In a Barren Land

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Marks has proven herself a skilled historian, having won the Western Writers of America Award for Precious Dust. However, her latest will probably be viewed as a valiant, but flawed, effort. She has taken on a topicAmerican Indians' forced divestiture of their ancestral lands by European immigrantsthat is perhaps impossible to properly embrace in a single volume. Marks not only spans a good portion of a continent, but also follows, in chronological order, the full 500 years of Native American-European relations, from their first encounters with each other to Indian land claims of the 1990s. In the first half especially, Marks's attempts to cover every instance of Indian removal undermines her book's cohesion (just when the reader is getting acquainted with John Ross and the Cherokees, up pop the Chickasaws). As timeand pagesgo by, the government's Indian policy becomes more unified, and so does Marks's narrative. If the sheer amplitude of the persecutions is daunting, there is still something to be gained by the recitation of it; we can look back and proclaim our ancestors despicable, now that Americans have stolen all the land humanly possible from its first inhabitants. It also becomes clear that less has changed over the past millennium than we might like to think, and that John C. Calhoun's early-19th-century dictum on the treatment of Native American still holds: "Our views of their interest, and not their own, ought to govern them."

Library Journal

Marks, whose recent book about the gold rush, Precious Dust LJ 2/15/94, won the Western Writers of America nonfiction award, examines the white conquest of Native Americas' lands from 1607 to the presenta constant and enveloping dispossession that, she notes, still causes problems today. Covering a specific time period in each chapter, she also addresses the complex bureaucratic political situation Native Americans now face as they attempt to manage their own resources. More important, she illustrates how the many Native American tribes and their leaders attempted to adapt to an alien culture. Ably blending various sources and photographs with contemporary historical scholarship, she reveals some long-forgotten policies regarding Natives' rights to land and self-governance while bringing to life important facts about little-known historical figures. Recommended for public and academic libraries.Vicki L. Toy Smith, Univ. of Nevada, Reno

Booknews

Inside cover maps of the locations of federally recognized tribes (as of 1990) bracket this chronicle of American Indian cultures under siege from the 17th century onward. Marks (American studies, St. Edwards' U., Austin) views the unsettling of the West from the indigenous perspective. Proponents argue that tribal casinos are the new buffalo in meeting needs. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Kirkus Reviews

A detail-packed survey of the manifold conquest of North America. In that conquest, writes historian Marks (And Die in the West, 1989), laws and whiskey figured as prominently as did firearms. Beginning her overview with the Plymouth Bay colony and ending in modern times, Marks considers the longstanding patterns of dependence and subservience established as a matter of policy by the European powers and their American successors. In the presence of these powers, Native American nations compromised and bargained in the hope of maintaining their lands, making major cultural adaptations that often reached the point of cultural suicide. Marks doesnþt arrive at any startling conclusions in her pages, and she breaks no new ground; the account relies, strangely for so sweeping a survey, on a relatively small number of sources. Yet she weaves together her narrative skillfully, emphasizing several themes without belaboring the usual guilty- conqueror-vs.-noble-victim trope. She shows, for instance, that in many cases the Indian nations were bargained straight into untenable situationsþin the case of the Sioux, for instance, trading hunting rights for federal rations that arrived only irregularly, which led to thousands of deaths by starvationþand that these desperate situations often led the Indians to an unwanted alternative, namely armed resistance. Marks traces the course of Native American dispossession from outright conquest and theft to federal programs that, intentionally or not, destroyed what little sovereignty most Indian nations may have enjoyed; she offers a variety of case studies to press her argument, and they do not make for cheering reading. Students of Indianpolicy will find this a useful reference.