Webblog

Jeff Armstrong

The major theme of this lecture, the Great American Desert, is the exploration and interpretation of the plains by its prospective colonizers, from the Spanish conquistadors and the French fur traders to Lewis and Clark. Although the Spanish appreciated the plains environment as similar to their own, the sole purpose of their mission was to locate gold and silver to meet the dictates of a mercantilist economy. As Webb observed, the Spanish never found adequate economic incentive for settlement and were severely hampered by the hostility of tribes such as the Commanche and Apache. Historians like Herbert Bolton glamorized the conquistadors, rather than sympathizing with indigenous groups such as the Pueblos, who rose up to drive the Spaniards from their land in 1680.

The French found an economic basis for settlement in the fur trade, but they never built up a large enough population or military force to impose their will on Native peoples in the region. They were instead forced to develop a complex system of alliances fortified by gift-giving and intermarriage. Early historians treated Indians as ignorant pawns of the traders, while post-1960s analysis tended to portray them as equally helpless victims. As the notion of indigenous agency has gained currency in recent years, a more sophisticated interpretation of the fur trade has emerged in which Indians have their own agendas and a shared responsibility for the depletion of wildlife.

I find the issue of Indian agency versus victimhood a fascinating one. I have to say I agree more with the quote from Dee Brown about Indian policy as an attempt to eradicate all traces of Indians from American life than with that of Elliot West. I haven’t read it for some time, but I don’t think Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee reduces the Natives to passive victims. Despite its faults, it was a powerful catalogue of war crimes which served as a necessary prelude to a more sophisticated analysis of indigenous resistance and accommodation. To make an analogy, it took a great deal of literature on the horrors of the holocaust before writers like Hannah Arendt could discuss the role of German Jews in collaborating with the program. I should reread Contested Plains before commenting, but I think West’s book sort of mystifies Cheyenne thinking and implies a type of collective consciousness and decision-making among them which would be very rare indeed.