American Settlement Research Articles

Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West by Cameron Blevins

Reviewed by: Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West by Cameron Blevins Susan Schulten (bio) Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West. By Cameron Blevins. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 232. Cloth, $34.95.) The U.S. Post has drawn far less attention than other federal agencies in the settlement of the West, particularly the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the General Land Office, and the U.S. military. Yet, in Paper Trails, Cameron Blevins argues that the postal network was essential to the conquest and settlement of this vast and geographically diverse region. By facilitating communication through a loose yet responsive network, the U.S. Post provided "the underlying spatial circuitry of western expansion" (3). Blevins describes the U.S. Post from the 1860s through the early twentieth century as "big, expansive, fast moving, and unstable" (5). This statement captures his nuanced and original thesis. The Post Office Department operated as a highly decentralized organization that relied on "agents" at the local level to convey letters, newspapers, and later money across the country. Blevins argues that its tenuous, unstable nature was precisely what enabled post offices and postal services to appear swiftly alongside new communities—such as mining towns—but also to contract just as quickly when those towns disappeared, as was so common across the West. To capture this dynamic, he terms the postal system in this era a "gossamer network." Blevins uses this observation to rethink the operation of state power. The temporary and flexible agency model enabled the postal network to keep up with the extraordinary pace and reach of western colonization in the late nineteenth century. It might be tempting to see the decentralized and privatized nature of postal operations as a limitation or disadvantage, particularly given our long-standing assumptions about bureaucracy and administrative power. But Blevins argues that the early western postal system was effective not in spite of its institutional weaknesses but because of them. In other words, it was "the absence of so many traditional hallmarks of bureaucratic strength that made the gossamer network such a crucial part of the American state's efforts to incorporate the western United States" (13). By the early twentieth century, he writes, this peculiarly unstable yet flexible style of federal power helped to "transform the western United States from a sprawling and remote territory over which the state had only a tenuous hold into an integrated region occupied by American settlers, industry, and government" (158). Blevins relies on several different types of sources and analysis to make his case. Students of the digital humanities will appreciate his ability to [End Page 417] extract meaningful patterns from an enormous data set that identified thousands of post offices in the second half of the nineteenth century. He asks two questions of this data: Where were post offices established, and when? He successfully maps two-thirds of these 166,000 post offices and, through careful accounting for error and missing information, helps to randomize what cannot be firmly established. With this aggregate data, he is able to see that post offices were constantly being established but also closed across the American West. This dynamic of simultaneous expansion and contraction sets the West apart from the rest of the country. Abundant maps in the study help guide the reader through this western dynamic of boom and bust, but readers will be even more intrigued by the extensive companion website to the book (www.gossamernetwork.com). In a site that is intuitive and thoughtful, Blevins and his colleagues show in real time how the postal network followed—and sometimes anticipated—the rapid dispossession of Native lands in the West. By aggregating and analyzing the location of postal networks, Blevins shows what would otherwise be invisible to historians of the West, answering critics of digital history as confirming what we already know. But Blevins is not strictly engaged with quantitative data. At one end, he relies on individual stories of western migrants whose geographically expansive lives were made possible by the postal network. By facilitating the movement of white Americans into the West, the postal network advanced the conquest of...

Aurum by Santee Frazier (review)

Reviewed by: Aurum by Santee Frazier No'u Revilla (bio) Aurum by Santee Frazier University of Arizona Press, 2019 IN HIS SECOND COLLECTION OF POEMS, Santee Frazier is attentive to the work of shaping sound to place. An enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and director of the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA program, Frazier has composed a collection that capably builds a world in which the unwanted, discarded, and forgotten of extractive capitalism sound their stories. To read Aurum is to listen. The sounds in Frazier's collection are at once desperate, menacing, and redemptive. Instead of the so-called postcolonial question of "now what?" Frazier's characters haunt the equally, if not more, prismatic problem of "now where?" What do these places sound like? Who is listening to the "where" of second, third, and fourth chances, to the "where" of hustling and hunger? The first poem of Aurum is faithfully driven by sound. Bladed by runs of alliteration and consonance, "Lactification" portrays a scene in which settler violence diminishes an Indigenous man to a mere body, an object to be inspected, punished, and domesticated. The poem's title gestures to the work of Frantz Fanon and the notion that white supremacy incentivizes (if not threatens) people of color to reject their racial identity, spurn their communities, and assimilate. Or, as "Lactification" rehearses: "a culling of melanin" (2). In the next poem, "Ore Body," the sound of machines interrupts land, and rituals of progress are juxtaposed with rituals "before mineral, polygon, the invention of the wheel, story of flat, firing / of clay" (4). Whereas progress is a linear narrative with clear winners and losers, Frazier's poems are non-linear and lyrical. Arguably, in "Ore Body," the "tongue of digging" works on two levels (4). First, it represents the language of labor on which industry and its fixation on all things pickaxed, dug out, and stolen are based. Second, the "tongue of digging" captures the intensity with which Frazier records the afterlives of industry. Enter: Mangled. Mangled Creekbed is a persona who appeared in Frazier's first book, Dark Thirty. In Aurum, he continues to embody Indigenous struggle for belonging. [End Page 193] We first see Mangled pretending to play music with an imaginary accordion. Apropos of Frazier's lyrical work, Mangled's gritty survival is defined by music rather than victimhood. In the "knife-etched stall" of "Mangled & the Accordion," for example, he tamps the tiled floor. Frazier adds: "When he mashes the keys and squeezes, daylight tunnels to fuzz" (18). Readers are subsequently privy to the crunching of bugs and the "shine of their bodies" between Mangled's fingers and teeth (21), to the rev and rumble of a demolition derby and the cheering audience Mangled imagines for himself (22), and to "the music of frying meat, of squirrel thighs dredged in corn meal" and the "[m]usic of lice wilting in kerosene" (23). In the final sequence of "Mangled & the Accordion," it is affirmed: "It was Mangled's tune, his humming of the knife, the slow slimming of his lips / to song" (25). The places we meet Mangled crunch, wilt, and buzz alongside him. Importantly, he is both witness to and maker of this music. In addition to sound, readers can also track motifs of light and dark in Frazier's collection. Aurum, itself, is the Latin name for gold. In the context of Frazier's worldbuilding, the title points to genocidal campaigns waged against Indigenous peoples for the promise of gold and to ongoing acts of environmental racism that yoke Indigenous lands and bodies to extractive capitalism. In fact the motif of gold throughout the book is anticipated by the repetition of the word "shine" in "Ore Body." Yet who or what is shining? And why? What relationship between light and dark are we readers invited to consider? As a Native Hawaiian woman reading Frazier's collection, I dwelled here. Light and dark are frequently rendered as antithetical, but how useful is this opposition? Where did it come from? How is it used? American settler colonialism perverted my ancestors' sense of dark and consequently corrupted our relationship to light. This...

