about globally significant, transboundary issues like world water policy and infrastructure projects. This discussion makes its point of departure on the topic of large‐scale seawater desalination (producing potable ocean water) in the American borderlands and Southwest region, an area that has recently been plagued by droughts, as well as being the subject of much reporting on the feasibility of expanding water infrastructure across the United States and Mexico. In particular, The New York Times has produced a series of stories on water scarcity in the state of Arizona and the “pipe dreams” of building a desalination plant in Mexico that would produce water to be pumped through a national monument, and into major Arizonan metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Tucson. This reportage has been useful in bringing water concerns amidst climate change to a broader audience, simultaneously challenging the well‐known American “growth machine” paradigm. However, when considering the recent scholarship from social scientists and water policy scholars, the media may be missing the point. In this transboundary region, when we consider existing evidence as well as the reports that have emerged in Arizona and Mexico, it becomes clear that water from desalination is a luxury good, and the industry continues to have a dubious political and economic track record when dealing with water providers, public and private. Therefore, more discussions of desalination in world water policy circles need to be asking who is served by desalination, as it increasingly represents a model of the overproduction of water in places that do not need it, therefore entrenching social inequality.

Reviewed by: Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898–1940 by Sarah Deutsch Sheila McManus Deutsch, Sarah–Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898–1940. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 640 p. Sarah Deutsch’s mammoth new tome on the United States West in the early twentieth century brings a fresh interpretive lens to these decades and draws new connections between familiar events. Its sheer size allows for both high-level thematic analyses and rich, granular case studies of how “what is usually placed at the margin” (p. 7) was central to the West’s history before the Second World War. Making a Modern West incorporates methodological insights from recent North American borderlands historiography into its nuanced discussion of how race, gender, and citizenship were used to shape the West’s communities, politics, and economies. Deutsch begins with the United States’ 1898 victory in the Spanish-American War and seizure of Hawaiʻi, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. The war “provided the nation’s policymakers and promoters and their audience with a new framework for western struggles over land, rights, and the nature of democracy and relegitimized both white supremacy and the concept of whiteness” (p. 5). US imperialism in the Pacific and these new territorial claims get little attention in the rest of the book and it is unfortunate that they only appear as a framing mechanism, but that starting point sets up her key theme of how multiple, new boundaries between insiders and outsiders were drawn in the West between 1898 and 1940 (p. 3). The book is divided into four parts, each covering one decade and three chapters. In Part I, “Demarcating, 1898–1910,” Deutsch explores the creation of a wide range of new divisions across the West, including between “the natural world” and built environments, the dusty past and shiny future, and among people (p. 13). Chapter 1, “Man and Nature,” focuses primarily on early irrigation and conservation schemes, the tensions between competing visions, and how they allowed the federal government to demonstrate their scientific modernity by dominating the landscape and enabling their White agrarian fantasies. The following chapter, “The Changing Meaning of Crossing Lines,” discusses cross-border landholding and development in the US-Mexico borderlands as well as “the patchwork quilt of changing racial formations at local, transnational, and imperial levels and the competing forces that deployed them, including colliding diasporas of workers” (p. 51) across both the US-Mexico and the BC-Washington borders. Chapter 3 is a case study of the Black town of Boley, Oklahoma, which became a microcosm of debates over race, manhood, citizenship, landholding, and the spaces in between, as Black, Creek, and White people debated what race and relationships were supposed to mean and look like. Part II, “Agitating, 1910–21,” describes some of the challenges to those “purportedly neat” racial, gendered, political, and environmental categories, including the Mexican Revolution, robust labour and farmers’ movements, White women’s struggles to get the vote for themselves, and disputes over the United States’ entry into the First World War. Chapter 4, “Revolution and Revolutionaries,” discusses the Revolution’s effects on radical politics across the US West and the [End Page 207] ways it “made credible the possibility of radical change in the United States” (p. 133). Chapter 5, “Women and Their Alliances,” focuses primarily on White women’s efforts to get the vote for themselves, and allies like the organized White farmers. The third chapter in this section, “Global Conflict and Local Strife,” examines the remarkable wave of upheaval across the West in 1917. In the same year that the United States joined the First World War, there were heated battles over labour rights in a range of primary sectors and women’s suffrage; between White ranchers and Indigenous Peoples over land rights; and between anti-immigrant politicians and Southwest growers who needed cheap, disposable Mexican labour to work in their fields. The war itself sharpened debates over who “really” belonged in the United States and deserved to call themselves a citizen. The section ends with the 1921 Tulsa...

