Legacy Of Conquest Research Articles

High School Matters: Navigating the Tip of the Sword: An English Teacher’s Journey through Conquest and Literature

A ninth-grade English teacher grapples with the dual identity of English literature as both a source of cultural richness and a legacy of conquest, exploring its impact on teaching practices and student understanding.

Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights by Gabriela González

Reviewed by: Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights by Gabriela González Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights. By Gabriela González. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 261. Paper, $38.95, ISBN 978-0-19-090962-8; cloth, $115.00, ISBN 978-0-19-991414-2.) Against a backdrop of western expansion, legacies of conquest, and the modernization of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, Gabriela González illuminates a binational history of human and civil rights struggles led by ethnic Mexicans. Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights chronicles how fronterizo activists in Texas from varying class backgrounds drew on the promises—and paradoxes—of modernity to inform their cultural, political, and economic agendas. Though activists' goals varied, they shared a vision for the uplift of ethnic Mexicans, particularly the poor and working class who experienced dispossession and proletarianization following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. As the author shows through bilingual archival research, "redeeming" Mexican people and culture in modernizing states was a complex task, which led some reformers to reinscribe racial and class hierarchies, while others looked to more radical politics. The first half of Redeeming La Raza examines activists who centered Mexican nationalism to discredit the "so-called Mexican Problem" by advocating for cultural redemption and searching for or imposing social stability among Mexicans between 1900 and 1929 (p. 58). Chapter 1 tackles these strategies in the context of gente decente (decent people) reformers, including the influential Idar family from Laredo, Texas. The second chapter shows the era's ideological diversity, as González traces the transnational work of liberals and anarchists who sought social change benefiting the Mexican masses. Chapter 3 centers on Leonor Villegas de Magnón, a fronteriza who organized and led medical and economic assistance initiatives during the Mexican Revolution. The second half of the study focuses on activism between 1930 and 1950. Chapters 4 and 5 show how reformers varied in gender and class consciousness. While the Munguías (chapter 4) fought for the uplift of Mexican people, they abided by traditional gender norms: Jose Rómulo Munguía Torres worked in the world of civic engagement and Carolina Malpica de Munguía in education. Emma Tenayuca (chapter 5) worked to improve the condition of working-class people as a communist organizer who fought for labor rights. The final chapter connects the legacies of gente decente reform efforts to the founding and development of LULAC. Throughout the chapters, González traces the evolution, transformation, and, at times, refusal of gente decente ideologies that animated transborder activism in the early twentieth century. She also gives critical attention to gender and its intersections with political development and involvement. González weaves the biographies of men and women enveloped in struggles for rights, and she shows, for example, how activists used "maternal feminism" (p. 3). Maternal feminism acknowledged the patriarchal ordering of society, while allowing women possibilities for organizing outside the home. González contributes to histories of race and ethnicity in the United States. Drawing on Benedict Anderson's work, González argues that "la raza" served as an "imagined community," a constructed, unified ethnic platform that [End Page 414] activists used to further their struggles for human and civil rights (p. 193). One limitation also rests at the nexus of race and ethnicity. Though the idea is not central to the project, Redeeming La Raza makes use of "Jaime Crow" as a Spanish-language transposition of the anti-Black Jim Crow era (p. 10). "Jaime Crow" is not explored for its connections to the nation's legacies of anti-Blackness, but rather serves as a nonanalytical, descriptive term. Further analysis and explication of the regional connections between such racial and ethnic projects are especially important for expanding histories of the U.S. South and Southwest. Overall, Redeeming La Raza is an excellent text that will be of great interest to borderlands and Mexican American historians. Those who research histories of civil rights, modernity, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and culture in a Mexico and/or U.S. context will also find it to be an invaluable addition to studies...

