Idaho's Place: A New History of the Gem State by Adam Sowards

Abstract

111 Reviews Jetté’s terms for the families she focuses on and the people who eventually overwhelmed them seem awkward, emerging from her microhistorical focus rather than readily falling in line with broader literatures on ethnogenesis or settler culture. Her choice of “French-Indian” to identify this group of families, rather than Métis or metis, is influenced by Tanis Thorne’s statement that families of mixed ancestry “may have shared a collective identity as members of a community, but not necessarily a nationalistic identity as a ‘new people’” ( p. 8). Jetté explores the shared ancestry, lifestyle, and kin ties of these families — all of which are familiar to students of Métis and metis peoples in Canada — but insists on local difference from broader patterns. While it is extremely important to insist on diversity across communities of mixed ancestry, more detailed comparison with parallel issues of identity and culture in Métis communities , such as Red River or the western Great Lakes from the same period, would have been useful to show such cultural distinctiveness. Jetté designates the White settlers and American officials who came to dominate the region as “Anglo-American,” another awkward phrase that does not quite encompass the complexity and diversity of the backgrounds and agendas of incomers who eventually dominated in the region. Again, more discussion of alternative terminology for this group across the broader literature of colonial studies, and why this phrase was chosen, would have been useful. The well-written and engaging narrative demonstrates how the French-Indian families of French Prairie navigated, participated in, and even initiated the colonial processes that would eventually disperse them, from farming to the establishment of provisional government in the 1840s to using imposed judicial processes to protect property within families. This is the real strength of the book: as a portrait of a culturally complex group of families who chose to make a community together, who found themselves part of the process of change, and who were also marginalized by it. The final chapters and epilogue present fascinating archival evidence of this phase of the French-Indian families’ histories and begin to document their choices of assimilation in various directions. Taking the story just a bit further, exploring genealogies and family histories in detail to understand such choices and to see this process of dispersal more clearly, would be a tremendous addition to the book and to broader understanding of such complex communities, and I very much hope Jetté will do so in future work. Laura Peers University of Oxford IDAHO’S PLACE: A NEW HISTORY OF THE GEM STATE editred by Adam Sowards University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2014. Illustrations, maps, index, 319 pages. $40.00 cloth. The State of Idaho emerged from imperial bargaining in the nation’s capital, where federal authorities directed mapmakers to draw arbitrary lines, carving pieces of mountainous and desert landscapes into an ungainly geographical jurisdiction . Those decisions severed the homelands of Native people and restricted their hunting and gathering activities. Idaho’s Place: A New History of the Gem State, a collaborative effort between editor Adam Sowards and eleven contributors, addresses this bifurcated political jurisdiction — its tribal histories, its conflicted environmental past, politics, religion, women’s and ethnic histories , Idaho’s cultural settings, and the historians who have framed its narratives. Adam Sowards asks “What is Idaho’s Place?” and follows with a series of questions about its geography, ethnicity, and other paradoxical issues that muddy an otherwise simple inquiry. Idaho is more than national stereotypes about Aryan Nations, J.R. Simplot and potatoes, and spectacular wilderness areas. “The state,” Sowards argues, “is a diverse and in-between place where there is far more than meets the eye” (p. 4). With the multifaceted contributions to this volume, the editor’s ambition is to provide a full cross-section of the state’s story and to place Idaho firmly in the regional history of the Pacific Northwest. Using documented sources and drawing on years of ethnographic research, Rodney Frey and Robert McCarl lead off with a survey of Idaho’s indigenous people, highlighting representative examples of the state’s 112 OHQ vol. 117, no. 1 seven sovereign tribes...