Reviewed by: Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the American West by Sheila McManus David C. Beyreis Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the American West. By Sheila McManus. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2022. Pp. 204. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Borderlands are complicated. Rather than places where a country's power to regulate commerce and dictate national loyalties are ascendant, these territories are often sites of political contestation, economic integration, and grass-roots identity formation. Sheila McManus calls on historians to develop a more nuanced comparative framework for borderlands studies. Part of this task involves rectifying an imbalance in historiography prioritizing the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Another element of the author's call to action is to search for patterns and dissimilarities in the processes of borderlands formation—what is true for the southern border is not necessarily true for the northern border and vice versa. In laying out a clear set of themes for investigation, pointing out analytical shortcomings, and providing commentary on underdeveloped topics, the author has produced an extraordinarily useful primer for students of borderlands history. To bring clarity to this complex topic, McManus identifies five themes that unite borderlands literature. First, she addresses borderlands as Indigenous spaces, particularly as sites of Native political dominance, trade, and diplomacy. McManus stresses the role of women as laborers and kinfolk and calls for increased attention to their roles as diplomats and peacemakers. Second, borderlands are places where nation-states attempt to create static identities for their citizens. Although governments often view borders as places where national identities are clear and unchanging, the reality is far more complex. The author points out that borderlanders themselves often make choices about loyalty and identity at a grassroots level, in decisions that challenge national, exclusivist binaries. Third, borderlands are often violent places where national law enforcement agencies and military forces attempt to "secure" the region by restricting and regulating the movement of people and goods. Fourth, the author contends that borderlands are capitalist landscapes whose function is often at odds with the nation-states' attempts to make borders hard dividing lines. [End Page 584] Mining, ranching, manufacturing, and farming have traditionally relied on the easy cross-border movement of capital and labor. In this sense, capitalism works at cross purposes with the forces seeking to stabilize borderland regions. Finally, borderlands are places where people engage in grassroots processes of identify formation, like blending, choosing, and becoming, that often challenge state directives and aspirations. McManus also points out notable gaps and disparities in borderlands literature. The author laments a historiographical imbalance between the massive list of works on the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and the much smaller body of literature on the U.S.–Canada borderlands. The robust literature of the Texas–Mexico borderlands contributes to this disparity. That said, works on Texas by historians like Juliana Barr, George T. Díaz, Monica Perales, Raúl A. Ramos, and Andrés Reséndez provide model studies of the region. Another gap McManus identifies is a relative paucity of gender history. Women are often overlooked and under analyzed. Curiously, the author largely overlooks environmental history as another avenue of comparative analysis. Sheila McManus has done a marvelous job pulling together, analyzing, and comparing a vast range of secondary borderlands material. Her clarity in identifying historiographical themes brings order from chaos. Her call to action, for more work on gender and the U.S.–Canada borderlands, could stimulate work in these fields and bring more regional parity. Both Sides Now should be required reading in graduate seminars and will undoubtedly become a standard reference work in North American borderlands studies. This book is a superb introduction to an endlessly fascinating, complex, and important topic. David C. Beyreis Saint Mary's School (Raleigh, North Carolina) Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

This article explores differences in national identities and orientations toward “the other” among Canadian and American students who attend geographically proximate universities in the southern Ontario/Upstate New York borderlands region. Drawing on descriptions of Canada–US cultural differences regarding national identities and views of “the other” from the work of Seymour Martin Lipset (and his critics) among Canadians and Americans at large, the authors uncover some evidence that is generally (although not universally) supportive of his characterizations. We then narrow our focus to compare the orientations of respondents who were raised in the bi-national borderlands region. Although the magnitude of difference between the views of the full sample and those of this geographically restricted group are generally not large, a multivariate test comparing scores on an additive index of cross-border affinity does show up robust evidence of increased affinity sentiments among those raised in these geographically proximate areas. Interestingly, however, the authors did not find that these heightened cross-border affinities are related to the frequency with which the individual crosses the border or to the existence of cross-border kinship networks.