Sintsincks to Sing Sing: Empire, the War of 1812, and the Transformation of U.S. Prisons

In the 1820s, incarcerated workers constructed Sing Sing Prison between the Hudson River and a limestone quarry. The prison’s name evoked the site’s legacy of conquest and colonization, while the War of 1812 served as a catalyst for large prisons like Sing Sing where confinement would be shaped by labor, violence, and coercion. During the war, both the British and the United States held captives in large prison complexes in North America and England. Initially envisioned as humane alternatives to earlier prison ships, British and U.S. military prisons soon became sites of intimidation and violence. Soon after, the cultural memory of the war helped reshape the meaning and experience of incarceration at Sing Sing. This led prison advocates, including veterans of the war, to reject the religious idealism of earlier prison advocates without rejecting prisons altogether.

Politics and the Limits of Pluralism in Mohamed Arkoun and Abdenour Bidar

One of the striking features of the literary culture of the modern Maghreb is the profusion of works that undertake to identify the essential features of the region – exercises in definition that almost always emphasize plurality. Philosophers, social scientists, and literary writers have highlighted the Maghreb's multilingualism – the coexistence of different forms of Arabic, Tamazight, French, and Spanish – the varied and hybrid cultural legacies of conquest and colonialism, and the effects of the region's geographical proximity to other parts of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. It would be hard to find a more ubiquitous theme of francophone Maghrebi literature than cultural diversity, and the subject is by no means absent from Arabic-language literature. This preoccupation with plurality can be seen as a response to a history of colonization and decolonization with particular ideological features. In their efforts to build “l'Algérie française,” the French colonial authorities suppressed Arabic as a language of culture and government. In response, anticolonial nationalists called for the replacement of French with Arabic. “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my nation” – the catchphrase of Abdelhamid Ben Badis's Jam'iyat al-'Ulama [Association of Muslim Ulema], an Islamic reform movement of the 1930s and 1940s – later became a slogan of the nationalist movement, the Front de libération nationale (FLN) [National Liberation Front]. Since the 1980s, a similar call to restore Arabic and eliminate French has been issued by the Islamist opposition to the corrupt and undemocratic FLN government and at times by officials in that same government seeking to restore their legitimacy. In emphasizing linguistic and cultural diversity, writers and scholars have tried to tender an alternative to these recurrent efforts to delimit the region's identity.

Dialogues

The California missions, whose original church spaces and visual programs were produced by Iberian, Mexican, and Native artisans between 1769 and 1823, occupy an ambiguous chronological, geographical, and political space. They occupy lands that have pertained to conflicting territorialities: from Native nations, to New Spain, to Mexico, to the modern multicultural California. The physical and visual landscapes of the missions have been sites of complex and often incongruous religious experiences; historical trauma and romantic vision; Indigenous genocide, exploitation, resistance, and survivance; state building and global enterprise. This Dialogues section brings together critical voices, including especially the voices of California Indian scholars, to interrogate received models for thinking about the art historical legacies of the California missions. Together, the contributing authors move beyond and across borders and promote new decolonial strategies that strive to be responsive to the experience of California Indian communities and nations. This conversation emerges from cross-disciplinary relationships established at a two-day conference, “‘American’ Art and the Legacy of Conquest: Art at California’s Missions in the Global 18th–20th Centuries,” sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art and held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in November 2019.

The Legacy of Conquest: In Conversation with Sir William Harris

The Legacy of Conquest: In Conversation with Sir William Harris

Heritage tourism and New Western history: a narrative analysis of six Colorado museums

ABSTRACTMuseums are important in heritage tourism, often presenting interconnected national, regional, and local histories. This article explores how six Colorado museums present state and regional identities. I ask how these museums have attempted to incorporate insights from ‘New Western’ History into their exhibits. New Western historians have called attention to the ‘legacies of conquest’ – the peoples displaced, the cultures destroyed, and the environments damaged by Anglo-American colonization of western lands – and offered critical and dissonant ‘counter-narratives’ of the region’s past. However, the region’s heritage tourism – a significant and growing industry – has emphasized more conventional narratives of settlement and economic progress. This study applies narrative theory to analyze how these critical histories are presented to tourists in Colorado museums and historic sites. Narrative theory examines how objects, texts, and media are shaped into stories, in this case stories linking popular readings of heritage to critical understandings of past events. Six case studies indicate that critical histories are presented in some sites, but are rarely the central focus of these attractions. However, the spatial juxtaposition of narratives and counter-narratives in these museums offers insight into how critical and dissonant history is beginning to be incorporated into heritage tourism in the American West.

