Violence over the Land

In this ambitious book that ranges across the Great Basin, Blackhawk places Native peoples at the center of a dynamic story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that shaped the American West. This book is a passionate reminder of the high costs that the making of American history occasioned for many indigenous peoples.

A very impressive achievement. Blackhawk has managed through prodigious research to piece together a coherent history of an understudied region while at the same time developing original arguments with broad implications for North American history. Compelling, at times provocative, this book has the potential to shift the center of gravity within the field. -- Jeffrey Ostler, University of Oregon Expansive, vivid, and beautifully creative, Violence over the Land is a tour de force. Blackhawk deftly weaves throughout the theme of violence and cultural change over three centuries in the scramble for a vast region of western North America. A missing piece of the puzzle has just been found. -- John Wunder, University of Nebraska Ranging widely across geography and time, Violence over the Land gives an often overlooked region and its peoples the same import routinely accorded the middle ground or the Atlantic rim. Ned Blackhawk's compelling interpretation completely reorients our understanding of the early American West. -- Philip J. Deloria, author of Indians in Unexpected Places A powerful work that challenges a long list of myths and preconceptions, this ambitious book asks us to reimagine the conventional narrative of North American history. Blackhawk's story of Great Basin peoples reveals both the violent history of the region and the habits of mind that, until now, have produced sanitized narratives of its past. -- Frederick E. Hoxie, University of Illinois Blackhawk shows how the forces unleashed by conquest and colonialism reverberated across the Great Basin, a region badly neglected in most histories of Native America and the West. Far from the scene of direct Spanish-Indian encounters, complex relations of power and violence developed between different Native peoples as contests escalated over horses, trade, tribute, and slaves. In the nineteenth century, American explorers, miners, settlers, and government agents entered a world already in turmoil. Violence over the Land paints a searing picture of the ripple effects of colonialism on Native communities. -- Colin G. Calloway, author of One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark In this triumph of historical detective work, Ned Blackhawk recovers the lost story of the Great Basin's Native peoples and brings them into the larger narrative of American history. Along with Utes, Navajos, Comanches, Spaniards, Englishmen, and Anglo Americans, violence itself is a major historical actor in this well-told story. Indeed, Blackhawk's analysis of violence may force a reconsideration of its role in other regions of early America. -- David J. Weber, author of Barbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment Eloquently written, wide-ranging, and deeply researched, Violence over the Land highlights the pervasive pain that shaped and reshaped the area known as the Great Basin. Ned Blackhawk demonstrates that the peoples long derided as the most impoverished of 'primitive bands' were made that way by colonial history, not by culture or ecology. This is a major contribution to our understanding of the American experience. -- Daniel K. Richter, author of Facing East from Indian Country At last, we Indigenous people of the Americas have a central part in history! In this major and much-needed work Ned Blackhawk features Indians in American history not in a peripheral role but in a pivotal way. While Native people were 'caught in the maelstrom of colonialism,' they were not merely victims but key participants in the hemispheric changes that began with Spanish imperialism in the fifteenth century. An outstanding contribution to the narrative history of the Americas. -- Simon J. Ortiz, author of From Sand Creek and Out There Somewhere Ethnohistorians have never given the West's interior deserts, home to the Utes, Shoshones, Paiutes and others, the attention they have deserved. In this fine history Ned Blackhawk tells a fascinating and disturbing story, centuries deep, enriched by cultural and moral complexity, but ultimately revealing of the tragedy of native dispossession throughout the continent. -- Elliott West, author of Contested Plains Violence over the Land reveals a tragic, yet telling account of colonialism, part of a tapestry woven from the threads of violence and indigenous pain running through the lives of the Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone communities. -- Estevan Rael-Galvez, New Mexico State Historian

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