Reviewed by: Warfare and Logistics along the US–Canadian Border during the War of 1812 by Christopher Dishman Don Hickey (bio) Keywords War of 1812, Canada, Maritime history Warfare and Logistics along the US–Canadian Border during the War of 1812. By Christopher Dishman. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. 352. Cloth, $39.95.) It is well-known that armies travel on their stomachs, but that doesn't mean that nations going to war are always prepared to adequately support their troops in the field. When the theaters of operation are numerous and remote, the problem of supply is magnified. In the War of 1812, there were arguably as many as ten theaters: Four in the Canadian–American borderlands (Lake Erie–Detroit River, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and the Richelieu River–Lake Champlain corridor); three on the Atlantic seaboard (Maine, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Georgia coast); another on the Gulf Coast (that included Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans); the St. Louis theater in the West; and, finally, the high seas. Although the British had to send men and materiel across the Atlantic, they had deep pockets and plenty of wartime experience and thus had a well-developed and well-financed system of supply. Even so, they had trouble supporting operations in the West, especially at Detroit and New Orleans. For the United States, the distances were more manageable, but without an established system of supply and the money to support it, their challenges were no less daunting. As a result, despite the successes of the British early in the war and of the Americans later on, the outcome on the battlefield was inconclusive. In his new book, Christopher Dishman, an independent scholar who cut his teeth on the Battle of Monterrey in the Mexican War, examines the war along the Canadian–American border. Not unreasonably, Dishman treats the four theaters as an integrated whole. Although the title, preface, and dust jacket promise that this work will take a deep dive into the logistics of the war, he offers little more on that important and underserved subject than one finds in any study of the battles and campaigns. There is some material on logistics in the opening chapter, but that is far from complete and serves as little more than a teaser for what should have followed. This work is instead a conventional narrative. Dishman is a newcomer to the field of 1812 studies, and he brings to the project a fresh set of eyes. This is often a plus because the author is unencumbered by the traditional narrative. For 1812 studies, Alan Taylor's The [End Page 627] Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York, 2010) is a good example of the freshness that a newcomer can bring to the table. The great strength of Dishman's work is that he offers readers a tight and coherent treatment of Canadian–American theaters in this conflict, and it was here, after all, that the war was going to be won or lost. Although the United States went to war to force the British to give up certain maritime practices—restricting and looting American trade under the authority of the Orders-in-Council and impressing American seamen from American merchant vessels—the only way the new nation could put any pressure on Britain to change these policies was by targeting Canada. In theory, this meant seizing Canada and holding it for ransom on the maritime issues, although in practice what the fate of Canada would have been had the United States actually conquered it is unknown. In any case, the young republic failed to take Canada, and in truth conquering it was probably beyond its means. If so, then this war was unwinnable and probably never should have been undertaken. Better, perhaps, to simply endure the insults and injuries until the end of the war in Europe eliminated them. The principal weakness of Dishman's work is that he is treading a well-worn path, and while he does a good job of drawing together material from a wide variety of sources, there isn't much here that most students of...

