How the West Was Drawn: Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the Trans-Mississippi West (2018)
Bernstein, David (Author)
University of Nebraska Press
Physical Details: 324
Language: English
How the West Was Drawn explores the geographic and historical experiences of the Pawnees, the Iowas, and the Lakotas during the European and American contest for imperial control of the Great Plains during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. David Bernstein argues that the American West was a collaborative construction between Native peoples and Euro-American empires that developed cartographic processes and culturally specific maps, which in turn reflected encounter and conflict between settler states and indigenous peoples. Bernstein explores the cartographic creation of the Trans-Mississippi West through an interdisciplinary methodology in geography and history. He shows how the Pawnees and the Iowas—wedged between powerful Osages, Sioux, the horse- and captive-rich Comanche Empire, French fur traders, Spanish merchants, and American Indian agents and explorers—devised strategies of survivance and diplomacy to retain autonomy during this era. The Pawnees and the Iowas developed a strategy of cartographic resistance to predations by both Euro-American imperial powers and strong indigenous empires, navigating the volatile and rapidly changing world of the Great Plains by brokering their spatial and territorial knowledge either to stronger indigenous nations or to much weaker and conquerable American and European powers.How the West Was Drawn is a revisionist and interdisciplinary understanding of the global imperial contest for North America’s Great Plains that illuminates in fine detail the strategies of survival of the Pawnees, the Iowas, and the Lakotas amid accommodation to predatory Euro-American and Native empires.
...MoreReview April R. Summitt (2019) Review of "How the West Was Drawn: Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the Trans-Mississippi West". Journal of American History (pp. 747-747).
Review Frank Kelderman (2020) Review of "How the West Was Drawn: Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the Trans-Mississippi West". Imago Mundi: A Review of Early Cartography (pp. 81-82).
Review Alessandra Link (July 2019) Review of "How the West Was Drawn: Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the Trans-Mississippi West". Environmental History (pp. 602-604).
Similar Citations
Article
Willmott, Cory;
(2014)
Beavers and Sheep: Visual Appearance and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Algonquian-Anglo Relations
(/isis/citation/CBB001201576/)
Book
Silva, Ignacio Alberto;
(2014)
Latin American Perspectives on Science and Religion
(/isis/citation/CBB001422634/)
Book
Short, John Rennie;
(2009)
Cartographic Encounters: Indigenous Peoples and the Exploration of the New World
(/isis/citation/CBB001022546/)
Chapter
Newman, Andrew;
(2011)
Closing the Circle: Mapping a Native Account of Colonial Land Fraud
(/isis/citation/CBB001221180/)
Article
Kopperman, Paul E.;
(2012)
The Attitude of Benjamin Rush (1746--1813) towards Native American Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB001200776/)
Article
Achim, Miruna;
(2011)
From Rustics to Savants: Indigenous materia medica in Eighteenth-Century Mexico
(/isis/citation/CBB001024013/)
Article
Parsons, Chris;
(2008)
Medical Encounters and Exchange in Early Canadian Missions
(/isis/citation/CBB001211515/)
Article
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker;
(2017)
“The Sagacity of the Indians”: William Dampier’s Surprising Respect for Indigenous Knowledge
(/isis/citation/CBB079440616/)
Article
Rickenbacher, Martin;
(2007)
Ferdinand Rudolf Hassler und die Vermessung der Schweiz, 1791--1803
(/isis/citation/CBB001024667/)
Book
Inglis, Robin;
(2008)
Historical Dictionary of the Discovery and Exploration of the Northwest Coast of America
(/isis/citation/CBB001033370/)
Book
Wooldridge, William C.;
(2012)
Mapping Virginia: From the Age of Exploration to the Civil War
(/isis/citation/CBB001200638/)
Book
Brückner, Martin;
(2006)
The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity
(/isis/citation/CBB000651412/)
Book
Gascoigne, John;
(2014)
Encountering the Pacific in the Age of Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB001421627/)
Book
Pei-Lin Yu;
(2015)
Rivers, Fish, and the People: Tradition, Science, and Historical Ecology of Fisheries in the American West
(/isis/citation/CBB765752569/)
Chapter
Stefanie Gänger;
(2021)
The Secrets of Indians: Native Knowers in Enlightenment Natural Histories of the Southern Americas
(/isis/citation/CBB027840169/)
Book
George Colpitts;
(2014)
Pemmican Empire: Food, Trade, and the Last Bison Hunts in the North American Plains, 1780-1882
(/isis/citation/CBB288119566/)
Article
Hämäläinen, Pekka;
(2010)
The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands
(/isis/citation/CBB001030561/)
Book
Mario Cams;
(2017)
Companions in Geography: East-West Collaboration in the Mapping of Qing China (c.1685-1735)
(/isis/citation/CBB321187384/)
Article
Chambers, Ian;
(2013)
A Cherokee Origin for the “Catawba” Deerskin Map (c. 1721)
(/isis/citation/CBB001320351/)
Book
Dennis, Matthew;
(2010)
Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic
(/isis/citation/CBB001032599/)
Cartographica Helvetica
William and Mary Quarterly
Journal of Medical Biography
History and Anthropology
Scientia Canadensis: Journal of the History of Canadian Science, Technology, and Medicine
Be the first to comment!