Review of The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos By Richard White

Authors

David Reed Miller, D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian

Date of this Version

Fall 1985

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 5, No. 4, Fall 1985, pp. 260-61.

Comments

Copyright 1985 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

In his 1954 essay entitled "Social Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Comparison," Fred Eggan called for studies to define carefully the parameters of research "combining the sound anthropological concepts of structure and function with the ethnological concepts of process and history." Historian Richard White presents an important contribution with this monograph, which exemplifies a response to the challenge put forth almost thirty years ago. White's decision to blend methodological and descriptive devices, drawing on the literature of several disciplines, demonstrates his willingness to present the complexity of human interactions in an effort to reconstruct the perspectives of three Indian peoples in such a way that their attitudes toward their lands and ways of life teach the reader new lessons.

Using a case study approach, White compares subsistence systems, land relationships, and diachronic social change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. He explores the social, cultural, and historical development of a "dependency" relationship for each group within the enveloping, larger non-Indian society in three regions of the United States. His survey for each of the groups covers staggered time periods: the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries for the Choctaws, the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries for the Pawnees, and the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries for the Navajos. White addresses the environmentalist stereotype often attributed to American Indians. He demonstrates how meaningless this generalization is, and how it dissolves the uniqueness of particular historical experiences. White also illustrates the changing subsistence patterns and land relations for these three peoples and focuses on their particular choices and responses both as creators of their worlds and as respondents to forces and threats to their ways of life.

This is not a work about victimization; it is about creative, courageous, and sometimes hopeless responses to overwhelming pressures. The book is not about environmental determinism but about the worlds of three Indian peoples employing particular subsistence systems that fulfilled the needs of their societies at the time of contact with non-Indians. Under pressures from epidemics and market economies, these societies were pushed out of balance, subjugated, and forced into a relationship of dependence which White defines as the "conditioning of one economy by another." This gradual disruption of societies occurred both implicitly and explicitly, but the process must not be seen as causal in one sphere alone, such as economics. White ably demonstrates the complexity of interchange between the tribes being described and their various adversaries-environmental, economic, political, or cultural-and shows that specific influences must be made "understandable only [from] within specific histories."