Written as the keynote for the 2018 Canadian Association for American Studies (CAAS) conference, this article draws on the author’s personal experience, half-century of historical research, and American art and fiction to examine American mainstreams and alternatives from the boundaries and borderlands of American social relationships and discourses. In the contexts of the Trump administration’s alleged “fake news” and “alternative facts,” it probes who defines the mainstream, who decides what stories are mainstream (or canonical), whose accounts are more “authentic” or “alternative” or just plain lies. Adding marginalized people and movements to history destabilizes “mainstream” histories distorted by skewed sources, silenced stories, and an assumed historical “mainstream” or “consensus.” Marginalized actors push the boundaries of national histories that do not easily accommodate multiple actors or perspectives. “Mainstream” histories of the nation that focus on public politics and powerful actors can make most people appear insignificant and erase the daily acts and grass-roots movements that change the historical mainstream. From unexamined margins, people start or catalyze social change with daily acts that begin to transform social relationships. Changes born in marginalized borderlands can become mainstream truths.

Prior to the publication of Ryan Hall’s Beneath the Backbone of the World, scholars and students interested in the history of the Blackfoot and the fur trade between 1720 and 1870 needed to consult the important works of many authors: John Ewers, Hugh Dempsey, David Wishart, John Milloy, Lesley Wischmann, and Ted Binnema. Employing crisp prose and engaging vignettes, Hall crafts a coherent and interesting story of how the Blackfoot “survived, suffered, and prospered” on the northwestern plains (10). All the while, he does so by emphasizing the centrality of place in Blackfoot culture and identity. Beneath the Backbone of the World refers to where the trickster and creator Náápi fashioned the world—leaving it replete with landmarks and sites possessing spiritual and pedagogical power—before retreating to the lofty peaks again to watch over his people for the rest of time.Hall’s main argument is that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Blackfoot were able to build one of the most vigorous and enduring Indigenous homelands in North America, dominating a region nearly the size of Germany. Commencing in the 1720s, the Blackfoot creatively dealt with the enormous changes that struck the northwestern plains in the form of the horse and manufactured goods from Europe. They quickly adopted their potential in domestic and martial life, then built trade relationships that gave them privileged access to markets. Blackfoot wealth and power grew beyond that of their Indigenous neighbors because of their homeland’s strategic location between two empires: British and American. The Blackfoot used shrewd diplomacy, intimidation, and occasional violence to play colonial powers off against each other and limit the spread of new technologies to their Indigenous competitors. The Blackfoot effectively cleared traditional enemies from their homeland while putting limits on colonial exploration and resource extraction, granting them near ironclad security until the mass migration of white Americans into Montana during the 1860s.Hall’s story consists of three parts (“Homelands,” “Boundaries,” and “Collisions”), each of which has two chapters. The first chapter focuses on the pedestrian Blackfoot and how the movement of horses and trade goods through Indigenous trade routes and middleman Cree traders transformed their culture. Chapter 2 illustrates how the great smallpox epidemic of 1781 prompted the Blackfoot to establish trade relations with the Hudson’s Bay Company based on traditional plains modes of diplomacy. Chapter 3 shows how the Blackfoot enacted a “scorched earth” policy against American fur traders in response to their declaration of opening trade with all regional Indigenous peoples, stymieing American exploration and resource extraction for decades. In 1831 the Blackfoot invited American traders to come to their territory—the subject of chapter 4—because the 1821 merger of the Hudson’s Bay Company and other fur trading outfits in Canada reduced Blackfoot wealth through lower trade prices and declining numbers of gifts. Blackfoot leaders employed their new American trade ties to regain what had been lost. Chapter 5 looks at the 1855 treaty between the Blackfoot and the US government. Hall’s last chapter examines the collapse of Blackfoot prosperity and security with the arrival of tens of thousands of white Americans who were more interested in mining and agriculture than the fur trade.Hall primarily uses written sources to reconstruct Blackfoot history—fur trade correspondence and journals, government records, traveler and explorer reports, and newspaper articles—which he refers to as the “colonial archive” because it is material written or mediated by outsiders. But where possible, he utilizes sources that privilege the Blackfoot perspective: winter counts, interviews, memoirs, and the insights of present-day Indigenous scholars. While the monograph will mostly interest specialists and nonspecialists alike who study Indigenous peoples, the fur trade, and the history of the West, those who teach both American and Canadian history will find a gold mine of useful content as well.

