Author: Marshall Poe

Between 1769 and 1834, an influx of Spanish, Russian, and then American colonists streamed into Alta California seeking new opportunities. Their arrival brought the imposition of foreign beliefs, practices, and constraints on Indigenous peoples.

Edited by Kathleen Hull and John Douglass, Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California (University of Arizona Press, 2018), reorients understandings of this dynamic period, which challenged both Native and non-Native people to reimagine communities not only in different places and spaces but also in novel forms and practices. The contributors draw on archaeological and historical archival sources to analyze the generative processes and nature of communities of belonging in the face of rapid demographic change and perceived or enforced difference. Contributors provide important historical background on the effects that colonialism, missions, and lives lived beyond mission walls had on Indigenous settlement, marriage patterns, trade, and interactions. They also show the agency with which Indigenous peoples make their own decisions as they construct and reconstruct their communities. With nine different case studies and an insightful epilogue, this book offers analyses that can be applied broadly across the Americas, deepening our understanding of colonialism and community.

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Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University.

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Histories of rights have too often marginalized Native Americans and African Americans. Addressing this lacuna, Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories (Dartmouth College Press, 2018), expands our understanding of freedom by examining rights theories that Indigenous and African-descended peoples articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As settlers began to distrust the entitlements that the English used to justify their rule, the colonized and the enslaved formulated coherent logics of freedom and belonging. By anchoring rights in nativity, they countered settlers’ attempts to dispossess and disenfranchise them. Drawing on a plethora of texts, including petitions, letters, newspapers, and official records, Yael Ben-zvi, American Studies Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, analyzes nativity’s unsettling potentials and its discursive and geopolitical implications. She shows how rights were constructed in relation to American, African, and English spaces, and explains the obstacles to historic solidarity between Native American and African American struggles.

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Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University.

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In the United States of America today, debates among, between, and within Indian nations continue to focus on how to determine and define the boundaries of Indian ethnic identity and tribal citizenship. From the 1880s and into the 1930s, many Native people participated in similar debates as they confronted white cultural expectations regarding what it meant to be an Indian in modern American society. Using close readings of texts, images, and public performances, Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), examines the literary output of four influential American Indian intellectuals who challenged long-held conceptions of Indian identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Kiara M. Vigil traces how the narrative discourses created by these figures spurred wider discussions about citizenship, race, and modernity in the United States. Vigil demonstrates how these figures deployed aspects of Native American cultural practice to authenticate their status both as indigenous peoples and as citizens of the United States.

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Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies.

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In All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), David C. Posthumus, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at the University of South Dakota, offers the first revisionist history of the Lakotas’ religion and culture in a generation. He applies key insights from what has been called the “ontological turn,” particularly the dual notions of interiority/soul/spirit and physicality/body and an extended notion of personhood, as proposed by A. Irving Hallowell and Philippe Descola, which includes humans as well as nonhumans. All My Relatives demonstrates how a new animist framework can connect and articulate otherwise disparate and obscure elements of Lakota ethnography. Stripped of its problematic nineteenth-century social evolutionary elements and viewed as an ontological or spiritual alternative, this reevaluated concept of animism for a twenty-first-century sensibility provides a compelling lens through which traditional Lakota mythology, dreams and visions, and ceremony may be productively analyzed and more fully understood.

Posthumus explores how Lakota animist beliefs permeate the understanding of the real world in relation to such phenomena as the personhood of rocks, ghosts or spirits of deceased humans and animals, meteorological phenomena, familiar spirits or spirit helpers, and medicine bundles. All My Relatives offers new insights into traditional Lakota culture for a deeper and more enduring understanding of indigenous cosmology, ontology, and religion.

Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies.

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Cameron Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) examines how colonists, soldiers, explorers, and American Indians created and circulated knowledge about the natural world and the inhabitants of the Gulf South. Covering 350 years of imperialism, Frontiers of Science demonstrates both how critical the creation of knowledge about imperial borderlands was to expansion and competition, but also to how diffuse, contested, and unstable these networks were.  Not only explorers, but slave owners and their slaves, American Indians, soldiers, bureaucrats, and merchants all participated in the production of knowledge and shaped the way that the Gulf South was known.

Lance C. Thurner is a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University. In July of 2018 he defended his dissertation, titled ‘The Making and Taking of “Indian Medicine”: Race, Empire, and Bioprospecting in Colonial Mexico.’  This work examines how native and low-caste healers and communities became newly integrated into imperial and global networks of science as colonists developed newfound enthusiasm for indigenous medical knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (New York University Press, 2018), edited by Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross, examines the conflict and interplay between settler and indigenous laws in the New World.

As British and Iberian empires expanded across the New World, differing notions of justice and legality played out against one another as settlers and indigenous people sought to negotiate their relationship. In order for settlers and natives to learn from, maneuver, resist, or accommodate each other, they had to grasp something of each other’s legal ideas and conceptions of justice.