I Fanhigaiyan: weaving an alternative journalism praxis from CHamoru decolonization media activism

In this article, I theorize an Indigenous media framework drawn from conversations with journalists and Indigenous activists in Guåhan (Guam). I refer to this framework as I Fanhigaiyan, a Fino’CHamoru (CHamoru language) term which can mean a thing which weaves or a place for weaving. This term captures the essence of CHamoru (the Indigenous people of the Marianas) media activism as a grounded and resurgent practice which establishes and maintains networks of reciprocity in Guåhan and in translocal spaces for Indigenous sovereignty and demilitarization. While in critical studies it is a given that news media serve an ideological function of state power, few researchers have examined the settler ideological power of media in American territories such as Guåhan. This article draws attention to the role of mainstream news media in concealing and reproducing settler logics of territoriality and elimination, and the mediated CHamoru resistance to American settler governance and discourse.

Human Y chromosome sequences from Q Haplogroup reveal a South American settlement pre-18,000 years ago and a profound genomic impact during the Younger Dryas.

The settlement of the Americas has been the focus of incessant debate for more than 100 years, and open questions regarding the timing and spatial patterns of colonization still remain today. Phylogenetic studies with complete human Y chromosome sequences are used as a highly informative tool to investigate the history of human populations in a given time frame. To study the phylogenetic relationships of Native American lineages and infer the settlement history of the Americas, we analyzed Y chromosome Q Haplogroup, which is a Pan-American haplogroup and represents practically all Native American lineages in Mesoamerica and South America. We built a phylogenetic tree for Q Haplogroup based on 102 whole Y chromosome sequences, of which 13 new Argentine sequences were provided by our group. Moreover, 1,072 new single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that contribute to its resolution and diversity were identified. Q-M848 is known to be the most frequent autochthonous sub-haplogroup of the Americas. The present is the first genomic study of Q Haplogroup in which current knowledge on Q-M848 sub-lineages is contrasted with the historical, archaeological and linguistic data available. The divergence times, spatial structure and the SNPs found here as novel for Q-Z780, a less frequent sub-haplogroup autochthonous of the Americas, provide genetic support for a South American settlement before 18,000 years ago. We analyzed how environmental events that occurred during the Younger Dryas period may have affected Native American lineages, and found that this event may have caused a substantial loss of lineages. This could explain the current low frequency of Q-Z780 (also perhaps of Q-F4674, a third possible sub-haplogroup autochthonous of the Americas). These environmental events could have acted as a driving force for expansion and diversification of the Q-M848 sub-lineages, which show a spatial structure that developed during the Younger Dryas period.

Hallucinations of the Spanish Imaginary and the Idealized Hotel California

Focusing on the Mission Inn and the Sherman Indian Boarding School in Riverside, this article analyzes an idealized “Hotel California” as a component of what I have called “the Spanish Imaginary.” Just as the Eagles’ song of the same name examines both the mythmaking of Southern California and the American dream, this article describes how that imaginary shapes our collective hallucinations of a time that rightfully should be mourned instead of celebrated. The Mission Inn, which opened in 1902, architecturally portrays the Spanish Imaginary and the mission themes of spirituality, hinting as well at the secular benevolence of the Mexicans and Americans who succeeded the Spanish. This article argues that the pervasive Mission Revival style of architecture that is synonymous with Southern California is a physical manifestation of the anti-Indian ideology that informed the greed and violence of European and American settlement. The newcomers eviscerated the future state’s environment, introducing a genocidal architecture that combines capitalistic culture with an historical imaginary, one that succeeded in drawing millions of settlers to California and became the embodiment of both the American dream and the American nightmare. Both continue to exert their influence: while the Sherman Indian Boarding School has moved away from its Spanish mission roots, today’s Mission Inn presents visitors with the idealized “Hotel California” version of the Golden State’s past, wrapping the reality of Indian slavery and genocide in a distinctive form of plantation nostalgia. Perhaps no other structure in California better illustrates the colonial desires of Spain (then of Mexico, then of the United States) to “civilize” Indigenous peoples than the Sherman Indian Boarding School, whose original design illustrates the collective delusion of the Spanish Imaginary. Opening its doors in 1903, Sherman intentionally drew its design from mission architecture. The choice makes sense, given that both missions and Sherman were designed to transform Native peoples. Both utilized Native bodies for their labor. Both drew sustenance from Native peoples’ difference, and from their availability as a threatening “Other” requiring physical as well as cultural control. The Sherman Indian Boarding School provides a potent site of analysis of the ways that twentieth-century Americans used architecture to harness a mythical past and then bend it to capitalist goals. Moreover, implicating Mission Revival–style architecture in American processes of mythmaking illustrates how colonizers’ notions of race undergirded their spatial colonial logics, in ways that devalued Native peoples in the past and continue to obscure their physical and cultural persistence today.

