JOHN R. WUNDER <cm;0>and <cm;1>PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN | Of Lethal Places and Lethal Essays | The American Historical Review, 104.4

Forum Essay: Responses

Of Lethal Places and Lethal Essays

JOHN R. WUNDER and PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN

The recent twenty-seven-page AHR article by Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron purports to shape a new paradigm for understanding Indian and Euro-American relationships in pre-twentieth-century North America.¹ The borderlands in the work of the authors seem sanitized, morally neutral domains—eerie lethal places—where native populations "declined" by 50 percent, where the "relocation" of Indians is followed by intra-Indian "mayhem," and where imperial warfare is a "watershed" succeeded by European reinforcement and reform over a "dark and bloody ground."² Indeed, there are so many issues raised in this essay that space does not allow a full explanation. A brief discussion of four elements will have to suffice. 1

     Adelman and Aron have devised what they claim to be a new way to understand the history of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century diplomacy and race relations in North America. This new concept revolves around time and several geopolitical words and their definitions: "empire," "frontier," "borderlands," and "bordered land." They evidently believe empires are European and lead to nation-states; empires are never indigenous, nor is there such an entity as an Indian nation. By definition, treaties are fictive or cynical tracts. Frontiers are ambiguous, borderless meeting places that involve cultural mixing. Borderlands are places of European imperial rivalry where Indians slyly seek micro-diplomatic openings. Once the rivalry is over, borderlands can become bordered land, where national borders are defined, and indigenous peoples are swallowed up by national cultures. To explicate the "new" principles derived from these definitions, three North American theaters are explored: the Great Lakes as a "middle ground" where "the patina of Indian autonomy" existed, the lower Missouri Valley as a dissolved "borderland accommodation," and the Greater Rio Grande Valley (that is, the southern Great Plains) as a failure in "paternalistic pacification."³ 2

     This is process history. It is Turnerian, and that is all fine and dandy, yet the authors seem uncomfortable with the baggage that the Turner thesis brings with it. There is a very selective historiographical murmuring. As a sample, Turner is directly praised for establishing temporal stages of frontier life—the boundaries of settlement.⁴ Not mentioned is Turner's relegation of Native Americans to the historical scrap heap. Nameless, nationless, not humans but a passive part of the environment to conquer, these are the fundamental weaknesses of Turner's Indians in American history. They seem to be Adelman and Aron's as well. 3

     Along the way, historiography is strangely adapted here and altered there. Patricia Nelson Limerick is scorned for "misleadingly" calling the history of the American West a place, not a process, with an unbroken past. The counterargument offered is that borderlands have historic turning points.⁵ One might critique Limerick's ideas and methodologies—they are always challenging—but trying to fit Adelman and Aron's proffered distinctly "old" western history, though represented as a breakthrough, into the "new" western history, feels distinctly like a square peg–round hole exercise. Nowhere is history more attached to the unbroken past than in the history of American Indians in the American West. A huge list of books and articles since 1975 attests to this now-accepted concept among Native American historians throughout the regions of North America. To deny the unbroken past is to deny the fundamentals of indigenous history.⁶ There are similar problems with Adelman and Aron's treatment of other influential figures in the literature of the North American West.⁷ 4

     The second fundamental problem with Adelman and Aron's model of intercultural relations is that it simplifies an enormously complex historical phenomenon. By emphasizing global colonial rivalries as a prerequisite for intercultural mixing and accommodation, the authors repeatedly lose sight of critical economic and environmental factors. They wish to deepen our understanding of the emergence of middle grounds but end up trivializing these inherently multifaceted phenomena as one-dimensional political-geostrategic processes. 5

     While the authors recognize economy, particularly the fur trade, as a factor in Euro-American and Native American accommodation, they repeatedly downplay the significance of economic relations in politics. Perhaps because the economic history of the American West does not always fit into their model, the "economy" is separated from the "politics." Indeed, even a quick glance at the fur trade literature reveals the infeasibilty of Adelman and Aron's paradigm. Patiently negotiating, teaching, and compromising, native peoples and Euro-American fur traders forged middle grounds all over the North American continent in such places as the northern Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific Northwest, which became theaters of intercultural accommodation before they became sites of colonial competition. In many cases, such as Fort Astoria and the Columbia River Basin, geographical and environmental factors proved much more critical in shaping intercultural relations than the dynamics of colonial struggles.⁸ 6

     Perhaps the most astounding factor missing from their essay is Indian agency. There is no sense that Indians are participants in their own history. The authors occasionally mention a variety of Indian nations—that they point out are really not nations—and try to reconstruct a variety of diplomatic turning points and watersheds without understanding in the least that treaties require at least "two to tango" and the accommodation of varied national interests.⁹ For example, Juan Sabeata, a Jumano leader of significance, had Jumano interests in mind when he opened economic and geopolitical negotiations with the Spanish in the 1750s. Carlana, leader of the El Cuartelejo Apaches in southeastern Colorado, balanced Spanish, French, Comanche, and Ute diplomatic negotiations in the early eighteenth century.¹⁰ 7

