Author: Marshall Poe

In his book, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008), Pekka Hämäläinen refutes the traditional story that Indians were bit players or unfortunate victims of the white man’s conquest of the American West. Old maps that divided America into Spanish, French, and British territories, Hämäläinen argues, are “fictions” insofar as they entirely miss great indigenous contenders of military, economic, and political power. Such a one were the Comanches who fought, traded, and cooperated—often simultaneously—with European and Native American rivals, and rose to be a dominating power in the Great Plains for almost 200 years. The Comanche Empire brings a riveting narrative in a dialectical spirit to the fields of American, American Indian, Spanish and Mexican Imperial, and Borderlands histories.

Professor Hämäläinen is Rhodes Professor at the University of Oxford, specializing in early and nineteenth-century North American history especially in indigenous, colonial, imperial, borderlands, and environmental history—all topics that invite comparative discussion and a global view. His first book was When Disease Makes History: Epidemics and Great Historical Turning Points (2006); The Comanche Empire is his second book; he is currently working on a history of the Lakota-Sioux that will be published next year.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College.

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Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe has quickly emerged as a crucial voice in twenty-first-century American literature. Her innovative, award-winning works of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism capture the complexities of Native American life and interrogate histories of both cultural and linguistic oppression throughout the United States.

In LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature (LSU Press, 2018), Kirstin L. Squint (Associate Professor of English at High Point University) expands contemporary scholarship on Howe by examining her nuanced portrayal of Choctaw history and culture as modes of expression. Squint shows that Howe’s writings engage with Native, southern, and global networks by probing regional identity, gender power, authenticity, and performance from a distinctly Choctaw perspective—a method of discourse which Howe terms “Choctalking.” Drawing on interdisciplinary methodologies and theories, Squint complicates prevailing models of the Native South by proposing the concept of the “Interstate South,” a space in which Native Americans travel physically and metaphorically between tribal national and U.S. boundaries. Squint considers Howe’s engagement with these interconnected spaces and cultures, as well as how indigeneity can circulate throughout them.

James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy.

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Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a peculiar temporality. In Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Joanna Radin explores the conjuncture of time and temperature in Cold War “salvage biology” projects.

Cryobiology, genetic epidemiology, and freezer anthropology constructed a dense and tangled global infrastructure of blood circulation. By following these circuits, Radin weaves a narrative about the Cold War human sciences that takes readers up to present ethical debates about the insufficiency of informed consent and the need to better involve communities whose vital materials have been taken for the sake of biomedical research. This book will be of interest to all historians of science, technology, and medicine, as well as to anthropologists and scholars working in Native American and Indigenous Studies.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America.

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Researching and writing about infrastructure is a tall task. Infrastructure’s vastness, complexity, and, if it’s functioning, invisibility can defy narratives. Andrew Needham, however, succeeds beautifully. His book, called Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press, 2016), tells the important and dramatic story of how the creation and development of a regional energy system linked Southwestern metropolitan and rural spaces. The book, Needham writes, “constructs a broad new map of postwar urban, environmental, and political change.”

Needham shows how that system produced and concealed geographic inequality. Post-World War II Southwest cities depended on abundant cheap energy, namely coal, and the primary source was far away in the Navajo lands. In addition to fueling the rapid metropolitan development, those lands also absorbed the majority of the energy system’s pollution. In other words, while city-dwellers and suburbanites consumed cheap energy, the Navajo bore the brunt of the ecological costs. The book would be of interest to urban historians, environmental historians, Native American studies scholars, historians of technology, and anyone wanting to engage in discussions of inequality and ecology.

Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

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In a remarkable new book, Daniel Heath Justice, an author and professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies and English at the University of British Columbia, makes an argument for the vitality of Indigenous literatures and their ability to help make sense of our world. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018) is one-part literary exegesis, one-part memoir, and many parts radical text which calls for, among other things, broader human and non-human kinship, and the use of indigenous literatures to push back against settler colonial forms of erasure and oppression. Justice explores the vibrant universe of over two hundred years of literatures (written and non-written alike), from autobiography to spoken word poetry, to fantasy and wonderworks, in order to make the case that yes, of course indigenous literatures matter; they do so because indigenous people matter. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter thus acts as both indigenous literary bibliography and call to action to people of indigenous and non-indigenous backgrounds to read up and take notice of indigenous people speaking back to colonial power structures.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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On November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction—the prelude to the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to European colonization of the mainland of the Americas—has long been the symbol of Cortés’s bold and brilliant military genius. Montezuma, on the other hand, is remembered as a coward who gave away a vast empire and touched off a wave of colonial invasions across the hemisphere. But is this really what happened?