Struggle, Strength, and Survival: The Trujillo Homesteads National Historic Landmark and Hispanic American Settlement in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Struggle, Strength, and Survival: The Trujillo Homesteads National Historic Landmark and Hispanic American Settlement in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

The Old Federal Road in Alabama: An Illustrated Guide by Kathryn H. Braund, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Raven M. Christopher

Reviewed by: The Old Federal Road in Alabama: An Illustrated Guide by Kathryn H. Braund, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Raven M. Christopher Christine E. Sears The Old Federal Road in Alabama: An Illustrated Guide. By Kathryn H. Braund, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Raven M. Christopher. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2019. 176 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-5930-0. The Old Federal Road in Alabama is a vivid and witty travel companion. The first part tells the history of the Old Federal Road and the second lays out a guide for touring Alabama’s Old Federal Road. The work blends historical context with the experiential to connect us to a time during which the “land and its people were remade” (93). The first section draws on recent scholarship on Creek Indians in the Southeast to provide a succinct and inclusive history of the ancient path that would one day become a road. The foundation was “laid by Indian feet” (7) which used the path for generations. Deer skin traders and native peoples traversed the footpath up to the Seven Years’ War. At war’s end in 1763, the Spanish and French were ejected while the British set up trading posts in Mobile and Pensacola, making “formerly minor paths to the Gulf Coast … major routes” (11). After the American Revolution, American settlers charged into what are now Georgia and Tennessee, straining Creek-US relations. The US government demanded road and waterways through Creek territory while pushing a “civilization policy” (12) to transform Creeks and other Indians into settled farmers. Creeks, through whose land much of the Old Federal Road passed, farmed proficiently and had already selectively adopted many Anglo practices. The authors give ample time to Creek resistance to Americans passing through and squatting on their land, as well as to those Creeks who leveraged the needs of travelers for their own gain. The broad outlines of nineteenth-century changes are likely familiar, but the authors, by anchoring their work around the road, add important depth to that outline. Readers will not be surprised that the Louisiana Purchase instigated a transformation along the worn path. But not just Anglo settlers journeyed to the new territory. The federal government and military needed improved access to the territory for communication and defense, particularly in regard [End Page 256] to the real prize of the Purchase, the port of New Orleans. Further, the Creek were not completely sidelined by Anglo immigration in the early 1800s. Many travelers hired Creek Indians as post riders. Creeks, like Samuel Moniac, constructed houses on the route to provide fresh horses, fodder, and a stopping place on the unpopulated roadway. The year 1811 proved a pivot point in pushing the “barely tolerable path” (5) to a wheel-worthy road. Importantly, the authors highlight the federal government’s role in this change. In 1811, the US Army widened the trail and built bridges along it. In the early 1800s, the government forced Creeks to cede much of their land. And whites increasingly owned the inns and stage stops along the road while Creeks were relegated to menial jobs. The Old Federal Road, the authors note, was a “conduit that enabled both immigration and deportation” (90), moving Creek inhabitants out and cotton planters with enslaved peoples in. The United States had transformed the area from Creek territory to the Cotton South. The work is enlivened with carefully chosen illustrations that are equally inclusive. A detailed 1773 French map of Louisiana (10) highlights existing Indian trails, including some that became the Alabama Old Federal Road. An 1802 Georgia passport giving a white man permission to travel through Creek Nation territory (17) indicates Creek control of their land. Multiple illustrations of Creek Indians give faces and form to Creeks living along the path (64-65). Photos of the contemporary landscape add life to the tour guide section of the work. My favorite is the photo of an evening primrose (139), a flower written about by William Bartram, who traveled to the area in 1775. The lovely primrose grows only around Stockton, Alabama. The book’s second part is sub-divided into three sections—into the Eastern, Central, and Southern segments...

Building the United Nations Headquarters as Worldmaking? Settler Colonialism, Modernist Architecture, and the Material Infrastructure for the Post-World WarII Order

What does it mean for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) building to be designed through modernist architecture principles on land acquired through settler colonialism? In 1947, construction began on the United Nations Headquarters (UNHQ) in Manhattan, a name derived from Manna-hata, a site within Lenapehoking, the homeland of Indigenous Lenape peoples violently displaced by waves of Dutch, British, and American settlers starting in the 17th century. This paper analyzes the structural dynamics that is in the literal foundations of the United Nations Headquarters, the post-World War II (WWII) worldmaking project intended to safeguard international order. By marshaling the history of Lenapehoking and analyzing the design principles informing the UNGA building, this paper narrows the claim that the post-WWII worldmaking project was contingent upon settler colonialism. Through a capacious reading of settler colonial theory, architectural history, and International Relations (IR), this paper aims to open up conversations on the ongoing structural and spatial dynamics embedded in the foundations of the UNGA building that are constitutive of the post-WWII international order.

