Ned Blackhawk
Katrin H. Lamon Resident Scholar 1996-1997
The Transformation
of Nevada: Cultural and Colonial Encounters in the American Great
Basin
The doctoral dissertation Ned Blackhawk began writing at SAR sets out to historicize
the native peoples of the American Great Basin by demonstrating the many ways
their lives were profoundly changed by contact with Europeans and Euro-Americans. "Indian
people in this region have generally been denied roles as actors in the historical
and anthropological literature," Blackhawk explained. "They have
been naturalized—viewed as having an unbroken lifestyle that went on forever
without varying." The process of historicizing, he said, restores social
agency and gives Indian people a richer and more complex historical voice.
Bounded roughly by the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada,
and the Colorado and Snake Rivers, the Great Basin was of only marginal interest
to Spanish colonialists. It lay far to the north and northwest of Santa Fe, which
was itself on the extreme fringes of New Spain. Nevertheless, writes Blackhawk, "although
sporadically documented, Spanish contact and colonization, first in New Mexico
and later in California, irrevocably transformed the lives of the indigenous
societies living in the Great Basin. From the introduction of the horse to the
trade in human slaves, Spanish influences reverberated north from Santa Fe in
small and often large waves."
The first section of Blackhawk's dissertation, titled "Tierra
Incognita: Spanish Exploration and the Slave Trade in the Great Basin," examines
the violence, disease, and destruction of families and environment that rippled
out from Santa Fe into the Great Basin. Slavery is one aspect of this destruction
that has been inadequately examined by historians, Blackhawk maintains. "All
the surrounding Indian groups were enslaved either by the Spanish or by other
Indians," he said. "The Southern Paiutes, for instance, were repeatedly
devastated by the slave raids of the Navajos and Utes."
Drawing on Spanish archival material such as baptism
and trade records, Blackhawk documents the extent of the slave trade in this
area. "Records show that hundreds of Indian children, some of Paiute origin,
were brought to the slave markets of New Mexico. If the Paiutes, who did not
have horses, were being raided by their powerful, equestrian Ute neighbors, it
seems likely that other nonequestrian Great Basin peoples, such as the Shoshone,
were also subject to Ute and other raids." Blackhawk, who is a Western Shoshone
Indian, noted that there are family stories among the Nevada Shoshone of Paiute
raids for women and children. Such intertribal raids, Blackhawk maintains, did
not grow out of precontact, indigenous practices. Rather, Indian slavery evolved
from and was integral to Spanish colonialism in the Southwest.
Blackhawk had not planned to devote so much time to
the Spanish influences on the Great Basin Indians. "But I realized that
to understand this region and the native peoples, we must understand the changes
brought by the first Europeans in the area."
Affiliation at time of award: Doctoral candidate in
history at the University of Washington.
Return to Resident
Scholars 1996-97
