Violence Over the Land

Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the American West (2006), a non-fiction book by Western Shoshone American author and historian Ned Blackhawk, relates the history of various Native American people across present-day Mexico, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and California, from the earliest arrival of Spanish explorers to the near-eradication of these tribes in modern society. In telling these stories, Blackhawk argues that, contrary to some prevailing popular narratives, these tribes were not anonymous savages at the margins of society but crucial players in the history of America and its various conflicts with Europe.

The predominant tribes featured in Blackhawk's narrative include the Utes, Navajo, Comanche, Apaches, Shoshones, and Paiutes. The author admits that little is known about these groups before European exploration and settlement. He can, however, attest to the fact that the innovations—and soon after, violence—Europeans brought to Native American groups resulted in an immediate and dramatic transformation for many of these tribes. Although horses became extinct in America between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago, Europeans reintroduced the animal to the continent, and Native Americans immediately took to domesticating the animals for work, battle, and trading. Various tribes also began to engage in intense trading competition in order to sell the goods they cultivated to the new European arrivals on American shores.

Blackhawk takes a meta-textual approach to deconstructing the kind of Native American mythmaking that took hold in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, largely through film and literature. For example, despite the fact that horses were a relatively new advent for Native Americans, “by the eighteenth century, the horse had become such an integral part of their lives that a non-equestrian existence must have seemed distant or inconceivable” to outsiders. As a result, the author says, popular American ideas about Southwestern tribes are disproportionately shaped by European influences. Therefore, the longer-term traditions and practices of Native Americans are overshadowed by relatively new changes to their existence.



Nevertheless, as the title infers, the biggest focus of the book is on the violence visited upon Native Americans. This includes violence perpetrated directly by Europeans and Americans of European descent, as well as inter-tribe violence which erupted as a result of wars and trading conflicts sparked by the arrival and intervention of outsiders from other continents. Perhaps the most significant of these cultural changes were visited on the Utes. Blackhawk writes, “These foreigners, Utes understood, brought guns, ammunition, and powder needed by Indian people.” As the Utes increasingly armed themselves with guns and horses, conflicts between the Utes and their neighbors in the Great Basin intensified, particularly against tribes like the Shoshones and Paiutes. On top of this, the more European interlopers traded with tribes like the Utes who had successfully integrated their traditions to meet the needs of new trading partners, the worse off the Utes’ neighboring tribes became. In this way, the arrival of Europeans completely disrupted whatever precarious truces existed between tribes occupying adjacent lands in the Southwest.

But for all the relative success the Utes had at trading with Europeans and dominating its neighbors, the tribe met its downfall in the nineteenth century when white Mormons were chased into Utah following the death of the religion's founder, Joseph Smith. Despite the inclusion of Native American peoples in their religious texts, and the prophecy that redemption would be visited upon these tribes, Mormons perpetrated some of the worst violence against American Indians in the frontier's history. After proposing for a short while that tribes like the Utes and Shoshone had as much a right to the land as the whites, Mormons quickly grew impatient with acts of theft visited upon them by Native Americans and changed their attitude toward these tribes. For example, Mormons would often steal children from the Utes and Shoshones under the premise that they were saving them from a life of savagery. Rather than educating or caring for these children, the Mormons used them as child slaves. By 1852, the Utah territorial legislature even passed a law allowing for legal slave trade with Native Americans. Granted, some of these children were already being held captive and employed as slaves by their own people. Nevertheless, Mormon participation in active slave trade created a booming market for these horrific, predatory practices.

The ultimate message of Violence Over the Land is that "violence and American nationhood... progressed hand in hand." And while this is a depressing narrative to embrace, it is an honest one, based on the evidence cited throughout the book.