Customer Reviews

In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

...Americans love the big picture, the bird's-eye view, the world under one roof. In fact, the pressures to condense and combine as such are as fierce in the book trade today as they are in the one-stop supermarket. Sometimes this leads, between the covers of a single volume, to a thin gruel of pallid generalization. On other, more rare occasions, it yields the virtues of good synthetic writing: broad-ranging, discerning, lucid, judicious.
"In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000 Year History of American Indians" by Jake Page happily does the latter. The book's hefty subtitle may give pause to general readers not prepared for extended time travel in Indian country. But the journey, all 400-odd pages of it, is well worth the trouble.
Mr. Page, a Southwest-based scholar and novelist who has written widely on Indian history, is well suited for the project. He brings with his lively prose a propensity for good judgment, a virtue in a field often marred by ax-grinders, whether they be the politically prehistoric or the politically correct variety.
The premise of "Great Spirit" won't surprise insiders  that the people we have come to know as "American Indians" are an amazingly diverse and complex group of nations and tribes. In Mr. Page's hands, Indians are neither primitives nor victims nor New Age sages, but people who have struggled to maintain cultures and families in the face of disease, war, misguided federal policy, and, yes, even disputes with tribal neighbors and personal shortcomings.
Be it the traditional or multicultural kind, Mr. Page likes to subvert the received wisdom. Most native people in North America in 1492 were small farmers, not nomads. No, the political philosophy of the Iroquois Confederation didn't significantly influence the framers of the Constitution. Yes, there may have been mortal pathogens in the New World before Columbus (tuberculosis and syphilis), and imperial wars for hegemony weren't simply a European invention.
Mr. Page has plenty of critical ground to cover. The California Gold Rush, the Dawes Allotment Act, the Termination movement of the 1950s, all come under his lash for their catastrophic consequences, whether directed by Washington or fueled by large-scale demographics. Thankfully, he censures without resorting to the kind of shrill invective that often dominates discussions of Indian policy.
Nor is the author content with easy targets. He examines controversial claims that the ancient Anasazi practiced cannibalism. He considers charges that native peoples sometimes make bad conservationists, from "Pleistocene overkill" to the historic exploitation of deer in the Virginia tidewater. He reflects on the promise and the failures of the modern gambling industry. His judgment deftly avoids a doctrinaire stamp.
A huge (but unappreciated) difficulty for a writer who does a historical overview is the question of what to leave out. Major trends, from migration to settlement to allotment to tribal sovereignty, are given their due in a straightforward chronological plan.
While another writer might justly have done more on energy resource development or tribal enrollment issues (and less with, say, the unfortunate Chiricahua prisoners of war), the major contours of the book are sound and defensible.
Mr. Page's research, almost all of it secondary, is solid. It's rare to find a gaffe (though the Great Sioux Reservation is misplaced in eastern, not western, South Dakota). Then too, the current class action suit against the Interior Department over trust land royalties is mischaracterized, likely the casualty of a hurried pace in telling a big story.
What makes "Great Spirit" so valuable is Mr. Page's effort to bridge pre-and post-Columbian America. Most authors choose between archaeology and history when writing about native people, so intimidating does the combined chore seem. This tendency to choose one discipline or the other, however, has given us a fractured picture of the past.
Indian history, as a result, is commonly told as a two-act drama that recounts a "rise and fall" story, moving from native "innocence" at the beginning (archaeology) to the corruption of all that followed Columbus in 1492 (history). It's rare that we find a coherent "before" and "after" narrative in one book, as we do in "Great Spirit," especially in a work that suggests the complexities of cultural exchange with little or no moral posturing.
Even for those well schooled in the subject, "Great Spirit" has much to teach. The creative mix of tribes in the 17th-century Great Lakes region; the ambivalent Indian response to World War I, complicated by issues of citizenship and segregation; the forgotten presence of urban Indians; the promising yet skeptical project of the Indian Claims Commission, intended, so very much in the American grain, to settle ancient grievances simply by giving people their day in court.
"Great Spirit" is also a handsome volume, filled with fine pen-and-ink illustrations (though sometimes cryptically labeled and placed). Not least of the virtues of a book that covers 20,000 years of history is that it can fit in a small briefcase.
You'll never get everything in one book. But if you're looking for a lively and readable compendium in a single volume of what we know about native history, "Great Spirit" is an excellent choice. You may be able to put the book down along the way, but not, perhaps, without a sense of regret at the end. It leaves us, as all good histories do, looking squarely at ourselves in the here and now.

Here's a few of the big-picture historical items and individual tribe tidbits you'll find here:

Page 111-19, Anasazi cannibalism - has been confirmed by presence of human myoglobin in coprolite.

183, Indian tribal names - Comanche from the Ute "komantica," or enemy (Comanche is itself a Uto-Shoshonean language); Sioux is from the Algonquian word "naodouessioux," also enemy.

204 - The Cheyennes were the first Indians to leave the upper Mississippi woods for the Great Plains, before the Sioux, starting about 1680. They were at the Missouri in central North Dakota circa 1740 About 1780, after Chippewa attacks, they moved west onto the plains

224-25, British and deliberate germ warfare - Sir Jeffrey Amherst., in 1763 in the midst of the so-called Pontiac's War, suggested "inoculating" Indians with smallpox-infested blankets. Not done here, but at Fort Pitt in 1763, two Delawares were given blankets and a handkerchief out of a smallpox hospital ward, and an outbreak did soon start.

232, Myth of Iroquois confederation being a forefather to the Constitution - Ben Franklin, in the 1750s, in urging colonial union, cited the confederation of the Six Nations to shame colonials into doing at least as much. There is no influence link.