     Adelman and Aron focus on a game of imperial chess, and in this game intercultural accommodation and middle grounds emerge only during stalemates, opening opportunities for indigenous peoples to play off the rival colonial regimes. Although this conceptualization allows Native Americans a role in a kind of mediation, the approach is nevertheless reductionist and ethnocentric. Indigenous peoples only react and adapt; they do not create, machinate, initiate, or control. In many ways, Adelman and Aron's model marks a return to a Turnerian tradition in which native populations are objects rather than subjects, mere pawns in the great colonial board game. In the grand scheme of things, Indian aspirations and strategies are irrelevant to the evolution of intercultural relations. This kind of view not only ignores an enormous body of ethnohistorical and cultural studies but, ironically, is not supported by Adelman and Aron's own evidence. For example, the commercial-diplomatic alliance between the Osages and the Spanish at the end of the eighteenth century emerged without the context of imperial rivalry. As the authors note, it was Osage raids and attacks that coerced the Spanish to adopt the policy of borderland accommodation in the Missouri Country.¹¹ The Osages systematically coerced the Europeans into abandoning their imperialist, exclusivist policies, and did not need imperial rivalries to do so. 8

     Then there is the Geronimo factor. Geronimo is the only indigenous leader save the mixed-blood Cherokee Richard Fields mentioned in their essay. We learn about Jeffrey Amherst, Thomas Jefferson—the originator of American ethnic cleansing concepts—Meriwether Lewis, Louis Juchereau de Saint-Denis, Jacobo de Ugarte, Bernardo de Gálvez, Manuel de Godoy, Napoleon, Ferdinand VII, Augustín de Iturbide, Moses Austin, and Charles Stillman; we do not learn about Iroquois, Huron, Osage, Apache, or Comanche leaders. 9

     Not understanding Indian history on its own merits leads the authors to make fundamental mistakes, pertaining both to the Native American past and to imperial interpretation. For example, because the authors use an inaccurate secondary source, they believe that Comanches were forced from their new homelands on the Great Plains by French-armed Pawnees. But disease-weakened Pawnees who had a few obsolete French weapons were not a primary factor in Comanche migrations.¹² The authors further complicate their rendition of history with their interpretation of Spanish-Indian relations on the southern Great Plains. By arguing that the Spanish "seem never to have understood the implications of Indian access to firearms and horses," the authors ignore systematic official attempts to regulate the flow of these critical commodities to native communities.¹³ Contending that Comanche migration was caused by European weaponry distribution makes key events of North American heartland history a mere by-product of Euro-American expansion. In fact, recent studies indicate that Comanche migration was motivated by a complex set of factors, including Sioux invasions of the northern and central Plains, the dynamics of horse and bison ecology, and the Comanche attraction to New Mexican markets. Another error, perhaps even more disturbing, the authors repeatedly lowercase the Puebloan peoples, relating, at the least, a poor understanding of tribal identities versus architecture.¹⁴ Mistakes like this suggest a bias toward an ethnocentric historiographical tradition in which regular standards of accuracy and professionalism do not apply to Native American history. 10

     Damaging to the essay's central paradigm is the misrepresentation of a significant imperial event—Spain's late eighteenth-century attempt to modify its Indian policies toward "the French model." Adelman and Aron believe the change was done to pacify Apaches by luring them into Spain's commercial orbit. In fact, this shift's primary result was the 1786 Spanish-Comanche alliance, one object of which was to remove the Lipan Apaches from proximity to Spanish settlements. After the 1786 treaty, Comanches had steady access to New Mexican markets and guns, which allowed them to eliminate the Lipan threat. The 1786 Spanish-Comanche treaty was a virtual triumph of Indian diplomacy, Comanche that is. Bourbon reforms, economic needs, and the incorporation of skillful French officials into Spanish colonial government all played a part in this evolution, but, in the final analysis, it was Comanche initiative that brought this southwestern "middle ground" into existence.¹⁵ To argue that true accommodation and middle grounds only exist under the cloak of imperial rivalry not only trivializes the cultural interaction that occurred but also marginalizes the indigenous peoples in a way that denies both their histories and their roles as rational, influential historical agents. 11

     Thus the construction of a borderlands and bordered lands paradigm without proper reference to and understanding of recent historiography, the interplay of imperial and indigneous political economies and environments, Indian agency, and basic native history is not very useful. Constructing an essay leaving out the very people whose homelands are invaded is to create a lethal essay. 12

¹⁰ See Nancy Parrott Hickerson, The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders of the South Plains (Austin, Tex., 1994); and Dianna Everett, The Texas Cherokees: A People between Two Fires, 1819–1840 (Norman, Okla., 1990).
¹¹ Adelman and Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders," 824–28.
¹² On page 833, the following appears: "The focal point of conflict was the Apaches, pressed from behind by Comanches, who in turn had been driven out of their homelands on the Great Plains by French-armed Pawnees." This quote cites note 48, relying on Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, Calif., 1991), 300–05, among several other works. Comanches are discussed on 298–300, and the authors accept as evidence a bizarre statement by Gutiérrez that French armament in the hands of other tribes forced the Comanches to leave their homelands in Illinois and move south into Apache country. Of course, Comanches were never forced out of Illiois or the central Plains, which does not include Illinois, by Pawnees or anyone else. Such a statement is an obscure point to a nonspecialist; to Plains people, to Comanches, or Plains Indian historians, it is laughable.
¹³ Adelman and Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders," 833.
¹⁴ Adelman and Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders," 831, 839. See also the works of Joe S. Sando, Alfonso Ortiz, and Ward Alan Minge for recent treatments of Pueblo history.
¹⁵ See Alfred Barnaby Thomas, ed. and trans., After Coronado: Spanish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696–1727 (Norman, Okla., 1935); Morris Foster, Becoming Comanche: A Social History of an American Indian Community (Tucson, Ariz., 1991); and Pekka Hämäläinen, "The Western Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains Indian Trade System," Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Winter 1998): 485–513. See also Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795 (College Station, Tex., 1975), and her other essays and edited books; and the essays of Martha A. Works.

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