The Son by Philipp Meyer (review)

Reviewed by: The Son by Philipp Meyer Don Scheese Philipp Meyer, The Son. New York: HarperCollins, 2013. 561pp. Cloth, $27.99; paper, $16.99; e-book, $12.49. “No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth” (164), says Peter McCullough, the conscience of this epic novel and the son of Colonel Eli McCullough, legendary Indian captive turned Indian fighter, Texas Ranger, and eventual patriarch of a 250,000-acre “proper acreocracy” (501) in southeastern Texas along the Nueces River. Dispossession and the legacies of conquest are the main themes here, in a family history (genealogical chart included) spanning the years 1836 to 2012. The author chronicles the displacement and near extermination of the Comanches by the first waves of pioneer settlers, the removal of the Mexicans by the Texans, then the gradual takeover of ranchers and cattlemen by the petroleum industry. The narrative is constructed from three different points of view: that of Eli McCullough, recounted through a wpa recording from the 1930s; that of his son Peter, chronicled through journal entries dating from the 1916–17 period, the time of the modern Mexican Revolution; and that of Eli’s great-great-granddaughter Jeanne Anne, a stalwart Republican feminist matron whose recollections take us up to the present. We see how the lives of these three individuals intersect and are affected by a grand sweep of historical events and forces: the conflicts with the Comanches, the US-Mexican War, the Civil War, the Mexican Revolution, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, the oil boom and subsequent embargo of the post–World War II era, and the two Iraq wars. Some figures, like the Colonel, seem to make and transcend history; others, like his son Peter, the Comanches, and the Mexican Americans who live along the border in the early twentieth century, are victimized by it. Jeanne Anne, with more than a bit of the Colonel in her blood, comes into her own after the premature death of her oil-catter husband and learns to profit from the boom-and-bust cycles of the industry, eventually becoming a legend in her own right and twice gracing the cover of Time magazine. I found most riveting those early portions of the novel representing Eli’s captivity narrative. Part ethnographic study of the [End Page 414] Comanches, part potboiler narrative and coming-of-age story of a thirteen-year-old white boy slowly inducted into the culture of the most powerful tribe on the Southern Plains, this aspect of the tale represents a revision of the revisionist school of western American history. To some degree the long-dominant myth of rugged individualism is challenged in the novel: “The strong white man comes to an unpopulated wilderness and proves himself. Except there has never been any such thing” (311), says Maria, whose once-aristocratic family has been ousted from its rancheria along the border. However, the Comanches, through young Eli’s interactions with chiefs and medicine men and “squaws,” are depicted not as politically correct Dances with Wolves–type Noble Red Men but simply as people, human beings who love their land, families, and tribe and who will do anything, no matter how seemingly brutal, to save their homeland. Reflecting back on his life, Eli extols his time with the tribe as “the greatest summer I ever had” (207), and when he is forced to return to white society because of the tribe’s decimation by smallpox, he laments that the forty acres of his host’s property felt “like a postage stamp. I was used to having twenty million or so at my disposal” (333). But in the end even as powerful and legendary a figure as the Colonel is a victim of historical forces, in this case manifest destiny and progress. “There are many things I have wanted to save,” he says to Peter late in life: “the Indians, the buff alo, a prairie where you could look twenty miles and not see a fence post. But time has passed those things by” (352). As well as a historical novel, this work is also an environmental history describing one of the greatest transformations of a bioregion...