David Arnold is Professor of History at Columbia Basin College where he teaches courses in US, Native American, and African American history. His first book, The Fishermen's Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska (University of Washington Press, 2008) is a social and environmental history of Indian and non-Indian fishermen from precontact to present.Matthew M. Babcock is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas at Dallas and author of Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule. He received his PhD at Southern Methodist University, and he focuses on the history of North American borderlands, American Indians, and the colonial Southwest.Rosie C. Bermudez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. Her research and teaching interests include Chicana grassroots activism, social movements, and women of color feminisms. Bermudez is currently writing a book about Chicana activist Alicia Escalante and the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization.Dea H. Boster is Associate Professor of History in the Humanities Department at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio. She has published several works on the history of American medicine and disability, including African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South (Routledge, 2012).Heather D. Curtis is the Warren S. Woodbridge Professor of Religion at Tufts University, where she also holds appointments in the Department of History and the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Curtis received her doctorate in American Religion from Harvard University. Her research explores how religion has shaped responses to racial injustice, humanitarian disasters, and bodily illness from the late nineteenth century to the present.Justene Hill Edwards is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (2021).David G. García earned his PhD in US History at UCLA and is Associate Professor in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. He is the author of the award-winning book Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (University of California Press, 2018).Lyrianne E. González is a History PhD student minoring in Latino Studies at Cornell University. She is a mid-twentieth-century historian with focuses in US labor history, US foreign labor relations, US–Mexico relations, and im/migration. Her research investigates the racial and generational legacies of US agricultural guestworker programs.José G. Moreno is a full-time senior lecturer in ethnic studies and sociology and the Associate Director of the Ethnic Studies Program at Northern Arizona University. He has published various peer review articles, critical essays, and book reviews in academic publications.Mark Newman is a reader in history at the University of Edinburgh. He thanks the University of Edinburgh Development Trust Research Fund, the British Academy, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and the Leverhulme Trust for the financial support that made this article possible.Lucy E. Salyer is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Under the Starry Flag (Harvard University Press, 2018), Laws Harsh as Tigers (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), and numerous articles on the history of immigration and citizenship policy.Ryan E. Santos is a lecturer in the Social and Cultural Analysis of Education program at California State University, Long Beach and in the Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles. His research and teaching emphasize educational history with an emphasis on race, community resistance, and the law.Cameron Tardif is a PhD student who studies twentieth-century US history at Cornell University. His research focuses on how the relationship of slavery and freedom between the United States and Canada impacts the experiences of transnational black athletes. His work has been published in the Journal of Sport History.Lila Teeters is Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Political Science at Worcester State University. She received her PhD in American History from the University of New Hampshire in 2021. Her dissertation is entitled “Native Citizens: The Fight for and against Native American Citizenship, 1887–1924.”Tara J. Yosso is Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Riverside. Her research seeks to recover counter-narratives of race, schooling, inequality, and the law. Her extensively cited publications examine the ways people of color utilize community cultural wealth to survive and resist racism and other forms of subordination.Hao Zou is an independent scholar based in San Francisco. His research interests include Asian American history, immigration history, race and ethnicity, and the history of the American West.

