| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.2

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. By Ned Blackhawk. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. xi + 372 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $35.00.)

A contest between power and agency underlies much of the historiography of Native peoples. Old forms of "American Indian history" were essentially the story of the colonial power. Told through the documents of the Indian bureau and the military, and shrouded in myths of national innocence, few, if any, real Indians appeared in these works. The "New" western and "New" Indian history that emerged in the 1980s came down firmly on the side of agency. Native peoples took center stage in grimmer narratives, which emphasized cultural persistence and the dialectic of resistance and accommodation. More recent scholarship has questioned both of these paradigms, asserting that privileging Native agency has masked the true horror and lasting consequences of colonialism. With Violence over the Land, Ned Blackhawk squarely places the meta-narrative of American Indian, and indeed, all of American history, in the realm of power. He argues that violence, shorn of all notions of progress and innocence, shaped the continent and made American history less a story of "achievement" than one of "pain" and "indigenous trauma" (p. 1).

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