266, Hopi intratribal murders at Awatovi - About 1700, one group of Hopis (re)converted to Christianity at Awatovi. Soon the village leader thought that meant they had become witches and called on other Hopis to kill them, which they did.

325, origins of Ghost Dance - started by Paiute named Wodziwob in 1860s, promising world without whites, etc, but then his teaching faded. Paiute Wovoka had vision Jan. 1, 1889 during solar eclipse, starts new Ghost Dance, which urges working with whites, promises rewards in next life. Visiting Sioux take dance home, give "bullet shirt" and other anti-white adaptations.

359 Indians in BIA get first "affirmative action" in 1930s. Legality of affirmative action in BIA confirmed in 1970s, page 391.

384 - Ira Hayes was one of the six Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima.

366 - Hopi also served, as well as Navajo, as WWII Code Talkers. In fact, on a smaller scale, Comanches did the same in WWI.

405 - Fake Indian jewelry has become a big problem. In fact, one town in the Philippines renamed itself "Zuni" to try to skirt the law.

407 - Dream catchers are not a traditional Plains (or other) Indian artifact, but were created by them to, basically, cash in on New Age beliefs.

412 ff - Indian tribal casino revenues are estimated at $10 billion in the year 2000. Average annual payment to a casino-owning tribal member is about $3,000. Pequots and Mohegans in Connecticut account for about $2 mil of that $10 mil.

I could see rating this book at a 4.5, but it does try too much to be all things to all people, and so a nice solid 4 is a good rating.

Virtually any Indian group you are looking for is included here. It is certainly informative and has some interesting lines of argumentation about the origins of Indian arrivals in this hemisphere. I thought some of the commentary on modern Indian issues was well done too. Those interested in the land issues and casino controversies will be delighted.
My reason for a middlish rating is that it does drone on, and tries to cover too much. It is certainly comprehensive but maybe tried to achieve too much in 400 pages, as it plods in areas and loses its readability.
I do praise it for its balance, but feel it is more of a reference work than enjoyable prose.

After spending time in New Mexico over the summer I realized that I didn't know anything about American Indians. I've seen as many cowboy movies as anyone else born in the 1950s, but I didn't know the difference between a Cherokee and an Apache. I was looking for a book that would give me a good overview and reasonable understanding of that difference. This book did that and more.

Jake Page (thankfully) doesn't worry about being politically correct, but offers a readable, seemingly balanced point of view, punctuated by a dry sense of humor. I was disappointed by the illustrations, which are over-pixilated and without relation to the text. One reviewer notes that it plods a little, but look at the subtitle! 20,000 years is a long time to cover without an occasional lull!

In the end, it was just what I was looking for, and enjoyable enough for me to want to check out Mr. Page's fiction.

Mr. Page bit off more than anyone could comfortably chew, but he kept masticating to the end. For that he deserves credit. His recounting of unwritten history up to Columbus reflects the considered opinions of many respectable archeologists as of the book's publication in 2003. Some of those may be outdated these eight years later. Following Columbus the book is decidedly sympathetic to Indians and is mildly, but not offensively, condescending toward "whites," "Europeans," and "the dominant society," He exhibits a special fondness for one group, the Akima O'odham. (I lost count of many times he says that the Pima and Papagos now call themselve O'odham.) At the same time he points out that many legislative measures enacted in the 19th and 20th centuries were well intended by their supporters, even though the results turned out quite differently than intended. However, he particularly goes after the Spanish and Mexican authorities whose brutality in the Southwest make much of the behavior in the then United States seem benign.

The book is full of interesting tidbits and covers many facets with general equalhandedness. The reader who is familiar with other works in the area will note significant omissions, unavoidable in trying to cover so much ground in about 400 pages. In discussing events following the end of the Indian wars, he shows how Indians have become politically engaged and are becoming gradually accepted by the "dominant society." This has shown itself to be a general trend of Americanism; once a group of people no longer present a danger, they can be viewed as friends. (Think the relationship between Americans and the Japanese and Germans following WWII).

His closing remarks, though, are that in spite of progress, conditions on reservations are very bad. This observation is routinely made by writers covering the subject. A shortcoming of the book is that it does not discuss adequately advances made by off-reservation Indians, some of whom have made great personal strides in rising to the top in the United States. Since off-reservation Indians constitute half or more of the Indians the failure to discuss is disappointing.

The objective of writing a book about the long history of Native Americans is just about an impossible task...yet Jake Page satisfies. Although he is not an "American Indian", he writes his brief historical sketches with great sympathy for their life-style without being overly sentimental. He is particularly knowledgeable about the Southwest Indian tribes - the Hopi and the Navajo..Example: the author talks about the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680. In this conflict, the Hopi unified, burnt down the missions and rousted the Spanish invaders straight out of Sante Fe. Jake Page explains that this event was only one of two instances where ""armed resistance against Europeans paid off. Today there is no dispute that this uprising, so well planned and executed, is the chief reason why the Pueblo Indian culture remains among the most viable and most intact in the nation." It is an important story...and I highly recommend it to young adults who need to know of important Indian contributions to our culture as well as the embarrassing tale of ethnic cleansing of non-white America. I particularly liked the insight that Native American religion makes no distinction between animals and man in the realm of the sacred...an insight that is needed in our ecologically troubled world.

This is a very nicely written comrehensive history of Native Americans that is not as biased as many histories tend to be. It is not an apologist work, nor is it demeaning to America's indigenous peoples. It appears to be a fair account, and is good for an introduction to Native American history.

The first 2 chapters are boring as well, but once you get to the meeting of the Spanish, English and french it is very interesting. i couldn't put it down from that point on.
Try hard to make it through the first two chapters, because you will be handsomely rewarded with great information from that point on.