In this intriguing book, historian Ryan Hall examines the history of the Blackfoot (Niitsitapi) people, who consist of the Siksika, Kainai, and Piikani nations, on the northwestern Great Plains during the tumultuous era of the fur trade. From their “strategically important” homelands between the Saskatchewan and Missouri Rivers, Hall argues, the Blackfoot effectively “shaped the diffusion of new technologies” and “played outsiders against one another” to become one of “the most powerful, prosperous, and geographically expansive” Indigenous groups in North America “from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries” (pp. 4–5). Challenging conventional national narratives of Native declension and dependence, Hall's book joins a growing body of scholarship showcasing the power and resiliency of Indigenous people at the periphery of imperial states and nations across the continent.In Part 1, “Homelands,” Hall provides an overview of Blackfoot history and culture through the eighteenth century. During the 1720s, they first received European trade goods, including hatchets, kettles, iron arrowheads, and some firearms, indirectly from Hudson Bay Company (HBC) fur traders via Cree and Assiniboine middlemen, and soon after they acquired horses through Native groups to the south and west. Metal goods and horses proved to be double-edged swords, Hall maintains, transforming the daily lives of Blackfoot men and women by facilitating hunting, hide preparing, wealth acquisition, and movement, but also escalating intertribal warfare and the Indian slave trade. Following a devastating smallpox epidemic in 1782, Blackfoot traders, who had begun to receive more significant numbers of European guns by the 1760s and 1770s, established direct trade ties with British HBC and Canadian North West Company (NWC) traders, thus lowering the trade prices of the products they received by eliminating Cree and Assiniboine middlemen. By denying their southern and western neighbors access to British and Canadian firearms, the Blackfoot were able to maintain dominance over horse-rich Shoshones, Flatheads, and many other Native groups through 1800.Part 2, “Boundaries,” describes how the Blackfoot people and their Gros Ventre allies responded to the Lewis and Clark expedition by using violence and intimidation to restrict US trade and expansion in the region and preserve their own superiority over outsiders and Native competitors through the 1820s. In the spring of 1831, a decade after the damaging merger of the NWC with the HBC, Blackfoot leaders shifted their strategy to diplomacy, inviting American Fur Company traders to establish a trading post on the Upper Missouri River within their territory. This enabled the Blackfoot to once again play their outside trading partners off of one other and, according to the author, remain “the most powerful and prosperous people on the northwest plains” through the mid-nineteenth century (p. 114).Finally, in Part 3, “Collisions,” Hall shows how shrinking game populations and US territorial expansion led to a crisis for the Blackfoot between 1848 and 1870. Seeking to use bison diplomacy to keep enemy Crees, Lakotas, Assiniboines, Flatheads, and Shoshones from hunting in their homelands, in October 1855 Blackfoot leaders joined their Gros Ventre allies in signing “their first (and only) treaty with the U.S. government” (p. 120). But the results revealed a diminishment of Blackfoot power, for their chiefs agreed to maintain peace and share hunting grounds with all of their neighbors in the southern and western portions of their territory, and they permitted US citizens to pass freely through Blackfoot country, utilize its resources, and settle there in exchange for promised annuity goods and “promotions of the Indians’ civilization” (p. 137). Tensions continued to escalate during the 1860s, as many Blackfoot warriors responded to disorderly and untrustworthy Indian agents, trespassing gold miners, disease outbreaks, and the decline of the fur trade by increasing their horse and resource raids. This, in turn, increased settler violence and nativism, particularly in Montana Territory, where in 1870 US troops under Major Eugene Baker unjustly slaughtered two hundred Piikanis in the Marias Massacre.The strengths of this well-written, well-researched book vastly outweigh its weaknesses. Although Hall did not contact Blackfoot people directly, he makes excellent use of Blackfoot written sources, particularly winter counts and Blackfoot orthography, and he conducted extensive archival research in four Canadian provinces, five US states, and Washington, DC. The subtitle could have been more geographically specific, and the author tends to mention Blackfoot challenges, such as the fact that Edmonton was in Cree territory after 1837, anachronistically at the beginning of ensuing chapters. Nevertheless, the broad transcontinental and comparative context Hall provides to the remarkable Blackfoot story makes this book well-suited for scholars and graduate students of Indigenous, Borderlands, and Western North American history.

From the 1590s to 1650s, the Spanish Crown tried different approaches to control the Florida ambergris trade. They were unable, however, to prevent various Florida governors, other local officials, and other peoples from Florida, Cuba, and beyond from profiting by an illicit trade in this maritime commodity. The Crown first tried establishing procedures and punishments, including requiring ships to stop and get a license from the Florida governor or face a fine. With the trade in ambergris continuing unabated, the Crown then tried ameliorating the penalty and offering financial reward to the governor and informants for information on the illicit trade. With these enticements not working, the Crown returned to the earlier higher punishments, but again to no avail. The central role of the governors in controlling the ambergris trade meant that despite repeated attention to the trade by the Crown, they were not able to gain regular payment of the quinto real, i.e., the royal fifth. The Florida ambergris trade thus revealed a combination of partially concealed pilfering by local officials and the limits of the Crown’s reach in the North American borderlands.