This ambitious volume advances our understanding of how natives and settlers in both the British and Iberian New World empires struggled to use the other’s ideas of law and justice as a political, strategic, and moral resource.  In so doing, indigenous people and settlers alike changed their own practices of law and dialogue about justice.  Europeans and natives appealed to imperfect understandings of their interlocutors’ notions of justice and advanced their own conceptions during workaday negotiations, disputes, and assertions of right.  Settlers’ and indigenous peoples’ legal presuppositions shaped and sometimes misdirected their attempts to employ each other’s law.

Natives and settlers construed and misconstrued each other’s legal commitments while learning about them, never quite sure whether they were on solid ground.  Chapters explore the problem of “legal intelligibility”: How and to what extent did settler law and its associated notions of justice became intelligible—tactically, technically and morally—to natives, and vice versa?  To address this question, the volume offers a critical comparison between English and Iberian New World empires.  Chapters probe such topics as treaty negotiations, land sales, and the corporate privileges of indigenous peoples.  Ultimately, Justice in a New World offers both a deeper understanding of the transformation of notions of justice and law among settlers and indigenous people, and a dual comparative study of what it means for laws and moral codes to be legally intelligible.

Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies.

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In Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Jorge Coronado, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, examines photography to further the argument that intellectuals grafted their own notions of indigeneity onto their subjects. He looks specifically at the Cuzco School of Photography (active in the southern Andes) to argue that photography, in its capacity as a visual and technological practice, can be a powerful tool for understanding and shaping what modernity meant in the region.

Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies.

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Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford, 2017) is a dramatic and vibrant story of a little-known Kentucky school, the Choctaw Academy. Christina Snyder, McCabe-Greer Professor of History at Penn State University, argues that this short-lived institution represented both the promise of a multi-ethnic American society, as well as the withering of that dream during the era of Jacksonian Democracy and Indian Removal. Snyder presents several characters, including the Choctaw scion Peter Pitchlynn, the enslaved nurse and sometime-plantation overseer Julia Chinn, and her mate and master, Vice President Richard M. Johnson. Each person’s story (as well as several others) underscores the complicated hierarchies of race and class in antebellum America, as their histories intertwine with that of the Choctaw Academy and its students. Winner of the 2018 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, Great Crossings is a richly told and thickly researched tale that upends simple narratives of pre-Civil War American society, Native nations, and enslaved people. In their place, Snyder tells of complex humans acting by turns graciously and selfishly, with cruelty and with kindness, as the diverse population of the antebellum American West fumbled its way into the modern era.

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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In the United States, contemporary discourse concerning “the border” almost always centers around the country’s southern boundary shared with Mexico. Rarely, in conversations public or private among Americans is there any discussion of the nation’s northern border with Canada. Whatever the reason (ignorance, indifference, or both) all this changes with the publication of All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands (UNC Press, 2017). In this stunning comparison of life along the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borderlands, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, the award-winning travel writer and Professor of Creative Non-fiction at UNC Chapel Hill, busts the conceptual block that views “the border” as a place of exceptionality. Focusing on the modern-day experiences of Tejanos/as, Mexican nationals, and Akwesasne Mohawks, Griest uncovers startling similarities between people and places separated by nearly 2,000 miles. Whether the issue is drug trafficking, confrontations with the Border Patrol, assimilation, environmental pollution, or health epidemics, Griest records the echoing testimonies of northern and southern border dwellers. Yet, amidst the harrowing tales of struggle and loss, Griest finds another commonality…transcendence! In both the northern and southern borderlands, residents, artists, and people of faith stand their ground by staging individual and collective battles against the forces that threaten communities and livelihoods. Beautifully written with force, empathy, and passion, All the Agents and Saints is required reading for those wishing to transcend the ignorance and indifference that drives so much of the social and political divisions of our day.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, the development of multi-ethnic/racial cities, and the evolution of Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the relationship between Latina/o politics and the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. You may follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD.

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In Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778-1855 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Utah State University Assistant Professor of History Seth Archer traces the cultural impact of disease and health problems in the Hawaiian Islands from the arrival of Europeans to 1855. Colonialism in Hawaiʻi began with epidemiological incursions, and Archer argues that health remained the national crisis of the islands for more than a century. Introduced diseases resulted in reduced life spans, rising infertility and infant mortality, and persistent poor health for generations of Islanders, leaving a deep imprint on Hawaiian culture and national consciousness. Scholars have noted the role of epidemics in the depopulation of Hawaiʻi and broader Oceania, yet few have considered the interplay between colonialism, health, and culture – including Native religion, medicine, and gender. This study emphasizes Islanders’ own ideas about, and responses to, health challenges on the local level. Ultimately, Hawaiʻi provides a case study for health and culture change among Indigenous populations across the Americas and the Pacific.

Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses, such as Native American Cultures and History in North America, at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies.

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