In a Barren Land: American Indian Dispossession And Survival - Hardcover

Marks, Paula M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688141439 ISBN 13: 9780688141431

Publisher: William Morrow, 1998

Synopsis

A prize-winning historian of America's westward expansion, Paula Mitchell Marks, presents the first comprehensive account of how the United States government and white settlers collaborated to seize the land on which the Native Americans had lived for centuries. Her tragic and appalling story covers all regions of the country, beginning in 1607 and ending in the present. It offers a startling narrative of what happened to this country's original settlers and dramatically illustrates how their attempts to adapt to an alien culture were thwarted by betrayals and power plays that still affect their descendants. The book not only recreates such famous events as the Trail of Tears and the Battle of Little Big Horn, but even more tellingly rediscovers forgotten policies and little-known heroes and villains.

About this title

Review:

The unfair and often brutal treatment of American Indians is a well-documented saga. Personalities and events such as Chief Joseph, Geronimo, the Trail of Tears, and the massacre at Wounded Knee are now familiar history, even if representative of a radically different era. But conflict still rages, as demonstrated in the legal challenges to Indian claims of limited sovereignty and the controversies caused by the existence of casinos on some reservations. This is complex and detailed history indeed, and Paula Mitchell Marks ambitiously grasps at nearly four centuries of conflict in In a Barren Land, beginning with the first European settlements in America and extending to the courtroom showdowns of the 1990s. As she deftly demonstrates, there has been plenty of heartbreak along the way: devastating diseases; massacres; lies; broken treaties; loss of ancient hunting, fishing, and burial grounds to private development and federal control; and rampant poverty on many reservations. Though Marks writes from the Indian's perspective, she works to avoid a good-versus-evil treatment of relations, explaining, for instance, how Indians were often aggressive and brutal in their attempts to check white migration onto their lands, and how tribes continue to receive large subsidies from the federal government even as they assert greater independence. In retracing their steps as a people, Marks illustrates how contemporary Indians occupy a gray area in U.S. society, wedged somewhere between assimilation and a collective desire for detachment that clearly indicates that there are many chapters yet to be written.

From the Back Cover:

With In a Barren Land, award-winning historian Paula Mitchell Marks reconfirms her status as one of the foremost contemporary chronicles of America and the American West. Following her And Die in the West: The Story of the O.K. Corral Gunfight ("should come to be regarded as definitive" -- Booklist) and Precious Dust ("far and away our best social history of the gold rush experience" -- The Washington Post Book World), she now tells the often appalling yet always engrossing story of American Indian cultures under siege from 1607 to the present.

Marks dramatically illustrates how, across the nation over the course of nearly four centuries, America's original inhabitants were stripped of both their land and their way of life by a series of broken promises and bloody persecutions. Here are such well-known events as the Battle of Little Big Horn, the Trail of Tears, and the massacre at Wounded Knee. And here, too, are such equally well-known personalities as Chief Joseph, Geronimo, Cochise, and Andrew Jackson, a president whose perfidies to the Indians still retain the power to shock and dismay.

In a Barren Land is an enduring contribution to the endlessly fascinating and controversial story of the settling of America.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0688141439
• ISBN 13: 9780688141431
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480