D'oh! Once again my own plans are thwarted by domestic requirements, so I'll have to miss this meeting as well.
I loved/loathed this book - I didn't really want to pick it up again each time, but once I started I was always hooked.
Here are a few things that I learned/relearned/better understood:
- The Comanches were just as savage & torturous towards their captives as I've always read.
- I didn't realize that they treated other Indian captives with the same brutality, as did all of the Plains Indians.
- They expected the same treatment themselves, which is one thing that made them such badass to-the-death warriors in battle.
- The typical "whites taking over Indian land with the noble Indian fighting to save his way of life" storyline is not wrong, but one-sided. The Comanches had actually done exactly the same thing, taking land & killing Indians who lived there in order to fulfill their own version of Manifest Destiny.
- So this was actually more a story about a collision of two forces with similar agendas and no understanding of each other.
- It's also intriguing as a clash between cultural & technological eras, Stone Age Man vs the Industrial Age.
- I didn't realize how much of this played out so nearby in Texas, in places that I've lived & visited, or that Austin was right on the border of Comancheria.
Overall, I think the author did a good job of playing up the horrific parts that attract & keep an audience, while actually being relatively balanced in his viewpoint.
Nathan
4 comments:
Similar to your experience, I enjoyed the historical narrative as an introduction to a period of history unfamiliar to me. Though often over sensational and unnecessary, I agree that Gwynne does an excellent job engaging the reader; however, I found glaring problems with his account preventing me from an overall positive experience.
By glancing at the book's cover, we see Gwynne intends this to be a book about the Comanches. But that's not really what he wrote. Like you said, its really a history about the collision between white Americans and the Comanches.
Yet Gwynne does offer a portrait of the Comanches. By defining comanche institutions entirely through western term in conjunction with his use outdated cultural evolutionary theory, Gwynne creates a simplistic, ethnocentric picture of Comanche culture that discredits the complex understanding of the world inherent in all cultures.
One example of ethnocentric definitions is immediately present in his title "Empire of the Summer Moon." The Comanches were in no way an empire, but, from my interpretation of this book, Gwynne doesn't seem to understand how a culture can exert such military force over a wide area without describing them as an empire. The odd thing is Gwynne even explains that they weren't actually empire, but he continues to call them one anyway.
Throughout his analysis of Comanche culture, Gwynne invokes a classical cultural evolutionary model in which culture progresses through universal stages from low/savage/hunter-gatherer societies to high/agrarian civilizations. Examples in the text include:
"They fought, reproduced, suffered, and died. They were in most ways typical hunter-gatherers. But even among such peoples, the Comanches had a remarkably simple culture. They had no agriculture and had never felled trees or woven baskets or made pottery or built houses. They had little or no social organization... In social development they were culturally aeons behind the dazzling Aztecs... They were in all ways utterly unlike the tribes from the American southeast, who... built sophisticated cultures around maize agriculture."
and,
"They remained relatively primitive, warlike hunters; the horse virtually guaranteed that they would not evolve into more civilized agrarian societies."
Both of these quotes demonstrate Gwynne's view that culture is something meant to progress through universal, predetermined stages. For a culture not to advance to high civilization means it was stunted in its evolutionary track and therefore stuck in a stone age culture that is inferior to modern civilization.
The problem with this model is that it denies the particular histories of unique cultures. Even among the most "primitive" cultures, there is always a high degree of variation. Gwynne doesn't seem to recognize this because he attributes cultural sophistication to material production; but culture is far more than the pottery people make, it includes kinship relations, linguistics, understanding of their environment, etc., all of which manifest themselves in complex, unique ways even in "primitive" cultures.
Another problem with his theoretical approach is that culture is always in flux, no society is stuck the Stone Age. So when Gwynne says, "Thus the fateful clash between settlers from the culture of Aristotle, St. Paul, Da Vinci, Luther, ad Newton and aboriginal horsemen from the buffalo plains happened as though in a time warp-as though the former were looking backward thousands of years at premoral, pre-Christian, low-barbarian versions of themselves," he not only illustrates the Comanches as an inferior people who have not great leaders of their own, but shows them as a people out of place in time who must assimilate into higher thinking western culture or stand aside to progress. The ironic thing is the Comanches had such a complex understanding of their environment that they continuously defeated higher white civilization for decades.
Of course he clearly intended this to be a history rather than an anthropological study, but since this was clearly intended to be about Comanches, I think a stronger effort is needed to gain some kind of non-ethnocentric perspective or at least one not rooted in a poorly constructed theory from the 19th century. What especially concerns me is when I saw this book located under Native American Studies at Book People, which is evidence that at least some portion of the public likely considers this book to be an authority on Comanche culture. However, that is criticism of the bookstore, not the author.
This book does give me a lot to think about in regards to what responsibilities popular authors should have when writing these kinds of books, which is far to complex to write about in this already long comment.
Ultimately I find this book to be a solid historical narrative of events that occurred. From this book about Comanches, you can learn a lot about American pioneers and western attitudes, but hardly anything about the Comanches.
Sorry for the obnoxiously long comment. I only intended to write a brief statement, but when I started typing I kept finding new things to say.
Having grown up in an environment full of western novels, Zane Grey at best, and rags like "True West", I had heard these stories before, but with more of the "Good Indian = Dead Indian" bent.
I think Gwynne knows his audience & plays to that to a large degree. Definitely not anthropology, no. More history than I've gotten out of these stories before though. It felt like the history was fairly accurate & actually researched to some degree as opposed to the complete word-of-mouth & myth that usually surrounds the "Wild West". Maybe that's how I'd represent the book: a historically accurate Wild West story.
That said, I liked it mostly, I just got tired of the killing & maiming - by either side.
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