Homesteading in the Age of Plastics

Homesteading in the Age of Plastics Karen R. Merrill (bio) Brian Q. Cannon. Reopening the Frontier: Homesteading in the Modern West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009. viii + 306 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. In 1953, over 4,000 people gathered in the center of Rupert, Idaho to see which lucky few among them would be randomly selected and awarded homesteads on the nearby Bureau of Reclamation Minidoka Project. As Brian Q. Cannon describes this and similar events in the West following World War II, festivities surrounded the lottery, and paeans to the American frontier and pioneers abounded in speeches by government officials. With strong preference given to World War II veterans, the federal program to settle homesteaders on Bureau of Reclamation land was compelling on all sorts of fronts—as recompense for the service that soldiers offered in the war, as a way to provide historical continuity with the almost-sacred image of the Western homesteader following the Civil War, and as an effort to put to agricultural use parts of the arid West. As Cannon points out, it was not a large program: in the end, about 3,000 farms were homesteaded on public lands with the help of the Bureau of Reclamation between 1946 and 1966. But he argues that it is worthy of examination because the program appears, at first glance, to stand in such stark contrast to our understandings of postwar American life, with its embrace of mass production in manufacturing and agriculture and large organizational structures. It pays to remember, even if such a reference relies on a cliché of the 1950s, that, by 1953, when the Minidoka Project was open to homesteading, Tupperware parties were in full glory. (By 1958, Earl Tupper could sell his company for $16 million.) In contrast to these suburban plastic-kitchenware-sale socials, the women who settled with their husbands on the homesteads of the postwar West typically did not even have electricity. One woman recounted that, in those early years of homesteading, she and her husband had three children still in diapers and no bathroom or running water in her house. Another woman described her chagrin of homesteading in Washington and discovering the backwardness of the residents in the area. When two “old-timers” came to visit, she recalled years later, “they set a sack of candy bars on the table and they said, ‘This is for the kids.’ And we looked at it and the candy bars had [End Page 706] all gone white. They [were] probably twenty years old’” (p. 108). Clearly, homesteading in the postwar West felt like a trip back in time. The seemingly anomalous place of a federal homesteading program in mid-twentieth century America is part of the appeal for Cannon. As he notes in the introduction: At first, these episodic outbursts of homesteading appear to be anachronistic throwbacks to an earlier era, romantic and entertaining sideshows that curiously brought new lands into production at the same time that the government was paying other farmers to withhold land on existing farms from cultivation. . . . [But] the unfolding of a quintessential element of the Old West—homesteading—within an urbanizing modern West created exceptionally vivid contrasts. Those contrasts, Cannon argues, provide fertile terrain to explore Patricia Nelson Limerick’s thesis—articulated most familiarly in The Legacy of Conquest—that “the continuities in western history override the temporal differences. We can better understand change and continuity in western history by examining the West after World War II through the lens of postwar homesteading” (p. 4). Cannon sees continuity in the ideological appeal of homesteading to many postwar Americans. Whether the postwar homesteaders on the Minidoka Project and other reclamation homesteading projects had come from a rural past or not, the allure of owning and working the land and of raising a family on a farm, rooted in traditional rural values, was great. However, whereas these values dominated American views of the West through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they now circulated in a changing cultural landscape in the postwar period, as many Americans increasingly understood Western lands as places where recreational, aesthetic, and/or environmental values should reign. In the end...

Introduction

Abstract The emergence of the “new western history” movement two decades ago was marked by two key events. The first was the publication in 1987 of Patricia Nelson Limerick's Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. The second was a 1989 symposium in Santa Fe, New Mexico (funded by western humanities councils and the NEH) entitled, “Trails: Toward a New Western History.” The new western history developed alongside another movement in the historical profession: public history. This roundtable seeks to examine the influence of the new western history on the practice of public history, particularly as it is found in museums and historic sites.