Matthew Restall, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History at Pennsylvania State University and President of the American Society for Ethnohistory, departs from this traditional telling in his When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History (Ecco, 2018). Restall uses “the Meeting”—what he dubs their first encounter—as the entry point into a comprehensive reevaluation of both Cortés and Montezuma. Drawing on rare primary sources and overlooked accounts by conquistadors and Aztecs alike, Restall explores Cortés’s and Montezuma’s posthumous reputations, their achievements and failures, and the worlds in which they lived—leading, step by step, to a dramatic inversion of the old story. As Restall takes us through this sweeping, revisionist account of a pivotal moment in modern civilization, he calls into question our view of the history of the Americas, and, indeed, of history itself.

Ryan Tripp teaches history at several community colleges, universities, and online extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.

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During his invasion of Creek Indian territory in 1813, future U.S. president Andrew Jackson discovered a Creek infant orphaned by his troops. Moved by an “unusual sympathy,” Jackson sent the child to be adopted into his Tennessee plantation household. Through the stories of nearly a dozen white adopters, adopted Indian children, and their Native parents, Dawn Peterson opens a window onto the forgotten history of adoption in early nineteenth-century America.  Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion (Harvard University Press, 2017) shows the important role that adoption played in efforts to subdue Native peoples in the name of nation-building.

As the United States aggressively expanded into Indian territories between 1790 and 1830, government officials stressed the importance of assimilating Native peoples into what they styled the United States’ “national family.” White households who adopted Indians—especially slaveholding Southern planters influenced by leaders such as Jackson—saw themselves as part of this expansionist project. They hoped to inculcate in their young charges U.S. attitudes toward private property, patriarchal family, and racial hierarchy.

U.S. whites were not the only ones driving this process. Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw families sought to place their sons in white households, to be educated in the ways of U.S. governance and political economy. But there were unintended consequences for all concerned. As adults, these adopted Indians used their educations to thwart U.S. federal claims to their homelands, setting the stage for the political struggles that would culminate in the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

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Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015) describes the implementation of public health reforms in late eighteenth-century Guatemala and the diverse ways that indigenous communities engaged and resisted these programs.  Contrary to expectations, colonists were often ahead of administrators in Spain in adopting new medical methods, such as inoculating patients against smallpox.  But bringing these to rural communities, some with a significant degree of autonomy, required adaptation and compromise; and if resistance was stiff, medical officers reacted with the persecution of indigenous practices in ways that mirrored the church’s anti-idolatry purges.  By bringing Guatemala and its native residents into the networks of Atlantic medicine in the eighteenth century, For All Humanity illuminates the plurality of medical cultures that interacted in the production of the Enlightenment.

Martha Few is Professor of Latin American History and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University.

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Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Duke University Press, 2017) engages fields including physics, phenomenology, native storytelling, and queer temporality. He describes the organization of Beyond Settler Time as “a series of meditations on particular kinds of temporal tensions—ways that Indigenous forms of time push against the imperatives of settler sovereignty” (ix). Exploring a range of sources including film, government documents, fiction, histories, and autobiography, Rifkin considers how time is defined by non-native ideologies.

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The American West has always been home to many deities, argues Jennifer Graber in The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (Oxford University Press, 2018). Graber, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Texas-Austin, tells the story of the Kiowa over the course of the long nineteenth century. For Kiowas, the continuation of well-established spiritual beliefs and practices sustained them in the face of great challenges, but at times these same elements were dynamic enough to change and adapt to fit new realities. Among the new realities were alliances with powerful neighbors such as the Comanche, with whom the Kiowa shared the Sun Dance ritual. Another was a growing rivalry and at times widespread bloodshed with Americans, whose Christian missionaries fought as much amongst themselves as they did for Native converts. Missionaries often operated under the guise of being “friends of the Indian,” even when their purposes were ultimately dispossession and cultural erasure. The Gods of Indian Country is a deep look at how one Native American society and their settler colonial conquerors  relied upon faith in the face of both success and failure, joy and sorrow, in a rapidly changing West.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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