This book, by a first-rate scholar, brings together research from history, archaeology, anthropology, and the natural sciences in an examination of the Eastern Shoshone tribe, now located on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, showing how this tribe underwent a process of ethnogenesis through cultural attachment to its physical environment that proved integral to its existence and survival.
As the author, Adam Hodge delves into his sources, several recurring themes emerge and bind the book together. Hodge emphasizes that all of these themes highlight the different ways that the environment contributed to Eastern Shoshone ethnogenesis. One theme is the evolution of Shoshone resource-use patterns over time and space. Gender is the second major theme, since ecological interrelationships that contributed to Eastern Shoshone distinctiveness were often manifested in the form of gender dynamics. The third theme is environmental change, and the fourth and final major theme is how the relationship between the environment and intercultural interactions factored into Eastern Shoshone ethonogenesis.
The book has seven integrated chapters that can also be read as distinct texts. Chapter 1 surveys Eastern Shoshone cosmology, spiritual beliefs and practices, and oral traditions in relation to their origins and subsequent cultural traditions. Examining these stories, the author provides readers with insights into what these people valued in the world around them, why they interacted with their physical environments in the ways they did, and what is the basis of their distinctiveness as a people.
Chapter 2 deals with the environmental and indigenous history of the Great Basin, where the earliest known historic roots of all Shoshone peoples have been located. Hodge stresses in this chapter the dynamism of pre-contact Native America, where population migration, cultural transformation, and the struggle to survive predated the European invasion of the Americas.
Chapter 3 explores the lifeways of Numic-speaking peoples who inhabited parts of the Columbia Plateau, Rocky Mountains, and Great Plains regions sometime before 1690. This chapter, in addition to analyzing critical developments in Great Plains and Shoshone history, also devotes attention to the Wyoming Basin. By the late 1600s, that transitional zone, situated in the Rocky Mountains between the Great Plains and Great Basin, became an important part of the vast territory occupied by the ancestors of the Eastern Shoshone.
Chapter 4 features the period of 1690 to 1780, examining how Shoshones acquired their first horses and subsequently introduced equestrianism to the northern Great Plains. By highlighting the interplay between the environment and ethnogenesis in the context of the equestrian revolution, Hodge in this chapter also challenges popular notions that the horse revolution undermined the status of indigenous women, emphasizing the ways that established social practices persisted as well as the ways Shoshone women also used horses and thus maintained gender complementarity and parity.
Chapter 5 analyses the years 1780 to 1806, a brief but eventful period in Shoshone history. It argues that the events of this period contributed to Eastern Shoshone ethnogenesis by ensuring that the Shoshone people would be receptive to forging amicable relationships with non-Indian newcomers to their lands. Chapter 6 highlights the initial impact of Anglo-American westward expansion on the Eastern Shoshone world during the period of 1806 to 1840, and chapter 7 examines the period of 1840 to 1868, exploring how American emigrants and settlers depleted vital resources, reduced Shoshone access to their lands, and ultimately caused their dispossession of these lands.
The book concludes with a glimpse of Eastern Shoshone environmental history since 1868, highlighting some threads of the past that are still visible today. In his book, Adam Hodge explores the intersection of environmental, indigenous, and gender history to illuminate the historic roots of the Eastern Shoshone bands that inhabited the intermountain West during the nineteenth century. Ecology and Ethnogenesis is a major contribution to environmental history, ethnohistory, and Native American history.
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[Review length: 630 words • Review posted on May 28, 2020]