Rhetorical Conquests: Cortés, Gómara and Renaissance Imperialism , and: Beyond Books and Borders: Garcilaso de la Vega and La Florida del Inca (review)

Reviewed by: Rhetorical Conquests: Cortés, Gómara and Renaissance Imperialism, and: Beyond Books and Borders: Garcilaso de la Vega and La Florida del Inca Sara Castro-Klaren Glen Carman . Rhetorical Conquests: Cortés, Gómara and Renaissance Imperialism. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2006. 249 pp. Raquel Chang-Rodríguez , Ed. and Intro. Beyond Books and Borders: Garcilaso de la Vega and La Florida del Inca. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006. 197 pp. 47 black and white ills; 8 color ills. At first glance these two books would seem to be quite different. The volume edited by Raquel Chang-Rodríguez is the product of a conference held in 2003 in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the publication in 1605 of La Florida del Inca. This volume includes not only studies on La Florida del Inca but also articles on the general outlines of the Inca's life and works, recent editions of the Comentarios reales, as well as the work of historians who have done research on the conquest and mapping of the peninsula of Florida by both Spain and France. The inclusion of studies on the history of Florida's mapping as well as the frontier wars waged by both the French [End Page 522] and the Spanish on each other, and on and with the Amerindians who at the time ruled Florida, would appear to follow or reference the path opened by the work of José Rabasa in his Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Oklahoma, 1993) and his later Writing Violence: The Historiography of Sixteen-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (Duke 2000). The fact of the matter is, however, that both Rhetorical Conquests and Beyond Books and Borders could not be further in methodological approach, conceptual frame work, and perspective from Rabasa's theoretical and methodological intervention in the field of colonial studies and especially in the visual semantics of cartography. When the books under review deal with historiographical questions, they do so within the philological framework. For the critics writing here, the text and its legacy remains paramount. Essays in Beyond Borders and chapters in Rhetorical Conquests seek to explain specific aspects of the text. Close attention is paid to various aspects of the authorial function: choice of topics, sources, borrowings, influences. Contextual aspects, such as publication conditions, revisions in original versions, determining relations to contemporary artists, intellectuals and fellow cronistas as well as publication sponsorship and hindrances are well documented and provide a rich tapestry in which to reconstruct the making and publication of the books by the Inca, Cortés's letters and Gómara's biography of the Spanish conqueror of Tenochtitlan. In this sense, reading Glen Carman's book on Gómara and Cortés falls easily next to the reading of the more diverse collection of essays that make up the richly illustrated edition of La Florida del Inca. Beyond Borders is divided into three parts. The Introduction is dedicated to the life and works of the Inca. Chang-Rodríguez offers a thoughtful and upto date summary of the current critical understanding of La Florida del Inca and the Comentarios reales, designed to serve as the framework for the essays that follow on the conquest of Florida, the Inca's textual relation to the de Soto expedition and his reading of the Cabeza de Vaca journey. Part I comprises four essays written by historians who have written extensively on the history of contact between Europeans and Amerindians in sixteenth century Florida. Jerald T. Milanich wades in with an informative essays on de Soto's Entrada (1539–1543) and follows with an account of the later (1559–1605) efforts by the French, under the leadership of Jean Ribault, to conquer the Amerindian inhabitants and settle in the peninsula, only to be thwarted by a new Spanish expedition which reclaimed the area for the Spanish Crown. Amy Turner Bushnell follows with a close examination of the relationship of the discourse of pacification and the praxis of continued war in this scene of European disputation for the marvelous possessions, territories and peoples of the so called New World. Patricia Galloway offers an...

