| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Common & Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains. By Theodore Binnema. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. xvi + 263 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)

This impressive book offers a synthesis of human relations and environmental history of the northwestern plains from C.E. 200 to 1806. Building on classic works by Oscar Lewis, Frank Raymond Secoy, and John Ewers, and modifying their arguments with insights from new ethnohistorical studies, Theodore Binnema creates an original and balanced history that moves beyond the abstract debates of culture change to illuminate the political, military, economic, and environmental realities that defined human experience in the region. 1

Central to Binnema's approach is the concept of inter-ethnicity, one of the key themes to emerge from recent scholarship on IndianEuro-American relations. Rejecting outdated notions of fixed ethnic identities, Binnema shows how various Indian bands and fur traders interacted, collaborated, fought, and merged on the northwestern plains, creating a common and contested ground where cultural boundaries became increasingly blurred. Remarkably, Binnema manages to blend multiple viewpoints and levels of analysis—Indian, Euro-American, economic, social, and ecological—into a lucid narrative without losing sight of individual human agency. In this book, people do not merely react to the impersonal forces released by intercultural clash and expanding markets. Instead, we see how different ethnic and interest groups embraced change as they struggled to adjust to one another's presence and conflicting aspirations. . . .

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