Ann Fabian

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Ann Fabian | Prize Reflections 2002 Western History Association Published Prizewinners | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.3 | The History Cooperative

PRIZE REFLECTIONS 2002 WESTERN HISTORY ASSOCIATION PUBLISHED PRIZEWINNERS

MIDWAY THROUGH HIS MAGISTERIAL BIOGRAPHY of John Wesley Powell, A River Running West (the winner of this year's Caughey-Western History Association Prize for the best book in western history), Donald Worster describes Powell's growing awareness that the American nation "included whites and Indians living together as fellow citizens." "In those seasons spent in the field," Worster writes, Powell "learned to see Indians as complicated people and enjoyed being with them. For him they were not, as dominant stereotypes had them, unredeemably cruel savages or incompetent children." Although Powell's confidence in assimilation and citizenship, may mark him as a man of the last century, like Powell, this year's prize-winners have spent seasons in the field. They depict a West full of complicated people who struggle to work out competing visions of the good, fair, just, and right settlement of the continent.¹	1
No one perhaps captures complexity better than the anthropologist Martha C. Knack. Her remarkable book, Boundaries Between: The Southern Paiutes, 1775–1995 won the John C. Ewers award for the best book on North American ethnohistory. Knack chronicles two centuries in the history of the Southern Paiutes, exploring how Paiute history followed a course different from the one anthropologists and historians would have predicted. How did a small-scale foraging culture survive the coming of Euro-Americans? "Paiutes," Knack writes, "maintained their own social and political structures in subtle ways, unseen, unrecognized, and unacknowledged by non-Indians from beyond the boundaries of the Paiute community."	2
There is no high drama in Knack's account of Paiute history—no great battles, no stirring accounts of conquest or resistance. Instead, Knack gives us a powerful, slow-moving account of two hundred years of transformation in Paiute life. Knack's remarkable use of detail gives us a sense of just what the coming of the Euro-American world must have looked like to those standing on Paiute ground. The networks of social, economic, and political relations that linked Paiutes among themselves came to tie them to the prospectors, settlers, and Mormons who moved in among them. Ties to non-Indian neighbors slowly pulled Paiutes into the wider world. Yet Paiute culture persisted.	3
Knack's command of information, her quiet presentation of evidence, gives her book a powerful eloquence. She describes instances enough of incompetence, cruelty, contradiction, and hypocrisy to make a cynic of the most kind-hearted reader. I often found her book moving, particularly its ironic end. One group of Paiutes in Nevada seem now to be making money with a golf resort. Knack leaves us wondering whether or not, as Paiutes begin to succeed in the market, the culture that sustained them for two centuries will be lost.²	4
In "They Mean To Be Indian Always: The Origins of Columbia River Indian Identity, 1860–1885" (the winner of the Arrell M. Gibson Award funded by the Indian Territory Posse of Westerners International for the best essay of the year on the history of Native Americans), Andrew Fisher deals with another group who, like the Southern Paiutes, managed to make and remake a distinctive cultural identity in the face of long odds. Fisher details the strategies employed by a group of Columbia River Indians who refused to move to reservations the government designated for them. Columbia River Indians had practical reasons to refuse: off reservation, labeled as "renegades" by the government, they had access to traditional foods and could better assert long-standing land claims. But "renegades" had abstract reasons—just as powerful as practical ones—to stay off designated lands. By refusing to behave as the government wished, Columbia River Indians were better able to make and maintain what they saw as an "authentic" Indian identity. In the long run, their strategies paid off, and Columbia River Indians earned federal recognition in part because they refused the "benefits" the government offered.³	. . .

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