In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780–1860 (review)

Reviewed by: In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780–1860 Timothy Sweet (bio) In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780–1860 Edward Watts Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006284 pp. The legacy of French colonization has received a great deal of attention from historians following studies such as Patricia Nelson Limerick's [End Page 237] The Legacy of Conquest (1987) and especially Richard White's The Middle Ground (1991), which replaced or at least supplemented Turnerian teolology with descriptions of "the racial, political, economic, and ethnic complexity of the frontier" (Watts 220). This terrain has been of less interest to literary scholars, however, with the rare exception of Gordon Sayre's comparative study, Les Sauvages Américains (1997). The undergraduate literary canon, even in the wake of the Heath anthology's multiculturalist revisions, has similarly minimized the French past, especially in contrast to the Spanish. The fifth edition of the Heath gives us only three French selections in volume A (to 1800) as compared with a dozen Spanish. The "Spanish America" section of volume B (1800–1865) contains several Anglophone selections, as well as Spanish writings in translation. The Norton, evidently returning to an Anglo orientation with the seventh edition after a foray into multiculturalism, has excised the French altogether (represented in the sixth edition by Champlain), while retaining at least recognition of Hispanic origins in selections from Columbus, Casas, and Cabeza de Vaca. The anthologies represent largely presentist responses to the legacy of imperial success: the persistence of the Spanish and the decline, after 1763 and 1803, of the French. The French decline is the foreground of Edward Watts's In This Remote Country. Watts investigates how the Anglo-American empire understood what it replaced in the "middle ground" that flourished prior to the War of 1812: the French and Métis culture of voyageurs (rivermen), coureurs de bois (fur traders), habitants (peasant farmers), associated Native Americans, and a few acculturated Anglos. Watts argues that Anglo-American writers found in the French colonial past grounds on which to debate the future of the United States: "Could it learn to live in peace with itself, its neighbors, and the rest of the world, happy on the margins of world power rather than at its center?" (5). It was still quite possible to entertain an optimistic answer to this question during the antebellum era, as dissident writers drew from a nostalgic French past a vision of a culture "less greedy, less racist, less aggressive" than America was turning out to be (4). This book continues Watts's ongoing project of bringing the Old Northwest into the early and antebellum American literary canon. In An American Colony (2002), Watts traced the development of a distinct literary culture in the Old Northwest, arguing that the region is best understood as an internal colony of the United States. Watts and David Rachels made [End Page 238] a wealth of documents from this literary culture (as well as from the Old Southwest) newly available in a classroom anthology, The First West: Writing from the American Frontier, 1776–1860 (2002) (reviewed in EAL 2003). In In This Remote Country, Watts gives us a means of approach and an argument for canonical recognition of commentators on colonial French and Métis culture such as Henry Marie Brackenridge, James Hall, Juliette Kinzie, and William Whipple Warren. None of these writers is anthologized today, except in Watts and Rachels's The First West. Hall is familiar (though seldom read) as Melville's source for the story of Colonel Moredock in the "Indian-hating" chapters of The Confidence Man. The others are virtually unknown, even though, as Watts demonstrates, they share our current disciplinary preoccupations with nation, race, class, and gender, seeing in the French and Métis past an alternative narrative of American origins and a critique of Anglo imperialism, racism, acquisitiveness, and patriarchy. Watts shows how some of Hall's stories, for example "A Legend of Carondolet" from Legends of the West (1832), would pair nicely with Irving's "Sleepy Hollow" or "Rip Van Winkle," both pitting Yankee culture against a prior, less acquisitive...

Conference on Cultural Heritage Issues: The Legacy of Conquest, Colonization and Commerce, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon October 12–14, 2006

On October 12 to 14, 2006, Willamette University hosted an international conference, “Cultural Heritage Issues: The Legacy of Conquest, Colonization and Commerce.” Some 30 distinguished panelists addressed five themes: the legacy of indigenous conquest, the legacy of international conquest and colonization, the legacy of commerce, avoidance and resolution of cultural heritage disputes, and issues related directly to museums and sites. Papers drew on the panelists' expertise in a broad range of disciplines, from archaeology to law enforcement. Topics included, for example, Repatriation of First Nations' Material Culture in Canada, the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, Recovery of Art Looted During the Holocaust, and The Effect of Colonization on the Cultural Property of Libya.

