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Reviews
Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains
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By Theodore Binnema
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University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2001. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 279 pages. $29.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Ken Coates
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon
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Theodore Binnema set out to write a comprehensive history of the
northwestern plains, focusing on human interactions and the interplay
of human and natural phenomena in the region from 200 A.D. to 1806.
The portrait he draws varies dramatically from the rather staid
image of a vast, thinly populated land inhabited by a small number
of American Indian groups, influenced by a handful of European explorers
and traders, and dominated by massive herds of buffalo. Binnema
argues that the biological wealth of the region, particularly the
buffalo herds, attracted Aboriginal peoples, sparked conflict over
resources, and encouraged trade between American Indian groups and
between Indians and newcomers. The result, he suggests, was a complex,
interwoven social environment marked by indigenous innovation, biological
change, and intricate social, economic, and political relationships.
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1
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Binnema has provided a rich and nuanced examination of the region. His central argument is that newcomers were not the defining feature of life on the northwestern plains in this era. While some Europeans had important relationships with some of the American Indian peoples in the region, Binnema argues that "we cannot hope to understand Indian-Euroamerican relations adequately unless we attempt to explain them in the context of broader Indian interactions. Any middle ground between indigenous peoples and newcomers developed within the common and contested ground" (p. 9). He challenges the standard historical interpretations by emphasizing interethnic relations more than the standard Indian-newcomer interaction and by drawing on archaeological, anthropological, and ethnographic literature to produce a nicely drawn analysis of early indigenous cultures in the region. He does a particularly effective job of documenting and explaining the complexities of interethnic and intraethnic relations, managing in the process to examine both broad socioeconomic and cultural trends and the specific impact of individuals and pivotal events. |
2
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The book unfolds in a generally thematic fashion. The first two chapters assess the nature of early indigenous life in the region, drawing on the extensive archaeological and anthropological literature. Maintaining a strong emphasis on the Aboriginal peoples in the region, he describes patterns of trade, conflict, and interethnic relations and describes the complex social relations that characterized indigenous occupation of the northwestern plains. He devotes a substantial chapter, perhaps the most interesting in the book, to the impact of horses and guns, arguing that the onset of the "equestrian era" was the most important transition in the pre–1806 period. He devotes the remainder of the book to an analysis of the calamitous impact of epidemic diseases and to the complex social relationships and struggles that characterized life in the area. He describes the patterns of Indian–newcomer contact but successfully argues that relations between and within indigenous cultural groups were a more important feature of life in the region before 1806. |
3
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Common and Contested Ground crosses borders. At the most obvious level, Binnema has ignored one of the most constraining of all borders — the national boundary that defines the limits of two countries and, far too often, of separate historiographies. He also crosses intellectual borders: the historiographical framework that has portrayed the history of the West largely in terms of Indian–newcomer contact, the long-standing assumption that cultural change among indigenous peoples equaled cultural disintegration, and the fairly standard unwillingness of historians to deal directly with geographic and biological phenomena. In the context of a new western history that challenges long-standing assumptions and that seeks to understand the roles and motivations of all participants in the great western drama, Binnema has done a fine job of examining the early history of the northwestern plans. Ironically, for a book that set out to challenge intellectual and cultural borders, this study ends in 1806, when changes in trade and economic relations resulted in the separation of the northwestern plains into regions that were increasingly defined as American and British North American, establishing a pattern that would reenforce the impact of boundaries on the indigenous peoples of the West. |
4
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Common and Contested Ground is an important, well-written, and nicely illustrated work. It draws on the strengths of the existing literature in a variety of scholarly disciplines and yet makes an original contribution. Binnema challenges the highly structural assumptions that govern much of the writing on indigenous–newcomer relations: that cultural groups were linked to economic and political activities, that American Indians and newcomers operated in separate spheres, and that the arrival of Europeans was, automatically, the defining event or process in a region's history. He has managed to write a book that is at once sensitive to broad cultural and social processes and structures and rooted in an understanding of the importance of individual actions and pivotal events. Perhaps most significantly, he tackles directly the assumption that indigenous peoples were preoccupied with protecting their culture from external influences, demonstrating instead a high level of choice, agency, and flexibility in their reactions to biological, technological, and economic changes. Common and Contested Ground makes a valuable contribution to western historiography and presents a respectful and well-argued challenge to some of the most fundamental assumptions governing the writing of indigenous history and the history of Indian–newcomer relations in North America. |
5
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