Border History is Indigenous History

Border History is Indigenous History Ryan Hall (bio) Benjamin Hoy, A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Notes and index. xv + 322pp. $35.00. In the desperate final months of 1862, some two thousand Dakota Sioux people trekked north through the cold Minnesota winter in search of safety. To these survivors, British lands north of the 49th parallel represented their last possible refuge, their last hope. Over the previous summer, the Dakota had launched a doomed resistance campaign against American settlers and government authorities, citing broken treaty promises that had left them on the brink of starvation. In the war's aftermath, soldiers quickly rounded up and arrested Dakota survivors. Those who remained unfettered were forced to flee, and danger stalked their every step. Some went west to the lands of their Lakota kin, but punitive U.S. Army expeditions followed them to the plains to hunt them down. Those who instead went north had to avoid packs of vigilantes who roamed the border hoping to capture stragglers for rewards. Even after they crossed, the Dakota refugees still had to evade illegal kidnapping parties; keep peace with Indigenous nations like the Crees and Métis, who resented their presence on fast-shrinking hunting grounds; mollify British officials who saw them as dangerous nuisances; and find ways to subsist and survive in the harsh northern prairies. Despite all this, they persevered. By the 1870s, the Dakota refugees secured a handful of small reserves in what is now central Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where descendants remain today. The border saved them. The Dakota were the first of many Indigenous peoples to cross the U.S.-Canadian border to escape violent death during the era of continental expansion. In January 1870, many Blackfoot people in Montana fled north after escalating violence with settlers culminated in the U.S. Army massacring nearly two hundred peaceful Blackfoot people encamped along the Marias River. Many of the Blackfoot survivors never returned to the southern portions of their homelands that lay in the United States. In 1877, the renowned Lakota chief Sitting Bull led three thousand of his people north into Saskatchewan to avoid certain retribution following victory over U.S. troops in the Battle of Little Big [End Page 160] Horn. Later that year, Nez Percé people in Idaho lashed out against an invasion of their homelands, then led the U.S. Cavalry on an epic, thousand-mile chase that ended with a frantic final dash towards the Canadian border. The Nez Percé leader Chief Joseph and most of his followers were ambushed and forced to surrender within sight of their destination, but several hundred still managed to slip away and join Lakota refugees in Canada. The border worked in both directions, and Indigenous people in Canada sometimes fled to the United States for the same reasons as their American counterparts. Following an 1870 resistance campaign against the Canadian government in Manitoba, the spiritual and political leader of the Métis people, Louis Riel, absconded to Montana to avoid prosecution. After he returned to Canada to wage another failed campaign in 1885, Riel was executed, but many of his fellow Métis resistors fled across the American border, as did several bands of Cree allies who had risen up alongside them. To Indigenous people in the North American West, the international border in the late nineteenth century meant something very different than it means today. To them, the border meant safety; it meant refuge; for many, it represented the only possible option for avoiding the marauding violence of what Americans called the "Indian wars" era. The experience of Indigenous people during the bloody decades of the late nineteenth century has inspired generations of public interest and often predictable strains of historical writing. Writers have used the Indian wars to tell moralistic stories of American avarice and doomed Indian heroism, the perils of industrialization, and the clash of irreconcilable worldviews. In Canada, a parallel tradition has belatedly unfolded around their (more limited) conflicts with Métis and Cree people. Like America's Indian wars, Canada's prairie conflicts have turned an uncomfortable mirror onto...

Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness by Maureen H. O’Connell

Reviewed by: Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness by Maureen H. O’Connell Alex Mikulich II In Undoing the Knots, Maureen O'Connell thoughtfully probes the entanglements of Roman Catholic Anti-Blackness. Yet in her efforts, she fails to address one of its enduring dimensions, namely: coloniality, the hidden, oppressive side of European modernity. Being a colonized and raced person is, by definition, “to be incapable of giving” explains Jane Anna Gordon in her celebration of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Gift of Double-Consciousness.”1 The colonial epistemology that the Roman Catholic papacy initiated in the early fifteenth century inaugurated both the sinful idolatry of racial superiority and Eurocentric people’s refusal to celebrate the divine giftedness of Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples. The interconnected economic, ecological, and racial crises of our time remain unabated, in part, because we white settler Americans consume a “happy story” about economic growthism in our socialization systems even as this so-called “free market” impoverishes billions of people and destroys the planet. We white American settlers conveniently forget that the economic rise of the West and the United States depended upon enslavement of African and American Indigenous peoples, expropriating both labor and capital, and dispossessing them of lands and abundant resources. This is the Colonial Matrix Power, aptly named by the sociologist Anibal Quijano, that perpetuates police and vigilante violence against Black people at rates nearly the same as that of lynching just a century ago. This so-called “modern” system colonizes Black, Latino/a, and Indigenous space and bodies through the school to prison pipeline, hyper-incarceration, and by fostering a political economy of segregation through a combination of racially structured banking, real estate, and [End Page 64] governmental policies that “hastens physical decline in urban neighborhoods [and] forever incentivizes their perpetuation.”2 Before any white theologian articulated racial mercy, W.E.B. Du Bois’s gift of double consciousness is only one example of many gifts African peoples offer to practice the porousness and mutuality O’Connell invites (168). Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples offer love within the binds of oppression, like the gift of double consciousness, inviting white folks to perceive and lament our own complicity in anti-Blackness, and celebrate the divine giftedness, beauty, grandeur, and dignity of Black peoples. A sense of awe before the Creator and celebration of the giftedness of Black people fosters the humility to open ourselves in vulnerability and acknowledge our need for Black people in the intimate, interdependent web of relations of human and non-human kin. Then, perhaps, we might loosen knots of coloniality and begin to sew a new cloth of mutuality and togetherness. When and how will we white folks celebrate the divine giftedness of Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples and engage the impasse of anti-Black coloniality? Alex Mikulich Independent Roman Catholic social ethicist Footnotes 1. Anna Jane Gordon, “The Gift of Double Consciousness: Some Obstacles to Grasping the Contributions of the Colonized,” in Postcolonialism and Political Theory, ed. Nalini Persram (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 143–163. 2. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Home Ownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 11. Copyright © 2022 American Catholic Historical Society