Fluid borders: Latino power, identity, and politics in Los Angeles

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments 1. Latino Political Engagement: The Intersection of Power, Identity(ies), and Place 2. Legacies of Conquest: Latinos in California and Los Angeles 3. A Thin Line between Love and Hate: Language, Social Stigma, and Intragroup Relations 4. Why Vote? Race, Identity(ies), and Politics 5. Community Problems, Collective Solutions: Latinos and Nonelectoral Participation Conclusion. Fluid Borders: Latinos, Race, and American Politics Appendix A: Study Respondents Appendix B: Interview Questionnaire Notes Bibliography Index

The Killing Fields of Wounded Knee

On December 29, 1890, as many as 300 Sioux were killed or mortally wounded by U.S. soldiers at Wounded Knee creek. After winter blizzard spread white blanket over the bloody mud, Dr. Charles Eastman, fullblooded Santee Sioux physician, attempted to rescue possible survivors on New Year's Day. Beneath mound of snow, he uncovered little girl about four years of age lying next to corpse. Her name was Zintkala Nuni, or Lost Bird. She was wrapped in shawl and wore buckskin cap, which bore traditional beadwork crafted into the design of an American flag. Despite mild frostbite, she was still alive. Brigadier General Leonard W. Colby, commander of the Nebraska militia, eventually adopted the orphan and gave her the name Marguerite.1 More than one hundred years later, historians continue to ask: what happened at Wounded Knee? Jeffrey Ostler, professor of history and department head at the University of Oregon, turns his gaze toward the killing fields to find answers. He seeks to revise the classic narrative of Robert M. Utley's The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (1963), which called it a regrettable, tragic accident of war ... for which neither side as whole may be properly condemned.2 Dissatisfied with existing scholarship, Ostler revisits rich cache of documents in the National Archives as well as an impressive number of secondary sources. He untangles contested process negotiated through century of empire building. Instead of the last Indian war, he sees America's legacies of conquest. Ostler argues that America's commitment to an expansionist ideology of manifest destiny ultimately led to Wounded Knee. His story arc resembles Dee Brown's best-selling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), although his approach to the subject is more analytical.3 He engages in the kind of analysis typical of New Western historians such as Patricia Nelson Limerick, who once called the frontier the f-word.4 Likewise, he prefers the c-word, conquest,

Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest; Conquest and Catastrophe: Changing Rio Grande Pueblo Settlement Patterns in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Book Review| July 01 2004 Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest; Conquest and Catastrophe: Changing Rio Grande Pueblo Settlement Patterns in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries By José Rabasa. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. xiv + 359 pp., introduction, abbreviations, notes, bibliography, index. $74.95 cloth,$23.95 paper.)By Elinore M. Barrett. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. xi + 180 pp., introduction, notes, bibliography, appendices, index. $39.95 cloth.) Tracy Brown Tracy Brown Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2004) 51 (3): 649–653. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-51-3-649 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Tracy Brown; Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest; Conquest and Catastrophe: Changing Rio Grande Pueblo Settlement Patterns in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Ethnohistory 1 July 2004; 51 (3): 649–653. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-51-3-649 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEthnohistory Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. 2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Unlearning the Legacy of Conquest: Possibilities for Ceremony in the Non-Native Classroom