Reviewed by: Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720–1877 by Ryan Hall L. James Dempsey (bio) Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720–1877 by Ryan Hall University of North Carolina Press, 2020 WHEN TAKING ON A HISTORY of one of the First Nations whose territory crossed the international boundary between the United States and Canada, one is confronted with how this First Nations tribe dealt with and reacted to the policies, actions, and most importantly the face-to-face interactions with members of non-Aboriginal populations. Ryan Hall takes on the task of detailing Blackfoot Confederacy's dealings with various fur trade companies, including the Hudson's Bay Company, the Northwest Company, and the American Fur Company. Hall's chronicle is an in-depth examination of a period when the Blackfoot Confederacy experienced immense change and evolution. Hall is mostly successful in his interpretation as he balances the different interactions the Blackfoot had with the Canadians and Americans; however, there is a stronger emphasis on the American side than the Canadian, which on occasion is overgeneralized. While the first chapter of the book covers Blackfoot culture and lifestyle, that content is not carried over into the rest of the book. Hall does not take into consideration the cultural life of the Confederacy, which may have been intentional on his part but would broaden the world's view of the Blackfoot and show that trade, while important, was not the center of their world nor always the main cause of the actions they took. A more extensive inclusion of the Blackfoot lifestyle would have clarified the issue of decision making. Hall asserts on a number of occasions that decisions were made on the Confederacy level, which does not take into consideration the tribal social structure. For example, political decisions were made at the band level, not the tribal or Confederacy level. An incident or action that took place in Montana may not have concerned the tribes on the Canadian side, and vice versa. As stated earlier, Hall traces the fur trade interactions of the Blackfoot Confederacy with the various fur trade companies. However, he implies that this trade was all important to the Blackfoot tribes, even concluding they were "dependent" on this trade. Hall never defines the term "dependent," [End Page 168] and much like fur trade historians of the pre-1970s, he bases many of his conclusions on statements made to traders at the posts by Blackfoot traders, rather than acknowledging the modern reinterpretation of these statements as "trade rhetoric." Trade rhetoric was a common form of bargaining in a barter system where one tries to gain the sympathy of the person they are dealing with in order to obtain a better deal. A closer look at Arthur Ray's work (in the bibliography) would reveal this contemporary assessment. It has to be noted, when writing about First Nations in today's climate, that tribal names have changed from what were used historically. This change has come about as First Nations restore the terms they used to refer to themselves, rather than use the terms that were more often than not placed upon them. Throughout the book the author makes use of different terms for the Blackfoot without any explanation why. Changes do make it difficult for authors to know which term to use, but this challenge should inspire them to provide a space to discuss and explain terms used in the book. Then the author should use terms consistently throughout the work. Using the Blackfoot as an example, historically they were known as the "Blackfeet" on the American side and the "Blackfoot" on the Canadian, but in reality the American Blackfeet were southern Piegans (a term they have been reintroducing) while the Blackfoot Confederacy on the Canadian side was made up of the northern Piegans, the Bloods, and the Blackfoot proper. Even here these tribes now refer to themselves by their Blackfoot language names. The book contains an extensive twenty-five-page bibliography. However, the footnote style is one that raises an issue about the sources. In many of the book's paragraphs...

Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720–1877

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Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, by Megan Kate Nelson The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. By Megan Kate Nelson (New York: Scribner, 2020. xx + 331 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $28.00). Matthew Babcock Matthew Babcock Matthew Babcock is associate professor of history at University of North Texas, Dallas. He is interested in the histories of North American Borderlands, American Indians, and the colonial Southwest. His scholarship includes Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule(2016). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Southern California Quarterly (2021) 103 (4): 493–495. https://doi.org/10.1525/scq.2021.103.4.493 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Matthew Babcock; Review: The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, by Megan Kate Nelson. Southern California Quarterly 1 November 2021; 103 (4): 493–495. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/scq.2021.103.4.493 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentSouthern California Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The Historical Society of Southern California. All rights reserved.2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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Review of: Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, by Ryan Hall.

Reviewed by: Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720–1877 by Ryan Hall Ted Binnema (bio) Keywords Native Americans, Blackfoot, Northern borderlands, Indigenous peoples Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720–1877. By Ryan Hall. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 260. Cloth $90.00.) Two traditions, ethnohistory and the New Indian History, have dominated Indigenous historiography in the United States since World War II. Ethnohistory has pre-war roots but was heavily influenced by the adjudications of the Indian Claims Commission, which demanded anthropological and historical evidence. Ethnohistorians assume that the histories of Indigenous societies are significant and interesting for their own sake. The many publications of John C. Ewers on the history of the Blackfoot peoples are exemplars of ethnohistory. The New Indian History emerged during the 1960s together with other “new” histories geared toward the marginalized (women, ethnic and racial minorities, working classes, and regional populations, for example) with the aim of integrating the histories of previously neglected groups into mainstream historiography. Ryan Hall’s history of the Blackfoot is in this second tradition. Hall asserts that Blackfoot history is [End Page 689] “essential to understanding the history of the U.S. and Canadian West” (5). Hall likewise argues that Blackfoot history “forces us to expand our framework for ‘early’ North America to include regions that have long been considered remote or peripheral” (5). Of course, North American Indians did not always fit the social historian’s “bottom-up” approach. In some contexts, they were the dominant peoples. That was the case for the Blackfoot during most of the period discussed in Hall’s history. So, Hall explicitly places his history in a growing body of recent work that portrays western Indian communities such as the Comanche, Lakota, and others as powerful “empires” or nations. Most of those studies focus on the United States–Spanish/Mexican borderlands, but Hall turns his attention to the northern borderlands. His central argument is that “from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, the Blackfoot were among the most powerful, prosperous, and geographically expansive polities in all of North America. The Blackfoot accomplished this in large part by recognizing and mastering the transnational dimensions of their homeland” (4–5). Unfortunately, in his attempt to demonstrate the significance of Blackfoot history in the history of the United States and Canada, Hall obscures and ignores what makes the history of the Blackfoot so fascinating and significant in its own right. The most important weakness of this book is that it depicts the Blackfoot as an almost state-like nation, and its leaders as powerful leaders. For example, it opens by describing Bull Back Fat as “one of the most powerful chiefs in the three Blackfoot nations, which made him one of the most powerful Indigenous people of all of North America” (1). Abundant historical evidence, long acknowledged by anthropologists and historians, shows that the Blackfoot of the time comprised many autonomous bands with no central authority, and that its leaders wielded no coercive power even over their own bands. Because Hall assumes that the Blackfoot were always a nation with powerful leaders he fails to recognize evidence that the Blackfoot bands may have been experiencing dramatic internal political changes in the 1870s. Hall mentions (172) the Blackfoot Council of 1875, after which fifteen Siksika, Kainai, and Piegan submitted a petition to the Canadian government, but not that these chiefs may have set a precedent by styling themselves as chiefs of the “Chokitapix.” Other documents suggest that the Blackfoot were developing new political strategies in the 1870s, to address the challenges of dealing with the American and Canadian governments. [End Page 690] If so, the development reflected a fascinating process that occurred in Indigenous societies around the world. Hall also fails to mention the impact that the Chokitapix petition had on Canadian government officials. Ignoring the history of Blackfoot (or Lakota or Comanche) political evolution obscures important historical processes as much is it would to assume that the 1789 United States Constitution was in effect in 1781, 1776, and 1763. This book implies that, since 1720...

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