Settler Colonialism by Settlers of Color: Understanding Han Taiwanese Settler Colonialism in Taiwan through Japanese American Settler Colonialism in Hawai’i

My paper evaluates the United States settler colonial framework in relation to Han Taiwanese citizenship, independence, and rights to the island now called Taiwan. I use parallels from the Japanese American occupation of Hawai'i to investigate how white settler colonial logics, such as multiculturalism and the settler-colonial Unconscious, are instilled in East Asian settlers through the promise of democratic rights and sovereignty. Settlers of color, therefore, complicate the binary between the “colonizer” and “colonized” as demonstrated through the simultaneous oppression of people of color by the white settler state and the oppression of Indigenous peoples by settlers of color. With this, I reflect on the following questions: What does it mean to claim independence on land that is stolen Indigenous land, and how is this narrative further complicated when these settlers are people of color? Similar settler colonial tactics and commitments to capitalism are utilized by both the U.S. and Taiwan; therefore, it is imperative for Taiwanese and Taiwanese American people to recognize this and reject the white settler colonial framework to truly be in solidarity with Indigenous peoples.

Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941 by Jessica M. Kim

Reviewed by: Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941 by Jessica M. Kim Joseph L. Scarpaci Jessica M. Kim Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. photographs, map, tables, appends., notes, bibl., index, (paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6624-2), $27.95. The publishing parentage of historian Jessica M. Kim’s book is as varied as the topic examined. A consortium forged by the David J. Weber Series in New Borderland History at Southern Methodist University, and the University of North Carolina’s already well established Latin American focus, birthed this interdisciplinary book. Already acclaimed with the Kenneth Jackson Award awarded by the Urban History Association, the work should interest students of economic, cultural, urban and regional geography. It dives headfirst into the much-used notion of core-periphery by anchoring the discussion on how Los Angeles’ growth in the post-Civil War Era, extending through the Porfiriato Era (1876–1911), and up to the onset of World War II, was intricately tied to southern California’s capital tentacles that reached deep into Mexico. This growth in empire comes to [End Page 208] life in vivid detail to convince readers (who might not otherwise accept the notion) that geopolitical borders are mere lines in the sand. Savvy strategies used by Los Angeles investors cajoled U.S. and Mexican governments to manipulate race, class and labor to extract value in agriculture, the petroleum industry, and real-estate. Think Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system’s theory or Saskia Sassen’s world city. At its core, this book shows the frenetic pull of investment that became a “marriage of capitalism and the nineteenth century city” (p. 9). It was driven by such “lumi-nary” Los Angeles iconic empire builders such as Griffith J. Griffith, Lewis Bradbury, Edward L. Doheny, Thomas Bard, Henry Workman Keller, Henry A. Crabb, Senator John A. Miller (CA), General William Starke Rosecrans (ret.), the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, the Colorado River Land Company, and Harrison Gray Otis, among others. The prevailing winds at their backs were the Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, victories in Havana and Manila, and the expectation that the role of U.S. and Mexican governments –the latter encouraged to facilitate liberal development through the support of these projects— would create favorable tax credits, build infrastructure (e.g., The Pan American Highway, or IPH: International Pacific Highway), military conquest, ideas of racial superiority, and American settler colonialism, among other forces. Mexican, Japanese, Native American, and Chinese laborers who toiled in anti-union and open-shop settings in Mexico and the United States helped alleviate the “white man’s burden.” Southern California investors hustled across the border to invest in agricultural and petroleum projects, keeping race, class, and labor lines in order. White managers and foremen stayed on top of brown-skin workers. And middle-class investors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century stock market cared little whether their investments were in sugar fields in Cuba or the Philippines, or agricultural projects in Mexico. Six chapters and an epilogue develop these and related themes. Historian Kim weaves personal letters, newspaper reports, archival materials, and copious materials to show how this cross-border web of elite alliances thrust Los Angeles into the pilot’s seat of empire building. Even after the Mexican Revolution, the legal framework allowed Los Angeles’ investors to hold considerable control over core-periphery trade. Chapter Two’s review of the Quimichis Colony of large-scale farming along the Pacific coast offers a granular look at how local settlements had little choice but to acquiesce to truck farming and U.S. consumer tastes. Chapter four’s discussion of lessons learned in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898 and afterwards portrays an ethos that revived and legitimated American expansion. While the late nineteenth century bravado and risk-taking grew out of a post-Civil War Manifest Destiny ethos, the 1898 war rekindled the ideology that empire was good for the world. The Mexican Revolution (possibly kindling revolutions in Russia, China and elsewhere), created an anti-Americanism and strong sense of nationalism that forced...

