In a Barren Land - by Paula M Marks (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Award-winning historian Paula Mitchell Marks reconfirms her status as one of the foremost contemporary chroniclers of the American West with this often appalling, yet always engrossing, account of American Indian cultures under siege from 1607 to the present. In a dazzling synthesis of the latest research with masterful storytelling, Marks portrays the systematic dispossession of America's original inhabitants over centuries of broken promises and bloody persecutions. Well-known events and personalities -- the Battle of Little Big Horn, the Trail of Tears, Geronimo, to name a few -- are juxtaposed with lesser-known but equally pivotal episodes such as the Navajos' Long Walk, the Snake Indian resistance, and more.

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.

Review Quotes

"Marks goes to the heart of the current problems confronting the Indian peoples."

-- The New York Times Book Review

A detail-packed survey of the manifold conquest of North America.In that conquest, writes historian Marks "(And Die in the West, 1989), " laws and whiskey figured as prominently as did firearms. Beginning her overview with the Plymouth Bay colony and ending in modem times, Marks considers the longstanding patterns of dependence and subservience established as a matter of policy by the European powers and their American successors. In the presence of these powers, Native American nations compromised and bargained in the hope of maintaining their lands, making major cultural adaptations that often reached the point of cultural suicide. Marks doesn't arrive at any startling conclusions in her pages, and she breaks no new ground; the account relies, strangely for so sweeping a survey, on a relatively small number of sources. Yet she weaves together her narrative skillfully, emphasizing several themes without belaboring the usual guilty conqueror-vs. noble-victim trope. She shows, for instance, that in many cases the Indian nations were bargained straight into untenable situations -- in the case of the Sioux, for instance, trading hunting rights for federal nations that arrived only irregularly, which led to thousands of deaths by starvation -- and that these desperate situations often led the Indians to an unwanted alternative, namely armed resistance. Marks traces the course of Native American dispossession from outright conquest and theft to federal programs that, intentionally or not, destroyed what little sovereignty most Indian nations may have enjoyed; she offers a variety of case studies to press her argument, and they do not make for cheering reading. "Kirkus Reviews, " 2-15-98