American Fables, Indigenous History: Violence Over the Land by Ned Blackhawk

This week we read Violence Over the Land by Ned Blackhawk to examine the topic “American Fables, Indigenous History.” Blackhawk’s book may be particularly insightful to readers who have taken few history courses beyond middle or high school, as he clearly aims to dispel myths shaping popular perceptions of American Indian communities and poverty.

Blackhawk focuses our attention on the role of violence in American Indians’ history, particularly in what is now the American west. He argues that from the mid-eighteenth through the end of the nineteenth century, violence from colonial powers including the Spanish, British, and Americans shaped Indians’ relationship with each other and the wider world, sometimes providing additional power (as in the case of the Utes) and sometimes undermining it (like the Shoshone). By the end of the nineteenth century, tribes such as the Utes had largely renounced violence in favor of diplomacy, but because they had ceded legal authority to an American government that rarely enforced treaty rules, many ended up with few material resources while the legacy of violence placing them in such a condition was obscured (for a copy of my notes, see here). Although it is often difficult to find sources on native peoples, Blackhawk is able to make his arguments by examining a series of archives containing Spanish colonial records as well as the papers of American and British explorers and traders, all of which discuss their relationships with American Indians. By searching these documents for native voices Blackhawk is able to highlight some of their perspectives, although he also freely admits there are some instances where their thinking will be impossible to recover.

Blackhawk often focuses on the Utes and their neighboring tribes, which had relationships with many colonial powers and appear frequently in the historical record. In the mid-eighteenth century the Utes and Spanish shared a common enemy and worked together in fighting the Comanche. During their battles, the Utes began to form a close relationship with the Spanish and traded with them, while at the same time learning violent tactics including corporal punishment and the Spanish’s desire for human slaves. These discoveries meant the Utes had a financial incentive to wage war on their neighbors and collect humans to trade.  The Spanish specifically sought women as slaves for sex and domestic work, further encouraging violent practices such as rape. While Spanish policy permitted only regulated trading missions to visit Indian tribes, the promise of lucrative financial rewards drove many to illegally trade with the Utes, further intensifying the importance of violence in pursuit of profit outside of legal channels.

After Mexico proclaimed its independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, the new Mexican government proved to be very weak. As a result, the Utes sought different trading partners including the British and Americans who operated differently from the Spanish. In particular, Americans viewed relationships with Indians completely differently from the Spanish as their leaders saw westward expansion as vital to the country’s economic future and vision of democracy and motivated the Louisiana Purchase.  Exploring these newly acquired lands west of the Mississippi, Lewis and Clark came across many poor tribes including the Shoshone whose lives had already been shaped by past wars with the Utes. Because the Shoshone were the enemies of the Utes, the Spanish had refused to sell them guns, leaving the Shoshone at the mercy of their violent neighbors. Although British and American explorers were more willing to trade weapons with the Shoshone, the Shoshone used their new weapons to go to war against former Indian trading partners and thus left the Americans as their only source of economic stability. This alliance proved problematic since the federal government was interested in acquiring the Shoshone’s territory.

The ensuing decades of the 1830s and 1840s ended the relative isolation of American Indians in the Great Plains and west. As American settlers moved into the plains, displaced tribes moved west and fought the Utes and Shoshones for land.  At the same time, the global market for beaver pelts collapsed, making the commodity the Utes and Shoshones had structured their economies around worthless.  Left with few other options, the Utes initially began raiding western cattle ranches but by the 1850s had essentially renounced violence in exchange for land treaties with the American government; during the Civil War the Utes even provided soldiers to the Union army to fight tribes allied with the Confederacy. However, the federal government failed to build forts and agencies or provide timely payments to the Utes, allowing unscrupulous American traders to enter onto the Utes’ reservation lands and disrupt their local economy. Despite the Utes’ repeated attempts to renegotiate treaties in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the American government increasingly stripped the Utes of their land, as government policies increasingly frowned on collective land ownership and insisted on Indians’ forced integration into American social and economic structures.

Blackhawk outlines specific economic and political policies that violently forced American Indians into poverty. However, at the turn of the twentieth century American intellectuals overlooked those realities and instead sought cultural or racial explanations for Indians’ destitution, believing that the Shoshone in particular were little better than “animals” because their members often engaged in violent squabbles with one another for ostensibly petty reasons, lacked much hygiene or medicine, were closely tied to the land, and had little interest in joining “civilized” American society.  In doing so, these anthropologists created myths about Indian society and its supposedly backwards or “primitive” nature when the reality was Indian tribes had been adapting and changing over the course of the nineteenth century in dramatic efforts to ensure their survival; unfortunately, government inaction ultimately them with nothing. By highlighting these myths, Blackhawk demonstrates that the Ute and Shoshone tribes were important actors in American history, shaping the boundaries of political and economic power.

Before beginning this blog post, I had little knowledge of the Trump Administration’s understanding of American Indians. However, I quickly discovered that many of its policies are built around the myths and problems of the past Blackhawk sought to dispel. The Trump Administration wants Indians to privatize their tribal lands and force them into corporate structures just as the American government did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a policy the Nixon administration renounced in the 1970s. The rationale for this change seems to be because it would  make it easier to extract oil, something Trump has urged Indians to do despite regulations to the contrary. While the administration’s emphasis on resource extraction mirrors the same economic pressures that drove Ute and Shoshone peoples into poverty, the administration also has proposed substantial budget cuts to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which works to help those currently impoverished. Ultimately, Blackhawk’s research reminds us that current policies attempting to force Indians into the American economy have been tried and failed, and that simply repeating these policies will do little to atone for the violence of the past.