Sally Ainse and the Intersection of Black-Indigenous Histories in the Thames River Valley, 1780–1865

Sally Ainse was an Oneida woman who purchased a large property in the Thames River Valley in the late eighteenth century. Ainse also owned enslaved peoples, including a Black man named Frank, who, along with Josiah Cutten, were included as part of the transactions when Ainse sold plots of her land to European American settlers. The intersecting stories of Ainse, Frank, and Cutten along a newly formed international border complicate narratives of settler colonial development. They highlight the complex relationships between settler expansion and racialized violence that help explain the region's shifting political landscape from 1780 to 1865, and, by doing so, illustrate the importance of local identities to settler colonialism.

Localized Native American impacts on past forest composition across a regional extent in north‐easternUnited States

AbstractAimResearchers have debated impacts of past Native American land use on forests including upon tree species composition in north‐eastern United States (US), with estimates of impacts ranging from local to regional extent. This study examines tree relative abundances to assess whether Native Americans influenced geographic distributions prior to Euro‐American settlement.LocationNorth‐eastern United States (approx. 420,000 km2).TaxonAsh (Fraxinusspp.), basswood (Tilia americana), beech (Fagus grandifolia), birch (Betulaspp.), cherry (Prunusspp.), chestnut (Castanea dentata), dogwood (Cornusspp.), elm (Ulmusspp.), fir (Abies balsamea), hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), hickory (Caryaspp.), ironwood (Carpinus carolinianaandOstrya virginiana), maple (Acerspp.), oak (Quercusspp.), pine (Pinusspp.), spruce (Piceaspp.), tamarack (Larix laricina) and walnut (Juglansspp.),MethodsWe used boosted regression trees to model abundance patterns and to assess the importance of distance‐based proxies of Native American land use versus environmental variables. We trained models that included and excluded distance‐based proxies. Abundance estimates from original land survey records (1650–1850 CE) were acquired for taxa at 8 km spatial resolution, and related to Native American settlement locations (1500–1800 CE) and 27 environmental variables.ResultsWhen evaluated upon test data, regional‐scale models of relative abundance that included distance‐based proxies performed only slightly better than models that excluded them, with mean improvements in RMSE of 0.1 percentage points. Models suggest that Native American land use modestly altered the relative abundance of taxa locally, extending no more than 50 km from settlement. Models also suggest slight increases near settlement of a few percentage points in relative abundance for fire‐tolerant and/or dietary taxa (e.g. oak, hickory and pine), and for early‐successional taxa (e.g. ash).Main conclusionsPast Native American land use had no detectable effect on forest composition across a regional extent, but increased the abundance of fire‐tolerant, shade‐intolerant and nut‐producing trees locally.

Diverting the Gila: The Pima Indians and the Florence Casa Grande Project, 1916–1928 by David H. DeJong

Reviewed by: Diverting the Gila: The Pima Indians and the Florence Casa Grande Project, 1916–1928 by David H. DeJong Charles Porter Diverting the Gila: The Pima Indians and the Florence Casa Grande Project, 1916–1928. By David H. DeJong. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021. Pp. 336. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index.) For generations, before White settlers arrived along the Gila River, Pima Indian growers successfully used the water to create a thriving and sustainable agricultural community. David H. DeJong's Diverting the Gila: The Pima Indians and the Florence Casa Grande Project, 1916–1928, tells the sad story of the Pimas' struggle to keep their irrigation community alive after the arrival of new White American settlers. Upstream diversions by immigrants to the Gila River valleys from the Civil War to 1890 depleted the river's flow to downstream Pima fields resulting in the collapse of the tribal community. The Pimas were experts in sustainably using the limited water resources of the Gila River to allow life to flourish in arid southern Arizona. Not only did the Pimas create the physical infrastructure to divert and use the water for irrigation, but they also created a system allowing fair, transparent, and equitable sharing of water, the essence of the life of their entire community. Across North America, settlers from the United States used complex government processes to cheat Native peoples out of their traditional lands, including their rights to use water. The simple way to control any society is to take away their water. The general surface water policy west of the Mississippi River under the American form of government holds that first in time equals first in right: whoever can prove the earliest use of surface water beneficially becomes first in line to use that water. There is no dispute that Pima communities were first to put the water of the Gila to beneficial use. Yet, as usual, the Americans found ways to exercise their [End Page 510] legal and political expertise to justify the diminution of the prior water rights of the Pimas. Just as other Native peoples experienced across the West, the Pimas had little chance to prevail in a legal system that they did not understand or in many cases had no desire to understand. When it comes to land and water acquisition by Anglo Americans, it seems that unethical behavior is exercised as a matter of course and sanctioned by legal action. Due to political maneuvering in the most despicable manner by Anglo Americans, the Pimas' water allocations were reduced by two-thirds, eliminating 60 percent of the growing capacity of their fields. Yet the Pima courageously adapted their growing practices by eliminating their least productive lands, planting less water-intensive crops, and stubbornly remaining committed to farming even though their economy was devastated in favor of upper Gila Valley White growers. The intense drought being experienced in the West today is putting existing water policies under extreme duress. Diverting the Gila should be read by any water policymaker seeking fairness in water rights for all people or trying to find a way through the current water crisis while treating everyone fairly. The book explains the consequences of water policies manipulated to favor the powerful. Further, DeJong uses his excellent academic training, tempered with real-world irrigation system experience, to provide readers with the historical facts of the consequences of unfair water policies. The Pimas were first in time to use the water. The Pimas put the Gila River water to beneficial use. Why then did they have to endure the devastation of their agricultural economy by newcomers? DeJong illuminates their struggle, a struggle that is as much about respect for dignity as it is about irrigation systems. Charles Porter St. Edwards University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Steam power, native labor, and contested terraqueous mobilities during American settlement of Puget Sound, 1846–1873