Historian Patricia Limerick’s book The Legacy of Conquest focuses on the history of the American West within the context of conquest as “the historical bedrock of the whole nation” and the American West as “a preeminent case study in conquest and its consequences.”1 Limerick writes that to “live with that legacy, contemporary Americans ought to be well informed and well warned about the connections between past and present.”2 The experiences, past and contemporary, of indigenous peoples form an integral part of this legacy. In Red Matters, Arnold Krupat asserts that “you just can’t understand America, more specifically, the United States, without coming to terms with the indigenous presence on this continent.”3 Still, in mainstream U.S. consciousness, there is little comprehension of the scope of past genocide or awareness of contemporary Native issues. Krupat writes that “this lack of awareness most immediately and directly hurts Native people,” but clearly “hurts Americans in general.”4 This statement becomes especially meaningful in the contemporary context of post 9/11 realities and the so-called “War on Terror,” constructed rhetorically through the political doctrine of neoconservatism.5 The building blocks supporting the rationale of perpetual warfare against an ideologically defined “evil” is located in traditionally imperialist rhetoric. To become intimate with the history of Native Americans in the evolution of the American nation means to better comprehend the destructive consequences of current imperial rationalizations which insist that the narrow parameters of Western cultural values define a highly complex world In “Lewis and Clark in Afghanistan,” Derq Quiggle traces the line of America’s imperial project from the Lewis and Clark expedition through the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the illegal ouster of President

Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest, by José Rabasa

<i>Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest</i>, by José Rabasa

Bound for Santa Fe: the road to New Mexico and the American conquest, 1806-1848

Bound far Santa Fg; TAe Road to New Mexico and American Conquest, 1806-1848. By Stephen G. Hyslop. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Pp. xiii, 514. Illustrations, map. Cloth, $34.95.)Despite its almost century-long existence, North American borderlands paradigm remains prominent in early American scholarship. Within last fifteen years, works by James F. Brooks (Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in Southwest Borderlands [2002]), and Daniel H. Usner, Jr. (Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 [1992]) have expanded cultural arid geographical venues of borderlands studies, while scholars such as Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron (From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and Peoples in Between in North American History, American Historical Review, 104 (June 1999), 814-41) have extended paradigm's theoretical boundaries. As a result, scope of borderlands research appears endless, and scholars who previously would have identified themselves as regional/local historians or specialists of the now must willingly or grudgingly consider conceptual framework in their interpretations. The uneven impact of these developments is vividly manifested in Bound for Santa Fe by Stephen G. Hyslop.Hyslop's work is centered on Santa Fe Trail, a loosely connected assemblage of pre-Columbian Indian hunting trails, dry riverbeds, community-maintained thoroughfares, and barely penetrable deserts that became a busy conduit for traders, adventurers, and soldiers traveling between St. Louis and Chihuahua during first quarter of nineteenth century. Through over four hundred pages of text, author methodically analyzes origins of trail, principal individuals arid groups key to defining and expanding pathway, and romantic contemporary literature that informed many Americans of its existence. He also provides chapters that concentrate on certain geographical stages of trail, such as Council Grove, Buffalo Country, and Bent's Fortdiverse settings that illustrate various environmental scenarios encountered by travelers. The concluding section of work deals primarily with U.S. conquest of trail, its major outposts during 184Os, and how this armed occupation transformed economic, social, and cultural lives of those who used highway and lived in its vicinity.According to Hyslop, one of goals in presenting this information is to explore trail's significance as an avenue of exchange in broadest sense (xii). Recent historiographical trends appear in author's approach to peoples involved with Santa Fe Trail. Mirroring interpretations by scholars such as Richard White (The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 [1991]) and Patricia Nelson Limerick (The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of American West [1987]), Hyslop emphasizes cross-cultural exchange and mutual accommodation between Indians, Mexicans, and Anglo-American settlers. Such interaction was conducted through exchanges that covered spectrum from thrusts arid parries of a romantic or spiritual nature to duels in marketplace to contests on field of battle (16-17). Eventual U.S. military and political domination belied Mexican and Native American agency in asserting cultural norms and integrating new settlers into traditional social networks. Santa Fe and Bent's Fort resembled other notable locales such as Taerisa and pays d'en haut in terms of their function as meeting grounds devoid of a centralizing dominant power. …

:Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest

:<i>Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest</i>