In a Barren Land: American Indian Dispossession and Survival

Marks has proven herself a skilled historian, having won the Western Writers of America Award for Precious Dust. However, her latest will probably be viewed as a valiant, but flawed, effort. She has taken on a topic--American Indians' forced divestiture of their ancestral lands by European immigrants--that is perhaps impossible to properly embrace in a single volume. Marks not only spans a good portion of a continent, but also follows, in chronological order, the full 500 years of Native American-European relations, from their first encounters with each other to Indian land claims of the 1990s. In the first half especially, Marks's attempts to cover every instance of Indian removal undermines her book's cohesion (just when the reader is getting acquainted with John Ross and the Cherokees, up pop the Chickasaws). As time--and pages--go by, the government's Indian policy becomes more unified, and so does Marks's narrative. If the sheer amplitude of the persecutions is daunting, there is still something to be gained by the recitation of it; we can look back and proclaim our ancestors despicable, now that Americans have stolen all the land humanly possible from its first inhabitants. It also becomes clear that less has changed over the past millennium than we might like to think, and that John C. Calhoun's early-19th-century dictum on the treatment of Native American still holds: ""Our views of their interest, and not their own, ought to govern them."" 8-page b&w photo insert. (Apr.)