ABSTRACT During U.S. colonization of the mid-nineteenth-century coastal Pacific Northwest, Native peoples and white American settlers used canoes and steamboats to imagine and sustain multiple overlapping mobilities within the same territory. Native peoples’ persistent mobility disrupted and delayed American colonization. Analyzing historical descriptions of mobility enables us to recover how Natives and non-Natives (primarily American settlers and U.S. officials) understood connections between technology, mobility, the environment, and power. A terraqueous approach highlights connections between land and water. While settlers routinely relied on Native canoe pullers to traverse Pacific Northwest waters into the mid-1870s, many resented this dependence and saw Native mobility as impeding U.S. colonization. Settlers imagined steamboats would let them control their own movements and those of Native peoples. Instead, steamboats became another way Native people integrated settlers into existing Native networks. Today, Pacific Northwest Native peoples have deliberately re-framed canoe mobility as a contemporary articulation of Native identity and sovereignty. Studying terraqueous mobility in a coastal border region offers fresh insights into the ways settler colonialism works (or tries to work) by revealing the importance of mobile Native labor as both an element of and an obstacle to settler colonization.

Heroes’ Missions: journey of Heroes and Japanese American settler colonialism in Hawai‘i

ABSTRACT While being marginalised in mainstream American history, Japanese Americans have been aiming to elevate their status in the U.S. This is also the case in Hawaiʻi where Japanese Americans hold strong economic and political standings. Up until today, members of the Japanese community in Hawaiʻi have strived for power, and in the realm of culture, one of their attempts came into fruition as a comic book. Titled Journey of Heroes: The Story of the 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team (Hawaiʻi, 2012), this comic book sheds light on Japanese American veterans who had heroically fought World War II. Journey of Heroes is functioning as an important archive through which to recuperate these heroes’ memories and reinstate them in mainstream American history. However, against the backdrop of the strained relations between the Japanese community in Hawaiʻi and Native Hawaiians, the comic book is potentially facilitating the violation of Native Hawaiians’ human rights, no matter how well-intended this memory project may be. Focusing on the production and distribution processes of Journey of Heroes, this paper reveals the comic book’s political connotation in Hawaiʻi as a cultural product.

Natural and Cultural History of Xanthorhiza simplicissima

Yellowroot (Xanthorhiza simplicissima Marshall, Ranunculaceae) is a low-growing deciduous shrub native to hardwood forests in the eastern United States. This review synthesizes existing knowledge about yellowroot's natural and cultural history including traditional uses, contemporary applications, and future implications. Emphasis is placed on the southern Appalachian mountain region, which is the core of its cultural importance. Natural history and ethnobotanical knowledge about yellowroot were collected from published literature, oral histories, and field observations. While it was first described by botanists in the 18th Century, yellowroot was already a well-established and culturally significant plant to the Native peoples of southern Appalachia for centuries. At least 34 Indigenous medicinal and craft uses are documented, confirming that yellowroot was, and to an extent still is, a culturally significant plant for Indigenous people in the southern Appalachian region. European and African American settlers to the region also incorporated the plant into many of their folk traditions, and wild harvesting and cultivation continues to this day. Modern analytical techniques have identified key phytoactive compounds in yellowroot extracts, lending credence to its traditional medicinal uses and potential applications in modern medicine.

The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s): Conflicting Discourses of Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and Territory in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Legal Texts and Indigenous Life Writing by Jens Temmen

