Reviewed by Sue Armitage | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2

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Reviewed by Sue Armitage | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. By Juliana Barr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 411 pages. $59.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).
Reviewed by Sue Armitage, Washington State University
Juliana Barr's Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, a study of Spanish-Indian contact in Texas, 1680–1780, has been widely reviewed and deservedly acclaimed. Taking to heart Daniel K. Richter's call to see the story of contact through Indian eyes, Barr has successfully shown that the various Indian groups she studies (Caddos, Apaches, Wichitas, and Comanches, to name the largest) always controlled their encounters with Europeans.¹ Repeatedly, Spaniards found themselves adapting to Indian viewpoints and rituals even when (as was frequently the case) they did not understand them. Barr's detailed explication of this argument, from first contact to joint settlement, has been accepted as a field-changing work.	1
Why, then, another review? Gender, the keystone of Barr's argument, deserves special attention because it is a novel concept in this setting and because Barr's formulation may be relevant to future studies of contact and conquest. Barr's use of gender is multifaceted and sophisticated. First, she argues that because Indian groups had no concept of the state, their understandings of power and political organization were based on kinship, a form of organization that classifies people by gender and age (not by race or class, as the Spaniards did). Thus, she argues, gender and power are relational. Initially, the Spaniards were outsiders to kin networks; to have any standing with Indian groups, they had to become part of kin networks, most often by intermarriage.	. . .

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