Reviewed by: The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s): Conflicting Discourses of Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and Territory in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Legal Texts and Indigenous Life Writing by Jens Temmen Katrina Phillips (bio) The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s): Conflicting Discourses of Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and Territory in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Legal Texts and Indigenous Life Writing Jens Temmen Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020, x +259 pp. ISBN 9783825347130, $56 hardcover. Settlers in what is now known as the United States dreamed of expansion before they even reached the westernmost part of the continent. According to Roberta Conner, Joseph J. Ellis identified a "fully continental vision of an American empire" in George Washington's 1783 annual message—and James P. Ronda contends that Thomas Jefferson was "determined to make the United States an imperial contender" (qtd. in Conner 108). It would not be as easy as these men hoped, though, particularly as American settlers, surveyors, and soldiers continually encountered hundreds of sovereign Native nations who had called these lands homes since time immemorial. America's burgeoning legal system—and its stumbling implementation of often contradictory federal Indian policies—regularly required what Jens Temmen considers "the terminology of aberration, exception, or simply extinction" in order to marginalize Native nations within US legal discourses (39). The federal government, along with American citizens, businessmen, and military officials, turned their attentions overseas toward the end of the nineteenth century, gleefully embracing the spoils of imperialism. For Temmen, though, this shift is not as neatly defined or differentiated as some scholars may hope (39). In The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s), Temmen traces the trajectory of US imperial expansion from the continent to overseas, focusing on what he considers "the moments and spaces that connect or disconnect these phases" (2). For Temmen, the US nation-state became conterminous with the North American continent as early as the American Revolution, projecting sovereignty over the continent while simultaneously nullifying Native and Indigenous sovereignties (3). Temmen argues that the study of US imperialism seems to be in a holding pattern, one that maintains an ongoing dialogue over how to analyze the differences in the two phases of American expansion without simply reverting to what Amy Kaplan calls "the central geographic bifurcation between continental expansion [End Page 104] and overseas empire" (10). The book is rooted in what he describes as "nodes of connection and narratives of disconnection between these U.S. imperialism(s)," centering 1898 as an alleged watershed moment for US imperialism (8). Temmen's addition of the plural "s" in parentheses is deliberate, underscoring his focus on this "multitude of imperial strategies, while still emphasizing their fundamental connectedness" (11–12). The notion of "the trinity of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territory" serves as what Temmen calls "the core vocabulary" of the book (3). By analyzing works that were either written or cowritten by Indigenous authors alongside US legal texts, Temmen highlights the myriad ways Indigenous people have long pushed back against the notions of US imperialism. At first glance, Temmen's choice of works may seem incongruous or too dissimilar or disparate to support his argument: Temmen places John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854) and Queen Lili'uokalani's Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen (1898) alongside Geronimo and Stephen M. Barrett's Geronimo's Story of His Life (1905). One might argue that there are few similarities among the histories of these three Indigenous nations—the Cherokee, the Kānaka Maoli, and the Apache—not to mention the differences among their engagements with and methods of resistance to American imperialism. However, Temmen's careful reading of these literary texts against legal and government-written texts balances out what he calls the consideration of the two, particularly by legal scholars, as "unequal partners" divided between robust enforcement and emotional education (45). The Indigenous authors of these texts wanted justice for their communities, and they deliberately put the US legal system on trial through their writings (48). These texts, for Temmen, become a means of "haunting" the system that has long sought to erase and eradicate Indigenous sovereignty. Temmen begins with Ridge's dime novel...

Settler Colonialism, Race and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists by Natsu Taylor Saito

Reviewed by: Settler Colonialism, Race and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists by Natsu Taylor Saito Shezadi Khushal Natsu Taylor Saito. Settler Colonialism, Race and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 368 pp. Notes. Cases. Index. $60.00 USD hc. Natsu Taylor Saito’s book, Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists, theorizes racial inequities from a legal perspective. The book’s main aim is to examine: (1) settler colonial theory and practice; (2) the relationship between racial justice and the law; and (3) domestic and international legal perspectives. In a critical race studies book series, Saito explains that it has been 70 years since the civil rights movement, yet things have not gotten much better for people of colour in terms of disparities and injustices…racial justice ultimately cannot succeed unless there is a willingness to acknowledge ongoing colonization. This 12-chapter book is organized thematically in three parts. Part one (Chapters 1-3) lays the groundwork for understanding structural racism as a function of ongoing colonization. Part two (Chapters 4-8) offers historical narratives and strategies used by settlers to further subjugation. Part three (Chapters 9-12) focuses on remedial possibilities. The introductory chapter commences powerfully by asking, how do we rectify a system that so brilliantly serves its intended purpose? asserting the notion that racialization is essential to the establishment and maintenance of structures of power and privilege in the United States, and that ignoring the reality of White supremacy in America is no longer an option (2). Chapters 1-3 explore themes of racial disparity, activism, repression and libera-tory potential. Only by acknowledging the persistence and adaptability of racism, will we be able to envision strategies capable of bringing about meaningful structural change (9). The author introduces the concept of a “false consciousness”, which implies that meaningful change will require narratives that incorporate the histories [End Page 131] and lived realities of peoples of color (24). These chapters also explore the violence of colonization, where lived realities of Indigenous peoples and others have been excluded from the settler class narrative (34). In Chapter 4, we understand that Indigenous peoples’ claims to their traditional lands are consistently ignored, and that “securing land remains integral to United States’ establishment and expansion, the creation of wealth and power, and the maintenance of global hegemony” (57). Chapter 5 contextualizes enslaved labor and examines strategies of subjugation used to “create, contain and control a workforce of enslaved Indigenous, African, and Afrodescendant peoples” (6). Settler colonial strategies of subjugation (i.e., population control, spatial containment, violence and terror) were intended to transform Africans from peoples into units of production (84).` Chapter 6 discusses the means used to contain and control African Americans, and the exclusion from opportunities that facilitated their economic and political independence. This includes criminalization, exclusion from property ownership and mass incarnation. The very title of this chapter places “emancipated” in quotations to illustrate that despite the 13th Amendment ratification in 1866 to forbid slavery and involuntary servitude, it, in fact, continued to subjugate and oppress African Americans. Understanding that racialization and colonization work simultaneously to “other” entire peoples, Chapter 7 explores theorizing the other, specifically, the “migrant other”. Migrant others have played significant and differing roles within the American settler colonial paradigm. This chapter also examines strategies used to subjugate and exploit peoples of color who have been incorporated into and excluded from settler society (115), and urges readers to understand that while anti-racist action may not deconstruct colonialism, decolonization may, in fact, be a prerequisite to eliminating racism in the United States (114). Chapter 8 instructs that American settler colonialism will not change the underlying structural dynamics that perpetuate hierarchies of racialized privilege and subjugation (153), and emphasizes the need to develop analytical tools and strategies of resistance for transformation. This chapter also stresses the importance of Law as a pathway to racial justice. In Chapter 9, Saito argues that protection under domestic law has failed to ensure racial justice because of its exclusion of people of colour from constitutional protection; and even when constitutional protection is available, it has been interpreted to preclude assimilation, thereby...